Ritual in Death

Three

Grateful she kept some workout gear in her locker, Eve stripped off the party dress, pried her aching feet out of the hated shoes, then pulled on loose cotton pants and a faded gray tee. Since she couldn’t walk around Central or successfully intimidate a suspect dripping in diamonds, she had no choice but to secure them in her locker.

Safe enough, she thought. If they’d been a candy bar, odds were lower that her property would be there when she opened the locker. But a small-probably not so small-fortune in diamonds, no problem.

After stepping into an ancient pair of skids, she met Peabody in the corridor.

“No criminal. Nothing, Dallas. He had a detained and released for disturbing the peace when he was twenty. Some college fraternity party. It wouldn’t be on his record except the campus cops slapped the whole fraternity over it. He’s from Pennsylvania, just moved here a couple of weeks ago. He’s a doctor, pretty much brand-spanking-new, and just took a position on staff at-”

“The West Side Health Clinic.”

“It’s annoying to do the run if I don’t get the payoff. Interview A. They got him cleaned up.”

“The victim?” Eve asked as they walked.

“Clean to the squeaky level. Moved to New York about two years ago from Indiana. Both parents and younger brother still back there. We’ll have to notify them.”

“We’ll take Pike first. They can wait a few hours to have their lives shattered.” She pushed open the door to the interview room, nodded to the uniform.

The uniform stepped out, and Eve walked to the table where Jack sat in the orange pants and shirt of a con. “Record on. Dallas, Lieutenant Eve, and Peabody, Detective Delia, in interview with Pike, Jackson, regarding the investigation into the death of Marsterson, Ava.”

“Ava?” Jack looked up, his face squeezed tight as if he struggled on the name. “Ava?”

“That’s right, Ava. You’ve been read your rights, Mr. Pike, is that correct?”

“Ah, I don’t know.”

“Then we’ll refresh you.” Eve recited the Revised Miranda. “Do you understand your rights and obligations?”

“I think. Yes. Why? Why am I here?”

“You don’t remember?”

“My head.” He pressed both hands to his temples. “Was I in an accident? My head hurts.”

“What do you remember about today?”

“I… I went to work. Didn’t I? What day is it? Is it Tuesday?”

“It’s Wednesday.”

“But…” Jack stared up at her. “What happened to Tuesday?”

“What drugs did you take, Jack?”

“I don’t, I don’t take drugs. I don’t do illegals. I’m a doctor. I’m on staff at…” He held his head again, and rocked. “Where? Where?”

“The West Side Health Clinic.”

He looked at Eve, his eyes, his face slack with relief. “Yes. Yes. That’s it. I just started. I went to work. I went to work, and then…” He moaned, shuddered. “Please, can I have a blocker? My head’s pounding.”

“You’ve got something in you, Jack. I can’t give you a blocker until I know what it is. Did you go to the Palace Hotel with Ava? To Suite 606?”

“Ava… I can’t… Ava works at the clinic.” Sweat shone on his face from the effort. “Ava, manages… Ava. We…” Then horror covered it. “No. No. No.”

“What happened to Ava, Jack?”

“No. No.”

“What happened in 606?”

“I don’t know. I don’t-”

“Stop!” She reached over, grabbed a fistful of his shirt. “You tell me what happened.”

“It’s not real. It didn’t happen.”

“What isn’t real?”

“The people, the people.” He surged to his feet, and Eve signaled Peabody to stay back. “The lights. The voices. Smoke and fire. And hell came.” He lurched around the interview room, holding his head. Tears leaked out of his eyes. “Laughing. Screaming. I couldn’t stop. Did I want to stop? We had sex. No. Yes. I don’t know. Bodies and hands and mouths. They hurt her. Did I hurt her? But she was smiling, smiling at me. Then her blood.”

His hands ran over his face as if wiping at it. “Her blood. All over me.”

His eyes rolled up in his head. Peabody managed to break the worst of his fall by going down with him. “Jesus, Dallas, no way this guy’s faking it.”

“No. Let’s get him into a cage. I want him on suicide watch. I want eyes on him.” She stepped to the door at the knock.

“Screening on your suspect, Lieutenant. They said you wanted it ASAP.”

“Thanks.” She took the report from a tech, scanned it. “Jesus, what doesn’t this guy have in him? Erotica, Rabbit, Zoner, Jive, Lucy.”

“Sleepy, Dopey, and Doc,” Peabody finished. Then shrugged at Eve’s frown. “Bad joke. No wonder his head’s screaming. Coming down off a cocktail like that’s gotta rip it up.”

“Get him into a cage, have a medic treat him. He’s had enough for one night.”

“He doesn’t come across like somebody who could do what was done to that woman tonight.”

“That much junk inside him, you don’t know what he could do. But he’s not a regular user. No way he could be a regular with that kind of habit and not have a single pop.”

Eve started back to her office. A couple of uniforms led a weeping woman away in the opposite direction. Outside the bullpen a guy wearing a torn and bloody shirt sat laughing quietly to himself while he rattled the restraints that chained him to the seat.

She swung into the bullpen while he went back to giggling. In her office she hit the AutoChef for coffee first, then sat at her desk. She gulped caffeine while she booted up the security discs from the hotel.

She ran the VIP check-in first, the elaborate parlor reserved for guests in the tonier suites and the triplexes. She ordered the computer to coordinate with the time stamped on the Asant Group’s check-in. And watched the parlor fuzz into white static. She ran it back, noted the glitch began thirty minutes before the log-in, and continued to twenty-three hundred.

The pattern repeated when she ran the security discs for the private elevator, and again when she ran the main lobby discs.

“Son of a bitch.” She turned to her interoffice ’link. “ Peabody, wake up your cohab. I need McNab in here to dig into the security discs. They’re wiped.”

If the boy genius from the Electronic Detectives Division couldn’t dig out data, she had someone who could. She contacted Roarke.

“Why are you awake?” she demanded when her ’link screen showed him at his desk.

“Why are you?”

“Oh, just a little something about a ritual murder. I thought you’d want to know that all the security discs from your hotel are compromised. Nothing but static on all starting thirty minutes before the log-in for the Asant Group.”

“Are you bringing them to me or am I coming to you?”

“I’ve got McNab coming in, but-”

“I’m on my way.”

“Wait. Listen, grab me some work clothes, will you? And my weapon harness, and-”

“I know what you need.”

Her screen went black. Pissed off, she thought, and couldn’t blame him. She imagined a few heads would roll at Roarke’s Palace, and in short order. But meanwhile, she had useless discs on her hands, a suspect with drug-induced memory blanks, and a mutilated body at the morgue.

And it was still shy of dawn.

She opened her murder book, set up her board. According to the hotel records, the Asant Group had booked the triplex two months prior, and secured it with a credit card under the name of Josef Bellor, who carried an address in Budapest.

She fed the data into her computer, ordered a standard run. Only to learn Josef Bellor of Budapest had died there five years before at the ripe age of one hundred and twenty-one.

“Gonna be hard-pressed to get him to pay the bill,” she muttered.

One night’s booking, she thought, going over the notes. All room service delivered through the suite’s AutoChefs or pre-ordered and delivered prior to check-in. Five cases of wine, several pounds of various European cheeses, fancy breads, caviar, pâtés, cream cakes.

No point in ritual murder on an empty stomach.

So they ate, drank, orgied, she thought, pushing up to pace the small space of her office. Popped whatever illegals suited their fancy. Three floors of revelry, soundproofed high-collar digs with the privacy shades activated.

Would’ve saved the best for last, she decided. The sacrifice would’ve been the evening’s crescendo.

Just how did a nice girl from Indiana end up the star of the show? How did a transplanted young doctor from Pennsylvania get invited and left behind?

“Lieutenant.”

She turned to the sleepy-eyed McNab in her doorway. He wore pants of screaming yellow that matched the fist-sized dots shrieking over a shirt of eye-tearing green. His long blond hair was pulled back from his thin, pretty face into a tail. She wondered if the hank of it somehow balanced the weight of the tangle of silver loops in his ear.

“Doesn’t it ever give you a headache?” she wondered. “Just looking in the mirror.”

“Huh?”

“Never mind. Discs.” She gathered them from her desk, pushed them at them. “Find something on them. Roarke’s on his way.”

“Okay. Why?”

“They’re his discs. Palace Hotel security. I’ve already shot a report to your unit in EDD. Read it, work it. Get me something.”

He stifled a yawn, then focused on her board. “Is that the vic?”

Eve only nodded, said nothing when he came in to study the board. He’d work better and harder, she knew, if he was invested. “That’s fucked up,” he said. “That’s seriously fucked up. And that’s gotta be more than one killer.” He slipped the discs into one of the pockets of his pants. “If there’s an image on these, we’ll get it.”

If there were no images, she thought when McNab left, it meant the security had been compromised on site. Knowing how tightly any ship in Roarke’s expansive fleet ran, that would’ve taken some serious magic.

She turned toward her ’link with the idea of tagging Roarke on his way in. And he walked into her office.

“That was quick.”

“I’m in a hurry.” He set a bag on her visitor’s chair. “Where are the discs?”

“I just passed them off to McNab. Wait.” She shot out a hand as he turned. “If the security was breached on site, how could it be done?”

“I don’t know until I see the discs, do I?”

“Be pissed off later. How could it be done?”

He made an obvious effort to settle himself, then walked to her AutoChef to program coffee for himself. “It would have to be through security or electronics, and one of the top levels. Most likely both, working in tandem. No one at that level would consider a bribe of any kind worth their position.”

“Threat, blackmail?”

“Anything’s possible, of course, but doubtful. It would be more to their advantage to come to me with the problem than to circumvent security.”

“I’ll need names anyway.”

He set the coffee aside, took out his PPC. After a moment’s work, he nodded toward her machine. “Now you have them. And if any of my people had a part in what happened to that girl, I want to know when you know.”

He walked out, his barely restrained fury leaving a bolt of energy behind. Eve blew out a breath, and since he’d forgotten his coffee, picked it up and drank it herself.