Kindred in Death

  “She wouldn’t be less dead if I was chowing on a dog, sucking down a brew, and watching the Yankees on freaking Peace Day.”

  “Gee, you’re right. It’s too bad she got raped, sodomized, raped again, terrorized, and choked to death on freaking Peace Day just to inconvenience you.”

  “Jesus, chill.” The murderous gleam in her eye must have gotten through his own ire as he waved those spider fingers in the air. “I’m here, aren’t I? And I already ran the glass. You got cherry fizzy and barbs. The mickey comes up as Slider, liquid form, with a small kick of powdered Zoner.”

  “Zoner?”

  “Yeah, just a touch. Didn’t need it, not with the Slider, but the combo gives the user freaky dreams. Usually, you wake up with a mother of a migraine. I don’t see an upside to sucking down this particular cocktail, but it takes all kinds.”

  “So, she’d have suffered even when she was out. And come back in pain.”

  “He’d wanted to just knock her out, the Slider’d do it. You have to figure he wanted the edge. I got DNA and prints, and both match the vic’s. I was just sending it over. You could’ve saved yourself the trip.”

  “What about the sheets, her clothes?”

  “I’m not a freaking machine. I’ve got them logged in, and I’m going to run them. Sweepers lit them up on scene—just like I figure you did—no semen. He suited up most like. But we’ll give them a full scan. If his suit sprang a leak the size of a pinhole, or he drooled, we’ll find it. Before you ask, the cuffs are standard issue. I took a gander and they look new. Or at least they hadn’t seen any use to speak of before this. Blood and tissue match the vic’s. No prints. Fibers caught in them, probably from the sheets. Harpo can take those in the morning.”

  She couldn’t argue. He’d done the job. “Send the report on the glass—and another as soon as you finish with the sheets, her clothes.”

  She left it at that and headed to Central with the low hum of a headache at the base of her skull.

  Even on Peace Day, cruising toward evening, Central buzzed. Protect and serve meant 24/7, and peace be damned. Bad guys, in their various forms, on their various levels, didn’t take time off. She imagined there were precincts across the island filled with not-so-bad guys who’d had too much holiday brew, indulged in some holiday pushy-shovey, or had their wallets lifted in the parade crush.

  She took the glides rather than the faster elevators to give herself just a little more time to level out.

  She wished she had something to pummel. Wished she could take twenty to swing into one of the on-site gyms and tune up a sparring droid. But eight hours after the tag from Whitney, she strode into the bullpen in Homicide, and straight through to her office.

  Coffee, she thought—the real deal—would have to substitute for the release of punches and sore knuckles.

  He sat in her visitor’s chair, one she knew was miserably uncomfortable because she didn’t want anyone to settle into her space too long.

  But he sat, working on his PPC, his sleeves rolled up, his hair tied back as it was when he prepared to dive into some thorny task or was already in the thicket.

  She shut the door.

  “I thought you’d be with Feeney.”

  “I was.” Roarke sat where he was to study her face. “They haven’t been back from the scene long. They’re setting up in the conference room you booked.”

  She nodded, walked straight to her AutoChef to order coffee. “I just want a minute to organize my thoughts for the briefing. You can tell them I’m on my way.”

  She’d wanted to brood out her skinny window while downing the coffee, but brooding required being alone. Instead, she turned to walk to her desk.

  He’d risen and stepped behind her. He made less noise than their cat. And he took the mug of coffee out of her hand to set it aside.

  “Hey. I want the kick.”

  “You can have it in a minute.” All he did with those strong, seeking blue eyes on hers was touch his fingertips to her cheeks.

  “Okay.” Letting go, just letting go, she stepped into his arms. She could close her eyes and be enfolded, be held, be loved and understood.

  “There now.” He turned his head to press his lips to her hair. “There.”

  “I’m okay.”

  “Not quite. I won’t ask if you’ll pass this on. You wouldn’t even if a colleague hadn’t asked you for help.” At the shake of her head, he kissed her hair again, then eased her back so their eyes met. “You need to prove you can get through it.”

  “I am getting through it.”

  “You are. But I think you forget you need to get through nothing alone.”

  “She was older than I was. Twice my age. Still . . .”

  He stroked her back when she shuddered, just one hard tremor. “Still. Young, defenseless, innocent.”

  “I’d already stopped being innocent. I was . . . When I was at the morgue, I looked at her, and I thought, that could’ve been me on the slab. If I hadn’t put him on one first, it could’ve been me. He’d have killed me sooner or later, or worse, turned me into a thing. Putting him there first had to be done, and that’s that. She didn’t have a chance, not even the chance I did. A good home, parents who loved her, and who’ll be broken, some pieces of them always broken now. But she didn’t have the chance I did. I could never pass her on.”

  “No, you never could.”

  She held and was held another minute, then stepped back. “I was wishing I had time to go beat the living crap out of a sparring droid.”

  “Ah.” He had to smile. “A never-fail for you.”

  “Yeah. This was better.”

  He picked up her coffee, handed it to her. “Taking a blocker for the headache would be better yet.”

  “It’s not so bad, not so bad now. I’ll work it off.”

  “The pizza I ordered should help.”

  “You ordered pizza?” The part of her that yearned warred against the part of her that wanted to maintain discipline. “I’ve told you not to keep buying food for my cops. You’ll spoil and corrupt them.”

  “There’s only one cop I’m interested in spoiling and corrupting, and pizza happens to be a weakness of hers.”

  She drank her coffee doing her best to scowl at him over the rim. “Did you get pepperoni?”

  5

  FEENEY CHOMPED DOWN ON A LOADED SLICE. He stood at the conference table, focused on the pie while Jamie and McNab attacked a second one. Her former partner, now captain of the Electronic Detectives Division managed to balance what was left of the slice and what appeared to be a tube of cream soda while studying crime scene photos Peabody had yet to tack to the murder board.

  He’d had his hair chopped recently, Eve noted, but it did little to combat the spring of ginger and wires of gray that spooled through it. His face, weathered and worn, drooped like a sleepy hound’s. She figured he’d bought the shit-brown jacket he’d paired with wrinkled trousers before his best boy, McNab, had been weaned from his mother’s tit.

  In contrast, the young EDD ace and Peabody’s cohab sizzled in atomic red cargos and a tee the color of radioactive egg yolks scrambled with lightning bolts. His long blond hair was tucked back from his thin, pretty face in a slinky braid.

  Since it was there, Eve scooped up a slice.

  “You okay having Jamie work on this?” she asked Feeney.

  “He’s going to push on it anyway. It’s better if he does it where I can keep my eye on him.” He took a swig of cream soda. “He’s going to be rocky right off, but he’ll steady up. I knew Deena, too. Good kid.” He kept his eyes on the crime scene photos. “Sick fuck. This one’s going to spread through the department. You’ll have more cops lining up for detail on this than you can use.”

  “How well do you know MacMasters?”

  “We worked a few together, knocked back some brews together. Good cop.”

  It was, she knew, Feeney’s highest praise.

  “You look at this, Dallas, and you think—as a cop,
as a father—you can do everything right, do the job, keep it clean, and you still can’t protect your own kid from something like this. You think you can, even though you know what’s out there, you have to think you can. Then something like this brings it right home, right in the front door. And you know you can’t.”

  He shook his head, but it didn’t budge the anger on his face. “We want to believe we can protect our own.” Then he paused, took another long drink. “I was going to head out with the wife to New Jersey this afternoon, a cookout at our boy’s. New Jersey for Christ’s sake,” he added with the deliberate disdain of a native New Yorker.

  “Well, look at it this way, traffic would’ve been a total bitch.”

  “That’s fucking A. Anyway, the wife’s bringing me back a plate.” He looked down at Deena again. “This little girl had a lot more than a holiday barbecue taken from her.”

  “He went for her, Feeney, knew how to get to her. There has to be a reason. We work from there.”

  “Payback.” Feeney nodded. “Could be. He’s been a cop a long time, LT of Illegals near ten years, I guess. Captain now. He closes cases and doesn’t take any bullshit. Good cop,” he repeated. “Good cops make enemies, but—”

  “Yeah, I’ve been working on the ‘buts.’ Let’s get started here, and we’ll go through them. Screen on,” she ordered.

  The command signaled the others, and the briefing began.

  “The victim is Deena MacMasters, female, age sixteen. ME has confirmed homicide by manual strangulation. The victim was raped and sodomized multiple times over a period between six and eight hours. Traces of barbiturate—street name Slider—mixed with a small amount of powdered Zoner found during tox screen indicate she was drugged.”

  “That’s Wig.”

  Eve paused, lifted her eyebrows at Jamie.

  “Sorry, Lieutenant. I wanted to inform you the freaks call that cocktail Wig because it, well, wigs you out. If you take enough to conk, you go into weird-ass nightmares. They’re supposed to be really real, and you have one bitch of a headache after.”

  Feeney jabbed a finger at Jamie. “How do you know so much about it? If you’re playing around with that shit at college, I’m going—”

  “Hey, don’t look at me. I’m clean. I get one bust I can lose my scholarship. Plus, Jesus, if I want a nightmare I’ll eat a burrito and watch a horror vid at midnight.”

  “Damn right.”

  “Jamie confirms what I learned from Dickhead at the lab. As there are no defensive wounds, no sign of struggle prior, we believe she was drugged with this combination, then taken to her bedroom where she was restrained. Cuffs on her hands, sheets used as ropes on her ankles.”

  “He wanted it to start for her even when she was unconscious,” Peabody murmured.

  “And while she was unconscious, he may have taken the time to run the plates and his glass through the sanitizer, may have accessed the control room. He would then have time to return to the bedroom before she’d come around.

  “Except for her underwear, her clothes were not removed but pulled away during the assaults. There are some tears on her shirt, but they don’t indicate much force. This shows a lack of rage, of frenzy, and a deliberation.”

  Eve cut her gaze toward Jamie as he started to speak. It was enough to have him subsiding. “Minor bruising on the face, the torso indicates she was struck, but not with serious force. Bruising on the biceps, shoulders, indicates she was held down. The bruising and lacerations on her wrists, her ankles mean she fought, and fought hard.

  “Her killer took his time, incapacitating her by choking or smothering until she passed out, at which time we believe he removed the ankle restraints, turned her over, and retied. He most likely waited for her to regain consciousness before raping her again. It appears he repeated this pattern more than once.”

  She glanced toward Jamie again. His face was very white, his eyes very dark, but he said nothing.

  “This tells us a lot,” she said, and waited.

  “Um. He didn’t waste time and energy smacking her around,” Peabody began. “He wasn’t interested in hurting her that way. He didn’t bother to strip her because he didn’t care. It wasn’t about that kind of humiliation.”

  Eve nodded. “It’s more insulting to leave her dressed. It makes the act more base than it already is. Penetration. Dominance. Pain.”

  Her heart fluttered, a quick beat of panicked wings. And she looked at Roarke, straight into his eyes, to calm it again.

  “The lab has confirmed a glass left on the kitchen counter contained the same drugs found in her system. Also confirmed, the restraints used on her wrists were police issue. Only her blood and tissue have been found on the cuffs. Thus far, Crime Scene has found no trace of the killer on scene. There is no DNA of the killer on or in the vic’s body. He sealed up. Peabody, witness statements.”

  “The lieutenant and I spoke to two of the victim’s known friends, as well as Jamie. I also spoke with two others on the list given us by the vic’s parents. Of these, only Jo Jennings stated any knowledge of a man the victim had been involved with. He is reported to be nineteen years of age, and apparently told the victim he was a student at Columbia, originally from Georgia. They met several weeks ago in the park where Deena routinely jogged, and began dating secretly. All subjects interviewed stated that the victim had a PPC, a pocket ’link, but neither were found on scene or on the premises. We conclude the killer took them as there may be communications between them thereon. None of Deena’s friends or family met or can identify this man, according to their statements.”

  “According to Jo’s statement,” Eve continued, “the vic told the UNSUB her father was a cop, an Illegals cop. He then told the vic he’d once been arrested for illegals use, and appears to have used that to convince her to keep their relationship from her friends and family.”

  “She’d have gone along.” Jamie glanced at Eve, got her nod. “If he said he was embarrassed or weirded out by that, she’d have gone along so he wouldn’t be uncomfortable. She didn’t like to put anyone on the spot, you know?”

  “Added to it,” McNab said, “a secret boyfriend? Pretty juicy for a kid that age.”

  “By all appearances the vic not only let him in on the night of the murder, but was expecting him. Again from Jo’s statement, the vic believed the killer was coming by to have something to eat, then taking her to the theater. The log on the AutoChef records two single-serving pizzas—one meat while the vic’s was a vegetarian—ordered at about eighteen-thirty. She ingested her first dose of drugs, through her soft drink.”

  “First dose?” Feeney asked.

  “She ingested a second dose around midnight. I believe the killer knew when her parents were due back, which was late this afternoon. I believe this second dose was given to ensure it showed clearly on the tox screen. He couldn’t know her parents would decide to come back several hours earlier than planned. He left the glass on the counter to be sure we’d run it, and find the drugs.”

  “A slap at MacMasters.” Feeney frowned at the tox report on the wall screen. “It follows, but . . . if you go after a cop, you go for the cop. If you’re going to go at him through his family, where’s the signature? You’d want him to know, no doubt, it was payback. Plus, Christ knows this fuck couldn’t have taken the kid out before today. Getting Deena to play along with the secret, that’s risky. A kid that age talks. She told one friend parts of it.”

  “More fun this way.” Eve switched the image on screen to Deena’s ID photo—young, fresh, smiling. “More personal. Not only in the house, in the girl’s pretty bedroom. And she opened the door. Confirmed?”

  Feeney nodded. “No sign of tampering, of bypass on any door or window in the place. Our prelim time line matches yours. Locks disengaged, from the inside and with proper procedure, at eighteen-twenty-three, and immediately re-engaged, again from the inside and with proper procedure. She let him in, then locked back up. At twenty-three-eighteen, the door to the control ro
om was opened, with passcode, and the cameras disengaged with proper procedure.”

  “He’d worked on her for about four hours by then.” Eve thought, couldn’t stop herself from thinking what it was to be raped and abused for hours. “She’d have given him the passcode. He didn’t have to work it himself. He worked her instead.”

  “She was a cop’s kid,” Jamie objected. “And she was smart. I don’t think she’d make it that easy for him.”

  Couldn’t see, Eve concluded. How could you when you’ve never been there? “Four hours being raped and terrorized, choked, smothered. He tells her, okay, I’m going, but I need to turn off the cameras, get the discs. Maybe she says no the first time, or the first few times. So he hurts her again, again. Give me the codes, Deena, and all this stops.”

  “She didn’t give him the code to get the discs, not the right one anyway.” McNab spoke up. “It may be she didn’t have them. No reason for her to have them. He hacked that, but it didn’t take him long. Ten minutes maybe, so he’s got some skills or some good equipment. The discs were removed according to the log at twenty-three-thirty-one. The hard drives were wiped and corrupted, but we dug out the time. And we may be able to reconstruct the data, with images. It’s not going to be a walk, but we’ve got a shot. The system’s ultra. The more ultra, the more fail-safes, the better chance at reconstructing a wipe and bypass.”

  “That’s a priority,” Eve said. “Once he had the discs, did the wipe and disengaged, he went back up and went at her for another two hours.”

  “He left by the front door,” Feeney put in. “Opening the locks from inside, resetting them at oh-four-three.”

  “Giving him a space after TOD to clean up, do his own sweep, leave the glass. No hurry, no panic, just one step at a time. Bet he had a check-list,” Eve muttered. “He leaves early enough not to be noticed or seen. Yet he arrived in daylight, and we’ve got no one who saw him. Blends well, moves well. There’re a couple of subway stops within three blocks. I’ve ordered copies of all security. But . . .”

  She didn’t like the odds. “If he’s smart enough to do all this, he’s too smart to get caught on security at a station close to the scene. On foot most likely. If his hole is any distance from the scene, maybe he rides or cabs it within ten blocks, any direction. Takes the damn bus. He could have his own transpo.”