chapter twenty
Eve supposed there could have been worse ways to wait through the last stages of an investigation. The atmosphere had it all over her cramped office at Cop Central, and the food was certainly a long leg up from the eatery.
Roarke had opened up his dome-ceilinged reception room with its glossy wood floors, mirrored walls, and sparkling lights. Long, curved tables followed the rounded walls and were artistically crowded with exotic finger foods.
Colorful bite-sized eggs harvested from the dwarf pigeons of the moon’s farm colony, delicate pink shrimp from the Sea of Japan, elegant cheese swirls that melted on the tongue, pastries pumped with pâtés or creams in a menagerie of shapes, the gleam of caviar heaped on shaved ice, the richness of fresh fruit with frosty sugar coating.
There was more. The hot table across the room steamed with heat and spices. One entire area was a treasure trove for those of a vegetarian persuasion, with another, at a discreet distance, decked out for carnivores.
Roarke had opted for live music rather than simulation, and the band out on the adjoining terrace played quiet conversation-enhancing tunes. They would heat up as the night went on, to seduce dancers.
Through the swirl of color, of scent, of gleam and gloss, waiters in severe black wandered with silver trays topped with crystal flutes of champagne.
“This is so decent.” Mavis popped a black button mushroom in her mouth. She’d dressed conservatively for the occasion, which meant a great deal of her skin was actually covered, and her hair was a tame medium red. Being Mavis, so were her irises. “I can’t believe Roarke actually invited me.”
“You’re my friend.”
“Yeah. Hey, you think if later on, after everybody’s imbibed freely, could I ask the band to let me do a number?”
Eve scanned the rich, privileged crowd, the glint of real gold and real stones, and smiled. “I think that would be great.”
“Superior.” Mavis gave Eve’s hand a quick squeeze. “I’m going to go talk to the band now, sort of worm my way into their hearts.”
“Lieutenant.”
Eve shifted her gaze from Mavis’s retreating form over and up into Chief Tibble’s face. “Sir.”
“You’re looking . . . unprofessional tonight.” When she squirmed, he laughed. “That was a compliment. Roarke puts on quite a show.”
“Yes, sir, he does. It’s for a worthy cause.” But she couldn’t quite remember what that worthy cause was.
“I happen to think so. My wife is very involved.” He took a flute from a passing tray and sipped. “My only regret is that these monkey suits never go out of style.” With his free hand, he tugged at his collar.
It made her smile. “You should try wearing these shoes.”
“There’s a heavy price for fashion.”
“I’d rather be dowdy and comfortable.” But she resisted tugging at her butt-molding skirt.
“Well.” He took her arm, eased her toward a shielding arborvitae. “Now that we’ve exchanged the obligatory small talk, I’d like to tell you you’ve done an excellent job on the investigation.”
“I bumped with Angelini.”
“No, you pursued a logical line, then you backtracked and found pieces others had missed.”
“The albino junkie was a fluke, sir. Just luck.”
“Luck counts. So does tenacity—and attention to detail. You cornered him, Dallas.”
“He’s still at large.”
“He won’t get far. His own ambition will help us find him. His face is known.”
Eve was counting on it. “Sir, Officer Peabody did fine work. She has a sharp eye and good instincts.”
“So you noted in your report. I won’t forget it.” When he glanced at his watch, she realized he was as edgy as she. “I promised Feeney a bottle of Irish whiskey if he broke it by midnight.”
“If that doesn’t do it, nothing will.” She put on a smile. There was no use reminding the chief that they hadn’t found the murder weapon in Morse’s apartment. He already knew.
When she spotted Marco Angelini step into the room, her shoulders stiffened. “Excuse me, Chief Tibble. There’s someone I have to speak to.”
He laid a hand on her arm. “It isn’t necessary, Dallas.”
“Yes, sir, it is.”
She knew the moment he became aware of her by the quick upward jut of his chin. He stopped, linked his hands behind his back, and waited.
“Mr. Angelini.”
“Lieutenant Dallas.”
“I regret the difficulties I caused you and your family during the investigation.”
“Do you?” His eyes were cool, unblinking. “Accusing my son of murder, subjecting him to terror and humiliation, bringing more grief upon already impossible grief, putting him behind bars when his only crime was witnessing violence?”
She could have justified her actions. She could have reminded him that his son had not only witnessed violence, but had turned away from it without a thought but to his own survival, and had compounded his crime by attempting to bribe his way out of involvement.
“I regret adding to your family’s emotional trauma.”
“I doubt if you understand the phrase.” He skimmed his eyes down. “And I wonder if, had you not been so busy enjoying your companion’s position, you might have caught the real murderer. It’s easy enough to see what you are. You’re an opportunist, a climber, a media whore.”
“Marco.” Roarke spoke softly as he laid a hand on Eve’s shoulder.
“No.” She went stiff under the touch. “Don’t defend me. Let him finish.”
“I can’t do that. I’m willing to take your state of mind into account, Marco, as the reason you would attack Eve in her own home. You don’t want to be here,” he said in an undertone of steel that indicated he was taking nothing into account. “I’ll show you out.”
“I know the way.” Marco’s eyes stabbed at Eve. “We’ll put our business association to an end as soon as possible, Roarke. I no longer trust your judgment.”
Hands balled into fists at her side, Eve trembled with fury as Marco strode away. “Why did you do that? I could have handled it.”
“You could have,” Roarke agreed, and turned her to face him. “But that was personal. No one, absolutely no one comes into our home and speaks to you that way.”
She tried to shrug it off. “Summerset does.”
Roarke smiled, touched his lips to hers. “The exception, for reasons too complicated to explain.” He rubbed away the frown line between her brows with his thumb.
“Okay. I guess I’m not going to be exchanging Christmas cards with the Angelinis.”
“We’ll learn to live with it. How about some champagne?”
“In a minute. I’m going to go freshen up.” She touched his face. It was getting easier to do that, to touch him when they weren’t alone. “I guess I ought to tell you that Mars has a recorder in her bag.”
Roarke gave the dent in her chin a quick flick. “She did. I have it in mine now, after I let her crowd me at the vegetarian table.”
“Very slick. You never mentioned pickpocketing as one of your skills.”
“You never asked.”
“Remind me to ask, and ask a lot. I’ll be back.”
She didn’t care about freshening up. She wanted a few minutes to simmer down, and maybe a few more to call Feeney, though she imagined he’d bite her head off for interrupting his compusearch.
He still had an hour to go before he lost his bottle of Irish. She didn’t think it would hurt to remind him. She was at the door to the library, preparing to code herself in, when Summerset melted out of the shadows behind her.
“Lieutenant, you have a call, termed both personal and urgent.”
“Feeney?”
“He did not grant me his name,” Summerset said down his nose.
“I’ll take it in here.” She had the small but worthy satisfaction of letting the door close smartly in his face. “Lights,” she ordered and th
e room brightened.
She’d almost gotten used to the walls of books with leather bindings and paper pages that crackled when you leafed through. For once she didn’t give them so much as a glance as she hurried to the ’link on Roarke’s library desk.
She engaged, then froze.
“Surprise, surprise.” Morse beamed at her. “Bet you weren’t expecting me. All dressed up for your party, I see. You look flash.”
“I’ve been looking for you, C. J.”
“Oh yeah, I know. You’ve been looking for a lot of things. I know this is on record, and it doesn’t matter. But you listen close. You keep this between you and me, or I’m going to start slicing off little tiny pieces of a friend of yours. Say hi to Dallas, Nadine.”
He reached out, and Nadine’s face came on screen. Eve, who’d seen terror too many times to count, looked at it now. “Has he hurt you, Nadine?”
“I—” She whimpered when he jerked her head back by the hair, touched a long slim blade to her throat.
“Now, you tell her I’ve been real nice to you. Tell her.” He skimmed the flat of the blade over her throat. “Bitch.”
“I’m fine. I’m okay.” She closed her eyes and a tear squeezed through. “I’m sorry.”
“She’s sorry,” Morse said between pursed lips and pressed his cheek to Nadine’s so both of their faces were in view. “She’s sorry she was so hungry to be top bitch that she slipped the guard you put on her and fell right into my waiting arms. Isn’t that right, Nadine?”
“Yes.”
“And I’m going to kill you, but not quick like the others. I’m going to kill you slowly, and with a lot of pain, unless your pal the lieutenant does everything I say. Isn’t that right? You tell her, Nadine.”
“He’s going to kill me.” She pressed her lips together hard, but nothing would stop the trembling. “He’s going to kill me, Dallas.”
“That’s right. You don’t want her to die, do you, Dallas? It’s your fault Louise died, yours and Nadine’s fault. She didn’t deserve it. She knew her place. She wasn’t trying to be top cunt. It’s your fault she’s dead. You don’t want that to happen again.”
He still had the knife at Nadine’s throat, and Eve could see his hand shake. “What do you want, Morse?” Calling up Mira’s profile, she carefully hit the right buttons. “You’re in control. You call the shots.”
“That’s right.” His smile exploded. “Damn right. You’ve got my position coming up on screen by now. You see I’m at a nice quiet spot in Greenpeace Park, where nobody’s going to bother us. All those nice green-lovers planted these pretty trees. It’s a wonderful spot. Of course, nobody comes here after dark. Unless they’re smart enough to know how to bypass the electronic field that discourages loiterers and chemi-heads. You’ve got exactly six minutes to get here so we can conduct our negotiations.”
“Six minutes. I can barely make that at full speed. If I run into traffic—”
“Then don’t,” he snapped. “Six minutes from end of transmission, Dallas. Ten seconds over, ten seconds you might use to call this in, to contact anyone, to so much as blink for backup, and I start ripping Nadine. You come alone. If I smell an extra cop, I start on her. You want her to come alone, right, Nadine.” As incentive, he turned the point of the blade to prick a narrow slice at the side of her throat.
“Please.” She tried to arch back as the blood trickled. “Please.”
“Cut her again, and I won’t deal.”
“You’ll deal,” Morse said. “Six minutes. Starting now.”
The screen went blank. Eve’s finger poised over the controls, thought of Dispatch, of the dozens of units that could be around the park in minutes. She thought of leaks, electronic leaks.
And she thought of the blood dribbling down Nadine’s throat.
She bolted across the room and hit the elevator panel on the run. She needed her weapon.
C. J. Morse was having the time of his life. He’d begun to see that he’d sold himself short by killing quickly. There was so much more kick in courting fear, seducing it, watching it swell and climax.
He saw it in Nadine Furst’s eyes. They were glassy now, the pupils huge, slick and black, with barely a rim of color at the edges. He was, he realized with great relish, literally scaring her to death.
He hadn’t cut her again. Oh, he wanted to, and made sure he showed her the knife often so that she would never lose the fear that he could. But a part of him worried about the cunt cop.
Not that he couldn’t handle her, Morse mused. He could handle her the only way women understood. By killing her. But he wouldn’t make it fast, like the others. She’d tried to outsmart him, and that was an insult he wouldn’t tolerate.
Women always tried to run the show, always got in the way, just when you were about to grab that fat brass ring. It had happened to him all of his life. All of his fucking life starting with his pushy bitch of a mother.
“You haven’t done your best, C. J. Use your brains, for God’s sake. You’ll never get through life on looks or charm. You haven’t got any. I expected more from you. If you can’t be the best, you’ll be nothing.”
He’d taken it, hadn’t he? Smiling to himself, he began to stroke Nadine’s hair while she shuddered. He’d taken it for years, playing the good, devoted son, while at night he’d dreamed of ways to kill her. Wonderful dreams, sweaty and sweet, where he’d finally silenced that grating, demanding voice.
“So I did,” he said conversationally, touching the tip of the knife to the pulse jerking in Nadine’s throat. “And it was so easy. She was all alone in that big, important house, busy with her big, important business. And I walked right in. ‘C. J.,’ she said, ‘what are you doing here? Don’t tell me you’ve lost your job again. You’ll never succeed in life unless you focus.’ And I just smiled at her and I said, ‘Shut up, Mother, shut the fuck up.’ And I cut her throat.”
To demonstrate, he trailed the blade over Nadine’s throat, lightly, just enough to scrape the skin. “She gushed and she goggled, and she shut the fuck up. But you know, Nadine, I learned something from the old bitch. It was time I focused. I needed a goal. And I decided that goal would be to rid the world of loudmouthed, pushy women, the ball breakers of the world. Like Towers and Metcalf. Like you, Nadine.” He leaned over, kissed her dead center of the forehead. “Just like you.”
She was reduced to whimpers. Her mind had frozen. She’d stopped trying to twist her wrists out of the restraints, stopped trying anything. She sat docile as a doll, with the occasional quiver breaking her stillness.
“You kept trying to shove me aside. You even went to management to try to get me off the news desk. You told them I was a . . .” He tapped the blade against her throat for emphasis. “Pain in the ass. You know that bitch Towers wouldn’t even give me an interview. She embarrassed me, Nadine. Wouldn’t even acknowledge me at press conferences. But I fixed her. A good reporter digs, right Nadine? And I dug, and I got a nice juicy story about her darling daughter’s idiot lover. Oh, I sat on it, and sat on it, while the happy mother of the bride to be made all her wedding plans. I could have blackmailed her, but that wasn’t the goal, was it? She was so ticked when I called her that night, when I dumped it all in her face.”
His eyes narrowed. They gleamed. “She was going to talk to me then, Nadine. Oh, you bet she was going to talk. She’d have tried to ruin me, even though I was only going to report the facts. But Towers was a big fucking deal, and she would have tried to squash me like a bug. That’s exactly what she said over the ’link. But she did exactly what she was told. And when I walked toward her on that nasty little street, she sneered at me. The bitch sneered at me and she said, ‘You’re late. Now, you little bastard, we’re going to set things straight.’”
He laughed so hard he had to press a hand to his stomach. “Oh, I set her straight. Gush and goggle, just like my dear old mother.”
He gave Nadine a quick slap on the top of the head, rose, and faced the camera he had set
up. “This is C. J. Morse reporting. As the clock ticks away the seconds, it appears that the heroic Lieutenant Cunt will not arrive in time to save her fellow bitch from execution. Though it has long been considered a sexist cliché, this experiment has proven that women are always late.”
He laughed uproariously and gave Nadine a careless backhanded slap that knocked her back on the bench where he’d put her. After one last, high-pitched giggle, he controlled himself and frowned soberly into the lens.
“The public broadcasting of executions was banned in this country in 2012, five years before the Supreme Court once again ruled that capital punishment was unconstitutional. Of course, the court was forced into that decision by five idiot, bigmouthed women, so this reporter deems that ruling null and void.”
He took a small pocket beam out of his jacket before turning to Nadine. “I’m going to key into the station now, Nadine. On air in twenty.” Thoughtfully, he tilted his head. “You know, you could use a little makeup. It’s a pity there isn’t time. I’m sure you’d want to look your best for your final broadcast.”
He walked to her, laid the length of the knife at her throat, and faced the camera. “In ten, nine, eight . . .” He glanced over at the sound of rushing feet on the crushed stone path. “Well, well, here she is now. And with seconds to spare.”
Eve skidded to a halt on the path and stared. She’d seen a great deal in her decade on the force. Plenty that she often wished could be erased from her memory. But she’d never seen anything to compare with this.
She’d followed the light, the single light that beamed a circle around the tableau. The park bench where Nadine sat passively, blood drying on her skin, a knife at her throat. C. J. Morse behind her, dressed nattily in a round-collared shirt and color-coordinated jacket, facing a camera on a slim tripod. Its red light beamed as steadily as judgment’s eye.
“What the hell are you doing, Morse?”