Imitation in Death Read online

  Instead, she walked over, plucked the cat off Roarke’s lap. “You’re in my seat,” she told him, and set him on another chair.

  She slid into Roarke’s lap, took his wine. “What’s this one about?”

  “It seems water is the commodity in fashion. This particular planet in the Zero quadrant—”

  “There isn’t any Zero quadrant.”

  “It’s fictional, my darling, literal-minded Eve.” He snuggled her in, pressing an absent kiss to her head as he watched the action. “Anyway, this planet’s all but out of water. Potable water. And there’s a rescue attempt being made to get the colony there a supply, and the means to clean up what they have. But there’s this other faction who wants the water for themselves. There’ve been a couple of bloody battles over it already.”

  Something exploded on screen, a shower of color, an ear-splinting boom of sound.

  “Nicely done,” Roarke commented. “And there’s a woman, head of the environmental police—the good guys—who’s reluctantly in love with the rogue cargo captain who’s helping deliver the goods—for a price. It’s about thirty minutes in. I can start it over.”

  “No, I’ll catch up.”

  She intended to sit with him for a few minutes only, let her mind rest. But she got caught up in the story, and it was so nice, so simple to stay, stretched out in the chair with him while fictional battles raged.

  And good overcame evil.

  “Not bad,” she said when the credits began to roll. “I’m going to get another hour or two of work in.”

  “Are you going to tell me about it?”

  “Probably.” She climbed out of the chair, stretched, then blinked like an owl when he turned on the light.

  “Well, damn it, Eve, what have you done to your face now?”

  “It wasn’t my fault.” Sulking a little, she touched fingers gingerly to her jaw. “Somebody knocked me into this guy’s fist when I was trying to stop him from beating this other guy who was whacking off in the subway to a bloody pulp. I couldn’t blame the guy, the guy with the fist, because he wasn’t aiming it at me. But still.”

  “My life,” Roarke said after a moment, “was gray before you walked into it.”

  “Yeah, I’m a rainbow.” She wiggled her jaw. “My face anyway. You up for some drone work?”

  “I might be persuaded. After we put something on that bruise.”

  “It’s not so bad. You know, the transit cop told me that guy’s a regular on that line. They call him Willy the Wanker.”

  “That’s a fascinating bit of New York trivia.” He pulled her toward the elevator. “It makes me yearn to ride the subway.”

  Chapter 8

  In Peabody’s cramped apartment, McNab ran her through a series of intense computer simulations. He’d proven himself, Peabody had discovered in the last few weeks, a strict and fairly irritating instructor.

  With her shoulders hunched, she carefully picked her way through a murder scene, selecting her choices and options in a field investigation of a double homicide.

  And cursed when her selection resulted in a blasting buzz—McNab’s personal addition to the sim—and a stern-faced figure of a robed judge shaking his finger at her.

  Ah-ah-ah—improper procedure, scene contamination. Evidence suppressed. Suspect gets a free walk due to detective investigator’s screwup.

  “Does he have to say that?”

  “Cuts through the legal mumbo,” McNab pointed out, and stuffed potato chips in his face. “Digs down to the point.”

  “I don’t want to do any more sims.” Her face fell into a pout that had McNab’s libido jiggling. “My brain’s going to leak out of my ears in a minute.”

  He loved her, enough to mostly ignore the image of peeling her out of her clothes and doing her on the rug. “Look, you’re aces on the written. You’ve got a memory for details and points of law, blah blah. You get thumbs-up on the oral, once your voice settles down from a squeak.”

  “It does not squeak.”

  “Sort of like how it does when I bite your toes.” He grinned toothily when she scowled at him. “And while I like how it sounds myself, the test team’s going to be less romantically inclined. So you’re going to want to oil the squeaks.”

  She continued to pout, then her mouth dropped open in shock when he slapped her hand away from the bag of chips. “None for you until you get through a sim.”

  “Jesus, McNab, I’m not a puppy performing for a biscuit.”

  “No, you’re a cop who wants to make detective.” He moved the bag out of her reach. “And you’re scared.”

  “I’m not scared; I’m understandably anxious about the testing process and proving myself ready to . . .” She hissed out a breath as he merely studied her with patient green eyes. “I’m terrified.” Because his arm came around her, she snuggled into his bony shoulder. “I’m terrified I’ll blow it, and I’ll let Dallas down. And you, and Feeney, the commander, my family. Jesus.”

  “You’re not going to blow it, and you won’t let anyone down. This isn’t about Dallas, or anybody else. It’s all about you.”

  “She trained me, she put me up for it.”

  “So she must figure you’re ready. It ain’t no snap, She-Body.” He gave her cheek a quick nuzzle. “It’s not supposed to be. But you’ve got the training, you’ve got the field time, the instincts, the brains. And, honey, you’ve got the guts and heart, too.”

  She turned her head to look up at him. “That’s so damn sweet.”

  “It’s a fact, and here’s another one, here’s what you don’t have right now. You don’t have the balls.”

  Her gooey affection toward him transformed into brittle insult. “Hey.”

  “And because you don’t have the balls,” he continued calmly, “you’re not trusting your gut, or your training. You’re second-guessing yourself. Instead of going with what you know, you keep wondering what you don’t know, and that’s why you keep missing up on the sims.”

  She’d pulled away from him. Her breath hissed out. “I hate you for being right.”

  “Nah. You love me because I’m so damn good looking.”

  “Asshole.”

  “ ’Fraidy cat.”

  “ ’Fraidy cat.” Her lips twitched into a reluctant smile. “Jeez. Okay, set up another one. Make it tough. And when I nail it, I not only get the chips, but . . .” Her smile widened. “You wear the hat.”

  “You’re on.”

  She rose to pace and clear out her head while he programmed the sim. She’d been afraid, she admitted. Afraid she wanted it too much. So she hadn’t used the hunger, but had let it eat away at her confidence. That had to stop. Even if her palms were damp and her stomach in knots it had to stop.

  Dallas never let nerves get in the way, she thought. And she had them, nerves and something deeper, darker. It had peeked through on the Gregg scene, for just a moment that afternoon. Now and again on a sexual homicide, it peeked through. It turned her lieutenant’s cheeks pale. Took her back, Peabody was sure, to something horrible. Something personal.

  Rape, Peabody was sure, just as she was sure it had to have been brutal. And she’d have been young. Before the job. Peabody had studied Eve’s career with the NYPSD like a template, but there’d been no report of a sexual assault on Dallas.

  So it had been before, before the Academy. When she was a teenager, or possibly younger. In automatic sympathy, Peabody’s stomach roiled. It would take guts, and balls, to face that, to revisit whatever had happened every time you walked into a scene that reverberated with sexual violence.

  But to use it, instead of being used by it, that took more, Peabody determined. It took what she could only define as valor.

  “Ready here,” McNab told her. “And it’s a doozy.”

  She sucked in a breath, squared her shoulders. “I’m ready, too. Go in the bedroom or something, okay? I want to do it on my own.”

  He looked at her face, saw what he’d hoped to see, and nodded. “Sure. Nail
the bad guy, She-Body.”

  “Damn right.”

  She sweated through it, but stayed focused. She stopped asking herself what Dallas would want her to do, even after a point what Dallas would do, and just concentrated on what needed to be done. Preserve and observe, collect and identify. Question, report, investigate. It began to click for her, the pattern emerging. She waded her way through conflicting witness statements, shaky memories, facts and lies, forensics and procedure.

  She built, she realized with rising excitement, a case.

  Though she wanted to hesitate on the final stage, the arrest, she bore down and selected. And was rewarded with the graphic of a prosecuting attorney.

  Pick him up. Murder One.

  “Yes!” She popped up from the chair, did her little victory dance. “I got an arrest. Nailed the murdering bastard. Hey, McNab, bring me those damn potato chips.”

  “Sure.” He stepped out, grinning. He carried the bag in one hand, and was naked but for her summer straw hat. Since it was perched jauntily at his crotch, she assumed her success made him as happy as it made her.

  She laughed until she thought her ribs would crack. “You’re such a moron,” she managed, and jumped him.

  For Eve it was a matter of merging bare facts with educated speculation. “He had to know their routines, which means he knew them. Doesn’t mean they knew him, doesn’t connect them, but he knew. He’s too cocky for them to have been random. He trolled first.”

  “That’s the usual pattern, isn’t it?” Roarke cocked his head at her look. “If my one true love was a dentist, I’d study up a bit on the latest thoughts on dental hygiene and treatments.”

  “Don’t say dentist,” Eve warned, automatically running her tongue warily over her teeth.

  “By all means let’s stick with bloody murder.” And knowing there was no talking her out of another cup of coffee at midnight, had another himself. “The trolling, the selecting, the stalking, the planning. They are all essential parts of the whole for the typical, if the word can be used, serial killer.”

  “There’s a rush in it, the control, the power, the details. She’s alive now because I allow it, she’ll be dead because I want it. It’s clear he admires the serial killers who made names for themselves. Jack the Ripper, the Boston Strangler, so he emulates them. But he’s very much his own man. Better than they were, because he’s versatile.”

  “And he wants you pursuing him because he admires you.”

  “In his own sick way. He wants the buzz. It isn’t enough to kill. That doesn’t heat the blood enough. The hunt, being both hunter and prey, that does it for him. He hunted these women.”

  She turned to the board she’d set up in her home office, with pictures of Jacie Wooton and Lois Gregg, alive and dead. “He watched them, learned their routines and patterns. He needed a prostitute for the Ripper imitation, and a certain type of LC. She fit the mold. He expected her to walk along that street at that time. It wasn’t chance. Just as Lois Gregg fit his need for a Strangler vic, just as he knew she’d be home alone on a Sunday morning.”

  “And knew someone would find her before the end of the day?”

  “Yeah.” Sipping coffee, she nodded. “Quicker gratification that way. More and more likely he called in the anonymous nine-one-one. Wanted Wooton found as soon as possible so the adulation and horror could begin.”

  “Which tells me he feels very safe.”

  “Very safe,” Eve agreed. “Very superior. If Gregg hadn’t had family or friends who were bound to check on her in a few hours, he’d have to wait to get the next kick, or risk another nine-one-one. So he targeted these women specifically, just as he’s targeted the next.”

  She sat, rubbed her eyes. “He’ll imitate someone else. But it’ll be someone who created a stir, and who left bodies where they could and would be found. We eliminate historic serial killers who buried, destroyed, or consumed their victims.”

  “Such a fun group, too.”

  “Oh yeah. He’s not going to copy someone like Chef Jourard, that French guy in the twenties, this century.”

  “Kept his victims in a large freezer, didn’t he?”

  “Where he carved them up, cooked them up, and served them to unsuspecting patrons of his fancy bistro in Paris. Took them nearly two years to catch him.”

  “And he was famed for his sweetbreads.”

  She gave a quick shudder. “Anybody who eats internal organs of any species baffles me. And I’m off the track.”

  He trailed a hand down her arm. “Because you’re tired.”

  “Maybe. He’ll stay more straightforward, won’t go for a play on someone like Jourard, or Dahmer, or that Russian maniac Ivan the Butcher. But people being what they are, he’s got plenty of others to work with. He’ll stick with women.”

  She walked back to the board. “When you kill women the way he did these two, you’ve got a problem with them. But he’s not connected to the actual victims. I’ll go back and push the paper—the note. See if anyone on the list has a particular interest in celebrity killers.”

  “There’s another you might want to speak with,” Roarke suggested. “Thomas A. Breen. He’s written what some consider the definitive book on twentieth-century serial killers, another on mass murderers throughout history. I’ve actually read some of his work, as the subject matter is of some interest to my wife.”

  “Breen, Thomas A. I might’ve read some of his stuff. Sounds vaguely familiar.”

  “He lives here in the city. I looked up the particulars when you were at Central, as I thought you might want a word with him.”

  “Smart guy.”

  This time when she reached for the coffeepot, he laid a hand over hers to stop her. “Smart enough to know you’ve had over your quota of coffee for the day, and despite it you’re starting to droop.”

  “I just want to run a couple of probabilities.”

  “Set them up then, and they can run while you’re sleeping. You’ll have the results in the morning.”

  She’d have argued, but she was too damn tired. Instead, she did as he suggested, and still her gaze was drawn back to the board. Back to Lois Gregg.

  She could hear the way the woman’s son, a grown man, had sobbed. She could see the utter devastation on his face when he’d pleaded with her to tell him what he should do.

  “Mom,” he’d said, the way she imagined a child would. Though over thirty he’d said “Mom” with a little boy’s helpless loss.

  She knew Roarke had felt some of that same helplessness, that young boy’s lost grief, when he’d learned the mother he’d never known had been murdered. Dead for three decades. Still he grieved.

  And just that afternoon, a grown woman had studied her with suspicion and resentment over a relationship with her mother.

  What was it that bound the child, so inexorably, with the mother? Was it blood, she wondered, as she stripped down for bed? Was it imprinted in the womb or something learned and developed after birth?

  Killers of women, lust killers, were often bred due to their unhealthy feelings or relationships with a mother figure. Just as she supposed saints were bred from healthy ones. Or all the normality of the human race between the extremes.

  Had this killer hated his mother? Abused or been abused by her? Was he killing her now?

  And thinking of mothers, she slipped into sleep to dream of her own.

  It was the hair, golden hair, so shiny and pretty, so long and curly. She liked to touch it, though she knew she wasn’t supposed to. She liked to pet it, as she’d seen a boy pet a puppy dog once.

  Nobody was home, and it was all quiet, the way she liked it best. When they were gone, the mommy and the daddy, nobody yelled or made scary noises or told her not to do everything she wanted to do.

  Nobody slapped or hit.

  She wasn’t supposed to go into the room where the mommy and daddy slept, or where the mommy sometimes brought other daddies to play on the bed without their clothes.

  But t
here were so many things in there. Like the long golden hair, or the bright red hair, and the bottles that smelled like flowers.

  She tiptoed toward the dresser, a thin girl in jeans that bagged and a yellow T-shirt that was stained with grape juice. Her ears were keen, as the ears of prey often were, and she listened carefully, prepared to dart out of the room at any moment.

  Her fingers reached out and stroked the yellow curls of the wig. The pressure syringe tossed carelessly beside it didn’t interest her. She knew the mommy took medicine every day, sometimes more than once a day. Sometimes the medicine made her sleepy, sometimes it made her want to dance and dance. She was nicer when she wanted to dance; even though her laughing was scary, it was better than the yelling or the slapping.

  There was a mirror over the dresser and she could just see the top half of her own face if she strained up high on her toes. Her hair was ugly brown and straight and short. It wasn’t pretty like the mommy’s play hair.

  Unable to resist, she put the wig over her own hair. It fell all the way to her waist and made her feel pretty, made her feel happy.

  There were all sorts of toys on the dresser, for painting faces with color. Once when the mommy had been in a good mood, she’d painted her lips and cheeks and said she’d looked like a little doll.

  If she looked like a doll, maybe the mommy and daddy would like her better. They wouldn’t yell and hit, and she could go outside and play.

  Humming to herself, she painted on lip dye, rubbing her lips together as she’d seen the mommy do. She brushed on cheek color and clumsily fit her feet inside the high-heeled shoes that were in front of the dresser. She teetered on them, but was able to see even more of her face.

  “Like a little doll,” she said, pleased with the golden curls and the smears of color.

  She began to use more, with enthusiasm, and was so intent on the game, on the fun, she failed to listen.

  “You stupid little bitch!”

  The scream had her stumbling back, tripping out of the shoes. She was already falling when the hand slapped across her face. It hurt where she banged her elbow, but even as the tears spurted out in response, the mommy was grabbing her by her sore arm and yanking her to her feet.