Portrait in Death (31 page)

"You've already spilled it." Eve gestured to the dribble.

"Oh, I'm running peds today. Just a little baby puke."

"Oh. Bleck."

With a chuckle, Louise grabbed coffee from the Auto-Chef. "I imagine you come home some days with a lot more interesting bodily fluids on your clothes than a little harmless baby puke. So?" She sat on the edge of the desk, then sighed. "Ah, I'm off my feet. Feels almost better than sex. What can I do for you?"

"Are you up on the story about the two murdered college kids?"

"I've caught the media reports. Nadine's particularly." She blew on her coffee, drank. "Why?"

"I'm working on a theory that the individual who killed them may be sick, even dying. Some disease, some condition."

"Why?"

"It's a complicated theory."

"I've got ten minutes." She dug in her lab coat pocket and came up with a red lollipop to go with her coffee. "You'll have to simplify it."

"There's an old superstition about absorbing the soul through the camera. I think he may be taking it to another level. He talks about their light-pure light. And how they belong to him now. It could be reaching, but what if he thinks he needs their light to live?"

"Mmm." Louise sucked on the lollipop. "Interesting."

"If he does, then it may follow he got some bad news regarding his life expectancy at some point. Don't you guys call tumors and masses, the bad stuff, shadows?"

"A tumor, a mass, would show as a kind of shadow-a dark spot-on an X ray or ultrasound."

"Those are like images, right? Like pictures?"

"Yes, exactly. I see where you're going, but I'm not sure how I can help."

"You know doctors, and they know other doctors. You know hospitals and health centers. I need to know who's gotten bad news in the last twelve months. I can fine-tune that to male patients between the ages of twenty-five and sixty."

"Oh well then, piece of cake." Louise shook her head, and drained her coffee. "Dallas, even with cancer vaccines, early diagnosis, the success rates of treatments, there are quite a number of people who fall to incurable or inoperable conditions. Add to those, the ones who for whatever reason refuse treatment-religious reasons, fear factor, stubbornness, ignorance-and you've got hundreds just in Manhattan. Maybe thousands."

"I can cull through that."

"Maybe you can, but there's one big problem. It's called doctor-patient confidentiality. I can't give you names, and neither can any other reputable doctor or health care provider."

"He's a killer, Louise."

"Yes, but the others aren't, and are entitled to their privacy. I'll ask around, but no one's going to give me names and I couldn't, in good conscience, give them to you."

Irritated, Eve paced the limited confines of the office while Louise pulled another lollipop out of her pocket and offered it to Peabody.

"Lime. Thanks."

"Sugar-free."

"Bummer," Peabody replied, but ripped off the clear wrapping.

Eve huffed out a breath, settled herself. "Tell me this. What kind of shadow is most usually a death sentence?"

"You don't ask easy ones. Assuming the patient took the recommended vaccines, went in for routine annual exams so early detection was a factor, I'd go for the brain. Providing the mass hasn't spread, we can remove, kill, or shrink most bad cells, or if necessary, replace the involved organ. We can't replace the brain. And," she added, setting her empty cup aside, "this is ridiculously hypothetical."

"Gotta start somewhere. Maybe you can talk to your brain doctor pals. The individual remains highly functional, able to plan and execute complicated acts. He's articulate and he's mobile."

"I'll do what I can. It's going to be very little. Now I've got to get back to my own front lines. By the way, I'm thinking of having a little dinner party. Just friends. Both of you, Roarke and McNab, me and Charles."

"Um," Eve managed.

"Sounds great. Just let us know when. How's Charles?" Peabody added. "I haven't had a chance to talk to him in a while."

"He's great. Busy, but who isn't. I'll be in touch."

"Hey. Give me a damn sucker."

With a laugh, Louise tossed Eve one, then bolted out of the room.

Outside, Eve walked around her vehicle. Crouched as if to examine the tires. Then sent the two men still in the doorway a big, toothy smile before popping the lollipop into her mouth. She didn't speak until she and Peabody were pulling away.

"Okay, none of my business, but why aren't you weirded out by the idea of a cozy little dinner party with Louise and Charles?"

"Why should I be?"

"Oh, I don't know, let me think." As if contemplating, Eve rolled the round of candy in her mouth. Grape, she thought. Not bad. "Could it be that at one time you were dating Charles, and the fact that you were hanging around with our favorite licensed companion made your current bedmate swing so far out of orbit he knocked Charles on his undeniably adorable ass?"

"Kind of spices up the stew, doesn't it. Anyway, Charles, of the undeniably adorable ass, is a friend. He loves Louise. I like Louise. I wasn't sleeping with Charles, and even if I had been, it shouldn't matter."

Playing mattress tag always mattered, no matter what anyone said. But Eve kept that opinion to herself. "Okay. If it shouldn't matter, why haven't you told McNab that you and Charles never did the mattress mambo?"

Peabody hunched her shoulders. "He acted like such a moron."

"Peabody, McNab is a moron."

"Yeah, but he's my moron now. I guess I should tell him. I hate to give him the satisfaction though. It gives him the hand."

"What hand?"

"The upper hand. See, now I have the hand because he thinks I was sleeping with Charles and I stopped sleeping with Charles because of him. McNab. But if I tell him I never did the deed with Charles anyway, I lose the hand."

"Now my head hurts. I should never have asked."

***

She went back to the beginning. Rachel Howard.

Carpet fibers. They'd identified the make and models of the vehicles that came standard with the type found on both victims, and the list of registered owners. Diego Feliciano's uncle's work van didn't match, nor did Hastings's.

So far, this had been a dead end, but she'd push harder against the wall.

There was the tranq. A prescription opiate, not street buzz. If her theory about the killer held, odds are it was his prescription. Something recommended to help him sleep, calm his nerves, block whatever pain he might have due to his condition.

She'd cross-check the vehicle owners with local pharmacies. Cross-check both against imaging equipment purchases over the last twelve months.

A tedious proposition, and time consuming. More so as she had to wait for the authorization to do some of the searches.

Would she have cut through that if Roarke had been around? she wondered. Would she have used him, let him talk her into involving himself in the case, let him man his far superior equipment with his far superior skill, and his habit of bypassing the standard security and privacy codes?

Probably.

But he wasn't around, so it wasn't an option. Time was weighing on her. The killer had taken two lives within a week, and he wasn't finished.

He wouldn't wait much longer to seek out the next light.

Eve began her first level of cross-checks while she waited for the authorization to go deeper. And she worried about some faceless college kid already caught in the crosshairs of a camera lens.

And she worried about Roarke, trapped in the cage of his own past.

***

He hadn't traveled often to the west of the country where he'd been born. Most of his business was centered in Dublin, or south in Cork, north in Belfast.

He had some property in Galway, but he'd never stepped foot on it, and had spent only a handful of days in the castle hotel he'd bought in Kerry.

Though he didn't share his wife's ingrained suspicion of the countryside, he usually preferred the city. He doubted he'd know what do to with himself for long in this place of rolling green hills and flower-strewn yards.

The pace would be too slow to suit him for more than a short holiday, but there was a piece of him that was glad it had been left much as it had been, century by century.

Green, velvet green, and quiet.

His Ireland, the one he'd fled from, had been gray, dank, mean, and bitter. This curve of Clare wasn't simply another part of the country, but a world away from what he'd known.

Farmers still farmed here, men still walked with their dogs across a field, and ruins of what had been castles and forts and towers in another age stood gray and indomitable in those fields.

Tourists, he supposed, would take pictures of those ruins, and scramble around in them-then drive for miles on the twisting roads to find more. And the locals would glance at them now and again.

There, you see, they might say, they tried to beat us down. Vikings and Brits. But they never could. They never will.

He rarely thought of his heritage, and had never held the grand and weepy sentiment of Ireland so many did whose ancestors had left those green fields behind. But driving alone now, under a sky layered with clouds that turned the light into a gleaming pearl, seeing the shadows dance over the endless roll of green and the lush red blooms of wild fuchsia rise taller than a man to form hedgerows, he felt a tug.

For it was beautiful, and in a way he'd never known, it was his.

He'd flown from Dublin to Shannon to save time, and because the night's dip into whiskey had given him a miserable head. Conversely, he'd opted to drive through Clare, to take his time now.

What the hell was he going to say to them? Nothing that had run through his brain seemed right. He'd never be able to make it right, and could find no logical reason for trying.

He didn't know them, nor they him. Going to them now would do no more than open old wounds.

He had his family, and he had nothing in common with these strangers but a ghost.

But he could see that ghost in his mind's eye, see her walking across the fields, or standing in a yard amongst the flowers.

She hadn't left him, Roarke thought. How could he leave her?

So when the route map he'd programmed into the in-dash 'link told him to turn just before entering the village of Tulla, he turned.

The road wound through a forest, much of it new growth, no more than fifty years old. Then the trees gave way to the fields, to the hills where the sun was sliding through the clouds in a lovely, hazy way.

Cows and horses cropped, close to the fenceline. It made him smile. His cop wouldn't be pleased with the proximity of the animals, and she'd be baffled by the little old man, neatly dressed in cap and tie and white shirt, puttering toward him on a skinny tractor.

Why? she'd wonder in an aggrieved voice he could hear even now, does anyone want to do that? And when the old man lifted his hand in a wave as if they were old friends, she'd be only more puzzled.

He missed her the way he would miss one of his own limbs.

She'd have come if he'd asked her. So he hadn't asked. Couldn't. This was a part of his life that was apart from her, and needed to be. When he was done with it, he'd go back. Go home, and that would be that.

DESTINATION, the 'link informed him, ONE-HALF KILOMETER, ON LEFT.

"All right then," he said. "Let's do what needs to be done."

So, this was their land-his mother's land-these hills, these fields, and the cattle that grazed over them. The gray barn, the stone sheds and fences.

The stone house with its blossoming garden and white gate.

His heart tripped a little, and his mouth went dry. He wanted, more than he wanted anything, to simply drive straight by.

She'd have lived here. It was the family home, so she'd have lived here. Slept here. Eaten here. Laughed and cried here.

Oh Christ.

He forced himself to turn the car into the drive-what the locals would call the street-behind a small sedan and a well-worn truck. He could hear birdsong, and the distant bark of a dog, the vague sound of a puttering motor.

Country sounds, he noted. She'd have heard them every day of life here, until she didn't really hear them at all. Is that why she'd left? Because she'd needed to hear something new? The bright sounds of the city? The voices, the music, the traffic in the streets?

Did it matter why?

He stepped out of the car. He'd faced death more times than he could count. At times he'd fought his way around it until his hands ran with blood. He'd killed-in blood both hot and cold.

And there was nothing in his life he could remember fearing as much as he feared knocking on the bright blue door of that old stone house.

He went through the pretty white gate onto the narrow path between banks of cheerful flowers. And standing on a short stoop, he knocked on the blue door.

When it opened, the woman stared back at him. His mother's face. Older, some thirty years older than the image that was carved into his brain. But her hair was red, with just a hint of gold, her eyes green, her skin like milk tinted with rose petals.

She barely reached his shoulder, and for some reason, that nearly broke his heart.

She was neat, in her blue pants and white shirt, and white canvas shoes. Such little feet. He took it all in, down to the tiny gold hoops in her ears, and the scent of vanilla that wafted out the door.

She was lovely, with that soft and contented look some women carried. In her hand was a red-and-white dishcloth.

He said the only words he could think of. "My name is Roarke."

"I know who you are." Her voice held a strong west county accent. Running the cloth from one hand to the other, she studied him as he studied her. "I suppose you'd best be coming in."

"I'm sorry to disturb you."

"Do you plan on disturbing me?" She stepped back. "I'm in the kitchen. There's still tea from breakfast."

Before she closed the door, she took a look at his car, lifting her brows at the dark elegance of it. "So, the claims you've money coming out of your ears, among other places, are true then."