Kindred in Death (7 page)

“If it was payback . . .”

She nodded at Feeney. “We’ll be going over MacMasters’s cases, and I’m going to talk to him again, go back with him. Jamie, would she recognize a gang type?”

“I think so, yeah. She was smart, like I said. Really street aware, just sort of . . . not self-aware? Is that right, do you get it? She knew to be careful, what types to avoid.”

“What type would draw her?”

“Well . . . he’d have to be clean. I don’t just mean cleaned up. He’d have to look right, sound right. Jo said he told her he went to Columbia? That might hook her since I do, and she’ll be going next year. It’s an opening, you know? And, ah, manners. Like, he’d be polite. If he came on too strong, he’d scare her off.”

Plenty of other schools in New York, Eve thought, but he hits on the one where one of her closest friends goes, where she plans to go. Eve didn’t see it as coincidence.

“He studied her, stalked her, researched her. And he took his time.” No, it wasn’t some illegals dealer or one of his spine-crackers. “MacMasters made the reservations for this trip ten days ago. This bastard was ready. This was his opportunity. She’d have told him her father got promoted.”

“She texted me, the night after he got informed,” Jamie told her. “I think she tagged everybody she knew. She was really proud. I was surprised she didn’t go on the trip, like a family celebration.”

“A girl, in the first weeks of a romance,” Peabody said. “She doesn’t want to go off with her parents for the weekend when she can stay home and see the guy. Even if she was on the fence about it, one word from him, how he’d miss her, and she stays.”

“We work the lines we have. Peabody, contact somebody at Columbia on the off chance he told her the truth. I want a list of every male student—and add in any staff—currently enrolled or employed, or who have been enrolled or employed within the last five years who are from Georgia. Age range eighteen to thirty. While that’s running tag Baxter, he and his boy are back on the roll. I want them to take Garcia, then follow up on all door-to-doors, and expand same to a three-block radius of the scene.”

In her office she ran like crimes, and did a full-scan search through Feeney’s brain child, IRCCA, to take it global, and run the data through off-world as well.

While her computer labored, she set up a second murder board in her office. Deena’s image—alive and dead—would stay with her while she worked.

“Smart girl,” Eve murmured as she pinned images, reports, time lines. “Cop’s daughter. Everyone says that. But under it you’re still just a girl. A nice-looking boy pays attention, says the right things, looks at you just a certain way. You’re not smart anymore.”

She hadn’t been, Eve thought. Not a cop’s daughter, but a seasoned cop—a cynic, a badass herself. And Roarke had paid attention, said the right things, looked at her in that way. She couldn’t claim she’d been smart. She’d bent her own rules, taken chances, fallen for a man she’d known was dangerous, one who’d been a murder suspect.

No, she hadn’t been smart. She’d been dazzled. Why would anyone expect Deena to be otherwise?

“I know what you felt, or thought you felt,” Eve murmured. “I know how he got to you, broke down your resistance, your defenses, your better judgment. Me, I got lucky. You didn’t. But I know how he got under your guard.”

So now, instead of thinking like the girl, she needed to think like the pursuer.

She turned toward the AutoChef—stopped.

Coffee, she remembered. Roarke’s first gift to her had been a bag of coffee. The real deal. Irresistible to her, and worth more to her mind than a fistful of diamonds.

Charming and thoughtful—and exactly right.

Had there been a token given? she wondered. Something small and exactly right?

She stepped back to her desk, studied Deena’s photo. Music and theater, she recalled. Big interests. And reading. All those music discs, she thought. Maybe he put together a music mix, designed just for her. Or poems—didn’t women get off on poetry, especially if it was from a man?

Wanted to join the Peace Corps or Education For All. But damned if she could think of a token that applied there.

Her computer signaled the first search was complete. Letting the other angle simmer, Eve sat down to read case files on rape-murder.

Nothing popped, though she read, analyzed, ran probabilities for more than an hour. The search through IRCCA gave her the same results. She had a handful of long shots to track down, but her gut told her it was just for form. Had to be done.

She’d eliminated half the long shots when Peabody stepped in.

“I got a partial list from Columbia—the currents. It’s going to be tomorrow before I can get the formers. At this time there are sixty-three male students from the great state of Georgia, and four instructors, one security guard, and two other employees. The guard’s on the high side at thirty, a groundskeeper at twenty-four, and a maintenance tech, twenty-six.”

“We’ll do background runs on them, all of them.”

“It just doesn’t feel like he’d have given her that much truth.”

“I think he gave her enough truth, so if she played cop’s daughter, checked him out, it would fly. He’s too careful to leave himself open.”

Peabody gestured toward the AutoChef, got a nod. “You think he’s a student there?” she asked as she walked over to program coffee.

“I think he may have set it up so if she checked, he’d pop up as a student. He may have already taken care of that, wiped the record. Here’s what you could do, if you were being careful. You find a student, clone his ID, take his name, or change it—dealer’s choice. You can bet your ass he had what would look like student ID. You get discounts, right, when you go to vids, theater, concerts. He took her out, he’d have to show it—and it would have to pass the scan.”

“I didn’t think of that. Which is why you get the slightly less crappy bucks than I do.” She passed Eve fresh coffee. “So maybe, one of these sixty-three is his dupe. Or . . . it could be he had a partner.”

“He works alone. A partner means you have to trust. Who could he trust this much? No loose ends if you work alone. I’m going to bet one of those students had their ID stolen or lost it within the last six months. He clones it, replaces the photo with one of himself, tweaks the basic data if necessary. If Deena gets a buzz, and checks, she’s going to find he’s registered as a student. For now, we run them. Dot every i. Tomorrow, we check to see if any of them replaced their ID. Take the top thirty,” she ordered. “I’ll take the rest. Work here or at home, and report to my home office in the morning, oh-seven-hundred.”

“Where are you going?”

“I want to go back to the scene, walk through it, then I’ll pick up the runs at home. Copy the data from Columbia to my home unit.”

“Okay. If I hit anything, I’ll let you know.”

Eve downed more coffee, and tagged Roarke. “Any progress?”

“This won’t be quick or easy.”

“I’m done here. I’m going to go back to the scene, do a walk-through, then take the rest home.”

“I’ll meet you in the garage.”

“Not quick or easy, remember?”

“With the captain’s blessing, I’m having some of the units sent to my lab at home. I’ve got better equipment. Five minutes.”

He clicked off.

She loaded up what she needed, sent copies of all reports, notes, files to her home unit. On the way to the garage she took a tag from one of the officers on the knock-on-doors. All residents on the victim’s block had been located and interviewed. And not one of them had seen anyone enter or exit the MacMasters home, save Deena herself, over the weekend.

Maybe Baxter and his faithful aide, Trueheart, would have better luck, she thought. Or she and Peabody would get a hit from the morning circuit of the park. But when a man left no trace of himself at a rape murder, when he took hours to complete the task and left nothing behind, the likelihood of him being careless enough to be seen with his victim was low.

Still, someone somewhere had seen them. Remembering was a different matter.

They’d walked, talked, eaten, played in the city, and over a number of weeks. She only had to find one venue, one person, one crack in the whole to pry open.

She walked to her car, leaned back against the trunk as she took out her memo book to key in more notes.

Columbia. Student ID.

Georgia. Southern accent.

Truth or lie? Why truth, why lie?

Missing pocket ’link, PPC—possible e-diary?—handbag. Other contents of handbag important? Protection and trophy?

She looked up when Roarke crossed the garage. “When you worked a mark, did you ever fake an accent?”

“A cop shop’s an odd place to discuss such matters from my standpoint. Since you’re working, I’ll drive.”

He waited until they were in the vehicle before he answered the question. “Yes, now and then, tailoring such to suit the mark. But more often the Irish suited well enough. I might layer it on—switching to a thicker West County brogue, or posh it up with public school tones.”

“But, especially if it was a long con, or some job that would take several weeks and a lot of communication with the mark, it would be easier and safer to stick close to natural. Posh it up or thicken it up, but stay with the basics.”

“That’s true enough,” he agreed as he headed uptown. “One slip and the whole thing can fall apart.”

“Guy tells her he’s from Georgia. She likes the accent, tells her friend that part. He’s smart, so the smart thing is to use what you have, what you’re comfortable with. Maybe he lived in the south, at least for a while. He tells her he goes to Columbia, so maybe he did, or he knows enough about it to be able to speak intelligently when she says, hey, I have a friend who goes there. No point in getting tripped up on those kinds of details. It’s hard to believe he’s nineteen, and has this kind of patience and control, this kind of focus.”

She glanced at Roarke. “Though some do.”

He switched lanes to slide into a narrow gap in traffic. “At nineteen I had a lifetime behind me, of being a street rat, of running games, thieving, and aiming toward getting the fuck out. So by then I’d honed some skills, and learned the need for that patience and control.”

“Murder’s different from thievery.”

“It is indeed entirely different. And more yet when it’s the deliberate murder of an innocent girl. It would be all in the motivation, wouldn’t it? To plan it, run it, execute it this way would take a strong motive. But for some, the motive’s all in the thrill, isn’t it?”

“It doesn’t feel like a thrill killing. It’s too exacting for that. And too cold.”

He said nothing for a few moments as he nipped around a Rapid Cab and through a light seconds before it flashed red. “When I went for the men who’d tortured and killed Marlena, it was cold. Cold-blooded, cold-minded. Some might have looked at the results and thought otherwise, but there was no thrill involved in it. None of it.”

Eve thought of Summerset’s young daughter—a girl Roarke had thought of as a sister, and who’d been used and murdered as a warning to him. “Deena wasn’t executed. If there’s a similarity it’s between her and Marlena. The payback. It keeps ringing for me. On the other hand, he could have taken her out other ways, at other times. Abducted her, put MacMasters through that agony before killing her.”

“He liked playing the boyfriend, you’re thinking. Stringing it out, making her care. He likes the game maybe. If there was a thrill, it would’ve been in that stage of it. Cold blood and a cold mind. You’d need both to be able to romance a girl, to use that for the express purpose of taking her life.”

When he pulled up in front of the MacMasters home, Eve got out to stand on the sidewalk.

“It’s later than it would’ve been when he walked here. He had to walk, nothing else makes sense. He could’ve come from either direction, even through the park. Until we find somebody who saw him that night, we can’t know. He had the cuffs, he had the drug. Warm night, but he could’ve been wearing a jacket. A lot of kids wear them more for style than need. Restraints in a pocket, maybe, same with the drug. But he’d need tools, wouldn’t he, for the security. Maybe he had a satchel, a bag, a backpack. Or he’s just got the tools in another pocket. McNab wears pants that have a million of them.”

“With a jacket you could hook the cuffs in the back, cover them, as cops often do.”

“I think he strode along, a young guy with somewhere to go. Just another teenager or college type, good-looking, clean, upscale clothes. Nobody pays attention. I think he tagged her from a block or two away, got her on the ’link, the way you said. Maybe just to say, ‘I’m nearly there,’ maybe, yeah maybe to pretend he wasn’t sure of the house. That would be smart. She’d guide him in, keep her eye out for him, open the door to greet him even as he makes the turn for the steps.”

“She would want him in quick and smooth, too, wouldn’t she? Wouldn’t want one of the neighbors mentioning to her parents how they’d seen the boy visiting while they were away.”

“Good point.” Eve narrowed her eyes. “Yeah, good point. They may have even worked it out ahead, when he talked her into having him over. ‘I’ll tag you when I’m close, so you can watch for me.’ Their little secret.”

She saw it in her head as she went up the steps, broke the police seal, used her master to open the locks.

“Still, somebody might see. He’s not worried about anyone mentioning it. She’ll be dead, game over. But he’d have to take precautions about what they see. So yeah, I’m betting jacket, probably a cap, shades. Keep your head down, hands in your pockets, using an earbud or headset. Maybe they can ID the clothes, but you’d ditch those. Maybe they can give a general idea of your height and build. Your coloring. So what? Even eye wits rarely get it just right. He’s just a boy going to see a girl.”

She stopped to stand in the foyer, to keep it rolling through her head. “She’s excited. He kisses her hello. Still the shy guy, still the sweet boy. He needs to keep that up so he can take her without a struggle, so she doesn’t have a chance to fight or get away or scrape any pieces of him off. She’s got music on, she likes music. They like music. Maybe show him some of the house, at least take him back to the kitchen so you can get the drinks, the food.”