Creation in Death (18 page)

“Why?”

“Has to be a lot of work, right? Focus, energy, dedication. And in most cases, a lot of interaction with others. Factor it in, sure,” she said, studying the display on-screen, “but when I rolled it around during my thinking time, it doesn’t fit for me. He’s no team player. My gauge is he likes his quiet time. You could, on some level, call his killings performances, but that’s not how I see them. They’re more intimate. Just between him and the vic until he’s done.”

“A duet.”

“A duet. Hmm.” She rolled that around, too. “Yeah, okay, a duet, I can see that. One man, one woman, the dynamics there, extremely personal. A performance, okay, without an audience, too intimate to share. Because, I think, at some time he was intimately connected to the woman all the rest represent. Yeah. They were a duet.”

“And his partner was killed.”

“Derailed his train. That’s why I think he uses chemicals to rein himself in for long periods—or conversely to free himself for short ones. There, the computer and I agree. So, I look for types of medications that can suppress homicidal urges. And if he’s sick, as we’re theorizing, he may be taking meds for whatever his condition might be. Do you know Tomas Pella?”

“The name’s not familiar, no.”

“He seemed to know you.”

“I know a great many people.”

“And a great many more know you, I get that. He used to own some restaurants in Little Italy. Sold them shortly after the time all this started nine years ago.”

“I might have bought them, or one of them. I’ll check the records.”

“How about Hugh Klok, antiquities dealer. You buy a lot of old stuff.”

“Doesn’t ring.”

“I’ll do a run on him. One of the others Newkirk remembered from the prior was this guy who did taxidermy. You know, stuffed dead animals.”

“Which always begs the question: Why in the bloody hell?”

“Yeah, what’s with that?” Eve slanted her gaze over to Galahad, who’d wandered back in to sit and wash up after his meal. “I mean, would you want…you know, when he uses up his nine?”

“Good God, no. Not only, well, creepy would be the word, wouldn’t it, for us, but bloody humiliating for him.”

“Yeah, that’s what I think. I liked the idea of the taxidermy guy for the symbolism. House of death and blah. But he’s clear. Lives on Vegas II, and has for four years. Checked out. So anyway, you want the background on these other two, and the third I questioned today, Dobbins?”

“I’m sure it’s as much sparkling dinner conversation as the philosophy of taxidermy and dead cats. Go ahead.”

D
owntown in their apartment, Peabody and McNab worked on dueling computers. Because he worked better with noise and she didn’t care, the air blasted with trash rock and revisionist rap. She sat, hunched over, tuning most of it out and picking her way through a complicated search.

He was up and down like a restless puppy, alternately snapping out directives and singing lyrics. She didn’t know how anyone could get any work done that way. But she also knew he not only could, he had to.

The remnants of the Chinese delivery they’d ordered were scattered around both their workstations. Peabody was already wishing she’d resisted that last egg roll.

When she finally found the data she was after, tears blurred her eyes. The hot prick of tears warned her she was overtired and her resistance was bottoming out.

“Hey, hey, She-Body!” McNab caught the look on her face. “Music off. Computer, save and pause. What’s wrong, honey?”

“It’s so sad. It just makes me so sad.”

“What does?” He’d already come behind her to pat and rub her shoulders.

It was a pretty good deal, she thought, to have somebody there to pet you when you were shaky. “I found Therese—Therese Di Vecchio Pella. Tomas Pella’s wife, one of the guys Dallas and I talked to today.”

“Yeah, from Old Newkirk’s notes, from the first go-round.”

“They got married in April. They were with the Home Force. He was a corporal, she was a medic. And see, look.” She tapped the comp screen. “In July she was dispatched to this area, on the edge of SoHo and Tribeca. An explosion, mostly civilian casualties. There was still firing in the sector, but she went in. She was wearing the red cross—the medic symbol. But she got hit by sniper fire when she tried to reach the wounded. She was only twenty. She was trying to help wounded civilians, and they killed her.”

She sat back, knuckled away the tears. “I don’t know. It just rips me, I guess. You’ve got to have hope, right, to stop long enough to get married in the middle of all that. And then, you’re gone. Trying to help people, and you’re gone. She was only twenty.”

McNab leaned down, pressed a kiss to the top of her head. “Want me to take this for a while?”

“No. We talked to that old man today. Well, not that old, really, but it seemed like he was older than Moses in that bed, with the breather on. And then I read this, and think how he’d been so young, and he’d loved this girl. Then…she’s too young.”

“I know it’s tough, baby, but—”

“No, no. I mean, yeah, it’s tough, but she’s too young to be the source of the pattern.” Tears—and some still clung to her lashes—were forgotten. “She was only twenty, and the youngest vic was twenty-eight. Twenty-eight to thirty-three, that’s been his span. So Therese Pella died too young, it most likely eliminates Pella as a suspect.”

“You were seriously looking at this guy?”

“He’s the right age, the basic type, connection with the Urbans, private home—and can you spell bitter? Got a tumor—or he says—Dallas is checking that. Lost his bride—bride and groom—who was a pretty brunette. But after that it doesn’t follow.”

Peabody sat back, shaking her head at the data on screen. “Doesn’t follow pattern. She’s hit by sniper fire, not tortured. She’s eight years younger than his youngest vic when she was killed. Misses the profile. But there was something. A tingle, Dallas called it. There was a tingle when we talked to him.”

“Maybe he knows something. Maybe he’s connected.”

“Yeah, maybe. I need to get this to Dallas, then try for deeper data on Pella.”

“I’ll give you a hand.” McNab gave her shoulders another rub, then toyed with the ends of her hair. “Okay now?”

“Yeah. I guess it’s not enough sleep and too much on the brain.”

“You need to take a break.”

“Maybe I do.” She knuckled her eyes again, but this time to clear fatigue instead of tears. “If it wasn’t so cold out, I’d take a walk, get some air, some exercise.”

“I don’t know about the air,” he said as she rose. “But I can help with the exercise.” Grinning, he laid a hand on her ass, gave it a squeeze.

“Yeah?” Her eyes danced; her libido boogied. “You wanna?”

“Let me answer that question by ripping your clothes off.”

She let out a laughing squeal as they tumbled to the floor. “I thought, you know, you weren’t feeling the bloom and spark.”

“Something’s blooming just fine,” he said as he dragged off her sweater.

She tugged his pants down over his hips to check for herself. Looking down, she said, “I’ll say.”

“And as for sparkage.” He crushed his mouth to hers in a kiss hot enough she envisioned smoke coming out of her ears. “Any more, and we’d torch the place.”

She saw his eyes go dreamy when his hand cupped her breast, felt her stomach muscles tighten in response.

“Mmmm, She-body, the most female of females. Let’s see what we can light up.”

L
ater, considerably later, Eve studied the data Peabody had sent to her office unit. “She’s right,” Eve mumbled. “Too young, wrong method. Dobbins hits me as just too sloppy, just too disinterested. Klok’s coming across as straight and narrow. But there’s something here. I just can’t see it yet.”

“Maybe you would if you got a decent night’s sleep.”

Instead, she walked around her boards again. “Opera. What about the opera-tickets angle?”

“I’ve got the list for season ticket holders for the Met. Nothing on the first cross-check. I’ll try others.”

“He jumps names, jumps names and ID data. Covert stuff. Smooth, under radar. Where’d he learn how? Torture methods. Covert operations have been known to employ torture methods.”

“I can tell you my sources on the matter of torturers isn’t popping anyone of this generation still living and in business, or anyone who moonlights by targeting young brunettes.”

“It was worth a shot,” Eve mused. “Covert might change that. Someone who was in military ops, or paramilitary at one time. He learned the methods somewhere, and developed the skill to manipulate his data.”

“Or has the connections or the funds to hire someone to manipulate it,” Roarke reminded her.

“Yeah, there’s that. So. Why do we torture someone?”

“For information.”

“Yeah, at least ostensibly. Why else do you torture? Kicks, sexual deviation, ritual sacrifice.”

“Experimentation. Another tried and true rationale for inflicting pain.”

She looked at him. “We eliminate the need or desire for information, and the sexual deviation. No doubt in my mind he gets personal gratification from inflicting pain, but it has to be more. Ritual’s part of it, but this isn’t some sick religious deal or cult. So, experimentation,” she repeated. “Fits. Factor in that he’s very good at it. Torture skills are specialized. He isn’t messy about it, he’s precise. Again, where did he learn?”

“And you’re back to the Urbans.”

“It keeps crossing there. Someone taught him, or he studied. Experimented before the experimentation. But not here, not in New York.”

Circling her board, she studied, considered angles. “We ran searches for others before. I did a Missing Persons run on the victim type. But what if he experimented elsewhere? If he purposefully mutilated the bodies to eliminate the correlation, or disposed of them altogether?”

“You’re going to do a global search on mutilations and missing persons involving the victim type.”

“He might not have been as careful. If we find something…he might have left something behind.” She stopped, stared at the sketch of the man she hunted. “Still honing his craft, still finding his way. We did globals, but maybe we didn’t go back far enough.”

“I’ll set it up. I can do it faster,” he said before she could argue. “Then it’ll take a good long while for any results you can actually work with. I’ll set it up, then we’re getting some sleep.”

“All right. Okay.”

T
he dreams came in blurry spurts, as if she were swimming through fog that tore and re-formed, tore and re-formed. The clock ticked incessantly.

Over that endless, echoing tick, she heard the sounds of a battle raging. A firefight, she thought. Blasts and bullets and the wild shouts and calls of the men and women who fought.

She could smell the blood, the smoke, the burning flesh before she could see it. Carnage carried a sickly sweet aroma.

As vision cleared, focused, she saw the battle was on a stage, and the stage was dressed to depict the city in a strange, stylized form. Buildings, all black and silver, were tipped and tilted above hard white streets that jagged into impossible angles or inexplicable dead ends.

And the players on stage were dressed in bright, elaborate costumes that flowed through bloody pools and swirled in dirty smoke as they murdered each other.

She looked down on it all with interest, from her gilded box seat. Below, in a pit where bodies lay twisted, she could see the orchestra madly playing their instruments. Their fingers ran with blood from razor-sharp strings.

On stage, the shouts and calls were songs, she realized, fierce, violent. Vicious.

War could never be otherwise.

“The third act is nearly over.”

She turned, looked into the face of the killer as he took a huge stopwatch out of the pocket of his formal black.

“I don’t understand. It’s all death. Who writes these things?”

“Death, yes. Passion and strength and life. Everything leads to death, doesn’t it? Who would know that better than you?”

“Murder’s different.”

“Oh, yes, it’s artful and it’s deliberate. It takes it out of the hands of fate and puts the power into the one who creates death. Who makes a gift of it.”

“What gift? How is murder a gift?”

“This…” He gestured to the stage as a woman, brown hair bloody, face and body battered, was borne in on a stretcher. “This is about immortality.”

“Immortality’s for the dead. Who was she when she was alive?”

He only smiled. “Time’s up.” He clicked the stopwatch, and the stage went black.

Eve came rearing up in bed, sucking for air. Caught between the dream and reality, she closed her hands over her ears to muffle the ticking. “Why won’t it stop?”

“Eve. Eve. It’s your ’link.” Roarke curled his fingers over her wrists, gently tugged her hands down. “It’s your ’link.”

“Jesus. Wait.” She shook her head, pulled herself into the now. “Block video,” she ordered, then answered. “Dallas.”

Dispatch, Dallas, Lieutenant Eve. Report to Union Square Park off Park Avenue. Body of unidentified female, evidence of torture.

Eve turned her head, met Roarke’s eyes. “Acknowledged. Notify Peabody, Detective Delia, request Medical Examiner Morris. As per procedure on this matter, relay notification to Commander Whitney and Dr. Mira. I’m on my way. Dallas out.”

“I’ll be going with you. I know,” Roarke said as he rose, “you don’t make prime bait with me along, but that’ll be Gia Rossi left on the ground. And I’m going with you.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Ah, Eve.” His tone changed, softened. “So am I.”

AS EVE HAD SEEN THEIR HOME IN ITS SNOWY
landscape as a painting, Roarke saw the crime scene as a play. A dark play with constant movement and great noise, all centered around the single focal character.

The white sheet on the white snow, the white body laid over it, with deep brown hair shining in the hard lights. He thought the wounds stood out against the pale flesh like screams.

And there his wife stood in her long black coat, gloveless, of course. They’d both forgotten her gloves this time around. Hatless and hard-eyed. The stage manager, he thought, and a major player as well. Director and author of this final act.

There would be pity in her, this he knew, and there would be anger, a ribbon of guilt to tie them all together. But that complicated emotional package was tucked deep inside, walled in behind that cool, calculating mind.

He watched her speak to the sweepers, to the uniforms, to the others who walked on and off that winter stage. Then Peabody, the dependable, in her turtle-shell of a coat and colorful scarf, crossed the stage on cue. Together, she and Eve lowered to that lifeless focal point that held the dispassionate spotlight of center stage.

“Not close enough,” McNab said from beside him.

Roarke shifted his attention, very briefly, from the scene to McNab. “What?”

“Just couldn’t get close enough.” McNab’s hands were deep in two of the many pockets of his bright green coat, with the long tails of a boldly striped scarf fluttering down his back. “Moving in on a dozen roads from a dozen damn directions. Moving in, you can feel we’re getting closer. But not close enough to help Gia Rossi. It’s hard. This one hits hard.”

“It does.”

Had he really believed, Roarke wondered, a lifetime ago, had he honestly assumed that the nature of the cop was to feel nothing? He’d learned different since Eve. He’d learned very different. And now, he stood silent, listening to the lines as the players played their parts.

“TOD oh-one-thirty. Early Monday morning,” Peabody said. “She’s been dead a little over twenty-six hours.”

“He kept her for a day.” Eve studied the carving in the torso. Thirty-nine hours, eight minutes, forty-five seconds. “Kept her a day after he was finished. She didn’t last for him. The wounds are less severe, less plentiful than on York. Something went wrong for him this time. He wasn’t able to sustain the work.”

Less severe, yes, Peabody could see that was true. And still the cuts, the burns and bruising spoke of terrible suffering. “Maybe he got impatient this time. Maybe he needed to go for the kill.”

“I don’t think so.” With her sealed fingers, Eve picked up the victim’s arm, turned it to study the ligature marks from the binding. Then turned it back to examine more closely the killing wounds on the wrist. “She didn’t fight like York, not as much damage from the ropes, wrists and ankles. And the killing strokes here? Just as clean and precise as all the others. He’s still in control. And he still wants them to last.”

She laid the arm down again, on the white, white sheet. “It’s a matter of pride in his skill—torture, create the pain, but keep them alive. Increasing the level of pain, fear, injury, all while keeping them breathing. But Rossi, she wound down on him ahead of his schedule, ahead of his goal.”

“Before he’d have been able to see the media bulletins with his image,” Peabody pointed out. “It’s not because he panicked, or took his anger out on her.”

Eve glanced up. “No. But if he had, she’d still be dead. If he had, we still did what we had to do. Put that away. He started on her Saturday morning, finished early Monday. York Friday night. So he had a little celebration, maybe, or just gets a good night’s sleep before he rewinds the clock for Rossi.”

Takes time out to shadow me, Eve thought. Another tried and true torture method. Rest and revisit. Time out again to lure and secure Greenfeld. Need your next vic in the goddamn bullpen.

“Cleans her up, takes his time. No rush, no hurry. Already got the dump spot picked out, already surveyed the area. Set up a canvass.”

From her crouched position, Eve surveyed the area. “This kind of weather, there aren’t going to be a lot of people hanging out in the park. Bides his time,” she continued. “Loads her up, transports her here. Carries her in.”

“Sweepers have a lot of footprints to work with. The snow was pretty fresh and soft. They’ll make the treads, give us a size, a brand.”

“Yeah. But he’s not worried about that. Smart enough, he’s smart enough to wear something oversized, try to throw us off. To wear something common that’s next to impossible to pin. When we get him, we’ll find them, help hang him with them, but they won’t lead us to him.”

As dispassionate now as those harsh crime scene lights, Eve examined the body. “She was strong, in top shape.” Good specimen? she wondered. Had he thought he’d had a prime candidate for his nasty duet? “She struggled, but not as much as York. Not nearly as hard as York, not as long. Gave out, that’s what she did. Physically strong, but something in her shut down. Must’ve been a big disappointment to him.”

“I’m glad she didn’t suffer as much. I know,” Peabody said when Eve lifted her head. “But if we couldn’t save her, I’m glad she didn’t suffer as much.”

“If she could’ve held out longer, maybe we could’ve saved her. And either way you look at it, Peabody, doesn’t mean a fucking thing.”

She straightened as she spotted Morris coming toward them. In his eyes she saw something that was in her, some of what was in Peabody. She would, Eve thought, see that same complicated mix of anger, despair, guilt, and sorrow in the eyes of every cop involved.

“Gia Rossi,” was all Morris said.

“Yes. She’s been dead a little more than twenty-six hours by our gauge. A group of kids cutting through the park found her. Mucked up the scene some, but for the most part then just cut and ran. One of them called it in.

“Something went wrong for him with her.” Eve looked down at the body again. “He didn’t get a lot of time out of her. Maybe she just shut down, or maybe he used something—experimenting—some chemical that shut her down.”

“I’ll flag the tox as priority. She isn’t as damaged as the others.”

“No.”

“Can she be moved yet?”

“I was about to roll her.”

With a nod, he bent to help, and together they rolled the body.

“No injuries on her back,” Morris said.

“Most of them don’t. He likes face-to-face. It has to be personal. It has to be intimate.”

“Some bruising, lacerations, burns, punctures on the back of the shoulders, the calves. Less than the others.” Gently, he brushed the hair aside, examined the back of the neck, the scalp, the ears. “In comparison, I’d say he barely got to stage two in this case. Yes, yes, something went wrong. I’ll take her in now.”

He straightened, met Eve’s eyes. “Will there be family?”

He never asked, or so rarely she’d never registered it. “She has a mother in Queens, a father and stepmother out in Illinois. We’ll be contacting them.”

“Let me know if and when they want to see her. I’ll take them through it personally.”

“All right.”

He looked away, past the lights into the cold dark. “I wish it were spring,” he said.

“Yeah, people still end up dead, but it’s a nicer atmosphere for the rest of us. And, you know, flowers. They’re a nice touch.”

He grinned, and some of the shadows around him seemed to lift. “I like daffodils myself. I always think of the trumpet as a really long mouth, and imagine they chatter away at each other in a language we can’t hear.”

“That’s a little scary,” she decided.

“Then you don’t want to get me started on pansies.”

“Really don’t. I’ll check in with you later. Peabody, get that canvass started.” She left Morris, heard him murmur,
All right now, Gia
, then stepped up to Roarke.

“I’m nearly done here,” she began. “You should—”

“I won’t be going home,” Roarke told her. “I’ll go in, start working in the war room. I’ll take care of getting myself there.”

“I’ll go on in with you.” McNab looked at Eve. “If that’s all right with you, Lieutenant.”

“Go ahead, and contact the rest of the team. No reason for them to lay around in bed when we’re not. This is a twenty-four/seven op now. I’ll work out subteams, twelve-hour shifts. The clock’s about to start on Ariel Greenfeld. We’re not going to find her like this.”

She looked back. “I’m goddamned if we’re going to find her like this.”

I
t was still shy of dawn when she got to Central. Before she went to her office, she walked into the war room. As the lights flicked on she looked around. It was quiet now, empty of people. It wouldn’t be so again, she thought. Not until they’d closed this down.

She was adding more men, more eyes, ears, legs, hands. More to work the streets, flash the killer’s picture, talk to neighbors, street people, cabbies, chemi-heads. More to knock on the doors of the far too numerous buildings Roarke had thus far listed in his search.

More people to push, push, push, to track down every thread no matter how thin and knotted.

Until this was done there was only one investigation, only one killer, only one purpose for her and every cop under her.

She walked to the white board and in her own hand wrote out the time it had taken for Gia Rossi to die after Rossi’s name.

Then she looked down at the next name she’d written. Ariel Greenfeld.

“You hold the hell on. It’s not over, and it’s not going to be over, so you hold the hell on.”

She turned, saw Roarke watching her from the doorway. “You made good time,” he told her. “McNab and I detoured up to EDD, to requisition more equipment. Feeney’s on his way in.”

“Good.”

He crossed over to stand, as she was, in front of the whiteboard. “It depends, on some level, on her now. On you, on us, certainly on him, but on some level, on her.”

“Every hour she holds on, we get closer.”

“And every hour she holds on, is another hour he may move on you. You want that. You’d will it to happen if you could.”

No bullshit, she decided. No evasions. “That’s right.”

“When they killed Marlena, all those years ago, broke her to pieces to prove a point to me, I wanted them to come at me.”

Eve thought of Summerset’s daughter, how she’d been taken, tortured, and killed by rivals of the young, enterprising criminal Roarke had been. “If they had, the whole of them, you’d have ended up in the ground with her.”

“That may be. That very likely may be.” He shifted his gaze from the board to meet hers. “But I wanted it, and would have willed it if I could have. But since that wasn’t to be, I found another way to end every one of them.”

“He’s only one man. And there may not be another way.”

Thinking of those who were lost, he looked at the board again. Only one man, and perhaps only one way. “That’s all very true. Here’s what I know, here’s what I understood out there in the cold and the dark with you tending to what he’d made of Gia Rossi. He thinks he knows you.”

He turned his head now, and those brilliant blue eyes fired into hers. “He thinks he understands what you are, knows who you are. But he’s wrong. He doesn’t know or understand the likes of you. If it comes to the two of you, even for a moment, if it comes to the two of you, he may get a glimmer of who and what you are. And if he does, he’ll know something of fear.”

“Well.” A little shaken, a little mystified, she blew out a breath. “That’s not what I was expecting out of you.”

“When I looked at her, at what he’d done to her, I thought I would envision you there. Your face with her face, as it is on your board.”

“Roarke—”

“But I didn’t,” he continued, and lifted her hand to brush his fingers to her cheek. “Couldn’t. Not, I think, because it was more than I could stand. Not because of that, but because he’ll never have that power or control over you. You won’t allow it. And that, Darling Eve, is of considerable comfort to me.”

“It’s a nice bolster for me, too.” She aimed a glance toward the door, just to make sure they were still alone. Then she leaned in, kissed him. “Thanks. I’ve got to go.”

“And if he kills you,” Roarke added as she strode to the door, “I’m going to be extremely pissed off.”

“Who could blame you?”

She started back to her office, stopped when Peabody hailed her. “Baxter and Trueheart are notifying the mother, as ordered. I just spoke with the father.”

“All right. When Baxter reports in, we’ll clear it for her name to be released to the media.”

“Speaking of the media, I poked into your office in case you were there. There’s about a half a million messages from various reporters.”

“I’ll take care of it. Let me know when everyone’s in the house. We’ll do the briefing asap.”

“Will do. Dallas, do you want me to update the boards?”

“I’ve already done it.” She turned away to go to her office.

She flicked through the source readout on the messages, transferring them to the liaison. Only when she came to one from Nadine did she pause, then order playback.

“Dallas, the lines are buzzing you’ve got another one. It’s going to get ugly, so this is a heads up. The spit’s already flying and most of it’s going to splatter on you and the NYPSD. If you’ve got anything I can use, get back to me.”

Eve considered, then ordered the callback. Nadine picked up on the first beep.

“I thought media darlings slept till noon.”

“Sure, just like cops. I’m already in my office,” Nadine told her. “Working on some copy. I’m going on at eight. Special report. If you’ve got anything, now’s the time to share.”

“A source from the NYPSD stated this morning that new and salient information regarding the individual the media has dubbed The Groom has come to light.”

“What new and salient information?”

“However, the source would not divulge any details of this information due to the need to confine any and all such data within the investigation. It was also stated by the same source that the task force formed to pursue the investigation is working around the clock to identify and apprehend the individual responsible for the deaths of Sarifina York and Gia Rossi. As well as to seek justice for them and for the twenty-three other women whose deaths are attributed to this same individual.”