Purity in Death (2 page)

"Yes, sir. I clocked off at eighteen-thirty and proceeded southeast from Central on foot."

"What was your intended destination?"

He flushed a little. Color came and went in his face. "I was, ah, proceeding to the home of a friend where I had arrangements for dinner."

"You had a date."

"Yes, sir. As I approached this building, I heard calls for assistance and looking up saw a woman leaning out of the window. She appeared to be in considerable distress. I entered the building, proceeded to the fourth floor where I could hear the sounds of an altercation. Several individuals came to their doors, but no one attempted to come out. I called requests for someone to call nine-eleven."

"Did you take the stairs or the elevator?" Details, she thought. She needed to take him through every detail.

"The stairs, sir. I thought it would be faster. When I reached this floor, 1 saw the male identified as Ralph Wooster lying on the floor of the corridor between apartments 42E and 43F. I did not, at that time, check him for injuries as I could hear screaming and breaking glass emitting from 42E. I responded to this immediately and witnessed the individual identified as Louis K. Cogburn assaulting a woman with what appeared to be a baseball bat. The weapon was . . ."

He paused a moment, swallowed hard. "The weapon was covered with what appeared to be blood and gray matter. The woman was unconscious on the floor, with Cogburn above her. He held the bat over his head as if preparing to strike another blow. I drew my weapon at this time, called for the assailant to cease and desist, identifying myself as Police."

Trueheart had to stop now, and rubbed the back of his hand over his mouth. The look he sent her was both helpless and pleading. "Lieutenant, it all happened fast from there."

"Just tell it."

"He turned away from the woman. He was screaming something about spikes in his head, about blasting out the window. Crazy stuff. Then he lifted the bat again, shifting so it looked like he was going to strike the woman. I moved in to prevent this, and he charged me. I tried to evade, to get the bat. He landed a couple of blows-I believe it broke at that time-and I fell back, knocked something over, hit the wall. I saw him coming at me again. I yelled at him to stop."

Trueheart took a steadying breath, but it didn't stop the quaver in his voice. "He cocked the bat back like he was swinging for home, and I discharged my weapon. It's set on low stun, Lieutenant, the lowest setting. You can see-"

"What happened next?"

"He screamed. He screamed like-I've never heard anything like it. He screamed and he ran out into the hall. I pursued. But he went down. I thought he was stunned, just stunned. But when I got down to put restraints on him, I saw he was dead. I checked his pulse. He was dead. I got jumbled up. Sir, I got jumbled up. I know it was incorrect procedure to tag you before calling-"

"Never mind that. Officer, were you, at the time you deployed your weapon, in fear for your life and/or the lives of civilians?"

"Yes, sir. Yes, sir, I was."

"Did Louis K. Cogburn ignore any and all of your warnings to cease and desist and surrender his weapon?"

"Yes, sir, he did."

"You." Eve pointed to one of the uniforms down the hall. "Escort Officer Trueheart downstairs. Medical attention for his injuries has been called for. Put him in one of the black-and-whites until the MTs can see him. Stay with him until I'm done in here. Trueheart, call your representative."

"But, sir-"

"I'm advising you to call your representative," she said. "I'm stating here, for the record, that in my opinion, after a cursory examination of the evidence, after an interview with Suzanne Cohen, your account of this incident is satisfactory. The deployment of your weapon appears to have been necessary to protect your life and the life of civilians. That's all I can tell you until my on-scene investigation into this matter is complete. Now I want you to go, get off your feet, call your rep and let the MTs take care of you."

"Yes, sir. Thank you, sir."

"Come on, Trueheart." The other uniform patted Trueheart on the back.

"Officer? Any of the beat cops know these dead guys?"

The uniform glanced back at Eve. "Proctor has this sector. He might."

"Get him," she said as she sealed up and walked into 43F.

"He's awful shook," Peabody said.

"He'll have to get over it." She scanned the room.

It was a filthy mess, smelling ripely of spoiled food and dirty laundry. The cramped kitchen area consisted of a two-foot counter, a mini-AutoChef and minifridgie. A huge tin sat on the counter. Eve lifted her brows as she read the label.

"You know, I just don't see our Louie K. baking a lot of cakes." She opened one of the two cupboards and perused the neat line of sealed jars. "Looks like Louie was in the illegals line. Funny, everything in here's neat as Aunt Martha's, and the rest of the place is a pigsty."

She turned around. "No dust on the furniture though. That's funny, too. You wouldn't figure a guy who sleeps on sheets that smell like a swamp would bother chasing dust."

She opened the closet. "Tidy in here, too. Clothes show a lack of fashion taste, but they're all clean. Look at that window, Peabody."

"Yes, sir?"

"Glass is clean, inside and out. Somebody washed them within thelast couple weeks. Why do you wash your windows and leave-what the hell is this?-unidentified spilled food substance all over the floor?"

"Maid's week off?"

"Yeah, somebody's week off. That's about how long this underwear's been piled here." She glanced at the door when a uniform stepped in.

"You Proctor?"

"Yes, sir."

"You know those two dead guys?"

"I know Louie K." Proctor shook his head. "Shit-sorry, Lieutenant, but shit, this is some mess. That kid Trueheart's down there puking his guts out."

"Tell me about Louie K., and let me worry about Trueheart and his guts."

Proctor pokered up. "Small-time Illegals rat, went after school kids. Gave them samples of Zoner and Jazz to lure them in. Waste of air, you ask me. Did some time, but mostly he was pretty slick about it, and the Illegals guys never got much out of the kids."

"He a violent tendency?"

"Anything but. Kept a low profile, never gave you lip. You told him to move his ass along, he moved it. He'd give you a look now and then like he'd like to do more, but he never had the guts for it."

"Had guts enough to open Ralph Wooster's head, bash a woman and assault a uniform."

"Must've been sampling his own products all I can think. And that's not profile either. He maybe smoked a little Zoner now and then, but he was too cheap to do more. What's out there looks like Zeus," Proctor added with a jerk of the thumb toward the corridor. "Little guy like that going nutso. But he never handled anything that hot I heard about."

"Okay, Proctor. Thanks."

"Guy sells illegals to school kids, world's better off without him."

"That's not our call." Eve dismissed him by turning her back. She moved to the desk, frowned at the computer screen.

ABSOLUTE PURITY ACHIEVED

"What the hell does this mean?" she asked aloud. "Peabody, any new shit on the streets going by the name Purity?"

"I haven't heard of it."

"Computer, identify Purity."

INVALID COMMAND.

Frowning, she entered her name, badge number, and authorization. "Identify Purity."

INVALID COMMAND.

"Huh. Peabody do a run on new and known illegals. Computer, save current display. Display last task performed."

The screen wavered, then opened a tidy, organized spreadsheet detailing inventory, profit, loss, and coded customer base.

"So, according to the last task, and time logged, Louie was sitting here, very efficiently doing his books when he got a bug up his ass to bust his neighbor's head open."

"It's hot, Dallas." Peabody looked over Eve's shoulder. "People can just get crazy."

"Yeah." Maybe it was just that simple. "Yeah, they can. Nothing on his inventory named Purity."

"Nothing on the current illegals list by that name either."

"So what the hell is it, and how was it achieved?" She stepped back. "Let's take a look at Louie K., see what he tells us."

Chapter 2

He didn't tell her as much as she'd have liked.

The best she could determine on-scene with her field kit was that Louie K. had died due to neurological meltdown. That wasn't exactly the sort of term that elicited sage nods from the brass.

She passed the body off to the ME, flagged for priority.

Which meant, due to summer hours and summer glut, she'd be lucky if she got a confirmed pathology by the first frost.

She meant to push, calling in chips with the chief medical examiner.

Meanwhile she spoke with Trueheart's departmental rep via 'link, and danced the bureaucratic dance. She sent the still shaken rookie home, and ordered him to stand by for Testing.

Then she went back to Central to write, and rewrite, a detailed report on the incident that had resulted in two deaths and one critical injury.

And though her stomach curdled, she followed procedure and copied Internal Affairs.

By the time she got home, it was well past the dinner hour.

The lights were on, so that the urban fortress Roarke had built glowed like a beacon in the night. Green shadows from grand and leafy trees threw patterns on velvet grass and slid softly over rivers of flowers that were bright and bold by day.

The Lower East Side neighborhood that had eaten up most of her evening was a world away from this private paradise of wealth, of privilege, of indulgence.

She was almost accustomed to straddling worlds now without losing her balance. Almost.

She left her vehicle at the base of the stone steps and jogged up them more out of a desperate desire to shrug off the weight of heat than out of hurry.

She'd barely stepped in, taken that first breath of cool, clean air, when Summerset, Roarke's majordomo, appeared in the foyer like an unwelcome vision.

"Yes, I missed the dinner," she said before he could open his mouth. "Yes, I'm a miserable failure as a wife and a poor example of a human being. I have no class, no courtesy, and no sense of decorum. I should be dragged naked into the streets and stoned for my sins."

Summerset raised one steel gray eyebrow. "Well, that seems to cover it."

"Good, saves time." She started up the stairs. "Is he back?"

"Just."

A little annoyed she'd given him no opportunity to criticize, he frowned after her. He'd have to be quicker next time.

When she was sure he'd evaporated to wherever he'd appeared from, Eve paused at one of the house screens. "Where's Roarke?"

GOOD EVENING, DARLING EVE. ROARKE IS IN HIS OFFICE.

"Figures." Business dinner followup. She gave one blissful thought to detouring to the bedroom, jumping headlong into the shower. But guilt had her heading to his office.

The door was open. She could hear his voice.

She supposed he was refining the details of some deal he had going, most likely the one that had involved tonight's dinner. But she didn't care about the words.

His voice was poetry, seductive in itself even to a woman who'd never understood the heart of a poet. Wisps of Ireland trailed through it, adding music to what she assumed were dry facts and figures.

It suited his face, one that bore all that wild Celtic beauty in its strong, sharp bones, deep blue eyes, in the full, firm mouth that might have been sculpted by some canny god on a particularly good day.

She stepped to the doorway, saw that he stood at one of the windows, looking out while he dictated his memo. He'd pulled his hair back, she noted, all that thick black silk he usually wore loose so that it streamed nearly to his shoulders.

He still wore his dinner suit, black and sleek, over his long, rangy form. You could look and see the elegant businessman, madly successful, perfectly civilized. He'd polished himself, Eve thought, but that dangerous Celt was still, always, just beneath the surface.

It still, always, allured her.

She caught a glimpse of it now as he turned, though she hadn't made a sound, and his eyes met hers.

"Sign Roarke," he said, "and transmit. File copy Hagerman-Ross. Hello, Lieutenant."

"Hi. Sorry about dinner."

"No, you're not."

She tucked her hands in her pockets. It was ridiculous, really, the way they continually itched to take hold of him. "I'm sort of sorry about dinner."

He grinned, that lightning bolt of charm and humor. "You wouldn't have been as bored as you think."

"You're probably right. If I'd been as bored as I thought, I'd have slipped into a coma. But I am sorry I let you down."

"You don't let me down." He crossed to her, tapped her chin up with his finger and kissed her lightly. "It adds considerably to my cachet when I apologize for my wife, who's been called to duty on a case. Murder always makes lively dinner conversation. Who's dead?"

"Couple of guys downtown. Small-time chem dealer whaled on his neighbor with a ball bat, then went after a woman and a cop. Cop took him out."

Roarke lifted a brow. More, he thought. There was a deal more trouble in her eyes than her quick rundown warranted. "That doesn't seem like the sort of wrangle that would keep you on duty so late."

"The cop was Trueheart."

"Ah." He laid his hands on her shoulders, rubbed. "How's he doing?"

She opened her mouth, then shook her head and paced away. "Shit. Shit, shit, shit."

"That bad, huh?"

"Kid breaks his cherry it's tough enough."

Roarke stroked a hand over the fat cat that sprawled over the console, then gave Galahad a little nudge to move him along. "That's an interesting way to put it."

"There are cops who go through the whole life of the job without deploying. Kid's in uniform under a year, and he's racked up a termination. It changes everything."

"Did it for you? Your first termination on the job," he added. They both knew she'd killed long before she had a badge.

"It was different for me." She often wondered if the way she'd started life made death somehow different for her.

A cold and personal insult.

"Trueheart, he's barely twenty-two and he's . . . shiny yet." Pity-a dark, slippery blossom-bloomed inside her. She crouched down, gave Galahad an absent scratch under the chin. "He won't sleep tonight. He'll go over it and over it and over it in his head. If I'd done this, if I'd done that. And tomorrow . . ." She rubbed her hands over her face as she straightened. "I can't block Testing for him. I can't stop the process."

She knew what it was. Stripped bare, monitored, questioned, forced to let machines and techs into your head. Into your gut like a tumor.

"Are you worried he won't pass through it?"

She glanced over, took the glass of wine he'd poured her. "He's tougher than he looks, but he's scared down to the bone. And he's swimming in guilt. Take all that guilt, all those doubts into Testing, they can drown you. And there's got to be an investigation. Internal."

"Why is that?"

She sat, gave him the details while the cat leaped up and kneaded a nest in her lap. It helped clear her mind to say it aloud, particularly to someone who caught on quickly and saw the full picture before you painted in all the lines.

"A uniform's stunner can't terminate under those conditions."

"Yeah." Eve nodded. "Exactly. It would have to be on full stun and jammed on the throat pulse. Even then it would take more than one jolt."

"Which means Trueheart's version of the events doesn't quite hold."

IAB wouldn't think so, she knew, and ran it through for herself as she would for them. "He was under serious duress. A civilian dead, another in extreme jeopardy, himself injured."

"Is that how you're going to play it with IAB?"

Yeah, he always saw the whole picture. "Pretty close to that." She drummed her fingers restlessly on her thigh, on the cat, sipped her wine. "I need the ME's report. But there's no way it's going to come out Trueheart terminated with deliberation. Panic, okay. He'll take a slap for panic, thirty days' suspension, some mandatory therapy. I can't get in the way of it. It's already dicey for him because he tagged me instead of calling it in through Dispatch. IAB smells cover-up, and the kid's finished."

Roarke sat, sipped his own wine. "Have you considered speaking to your old friend Webster?"

She tapped her fingers on the arm of her chair now and kept her gaze steady on Roarke's. There might have been amusement on his face-or something else. It was often tough to call.

Don Webster wasn't precisely an old friend. He had been very briefly and years before a lover. The fact that he, for reasons that would never be clear to Eve, had never gotten over that single night they'd shared had caused a violent and fascinating altercation between him and Roarke.

It wasn't something she wanted to repeat.

"Maybe, unless you're thinking that'd be a nice opportunity to pound his face in again."

Roarke sipped, smiled. "I believe Webster and I have a reasonable understanding. I can't fault him for being attracted to my wife, as I'm very attracted to her myself. And he knows that if he puts his hands on what's mine again, I'll break every bone in his body into small, jagged pieces. It works well for us."

"Great. Dandy." She said it between her teeth. "He's over it. He said so," she added and Roarke merely smiled again. Lazily now. Catlike.

"You know what, I've got enough to think about, so we're just not going to go there tonight. I want to call the commander," she said. "And I can't. I have to play this by every page in the book. Kid was dog sick after. Nothing I could do for him."

"He'll be all right, Mum."

Her eyes narrowed. "Careful. I'm the one who brought him in out of Homicide Lite. I put him in the hospital a few months ago."

"Eve."

"All right, all right. I put him in a situation where he ended up in the hospital. Now he's dealing with a suspicious termination. I've got a responsibility."

"You'd see it that way." He grazed his hand over the backs of her restless ringers. "That's what makes you what you are. And why he called it in to you first. He was scared, he was shaken. The taking of a life isn't a simple matter for most, and it shouldn't be. Doesn't it make him a better cop that he felt something?"

"Yeah, and I'll use that, too. It just doesn't hang, Roarke. Just doesn't hang," she said as she got to her feet to pace again. Annoyed, the cat shot his tail into the air and stalked out of the room.

"No burn marks on his throat. If Trueheart had zapped him that way, there should have been marks. Why weren't there?"

"Could he have used another weapon, one with lethal power?"

She shook her head. "I don't know anyone less likely to carry a drop piece. If I'm wrong about him, where is it? It wasn't on him. It wasn't in either apartment. I had the recyclers checked. His call to me came in minutes after the termination. No time to think clearly enough to ditch one safely. Besides, when you go back through it, the whole thing doesn't make sense."

She sat again, leaned in. "Take this Louie K. The beat cop, the neighbors, even the woman he attacked all describe him as your basic lowlife wimp. Preyed on schoolkids. He's got a sheet, but nothing on it with violence. No assaults, no batteries. No weapons of any kind in his flop."

"The bat?"

"He played ball. So he's sitting there in his underwear doing his books. Tidy books, filthy apartment. But not logically filthy. Cupboards are organized, windows are washed, but there's food and dirty dishes, ripe laundry tossed around. It's like he got sick or went on a bender for a week."

She scooped her hand through her hair as she brought the picture of his cramped little apartment into her head. Pictured him in it. Sitting in the heat at his desk unit, by the open window. Sweating through his Jockey shorts.

"He's got the music up to ear-blasting, nothing new according to neighbors. Ralph from across the hall goes over and bangs on the door. Again, nothing new. But this time, instead of turning the music down, Louie K. picks up his bat and beats his sometime drinking buddy to death with it."

"Cracks his skull," she continued."Turns his face to jelly, beats down hard enough to crack a good, solid baseball bat. Neighbor outweighs Louie K. by better than a hundred pounds, but he doesn't get a chance to put a mark on him."

He knew she was seeing it now, pulling images into her brain of what had happened. Though she hadn't been there, she would see it. "It's tough to fight back if your brains are leaking out of your ears."

"Yeah, that's a disadvantage. But then, screaming all the while, Louie K. kicks in the neighbor's door and goes after the woman. Cop responds, and Louie goes for him."

"The heat can turn people."

"Yeah, it can. It brings out the mean. But the sucker was sitting there, doing his books. Making entries. Just like he did every evening about that time. It doesn't feel right."

Frowning, she leaned back on Roarke's desk. "You know of any illegal that goes by Purity?"

"No."

"Neither does anyone else. When I went into his apartment, his screen was on. It said Absolute Purity Achieved. What the hell is absolute purity, and how was it achieved?"

"If it's something new, why would a small-time playground dealer be in on the ground floor?"

"I've been asking myself that. The computer wouldn't identify, even with my authorization code. So I've sent it into EDD. Can't bring Feeney in," she mused. "Looks wrong to tag the head of Electronics Detective Division for a standard data search."

"You could've tagged me."

"Talk about looking wrong. Besides, you were working."

"So I was, and eating, which I imagine you weren't. Hungry?"

"Now that you mention it. What did you have?"

"Hmm. Chilled plum soup, crab salad, and an excellent grilled turbot."

"Huh." Eve pushed to her feet. "I could go for a burger."

"Somehow I knew that."

***

Later, Eve lay awake, staring at the ceiling as she reconstructed data, evidence, theory. None of it
felt
right, she thought, but couldn't be sure how much of that was influenced by concern over a young, promising cop.

He had a good brain, and an idealism that was as bright and shiny as polished silver. Purity, she thought again. If she had to use one word to define it, it would be Trueheart.