Devoted in Death

5

Eve walked back to the bull pen and Peabody’s desk.

“Give me what you’ve got. We’re going to switch off.”

“FBI’s in it. The agent in charge is Carl Zweck. They’re following up a lead in Branson, Missouri, but have already connected with the primary in Pleasant Acres, New Jersey, on the murder last week. I just finished talking to her,” Peabody continued. “Detective Francine Lupine. They’re small town, Dallas, and don’t have a lot of resources or experience with serials. She’s looking for all the help she can get.

“Transferring notes to your computer right now. I reached out to the two primaries in Pennsylvania. Working my way back. FBI’s profiled a team, the romantic angle, just where we’re leaning.”

“Suspects? Descriptions?”

“They got nothing.” Peabody lifted her hands. “I’m wading through reams of reports and federal doublespeak, but it comes down to not so much. It looks like the unsubs switch vehicles here and there, and the ones recovered – in the cases where the owner was a vic – are wiped clean. Dozens of interviews over the past couple months, and conflicting reports¸ as you’d expect. A man and a woman, two males, various races, age ranges. The probability run is higher on the hetero couple, and the profile is giving an age range of twenty-five to thirty-five.”

Which was, Eve agreed, not so much.

“I’ll work with this. The interviews here indicate the vic left after the performance, with plans to go downtown to After Midnight. Several friends were to join him. Earnestina is Tina R. Denton. She’s not going to play into this, but we’ll follow up.”

A follow-up wasn’t wasting time, Eve thought, even when it felt like it.

“The most likely now is Kuper caught a cab, went downtown, and they grabbed him. Random choice, wrong place, wrong time. You’re looking for insight from the remaining interviews, and corroboration on the timeline and movements on the night the vic went missing. And if I’m wrong, any sense he was stalked or threatened prior.”

“You’re not going to be wrong. Everything I’ve got here says these two breeze into a town, a community, choose a vic, have their fun and move on. Identified areas so far are usually remote areas or, in more urban areas, an abandoned building. Two or three days, they’re done. They could already be done here, Dallas, and gone. That’s the pattern.”

“We follow through. Look at the route, Peabody. They were aiming for New York. This is where they wanted to be. Let’s find out why.”

In her office, she reviewed Peabody’s notes, and set up a second board. For once as she arranged the data on previous victims, she wished for bigger office space.

It took some doing, but she tracked the cab. Her vic had hailed one on Broadway, and taken it downtown where – at his request – the cab dropped him at the corner of Perry and Seventh – a few blocks shy of the club.

Why? Eve wondered. Nice night?

She did a quick back check on the weather, nodded.

“Nice night,” she murmured. “Take a little walk, stretch your legs, get some air. You know the neighborhood. How’d they mark you?”

She sat again, put her boots on the desk, shut her eyes.

The female, she thought – because she believed the probability of a hetero couple – use the female to lure him.

Excuse me? Try flirty but flustered, just a little helpless. Certainly harmless. Could you help me? I’m lost.

Yeah, maybe, maybe just that simple.

Or the ploy Dahmer used – that classic had proven to do the job in all the decades following.

Lone woman struggling to lift something heavy into the back of a vehicle.

Can I give you a hand?

Oh, golly. Would you mind? I just can’t quite get it up there.

Vic does the good deed, and the male comes up behind, bashes him. They drag him into the back of the vehicle – van or all-terrain – one jumps in with him to restrain, the other gets behind the wheel.

She opened her eyes again, studied the board.

Can’t hold him in the vehicle for two days. Got a hole somewhere, got a place. How’d they get it? Downtown, highest probability. It’s where they took him, it’s where they dumped him.

She ran the route, the drive time from Perry to Mechanics Alley. Highlighted the sector on her map.

Possible kill location, she thought. Somewhere in that sector.

Abandoned building? Nothing stayed empty for long, she thought. Junkies, sidewalk sleepers, squatters, somebody moved in.

She did a search, found six potentials, arranged for uniforms to check them out.

Then she picked up where Peabody had left off, began to reach out to other cops with other victims.

Mid-afternoon, and looking a little hollow-eyed, Peabody came in, dropped a vending bag on Eve’s desk.

“What is that?”

“It a Vegalicious Pocket – it’s new. And, well, I’d call it Vegaterrible, but it fills the hole. Can I get coffee, my post-holiday-workout-daily butt is seriously dragging.”

Eve just wagged a thumb at the AutoChef, and filled Peabody in on the victim’s movements, the notes from other primaries.

“The one in Woodsbury, Ohio, is keeping it front and center. It’s the first murder in his town for over a decade, and he’s taking it personal. He may be a good resource as we progress, and – Jesus Christ.”

Eve managed – barely – to swallow the bite she’d taken out of the vending pocket, then grabbed Peabody’s coffee regular, gulped. “Oh, and nearly as bad. Who deliberately makes anything that tastes like that?”

“Maybe there are more sadists out there than we can possibly imagine.”

“Crap. Crap. I don’t even want to think about what’s in there, and now it’s inside me. Along with coffee murdered by milk and sugar. And now I’m hungry.”

Eve dumped the offensive pocket in the recycler where it belonged. “I wasn’t hungry, and now I am. Damn it.”

She went to the AutoChef, programmed a vitamin smoothie.

And was shocked when that’s exactly what she got.

It has worked for Feeney, she thought, bitterly, disguising his real coffee for a spinach smoothie in his office machine. But did she get the candy bar she’d disguised in there?

No, she did not.

“Goddamn Candy Thief. I should’ve known he’d steal me blind while I was on leave.”

“You have candy in there? What kind of —”

“Not anymore.” In disgust, Eve went back to her desk, yanked out a drawer. “Bastard leaves the dumbass power bars, takes the really good chocolate.”

“Chocolate!”

“Gone.” In penance for her own failure, Eve took a glug from the smoothie – which could have been worse – unwrapped the power bar.

“On the map,” she said. “It’s logical to assume they hit him between Perry and Christopher. Tag-teamed him, disabled, got him in the vehicle, restrained. Most probable hole would be this sector. I’ve got uniforms checking out abandoned buildings.”

“I’m not getting anything new or salient in the interviews. Theo Barron and Samuel Deeks came in on their own, so I went ahead and talked to them.”

“Part of the After Midnight group.”

“Right. Theo cried the whole time, kept saying if he hadn’t tried to score with the singer – Hanna – he’d have been with Dorian, and Dorian would still be alive.”

“He’s right about that.” When Peabody’s tired eyes widened, Eve waved her off. “It doesn’t make him guilty or responsible or at fault, it’s just fact. These two wouldn’t have tried for a couple of guys at once. They take singles – that we know of.”

“You still think there’s more.”

“It’s not fact, yet. But it’s logical. Some gaps on the route. Now, maybe they were in a hurry to get from one point to another, or maybe they just didn’t find anybody who did it for them, but the most logical conclusion is they killed somebody in these gaps. It hasn’t been connected, or the body hasn’t been found. But here…” With the power bar she gestured to the New York map. “This is promising. We’ll check it out.”

“I scheduled this break time, but we’ve got more coming in for interviews.”

“Are Baxter and Trueheart still in the bull pen?”

“Yeah, they haven’t caught anything.”

“Fill them in,” Eve ordered. “They’ll take over the interviews while we’re in the field. Give me five to update Mira, send an update to Whitney.”

She tried for an actual conversation with Mira, but was told in no uncertain terms by Mira’s dragon of an admin the doctor was in meetings. So Eve settled for hammering out a quick update, copying both Mira and her commander.

Because it was there, she drank down the rest of the smoothie, then grabbed her coat.

“You set?” she asked Baxter, with a nod to Trueheart as she hit the bull pen.

“We’ve got it.”

She paused a moment, shifted back to Trueheart’s young, earnest face. “Are you set otherwise, Officer?”

“I… yes, sir.”

“She means the detective’s exam, my young apprentice.”

“Yes, sir. I’m prepared for it.”

“Stay that way. Peabody, with me.”

Eve swung on her coat as she headed to the glides and, remembering the vicious cold of the morning, pulled out the scarf Peabody had knitted her.

“The FBI are looking at Tennessee as the first,” she began. “I don’t buy that. It was too organized, too clean. Wouldn’t the first be sloppier, maybe even impulsive? How did they come to figure out killing – torturing and killing – was their deal?”

“Maybe somebody they knew the first time.” As they rode down, Peabody wound her mile-long scarf into some sort of complex and artistic looping knot around her neck. “Somebody they – or one of them anyway – was pissed at, or wanted something from.”

“More possible,” Eve agreed. “How did they team up? How long have they been together? And the first, add in possible defense or accident, another crime gone south. But somewhere in there, they found their romance.”

When they were close enough to keep it short, she switched from glide to elevator. “Are they from New York and coming home – or again one of them – or are they from out west, and looking for some fun in the big city? Not enough to see them yet. We don’t have enough to see them yet. But they’re not picking on the type of victim. It’s not just random, it also reads opportunity. The one prior to ours, a woman in her seventies, most likely taken from the parking lot of a small outdoor mall where she worked – out of range of the security cameras, then dumped two days later into a ravine six miles away. And we’ve got a twenty-year-old male who went missing from a rest-stop area in Pennsylvania, dumped two days later off the highway heading northeast.”

She got out, headed for her car. “Always a single vic, always alone, and what looks like opportunity rather than specific targets. The body dump some distance from kill zone, or most usually. Which means their hole is more likely Lower West than near the Mechanics Alley dump site.”

She got behind the wheel, backed out. “If Kuper hadn’t gotten out on Perry, if he’d had the cab take him all the way to the club, he’d probably be playing his cello and someone else would be dead.”

“They could still be heading north,” Peabody commented. “They’ve never hit anything as big or as urban as New York.”

“Exactly why it strikes as a destination.”

And look at them all, Eve thought as she drove. Millions of possible victims.

The LCs, the beggars, the unwary tourists, the executive hurrying to make a late meeting, his mind on business, the shopkeeper, shutting down for the night, the stripper heading home in the predawn dark.

Pick and choose, Eve thought, and the variety was endless.

She parked on Perry, thought about the neighborhood.

“Do me a favor. Contact Charles or Louise, they live pretty damn close, and Louise, especially, would come and go at odd hours and alone.” Doctors and cops, Eve thought, kept no hours. They kept all hours.

“I already did, after I saw the map.”

“Good thinking. The cab dropped him here. Perry and Greenwich. Three blocks to Christopher, and another block and a half on Christopher to the club. Somewhere on these four and a half blocks, they hit him.”

She began to walk, scanning, considering, trying to see it.

“He knows the area, comes down here a lot. It was cold, but clear. No wind to speak of, nothing spitting out of the sky. A nice frosty night for a brisk walk, clear out the opera, maybe, pull in the jazz.”

“It wouldn’t take more than five minutes to walk it,” Peabody pointed out.

“That’s all they needed.” She stopped. “Here. Look at that brownstone. Nobody cleared the snow off the walkway or the steps. All the privacy screens are down. What do you want to bet whoever lives there is away? Business trip, vacation.”

“Do you think they used this place? But like you said, the walk, the steps. If they took him in there, there’d be signs someone walked through the snow.”

“I don’t think they took him in there, I think they took him here. Park in front of this place. Yeah, other houses around, but no one directly. And it’s going on midnight, a cold, clear night in a settled neighborhood. I bet a lot of the lights were off in the neighboring houses. They have to take him fast, and quiet. Distract him with the female, the male moves in – that’s got to be it. Disable, restrain, transport. Let’s knock on doors.”

They tried the nearest neighbor, another dignified brownstone with a square of front courtyard that set it back from the sidewalk. They got the nanny, and after she electronically scanned their ID, eyeballed them herself, she admitted them as far as the front foyer.

“The kids are having their afternoon snack. If Justin knows there’s a cop around, he’ll get hyper. He loves cops vids and games. Is there a problem?”

“Nothing here. Just a few questions. The people next door? Are they away?”

“The Minnickers, yes.” The nanny, all five feet of her sniffed. “Don’t tell me somebody broke in there. They got enough security for the White House. Not what you call friendly people, either. Pretty snooty, not like my people. And that woman. She came over here getting all up in my face last summer because my little Rosie picked one of her flowers. It was coming right through the pickets, out to the sidewalk. What harm did it do for Rosie to have it? But what did my lady do, my lady has class. She had the florist take that woman a big arrangement. And didn’t even get a thanks for it. That’s what kind of people they are over there.”

She folded her arms at her chest with a distinctive hmmph. “I bet they got in trouble, didn’t they, out in Hawaii? That’s where they are, right up till March is what I heard.”

“I couldn’t say. Are you live-in?”

“Nope. Eight to four most days. What’s this about?”

“Have you noticed a strange vehicle around the neighborhood in the last few days? Maybe just driving by too often, or parked next door.”

“I can’t say I have, no, sorry.” She stopped, head angled, eyes narrowed. “They’re starting to get into it back there. I’ve got to get back to them. You could try Mr. Havers, on the other side of that house. He works nights a lot – at home. They’re nice people.”

They found Havers at home and willing to talk.

He was a bulky man in his middle fifties, by Eve’s gauge, and with an absent look in light brown eyes.

“Not last night,” he muttered. “Not the night before. Night before that. Okay, okay, I’d’ve been working. I write horror novels, and right now it starts rolling for me about ten at night.”

“Drew Henry Havers?” Peabody asked.

“That’s right.”

“You’ve scared the bejesus out of me for years.”

His plain, pale face lit up like a runway. “Best compliment ever. Thanks.”

“Where do you work?” Eve asked.

“Oh. Upstairs. I have a studio facing the street so I don’t disturb my wife and the kids. Bedrooms face the back. A vehicle you say, a strange vehicle. I get caught up in the work, don’t notice much outside it. But…” He scratched his head, rubbed his eyes. “I was pacing around the studio, trying to figure out if the psychotic demon should disembowel the character or if flaying was more appropriate given the build-up. I did see someone parked in front of the house next door. Very unfriendly people over there – away now. But I didn’t think anything of it, I’m afraid. Didn’t even remember they were away. I might’ve thought, huh, the un-neighbors – that’s what we call them – must’ve bought a new ride. But they were away.”

“What kind of vehicle?”

“Ah… I barely registered it. Dark, yes, it wasn’t white or cream, but a dark color. Not a car,” he considered, “bigger. Maybe one of those burly all-terrains. Or a van. Maybe a van.”

“Did you see anyone around it?”

“I barely glanced out the window, just as I was pacing around. I do think I saw someone. I can’t tell you if it was a man or a woman. Bundled up. I think they had a chair. I must be imagining that, mixing it up. Why would anyone stand out on the street with an armchair? I’m very likely mixing it up, I’m sorry.”

“What was this person doing with the chair?”

“I can’t say – there probably wasn’t a chair. My wife is always saying I live in my head more than out of it. I get the impression they were putting it in the back of the van, or maybe they’d taken it out.”

“Do you remember the time, the time you saw this?”

“I have no idea. It would’ve been after ten, when it started rolling. Probably well after ten, as I’d written right up to the kill. And it would’ve been before two, when I stopped and went to bed – well before two as I decided on the disemboweling, and wrote right through to the sacrificial rite before I tapped out.

“I wish I could be of more help. I appreciate all you do – the police. I especially appreciate police who read my books.”

“We appreciate the time, Mr. Havers,” Eve told him. “If you remember anything else, please contact us. Peabody, give Mr. Havers one of your cards.”

They knocked on a few more doors, but got nothing to match Havers.

“He’s responsible for most of my nightmares,” Peabody said as they got back into the car.

“Why would you read something that gives you nightmares?” Life and the job, Eve thought, gave her plenty of her own.

“I don’t know. Irresistible. He’s really good. Mostly I like stories that have happy endings – and his do. I mean good overcomes evil – after a lot of blood, terror, death. Sort of like us,” Peabody concluded. “Maybe that’s why.”

“Dark colored A-T or van. He was leaning van. It’s not much, but more than we had. And the woman with the chair.”

“He didn’t say woman.”

“It’s going to be the woman. The woman trying to get the chair into the back of the vehicle.”

“Classic ploy,” Peabody added.

“Because it often works. Kuper comes along, sees her struggling, steps over to offer a hand.”

Just as she’d seen it, Eve thought. It had been the most logical because it was the most true.

“It all works, including the timing. Let’s hit the club since we’re here.”

After Midnight was a moody little place with a scatter of patrons, and an ancient piano player noodling the keys as a woman with the face and body of a siren swayed and sang about love gone the wrong way around.

She could see Morris here, clearly see him adding the mournful song of his sax. And with the picture formed in the last hours, she could see Dorian Kuper, adding those down-low notes of the cello.

An intimate place, she thought, with tables crowded together and huddled close to the stage. A single bar and the man who tended it, and the lighting dim and faintly blue.

She talked to the bartender, the lone waitress, the old man and the young siren. She got fresh grief and shock, but no new information.

“They really liked him,” Peabody commented when they walked from the blue warmth to the gray cold.

“He seemed to have that effect on most people. What did we learn?”

“Well, that he went there at least three or four times a month, and they liked him.”

“That, and his killers never went in there. It’s small, it’s intimate, and while they get people who just go in, a tourist who’s heard of it, they mostly have regulars. A couple who’d been in there around the time the vic went missing, they’d be noticed. And that leads more weight to random. Wrong place, wrong time.”

“Okay, yeah. Yeah, I see that. Everybody remembered Earnestina – in detail.”

“And speaking of.” Eve checked the time. “I’m going to drop you back at Central. Any progress Baxter and Trueheart have made, I want to know. Check in with EDD in case they found something on the vic’s electronics we missed. Unless something else pops, go home after that. I’ll go by and talk to Earnestina on my way home – both her work and residence are on the way. She doesn’t play in, but we’ll cross her off anyway.”

“She should be home. I checked her schedule.” Peabody climbed in the car. “Her last class should have ended about a half hour ago. Even if she hangs around the school for whatever, she should be home by the time you get uptown. You might want to check there first. Traffic’s going to be a bitch.”