“This might hold up.” She set the document down. “Or it may not. Either way, we’re not done. You shouldn’t have used Gregor Pensky’s DNA, because I’m going to link you to him.” She stepped closer, ignoring the tickle at the back of her throat as those dark eyes pierced hers. “We’ll talk again real soon, Dorian.”
He grabbed her hand, brought it to his lips. She told herself she hadn’t yanked it away to prove a point. But she wasn’t entirely sure.
“I’ll look forward to it.”
Watching him, she dipped a finger in his cup, sucked the liquid off her finger. “Tasty,” she said as his eyes blurred with what she recognized as excitement.
She walked out, down the stairs. With an effort she kept her expression cool as he once again materialized in front of her, in the mists that now clouded the club.
“I always escort my guests to the door. Safe travels, Lieutenant. Until we meet again.”
“How’d he do that?” Even as her eyes tracked the tunnels, Peabody stuttered out the question. “How’d he do that?”
“Elevator, false doors. Smoke and fucking mirrors.” It irritated Eve that he’d nearly made her jump, disturbed her so that her skin crawled as if he’d run his fingers over it.
She had to remind herself she’d bearded him in his own den, and she hadn’t cracked. Her pulse wasn’t steady, but she hadn’t cracked.
“Damn good trick though,” Baxter commented from the rear. “Did you get a load of the blonde? I might try a little blood sucking if you score that kind of action.”
“She’s an idiot, and a lucky one,” Eve tossed back. “He needs to keep her alive, unless he’s bone stupid.”
“She was using. You were right on that one, Lieutenant.” Trueheart’s voice was just a little breathy. “I saw plenty of zoners and chemi-heads when I did sidewalk sleeper detail. She was zoned to the eyeballs.”
“Okay, so he likes his women toked, and plays magic tricks. Not so scary,” Peabody decided. “And the stuff he was drinking? Syrup, right? Just red syrup.”
“No.” Eve avoided a smear of some unidentifiable substance on the tunnel floor and aimed for the dim light ahead. “That was blood.”
“Oh.” Peabody gripped the cross at her neck. “Well.”
On the street, Eve snapped out orders as she moved to her vehicle. “Baxter, I want you and Trueheart to find me a connection, any connection between Vadim and Pensky. Use EDD, if necessary, and see if you can pin Vadim in the area Pensky was killed. I’ll get you the data I have. Peabody, push harder on the jewelry from the first vic. Turning the glitters liquid may be too hard to resist. We need to run this Kendra moron. My money says she’s got a deep well. His pattern is to bilk rich women. However he’s escalated, whatever the game, that’s his base.”
She shoved her way into traffic. “I’m going to the PA. I need a damn warrant, and I want to shatter his religious shield into a lot of tiny pieces.”
But an hour later, Eve stood, stunned and furious, in APA Cher
Reo’s office.
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“I’m giving it to you straight.” Reo was smart, savvy, and ambitious, a small blond dynamo. And she tossed up her hands. “I’m not saying we couldn’t have the order overturned, I’m saying it’s a tricky business, and one that would take time and a lot of taxpayer dollars. The boss won’t move on it, not with what you have. Bring us evidence, even a real glimmer of probable cause on the homicides, and we’ll start the war. And war is the word. The courts don’t like to mess with religious objections and predilections, even when they’re obvious bullshit.”
“This guy bled two women to death.”
“Maybe he did. You say he did, I’m going to agree with you. But I can’t give you a warrant for his residence, his place of business, on what you’ve got. I can’t break down his objection to daylight hours with what you’ve got. Worse, the DNA you took—the vial with your initials on it, doesn’t match.”
“He switched them.”
“How?”
“I don’t know how.” She kicked Reo’s desk.
“Hey!”
“Reo, this guy’s just getting started. He’s pumped. He’s using God knows what to keep pumped, and the killing’s got him flying on his own importance. He’s got a club full of opportunities every damn night. Like a damn all-you-can-eat buffet.”
“Bring me something. I’ll go to the wall for you, you know that. Bring me something I can use. Until you do, I’ll do some research on precedents for breaking through a religious objection. If you can wiggle something that rings on the use or possession of illegals, I’ll get you a warrant to search and seize on those grounds. It’s the best I can do, Dallas.”
“Okay. Okay.” Eve raked her hands through her hair. “I’ll get something.” She thought of Allesseria’s ex. Illegals passed around like party favors, he’d said. Add three cops and another civilian who had been in the club and they’d all swear they’d witnessed illegals bought, sold, and consumed. “Yeah, I can get something for an illegals raid.”
“Make it work. And you know,” Reo cast a glance at her office window, “I think I’m going to be damn sure I’m home and behind a locked door before sunset.”
CHAPTER NINE
Eve hunted up Feeney and Roarke in a lab in EDD. She could see
them both standing, hands in pockets, as they studied a screen—in the same way she’d noted men often studied motors or other gadgets.
Physically, they couldn’t have been less alike with Feeney nearly a head shorter even with the explosion of the mixed ginger and silver bush of his hair. Feeney habitually slouched, just as he was habitually rumpled and wrinkled. Roarke may have ditched his suit jacket and rolled up the sleeves of his crisp white shirt, but the contrast remained very broad.
Inside, she knew they often ran on the same path, particularly when it came to e-work. Geeks born of the same motherboard, she thought.
It was a relief to see them, and not so hard to admit. A relief to see these two men—so essential to the life she’d made—after coming from her confrontation with Dorian, and the demons he woke in her.
She stepped in. “Did you clean up the transmission?”
Feeney turned to her, droopy eyes, mournful expression. Roarke shifted, eyes of an almost savage blue. There was a click here, too, but a good solid one, one that made her smile.
Roarke angled his head. “Lieutenant?”
“Nothing.” But she thought:
Who needs crosses and holy water to fight demons when you have two men like this?
Dorian would never have understood that bright and brilliant human link. Her father had never understood it.
“So.” She crossed to them, and because it amused her, slid her hands into her pockets to mirror their stances. “What’s the word?”
“Good news,” Feeney began. “We got her clean. Bad news, there’s not much of him.”
“I don’t need much.”
“Going to need more than what we’ve got. Computer, run enhanced transmission.”
Acknowledged . . .
Eve watched Allesseria’s face. It was crystal clear now, as was the night around her, as was her voice. A streetlight beamed over her. The movement—rather than the jerky bounce of her quick walk—had been smoothed out, slowed down.
There was a sound, a
whoosh
of air, a ripple of fabric on the breeze. Eve watched the gloved hand snake in, between the ’link and the victim’s face. There was an upward jerk, an instant of pain and terror in Allesseria’s eyes. Then the image flipped as the phone tumbled: sky, street, sidewalk. Black.
“Crap” was Eve’s comment, and her hands fisted in her pockets now. “Anything when you magnify and slow it down?”
“We can enhance so you can count the stitches in the seams of the glove,” Feeney told her. “Can use the scale program to get you the size of it. We can give you the attacker’s probable height calculated from the size, the angles. But we can’t put on-screen what’s not there. Got some snatches of audio though, for what it’s worth.”
He set the comp again, made the adjustments, then played it back.
What she heard first was silence.
“We backed out her voice, her footsteps,” Roarke explained, “the ambient city noises. Now . . .”
She caught it. Feet on pavement, the faintest rustle, then the rush she identified as a run followed by a jump or leap. There was a breath, expelled in a kind of laugh as the hand shot out and clamped Allesseria’s throat. And as the images rolled and tumbled on-screen, a single low word.
You
.
“Not enough for a voiceprint,” Feeney pointed out. “Never hold up in court even if we could match it on one syllable.”
“He doesn’t have to know that.” Eve narrowed her eyes at the screen. “Maybe what we’ve got is just enough to shake him, to make him think we have more.”
Feeney grinned at Roarke, tapped a finger to his temple. “She’s got something cooking up there.”
“Yeah, I do. This time, we con the con.”
Roarke stepped into Eve’s office, closed the door. “I don’t like it.”
She continued across the cramped little room to her AutoChef, programmed coffee. “It’s a good plan. It’ll work.” She took the two mugs of hot black out, passed him one. “And I didn’t figure you’d like it. That’s one of the drawbacks of having you inside an investigation.”
“There are other ways to run him to ground, Eve.”
“This is the quickest. There’s no putting standard surveillance on him,” she began. “There are dozens of ways in and out of those tunnels. I can’t know what kind of escape hatch he might have in that club, up in his apartment. He decides he’s bored here, or there’s too much heat, he’d be in the wind before we got close.”
“Find a way to shut down the club. Illegals raid will put him out of business.”
“Sure, we could do that, we
will
do that. And if that’s all we do, he’ll be smoke. There are fronts to the business,” she pointed out. “You said so yourself. And it’d take time we don’t have to cut through them and dig down to him. By then he’s gone.”
He set the coffee down on her desk. “All right, even agreeing that all that’s true, or very likely, it doesn’t justify you going in alone. You’re setting it up this way because the DNA crashed on you, and you’re blaming yourself.”
“That’s not true.” Or not entirely, she amended silently. “Sure, it pisses me off he pulled that over on me, but I’m not doing this to even the score.” Or not entirely.
Logic, she decided, was the best way to lay it out. Not as satisfying as a fight, she thought, but quicker. “Okay, look. I go in there with troops or other badges, he’s not going to talk, even if he sticks around long enough for me to corner him. He doesn’t have to stick around at this point. I can’t even pry him aboveground and get him in the box for interview. It has to be on his turf, and it has to be between him and me.”
“Why—on the last point?”
“Why didn’t you like him, from the get?”
She could see irritation cross Roarke’s face before he picked up the coffee again. “Because he scoped my wife.”
“Yeah. He’d like to take a bite, not only because I’m the cop looking at him, but because I’m married to you. Be a big ego kick for him to score off you. And if he thinks he has a shot at that, he’ll take it, and I’ll be ready.”
“Eve—”
“Roarke. He’ll kill again and soon. Maybe tonight. He has a taste for it now. You saw that, and so did I, the first time we met him. I’m telling you I saw more of it today. I see what he is.”
This was the core, he knew, whatever she said. Whatever the other truths, this was the heart of it for her. “He’s not your father.”
“No, but there’s a breed, and they’re both of it. The smoke, the blood, the insinuation: Is he or isn’t he an undead, blood-sucking fiend? That may tingle the spine, rouse superstitions, even tease the logical to entertain the illogical. But it’s what’s under it, Roarke. It’s, well, shit, it’s the beast that lives there that has to be stopped.”
“The one you have to face,” he corrected. “How many times?”
“As many as it takes. I want to walk away from it. Hell, I get within five feet of him, I want to run from it. And because I do, I can’t.”
“No.” He traced his thumb down the shallow dent in her chin. “You can’t.” That, he knew, was what he had to face—again and again. Loving her left him no choice. “But this rush—”
“He’s flying on the moment. Whatever drugs he’s on, they’re not as potent as the kill. As the blood. If I don’t try this, and he gets another, how do I live with that?”
He searched her face, then lifted a hand to her cheek. “Being you, you don’t. You can’t. But I still don’t have to like it.”
“Understood. And . . .” She took his hand, squeezed it briefly. “Appreciated. Let’s just count on me doing my job, and the rest of you doing yours. We’ll shut him down, nail down that lid, before he knows what the hell’s going on.”
“He best not get so much as a nibble of you. That’s my job.” He leaned down, caught her bottom lip between his teeth. After one quick nip, he sank in, drawing her close, taking them both deep.
Her initial amusement slid away into the dreamy until she could float away on the taste of him, glide off on the promise. When she sighed, eased back, her lips curved up.
“Good job,” she told him.
“I do my best.”
“Maybe later you can put in some overtime.”
“Being dedicated to my work, I’ll be available.”
“But for right now, let’s go get the team together for a full briefing. I don’t want any screwups.”
“Lieutenant.” He caught her hand before she reached the door, and tugged her back around. Out of his pocket he drew a silver cross on a silver chain, and dangled it in front of her.
“Knew I forgot something.” But when he draped it over her head, she goggled. “What? You’re serious?”
“Indulge me.” He planted another kiss on her lips, this one brief and firm. “I’m a superstitious man with a logical mind that can entertain the illogical.”