“It is, yes. An old adversary come round again. It’s troubling,” Roarke said as he started upstairs with the cat trotting after him.
She ran three miles
, hard, selecting an urban setting, so the program simulated the sound of her feet pounding on pavement, the buzz of traffic—street and air.
She set another program for weights and pumped until her muscles wept. When that wasn’t enough, she showered off the sweat in the bathroom attached to the expansive gym.
She’d do a couple dozen fast laps in the pool, she decided, and burn off the last of this ugly frustration and sick fear.
She didn’t bother with a bathing suit, but just grabbed a towel. More than the hour she’d asked for, she noted, but she wasn’t quite there yet.
When she stepped out into the tropical paradise of the pool area, wound through the trees, the flowers, she saw him sitting at a table. He’d changed into a T-shirt and casual pants. He had a bottle of wine, a couple of glasses—and worked with apparent enjoyment on his PPC.
Waiting for her, she thought. Wasn’t that a miracle? This amazing man would wait for her, would be there.
She hadn’t needed the three miles, she realized, or the weights or the laps. All she needed was Roarke.
“There you are.” He glanced up. “Better?”
“I took longer than I said. I got caught up.”
“No matter. I had a bit of work to finish up, and had a swim as well.”
“Oh. I was thinking you’d take one with me.”
“Well, I could, but I always enjoy watching you in the water, especially since you like to swim naked.”
“Pervert.” She walked to him. “Why don’t you come in? Unless watching’s all you’re up for.”
She let the towel drop.
“When you put it that way.”
Rather than diving in as was her habit, she walked down the steps, through the lagoon corner, ordering on the jets and blue lights as she slowly sank in.
“I was going to burn the rest off with some laps,” she said as Roarke shed his clothes. “But I figure you can do a better job of it. Maybe.”
“A challenge.” He joined her in the water. “Something else I’m always up for.”
She tipped her head back, shot her fingers in his hair, gripped it. “Prove it,” she said, and dragged his mouth to hers.
She wanted hot and hard, like the jets pulsing in the blue water. No tenderness, no gentle caress, but greedy and careless.
He knew, he always knew. She set her teeth on his shoulder as his hands took, rough and ready, whipping her to the place where there was no room for thoughts, for worries, for a world of the cruel.
His mouth, his mouth, scorching her skin, devouring her heart right through her breast while his hand shoved between her legs. The first orgasm ripped her as he dragged her under the water.
Breathless, blind, she sank into the pool, into him and the battering sea of sensation. Only to surface on a wild cry of release when he pulled her up again.
She wrapped around him, slick with water, hot with needs. Her hands and mouth were as busy as his, as demanding and urgent. The trouble he’d seen in her eyes, the sadness he’d sensed coiled in her dropped away. With them went his worry, went everything but this mad, almost brutal wanting.
Snared in it, he shoved her to the wall. His fingers dug into her hips as he plunged into her.
Breathless gasps muffled against his mouth. He wanted to swallow them, swallow her in deep, dark gulps. The water slapped and slithered, sluiced off skin faintly and eerily blue in the light.
“Take more.” Steeped in her. Drowning in her. “Take more.”
Yes,
she thought,
yes. More.
Gripping the edge, she wrapped her legs around his waist. Arching up, arching back, she took until her cries echoed around the garden. Took until there was nothing left.
3
H
e knew if it was left up to Eve they’d have the conversation and what passed for a meal in her home office. Another case, he decided, where she needed more. As summer refused to retire for the season, he arranged for the meal on one of the terraces where the gardens burst with color and scent.
There, with the air stubbornly holding the damp from the morning’s storm, tiny lights glimmered, candles flickered against the dark.
“I’ve got a lot of research to get to,” she began.
“Undoubtedly, and we’ll take all the time you need once I understand the situation, and you’ve got some food in you. Red meat.” He lifted the cover off a plate.
Eve eyed the steak. “Playing dirty.”
“Is there another way? We’ve a barrel of salt for your fries.”
She had to laugh. “Really dirty.” She took the wine he offered. “You know my weaknesses.”
“Every one.” And he hoped the pretty table, the pretty evening would help her through what she had to tell him. “I’ll wager you missed lunch.”
She sipped, sat. “I had to hack away at paperwork all morning, and kept thinking if I just had a body, I could skate out of it. It’s that
careful what you wish for
bit. Sucks that it’s usually true.”
She told him about Tray and Julie, then of the prison administration dragging their feet on notification of McQueen’s escape. Bookending the worst of it, she supposed. Building up to going back.
“He wants your attention.”
“And he’s got it. He’ll keep it until he’s back in a cage. He should’ve been transferred to an off-planet facility six years ago when Omega was complete. But . . .”
She shrugged, continued to eat.
“They never charged him with the murders. His mother, the girls never recovered, the other women?”
“No. Not enough evidence, especially if you’re a PA more concerned with your conviction rate than actual justice.”
“You were disappointed,” Roarke commented.
“I was green.” She shrugged again, but with more of a jerk. “I figured we had enough solid circumstantial on the four missing girls, on the dead mother, partners. We had enough to try him on those charges, too. But that wasn’t my decision. That’s not my job.”
“You’re still disappointed.”
“Maybe, but I’m not green now, so I’m realistic. And McQueen wouldn’t break. Feeney worked him for hours, days. He let me observe. He even brought me into the box briefly, hoping seeing me would shake, or just piss off McQueen enough for him to say something, make some mistake. And I’m getting ahead of myself,” she realized. “I guess I’d better start at the beginning.”
“Twelve years,” he prompted her, wanting her to talk it out, for both of them. “You’d barely begun.”
“I’m trying to remember me, to see myself. To feel. I wanted to be a cop so bad. A good cop, solid. To work my way up to detective. I wanted Homicide, that was always the goal. Homicide detective. I didn’t really know anybody in the department, in the city for that matter. Most of the rookies who graduated with me were scattered around the boroughs. I got Manhattan, and that was big. I needed to be here.”
He topped off her wine, gave her a small opening. “I think of the photo you gave me for Christmas, of you at your desk at the Academy. Hardly more than a child, and your hair long.”
“I’d hacked it off by the time I graduated.”
“You had cop’s eyes even then.”
“I missed things. I had a lot to learn. I was working out of the Four-Six, Lower West. A little house. Central absorbed it, I guess, about eight years ago. It’s a club now. The Blue Line. Weird.”
She paused when a thought struck her. “You don’t own it, do you?”
“No.” But he filed it away, thinking she might enjoy owning her first cop shop.
She drew a breath. “Okay. So. I was only a few weeks on the job, on patrol or doing the grunt work they stick rooks with. It was hot, like this, late summer when you’re wondering if it’ll ever cool off again. There was a mugging that went way, way south. A couple in visiting their daughter. She’d just had a baby. They’re walking back to her place, did some shopping for the kid.
“Junkie, crashing, and he’s got a six-inch sticker. They don’t hand everything over fast enough, and he gives the woman a jab to hurry them up. One thing leads to another, and the man ends up dead with a dozen holes in him; the woman’s critical, but conscious. Manages to call out until somebody stops. It’s a decent enough neighborhood, and it’s freaking broad daylight. But there just wasn’t anybody around. Bad luck. Feeney caught the case.”
“That would be good luck,” Roarke prompted.
“Yeah. Jesus, Roarke, he was good. I know the e-work is his thing, and he’s the best. But he was a hell of a murder cop. He didn’t look that much different—less gray, not as many lines. But even back then he looked like he’d slept in his clothes for a couple nights running. Just watching him was an education. How he worked the scene, read it, read the wits.”
Looking back, seeing Feeney in her head, she settled a bit more. “I stood there, watching him, and I thought, ‘That’s what I want.’ Not just Homicide, but to be that good. He stood on the sidewalk with the blood and the body, and he saw it. He felt it. He didn’t show it, hard to explain.”
“You don’t need to.” Because he’d stood and watched her with blood and body, and knew she saw. Knew she felt.
“Well. The junkie went rabbit, and the wits gave conflicting descriptions. The surviving vic was mostly out of it, but we had a general to go on. They called in some uniforms to canvass because one of the wits said they thought maybe he lived right there on Murray, or knew somebody who did. I was partnered up with Boyd Fergus, a good beat cop. We ended up at two-fifty-eight Murray. We weren’t getting anywhere. Nobody’d seen anything, and most of the people who lived in that neighborhood were at work anyway. So when we got to that building, Fergus said we’d split up, and since I was younger and had better legs, I should start up on three. He’d take the first floor, and we’d meet up again on two. It was just . . .”
“Fate?”
“Or luck, or what the fuck. But I headed up to the third floor.”
And she saw it. Felt it.
The old building trapped the hot like a steel box, then mixed it with the smell of the veggie hash—don’t spare the garlic—someone was stirring up for dinner on the second floor. She could hear the various choices of evening entertainments vibrating against walls and doors. Trash rock, media reports, canned laughter from some sitcom, soaring opera banged and echoed dull through the stairway. Over it she heard creaks, voices, and somebody carping about the price of soy coffee.
She could relate.
She filed it all away, automatically taking note of the size and shape of the hallway, the exits, the window at the far end of the landing, the cracks in the ancient plaster.
It was important to pay attention, take in the details, know where you were. She appreciated Fergus for trusting her to do so, trusting her to handle the knock on doors on her own, even if it was just another routine.
Routines made up the whole, formed the structure for everything else. Boredom was a factor, sure, in the routine of knocking, identifying, questioning, moving on, and doing it all again and again. But whenever boredom tried to sneak in, she reminded herself she was a cop, she was doing the job.
For the first time in her life, she
was
someone.
Officer Eve Dallas, NYPSD.
She stood for something now. For someone. She climbed the stairs in the stuffy, noisy building for Trevor and Paula Garson.
Two hours before Trevor had been alive, Paula healthy. Now he was dead and she was struggling not to be.
And one of those knocks might, just might, result in information on the asshole who’d taken a life, broken all the lives connected to it.
So she knocked, identified herself, questioned, moved on.
At the second apartment, the woman who answered wore pajamas and exhausted eyes.
“Summer cold,” she told Eve. “I’ve been trying to sleep it off.”
“You’ve been home all day?”
“Yeah. What’s this about?”
“Two people were mugged in this vicinity approximately two hours ago. Did you see or hear anything unusual?”
“You know, maybe. Head cold’s got me, so I can’t taste anything, brain’s fuzzy, and my ears are plugged up. But I thought I heard somebody screaming. Figured I imagined it, or it was from one of the neighbor’s screens, but I looked out the window. I did see somebody running, but I didn’t think anything of it, just went back to bed. God, was somebody hurt? This is a good neighborhood.”
“Yes, ma’am, someone was hurt. Could you describe the individual you saw running?”
“Maybe. I didn’t really get a good look. That window.” She gestured. “I’d come out to get a drink—lots of fluids—and thought maybe I’d try the couch awhile. I heard something, and walked over to look.”
“Do you mind if I come in?”
“No, sure. Better keep your distance. I’m probably contagious. Honestly, Officer, I was pretty out of it. All the meds, but I did see somebody running. That way.”
At the window, she pointed west. “It was a man. Long hair, um, brown, I think. He was running away, but he did look over his shoulder. I think. He had a scruffy little beard.”
“Height, weight, skin color?”
“Oh. White, I think. Not black. I guess he looked sort of skinny. Shorts! He was wearing shorts. Knobby knees. And he was carrying a couple of bags, shopping bags. I remember because I thought, ‘Wow, he’s in a hurry to get home with his loot.’ Jeez, it was someone else’s loot.”
“Was it someone you’ve seen before?”
“I don’t really think so. I’m usually at work during the day. I only moved in a couple months ago, and don’t really know anybody yet.”
Eve took the woman’s name, her contact information, thanked her for her cooperation. She stepped out, intending to tag Fergus, inform him of the lead and her status.
She saw someone at the door of 303.
He had two shopping bags—local market, she noted—and set them down to uncode his door.