The In Death Collection, Books 11-15 Read online

  J.D. Robb THE IN DEATH COLLECTION Books 11-15

  Judgment In Death

  Betrayal In Death

  Seduction In Death

  Reunion In Death

  Purity In Death

  J. D. Robb

  Nora Roberts

  Hot Ice

  Sacred Sins

  Brazen Virtue

  Sweet Revenge

  Public Secrets

  Genuine Lies

  Carnal Innocence

  Divine Evil

  Honest Illusions

  Private Scandals

  Hidden Riches

  True Betrayals

  Montana Sky

  Sanctuary

  Homeport

  The Reef

  River’s End

  Carolina Moon

  The Villa

  Midnight Bayou

  Three Fates

  Birthright

  Northern Lights

  Blue Smoke

  Angels Fall

  High Noon

  Tribute

  Black Hills

  The Search

  Chasing Fire

  Series

  IRISH BORN TRILOGY

  Born in Fire

  Born in Ice

  Born in Shame

  DREAM TRILOGY

  Daring to Dream

  Holding the Dream

  Finding the Dream

  CHESAPEAKE BAY SAGA

  Sea Swept

  Rising Tides

  Inner Harbor

  Chesapeake Blue

  GALLAGHERS OF ARDMORE TRILOGY

  Jewels of the Sun

  Tears of the Moon

  Heart of the Sea

  THREE SISTERS ISLAND TRILOGY

  Dance Upon the Air

  Heaven and Earth

  Face the Fire

  KEY TRILOGY

  Key of Light

  Key of Knowledge

  Key of Valor

  IN THE GARDEN TRILOGY

  Blue Dahlia

  Black Rose

  Red Lily

  CIRCLE TRILOGY

  Morrigan’s Cross

  Dance of the Gods

  Valley of Silence

  SIGN OF SEVEN TRILOGY

  Blood Brothers

  The Hollow

  The Pagan Stone

  BRIDE QUARTET

  Vision in White

  Bed of Roses

  Savor the Moment

  Happy Ever After

  Nora Roberts & J. D. Robb

  Remember When

  J. D. Robb

  Naked in Death

  Glory in Death

  Immortal in Death

  Rapture in Death

  Ceremony in Death

  Vengeance in Death

  Holiday in Death

  Conspiracy in Death

  Loyalty in Death

  Witness in Death

  Judgment in Death

  Betrayal in Death

  Seduction in Death

  Reunion in Death

  Purity in Death

  Portrait in Death

  Imitation in Death

  Divided in Death

  Visions in Death

  Survivor in Death

  Origin in Death

  Memory in Death

  Born in Death

  Innocent in Death

  Creation in Death

  Strangers in Death

  Salvation in Death

  Promises in Death

  Kindred in Death

  Fantasy in Death

  Indulgence in Death

  Treachery in Death

  Anthologies

  From the Heart

  A Little Magic

  A Little Fate

  Moon Shadows

  (with Jill Gregory, Ruth Ryan Langan, and Marianne Willman)

  THE ONCE UPON SERIES

  (with Jill Gregory, Ruth Ryan Langan, and Marianne Willman)

  Once Upon a Castle

  Once Upon a Star

  Once Upon a Dream

  Once Upon a Rose

  Once Upon a Kiss

  Once Upon a Midnight

  Silent Night

  (with Susan Plunkett, Dee Holmes, and Claire Cross)

  Out of This World

  (with Laurell K. Hamilton, Susan Krinard, and Maggie Shayne)

  Bump in the Night

  (with Mary Blayney, Ruth Ryan Langan, and Mary Kay McComas)

  Dead of Night

  (with Mary Blayney, Ruth Ryan Langan, and Mary Kay McComas)

  Three in Death

  Suite 606

  (with Mary Blayney, Ruth Ryan Langan, and Mary Kay McComas)

  In Death

  The Lost

  (with Patricia Gaffney, Mary Blayney, and Ruth Ryan Langan)

  The Other Side

  (with Mary Blaney, Patricia Gaffney, Ruth Ryan Langan, and Mary Kay McComas)

  Also available…

  The Official Nora Roberts Companion

  (edited by Denise Little and Laura Hayden)

  Table of Contents

  Judgment In Death

  Betrayal In Death

  Seduction In Death

  Reunion In Death

  Purity In Death

  JUDGMENT IN DEATH

  J. D. Robb

  Contents

  chapter one

  chapter two

  chapter three

  chapter four

  chapter five

  chapter six

  chapter seven

  chapter eight

  chapter nine

  chapter ten

  chapter eleven

  chapter twelve

  chapter thirteen

  chapter fourteen

  chapter fifteen

  chapter sixteen

  chapter seventeen

  chapter eighteen

  chapter nineteen

  chapter twenty

  chapter twenty-one

  chapter twenty-two

  chapter twenty-three

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Judgment in Death

  A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with the author

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 2000 by Nora Roberts

  This book may not be reproduced in whole or part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission. Making or distributing electronic copies of this book constitutes copyright infringement and could subject the infringer to criminal and civil liability.

  For information address:

  The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  The Penguin Putnam Inc. World Wide Web site address is

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  ISBN: 978-1-1012-0379-8

  A BERKLEY BOOK®

  Berkley Books first published by The Berkley Publishing Group, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  BERKLEY and the “B” design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Putnam Inc.

  Electronic edition: October, 2003

  The vices of authority are chiefly four: delays, corruption, roughness and facility.

  Francis Bacon

  More things belong to marriage than four bare legs in a bed.

  John Heywood

  chapter one

  She stood in Purgatory and studied death. The blood and the gore of it, the ferocity of its glee. It had come to this place with the wil
lful temper of a child, full of heat and passion and careless brutality.

  Murder was rarely a tidy business. Whether it was craftily calculated or wildly impulsive, it tended to leave a mess for others to clean up.

  It was her job to wade through the debris of murder, to pick up the pieces, see where they fit, and put together a picture of the life that had been stolen. And through that picture to find the image of a killer.

  Now, in the early hours of morning, in the hesitant spring of 2059, her boots crunched over a jagged sea of broken glass. Her eyes, brown and cool, scanned the scene: shattered mirrors, broken bottles, splintered wood. Wall screens were smashed, privacy booths scarred and dented. Pricey leather and cloth that had covered stools or the plusher seating areas had been ripped to colorful shreds.

  What had once been an upscale strip club was now a jumbled pile of expensive garbage.

  What had once been a man lay behind the wide curve of the bar. Now a victim, sprawled in his own blood.

  Lieutenant Eve Dallas crouched beside him. She was a cop, and that made him hers.

  “Male. Black. Late thirties. Massive trauma, head and body. Multiple broken bones.” She took a gauge from her field kit to take the body and ambient temperatures. “Looks like the fractured skull would have done the job, but it didn’t stop there.”

  “He was beaten to pieces.”

  Eve acknowledged her aide’s comment with a grunt. She was looking at what was left of a well-built man in his prime, a good six-two and two hundred and thirty pounds of what had been toned muscle.

  “What do you see, Peabody?”

  Automatically, Peabody shifted her stance, focused her vision. “The victim. . . well, it appears the victim was struck from behind. The first blow probably took him down, or at least dazed him. The killer followed through, with repeated strikes. From the pattern of the blood splatter, and brain matter, he was taken out with head shots, then beaten while down, likely unconscious. Some of the injuries were certainly delivered postmortem. The metal bat is the probable murder weapon and was used by someone of considerable strength, possibly chemically induced, as the scene indicates excessive violence often demonstrated by users of Zeus.”

  “Time of death, oh four hundred,” Eve stated, then turned her head to look up at Peabody.

  Her aide was starched and pressed and as official as they came, with her uniform cap set precisely on her dark chin-length hair. She had good eyes, Eve thought, clear and dark. And though the sheer vileness of the scene had leached some of the color from her cheeks, she was holding.

  “Motive?” Eve asked.

  “It appears to be robbery, Lieutenant.”

  “Why?”

  “The cash drawer’s open and empty. The credit machine’s broken.”

  “Mmm-hmm. Snazzy place like this would be heavier in credits, but they’d do some cash business.”

  “Zeus addicts kill for spare change.”

  “True enough. But what would our victim have been doing alone, in a closed club, with an addict? Why would he let anyone hopped on Zeus behind the bar? And . . .” With her sealed fingers she picked up a small silver credit chip from the river of blood. “Why would our addict leave these behind? A number of them are scattered here around the body.”

  “He could have dropped them.” But Peabody began to think she wasn’t seeing something Eve did.

  “Could have.”

  She counted the coins as she picked them up, thirty in all, sealed them in an evidence bag, and handed it to Peabody. Then she picked up the bat. It was fouled with blood and brain. About two feet in length, she judged, and weighted to mean business.

  Mean business.

  “It’s good, solid metal, not something an addict would pick up in some abandoned building. We’re going to find this belonged here, behind the bar. We’re going to find, Peabody, that our victim knew his killer. Maybe they were having an after-hours drink.”

  Her eyes narrowed as she pictured it. “Maybe they had words, and the words escalated. More likely, our killer already had an edge on. He knew where the bat was. Came behind the bar. Something he’d done before, so our friend here doesn’t think anything of it. He’s not concerned, doesn’t worry about turning his back.”

  She did so herself, measuring the position of the body, of the splatter. “The first blow rams him face first into the glass on the back wall. Look at the cuts on his face. Those aren’t nicks from flying glass. They’re too long, too deep. He manages to turn, and that’s where the killer takes the next swing here, across the jaw. That spins him around again. He grabs the shelves there, brings them down. Bottles crashing. That’s when he took the killing blow. This one that cracked his skull like an egg.”

  She crouched again, sat back on her heels. “After that, the killer just beat the hell out of him, then wrecked the place. Maybe in temper, maybe as cover. But he had enough control to come back here, to look at his handiwork before he left. He dropped the bat here when he was done.”

  “He wanted it to look like a robbery? Like an illegals overkill?”

  “Yeah. Or our victim was a moron and I’m giving him too much credit. You got the body and immediate scene recorded? All angles?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Let’s turn him over.”

  The shattered bones shifted like a sack of broken crockery as Eve turned the body. “Goddamn it. Oh, goddamn it.”

  She reached down to lift the smeared ID from the cool, congealing pool of blood. With her sealed thumb, she wiped at the photo and the shield. “He was on the job.”

  “He was a cop?” Peabody stepped forward. She heard the sudden silence. The crime scene team and the sweepers working on the other side of the bar stopped talking. Stopped moving.

  A half dozen faces turned. Waited.

  “Kohli, Detective Taj.” Eve’s face was grim as she got to her feet. “He was one of us.”

  Peabody crossed the littered floor to where Eve stood watching the remains of Detective Taj Kohli being bagged for transferal to the morgue. “I got his basics, Dallas. He’s out of the One twenty-eight, assigned to Illegals. Been on the job for eight years. Came out of the military. He was thirty-seven. Married. Two kids.”

  “Anything pop on his record?”

  “No, sir. It’s clean.”

  “Let’s find out if he was working undercover here or just moonlighting. Elliott? I want those security discs.”

  “There aren’t any.” One of the crime scene team hurried over. His face was folded into angry lines. “Cleaned out. Every one of them. The place had full scope, and this son of a bitch snagged every one. We got nothing.”

  “Covered his tracks.” With her hands on her hips, Eve turned a circle. The club was triple-leveled, with a stage on the main, dance floors on one and two. Privacy rooms ringed the top. For full scope, she estimated it would need a dozen cameras, probably more. To snag all the record discs would have taken time and care.

  “He knew the place,” she decided. “Or he’s a fucking security whiz. Window dressing,” she muttered. “All this destruction’s just window dressing. He knew what he was doing. He had control. Peabody, find out who owns the place, who runs it. I want to know everybody who works here. I want to know the setup.”

  “Lieutenant?” A harassed-looking sweeper trudged through the chaos. “There’s a civilian outside.”

  “There are a lot of civilians outside. Let’s keep them there.”

  “Yes, sir, but this one insists on speaking to you. He says this is his place. And, ah . . .”

  “ ‘And, ah’ what?”

  “And that you’re his wife.”

  “Roarke Entertainment,” Peabody announced as she read off the data from her palm PC. She sent Eve a cautious smile. “Guess who owns Purgatory?”

  “I should’ve figured it.” Resigned, Eve strode to the entrance door.

  He looked very much as he’d looked two hours before when they’d parted ways to go about their individual business. Sleek and g
orgeous. The light topcoat he wore over his dark suit fluttered a bit in the breeze. The same breeze that tugged at the mane of black hair that framed his poetically sinful face. The dark glasses he wore against the glare of the sun only added to the look of slick elegance.

  And when he slipped them off as she stepped out, the brilliant blue of his eyes met hers. He tucked the glasses in his pocket, lifted an eyebrow.

  “Good morning, Lieutenant.”

  “I had a bad feeling when I walked in here. It’s just your kind of place, isn’t it? Why do you have to own every damn thing?”

  “It was a boyhood dream.” His voice cruised over Ireland, picked up the music of it. He glanced past her to the police seal. “It appears we’ve both been inconvenienced.”

  “Did you have to tell the sweeper I was your wife?”

  “You are my wife,” he said easily and shifted his gaze back to her face. “A fact which pleases me daily.” He took her hand, rubbing his thumb over her wedding ring before she could tug it free again.

  “No touching,” she hissed at him, which made him smile.

  “That’s not what you said a few hours ago. In fact—”

  “Shut up, Roarke.” She glanced around, though none of the cops working the scene was outside or close enough to hear. “This is a police investigation.”

  “So I’m told.”

  “And who told you?”

  “The head of the maintenance team who found the body. He did call the police first,” he pointed out. “But it’s natural he’d report the incident to me. What happened?”

  There was no point in griping because his business had tangled around hers. Again. She tried to console herself that he could and would help her cut through some of the muck of paperwork.

  “Do you have a bartender by the name of Kohli? Taj Kohli?”

  “I have no idea. But I can find out.” He took a slim memo book out of his breast pocket, keyed in a request for data. “Is he dead?”

  “As dead gets.”

  “Yes, he was mine,” Roarke confirmed, and the Irish in his voice had taken on a cold note. “For the past three months. Part time. Four nights a week. He had a family.”

  “Yes, I know.” Such things mattered to him, and it always touched her heart. “He was a cop,” Eve said. This time his brows lifted. “Didn’t have that data in your little scan, did you?”