Kindred in Death (30 page)

This time his facial muscles twitched into the smallest of smiles.

“You are a sick fuck.” Peabody shoved back her chair as she sprang to her feet. She leaned over the table until she was nose to nose with Darrin. “It pisses me off we’re wasting time with you, that we have to go through this routine. We’ve got witnesses, you asshole. We’ve got security recordings of you walking into Deena MacMasters’s house the night you killed her. Of you entering the building the day you killed Karlene Robins.”

“Bullshit. That’s bullshit, because I was never anywhere near those places.”

“Bullshit? I’ll show you bullshit. Wall screen on!” She caught herself, glanced toward Eve.

“Go ahead, you’ve already spoiled my surprise.”

“Display image 1-A,” Peabody ordered.

The screen filled with a clear shot of Darrin climbing the steps of the MacMasters’s home toward a smiling Deena. The time stamp pulsed in the bottom corner as the recording continued with him reaching her, offering her the flowers, easing into the doorway, into the house.

“She told her friends about you—David,” Eve added as he stared at the screen. “She told them all about her secret boyfriend from Columbia University. The shy guy she met in the park.”

“We’ve got eyewitnesses who saw the meet,” Peabody continued. “We’ve had your face for days, picking up other witnesses who saw you together.”

“She kept souvenirs—like the program from the musical you took her to at the college. Your prints are on it.” Eve tossed another paper from the file on the table. “We got a match once you were printed downstairs.”

Face blank, he nodded. “So, you got lucky.”

“You keep thinking that, too. Now, let’s discuss details.”

22

“LUCK?” EVE TIPPED BACK IN HER CHAIR, meeting his smirk with one of her own. “Luck that EDD killed your virus? Or that we know what you were wearing on New Year’s Eve when you lifted Darian Powders’s ID? I know where you bought the shoes you’re wearing, Darrin, and how much you paid for them. The backpack, too, and the Columbia sweatshirt you had on when you lured Deena into the first meet in Central Park.”

Now she smirked, deliberately, leaning back in a way that transmitted casual derision. “I know what kind of airboard you ride, and exactly where you rode it, with Deena, on a rainy afternoon in May.”

“That’s bullshit.”

He didn’t look afraid, not yet, Eve thought. But he looked puzzled, and just a bit defiant.

“You keep thinking that, asshole.” Peabody all but growled the words, and made Eve think she’d have to teach her new “bad” cop to tune it back.

“I knew what you looked like when I set you up at the media conference, the day after you raped and strangled Karlene Robins. Drew. I know your name, where you were born, oh, and the name you were using when your mother bought it in Chicago.”

There, Eve thought, that hit the mark. Rage boiled out of his eyes. He turned it back, quickly, she’d give him that. But she’d seen it and the trigger she needed.

“We’re just smarter than you, Darrin. You got lucky at the memorial, no question. But, gee, looks like your luck ran out. Like your mother’s did in that prossy flop in Chicago.”

“You’re going to want to be careful.”

“About what? You’re nailed. You’ve got some skills with electronics, but they’re average. You couldn’t find a way to jam the cameras or the lock, you couldn’t bypass the system without being inside. The virus?”

She rolled her shoulders, stretched lazily. “It was a good try, kept our e-team entertained for a while. But the fact is, an e-rookie has more chops than you. But then, you learned most of them from your father.”

“Well, that depends.” Peabody shrugged. “We’re not sure if Vincent or Vance Pauley is his father. His mother let both of them have the bangs.”

“Right, right.” Eve waved agreement as Darrin’s jaw clenched. “I wonder if your mother knew, since she fucked both of them. But, hey, it could’ve been someone else altogether. Since she was a whore.”

“Shut your fucking mouth.”

“Want to shut it for me, Darrin? The way you shut Deena’s, Karlene’s, when you held a pillow over their faces after you raped them? I wonder, when you were raping them, looking at their faces when you pounded and tore into them, did you see your mother? Is that how you got it up, Darrin? Thinking about Mom, and how you really wanted to fuck her?”

She didn’t blink when he lurched up. His hands balled into fists as the lead of his restraints clanged against the bolt.

“Want to take a shot at me? It’s a pisser not to be able to fight back, isn’t it? I guess you know how Deena and Karlene felt. You must be disappointed that you won’t be able to watch Judge Mimoto’s mother struggle, hear her scream. Or Elysse Wagman,” she said and looking into his eyes recited the names of his other targets.

“We found them all,” Peabody said, piling on scorn. “That’s how lucky we are.”

“Now you won’t be able to finish your sick homage to your whore of a mother.”

He got his hands under the table, tried to lift it, heave it, but Eve and Peabody simply counterweighted the other side.

“Frustrating, isn’t it?” Eve commented. “To be helpless. To be controlled.”

His muscles trembled with the effort, but he pulled back, sat again. “If you’ve got me nailed, why are we wasting time with all this?”

“That’s what they pay us for. So, if you’re in a hurry, why don’t you lay it out for the record?” Eve prompted. “You know you want to. It has to be satisfying to brag about what you did manage to pull off. I can give you a little springboard. You’ve been stalking your targets for months, researching them, planning. Hell, you’ve been thinking about it for years. All your life, basically. I have to figure you picked Deena to start as she was the easiest. Just a kid, a shy girl—the virgin—easily dazzled by attention, excited by the idea of a secret boyfriend. You used the Columbia connection. You’d gone there, so you knew the campus. And since her friend Jamie Lingstrom goes there, a little field-work and you could toss out some names she’d recognize. Lower her defenses.”

He shrugged.

“If you think we’re going to offer you a deal, like your mother got when she was caught using and whoring twenty years ago, think again.”

Darrin bared his teeth in a vicious smile. “You can tell MacMasters his precious daughter was the whore. I’ve been fucking her for weeks.”

Eve glanced at Peabody. “Did we actually think this moron had some smarts?”

“We did. He’s sure proving us wrong since we know, conclusively, the only way he could get his pathetic dick into Deena was to drug her, restrain her, and rape her.”

“All you had to do with his mother was pay her.”

“Shut the fuck up. You don’t know anything.”

“Enlighten me. Explain to me why the people involved in your mother’s bust in New York twenty-one years ago are responsible for her death in Chicago nineteen years ago? Help me make that leap, Darrin.”

“It was that fucking cop who ruined her. Set her up.”

“MacMasters set her up?”

“Planted the illegals on her, blackmailed her into having sex with him, the same as rape. Then he covers it up, says she’s whoring. My mother was the best shifter on the grift there was.”

Eve changed her tone, put a touch of admiration into it. “She had the ID skills.”

“She could be anybody she wanted to be, take anything she wanted to take. And so what? Nobody got hurt.”

“How about the people she swindled? How about Vincent Pauley?”

“Marks.” He shrugged again. “They’re lame enough to get taken, they get taken. Vinnie? He’s always been a dick, always been jealous of my father, always came in second best to him. My mother needed somewhere to stay when she was pregnant with me and my father got railroaded into prison. She only slept with that asshole for my sake.”

“Is that what she told you?”

“She never talked about it, any of it. What happened to her ruined her. Took the life out of her before those cops set her up with the Stallions in Chicago. Before they killed her.”

“Interesting.” Eve furrowed her brow, flipped through the papers in the file on the table. “None of that’s in my file. Where did you get this information?”

“My father told me everything. How they tore the life out of her before they killed her, how they ripped our family apart because the cops blackmailed her into trying to get the goods on them.”

“So . . . the Chicago cops blackmailed your mother to infiltrate the Stallions.”

“MacMasters set it up. She was worn out when she got out of prison, and he used that. He had an in with that crooked judge, and made her weasel for him or he’d send her back in.”

“But she was killed in Chicago.”

“She tried to get away, take me away, but he tracked her, and set her up with the Chicago cops.”

“He must’ve been pretty obsessed with her to go to all that trouble.”

“That’s the way it was.”

“Your father gave you all this information.”

“He had to raise me on his own, because they killed her. They humiliated her, locked her away, raped her. She was beautiful, and they killed her.”

“And she loved you,” Peabody said, with a hint of sympathy. “She sacrificed for you.”

“She lived for me. We had a good life. We didn’t have to play by anyone else’s rules.” Darrin balled his hands into fists on the table. “She was free, and beautiful. That’s why MacMasters wanted her, why he forced her. Then he had to cover it up. They had that bitch take me away.”

“Jaynie Robins.”

“In MacMasters’s pocket, like the rest of them. They tried to keep me from my father, but he fought to get me back. He promised my mother he’d take care of me.”

“And Robins’s supervisor, the APA, the judge, the rest?”

His face went cold again, blank again. “They were all responsible, one way or the other.”

“So you and your father worked out how you’d avenge your mother, how you’d make those who’d hurt her pay.”

“Why should they get away with it? Why should they have their lives, their families?”

“So your father—Vance—picked the order. He picked Deena as the first target, the first kill.”

“We decided together. We’re a team, we’ve always been a team.”

“So he could do some of the research, the stalking on one target while you worked another. Very efficient.”

“We’re a team,” Darrin repeated. “We’ve always been a team.”

“Plus he could go to Colorado to research the APA while you stayed here to work Deena. How did he decide you’d plan to kill the sister there, and not the mother, for instance?”

“For Christ’s sake, the sister’s in New Jersey. It’s basic geography.”

“He did the preliminary stalking there then, right? Until the contact.”

“Didn’t I say we’re a team? He’d start the field- and e-work, gather the data, then I . . .” His face tightened. “I’m not saying anything else about my father.”

“Fine. Protect him like your mother did. You go down, he walks. There’s déjà vu. Only you don’t go away for a year and a half like she did. You’re going away for two life terms, no possibility of parole, with the extra twenty-five for intent on Mrs. Mimoto.”

“Long time,” Peabody commented, “when you go in this young. You know, Dallas, I bet Vance had alibis set up for himself each time the kid here went on a kill. That’s his pattern.”

“Doesn’t matter, the old man’s got no balls. We’ve got the big fish here, and he can flop and gasp on the shore alone.”

“If you think I’ll turn on my father, you’re crazy. And you’ll never find him.”

“Couldn’t care less. You’re all I need, Darrin. You’re young, and that just makes me want to sing and dance. Because that means you’ll be in a cage on a rock off planet for about a century. You’re going to have a really, really long time to think, to figure out how you’ve been screwed with.”

“You think you scare me? It was worth it, just to see MacMasters standing there, and his dead daughter in a box. It’s better, even better, because now he knows why. He’ll know why, every day he sucks in air, that he killed his own daughter the day he killed my mother.”

“I’ll give you the bonus. Make him suffer even more. Walk us through what you did to Deena.”

His lips twitched into a smile. “You were right. She was easy.”

It made her sick, turned her stomach into a raw, churning mass of revulsion. She’d seen it, most of it, in her head already. But now he spoke for the record, relaying every detail. Not reveling in it, Eve noted. Somehow his pragmatic step-by-step was worse than glee.

He’d done what he had to do. What, she believed, he’d been created to do.

When he’d finished relating the murders of Deena and Karlene, his framework and intentions for murdering the others, he sat back, eye ing Eve quietly.

“Is that enough for you?”

“We’re done. You’ll be taken back to a cell. The court will appoint counsel for you if you don’t select an attorney of your own.”

“I don’t need a lawyer. I don’t need a trial. Your laws mean nothing to me. I’m young, like you said. Eventually I’ll find my way out, my way back. And I’ll finish what I started.”

“Sure you will.” Eve rose. “Record off. Peabody, get someone to take Darrin back to his cage.”

She waited until Peabody stepped out. “He set you up, Darrin, this man you worship. He twisted your mind from the time you were a baby, so he could cover his own actions, maybe his own guilt. He set you up, like he set your mother up, his brother up. He set your mother up, here in New York, and again in Chicago. Because he wanted quick money. Because he wanted her to do the work. Because he was, is, a coward.”

“You’re a lying cunt.” He spat at her, with that vicious smile in place.

“Why would I lie? You’ll ask yourself that eventually. Vance Pauley? He’s a user.”

“You don’t know shit.”

“More than you can imagine,” she said, thinking of the first eight years of her life. “The reason I’m telling you this is because sometime in the long, long decades you’re in that concrete cage, you’re going to think about it. You’re going to think, and wonder, and maybe realize the truth. I really hope you realize the truth. Because it’ll make you suffer. Your father killed your mother.”

“You’re a liar.”

She only shook her head. “No gain in it for me. I’ve closed this case, and you’re finished. You’ll have a long time to think about that.” She turned to the door, nodded to the pair of uniforms who stepped in. “Take this worthless shit back to his cage.”

Eve stood where she was, pressed her hands to her face. Rubbed hard as if to scrub away a film of ugly memories.

She turned to MacMasters when he came to the door. “I’m sorry you had to hear that.”

“Don’t be. She was mine, and I needed to know . . . everything. I needed to know. You’re going after the father now.”

“Yes, I am.”

He nodded. “This is enough for me, has to be. I’m taking a leave of absence. My wife and I need time. She asked me to apologize to you.”

“There’s no need.”

His face was unbearably sad, unbearably weary. “There is, for her. Please accept.”

“Then I do.”

He nodded again. “Good-bye, Lieutenant.”

“Good-bye, Captain.”

She made a copy of the recording, gathered her files. When she walked into her office, Roarke turned from her window.

“This is getting to be a habit. I didn’t know you were here.”

“I haven’t been here long. Long enough to have heard the last of that.” He came to her, stroked her cheek. “Difficult for you. Hideous to hear him go step-by-step on what he did to that girl, and to that young woman.”

“There’ll be worse. There’s always worse.” For a moment she felt inside her what she’d seen in MacMasters’s eyes. Unbearable sadness. Unbearable weariness. “Something like that, like him? It makes you realize there’s never a limit on cruel.”

“Dallas?” Peabody hesitated at the door. “I just wanted to tell you I’d write this up. Mira was in Observation as requested, and she’ll write up her findings.”