SHE WOKE IN THE DARK. THROUGH THE SLATS on the window
shades, the first murky hint of dawn slipped, slanting
shadowy bars over the bed. It was like waking in a cell.
For a moment she simply lay there, shuddering, imprisoned,
while the dream faded. After ten years on the force, Eve
still had dreams.
Six hours before, she'd killed a man, had watched death
creep into his eyes. It wasn't the first time she'd
exercised maximum force, or dreamed. She'd learned to
accept the action and the consequences.
But it was the child that haunted her. The child she
hadn't been in time to save. The child whose screams had
echoed in the dreams with her own.
All the blood, Eve thought, scrubbing sweat from her face
with her hands. Such a small little girl to have had so
much blood in her. And she knew it was vital that she push
it aside.
Standard departmental procedure meant that she would spend
the morning in Testing. Any officer whose discharge of
weapon resulted in termination of life was required to
undergo emotional and psychiatric clearance before
resuming duty. Eve considered the tests a mild pain in the
ass.
She would beat them, as she'd beaten them before.
When she rose, the overheads went automatically to low
setting, lighting her way into the bath. She winced once
at her reflection. Her eyes were swollen from lack of
sleep, her skin nearly as pale as the corpses she'd
delegated to the ME.
Rather than dwell on it, she stepped into the shower,
yawning.
"Give me one oh one degrees, full force," she said and
shifted so that the shower spray hit her straight in the
face.
She let it steam, lathered listlessly while she played
through the events of the night before. She wasn't due in
Testing until nine, and would use the next three hours to
settle and let the dream fade away completely.
Small doubts and little regrets were often detected and
could mean a second and more intense round with the
machines and the owl-eyed technicians who ran them.
Eve didn't intend to be off the streets longer than twenty-
four hours.
After pulling on a robe, she walked into the kitchen and
programmed her AutoChef for coffee, black; toast, light.
Through her window she could hear the heavy hum of air
traffic carrying early commuters to offices, late ones
home. She'd chosen the apartment years before because it
was in a heavy ground and air pattern, and she liked the
noise and crowds. On another yawn, she glanced out the
window, followed the rattling journey of an aging airbus
hauling laborers not fortunate enough to work in the city
or by home 'links.
She brought the New York Times up on her monitor and
scanned the headlines while the faux caffeine bolstered
her system. The AutoChef had burned her toast again, but
she ate it anyway, with a vague thought of springing for a
replacement unit.
She was frowning over an article on a mass recall of droid
cocker spaniels when her telelink blipped. Eve shifted to
communications and watched her commanding officer flash
onto the screen.
"Commander."
"Lieutenant." He gave her a brisk nod, noted the still wet
hair and sleepy eyes. "Incident at Twenty-seven West
Broadway, eighteenth floor. You're primary."
Eve lifted a brow. "I'm on Testing. Subject terminated at
twenty-two thirty-five."
"We have override," he said, without inflection. "Pick up
your shield and weapon on the way to the incident. Code
Five, Lieutenant."
"Yes, sir." His face flashed off even as she pushed back
from the screen. Code Five meant she would report directly
to her commander, and there would be no unsealed
interdepartmental reports and no cooperation with the
press.
In essence, it meant she was on her own.
Broadway was noisy and crowded, a party that rowdy guests
never left. Street, pedestrian, and sky traffic were
miserable, choking the air with bodies and vehicles. In
her old days in uniform she remembered it as a hot spot
for wrecks and crushed tourists who were too busy gaping
at the show to get out of the way.
Even at this hour steam was rising from the stationary and
portable food stands that offered everything from rice
noodles to soy dogs for the teeming crowds. She had to
swerve to avoid an eager merchant on his smoking Glida-
Grill, and took his flipped middle finger as a matter of
course.
Eve double-parked and, skirting a man who smelled worse
than his bottle of brew, stepped onto the sidewalk. She
scanned the building first, fifty floors of gleaming metal
that knifed into the sky from a hilt of concrete. She was
propositioned twice before she reached the door.
Since this five-block area of West Broadway was
affectionately termed Prostitute's Walk, she wasn't
surprised. She flashed her badge for the uniform guarding
the entrance.
"Lieutenant Dallas."
"Yes, sir." He skimmed his official CompuSeal over the
door to keep out the curious, then led the way to the bank
of elevators. "Eighteenth floor," he said when the doors
swished shut behind them.
"Fill me in, Officer." Eve switched on her recorder and
waited.
"I wasn't first on the scene, Lieutenant. Whatever
happened upstairs is being kept upstairs. There's a badge
inside waiting for you. We have a homicide, and a Code
Five in number eighteen-oh-three."
"Who called it in?"
"I don't have that information."
He stayed where he was when the elevator opened. Eve
stepped out and was alone in a narrow hallway. Security
cameras tilted down at her, and her feet were almost
soundless on the worn nap of the carpet as she approached
1803. Ignoring the hand plate, she announced herself,
holding her badge up to eye level for the peep cam until
the door opened.
"Dallas."
"Feeney." She smiled, pleased to see a familiar face. Ryan
Feeney was an old friend and former partner who'd traded
the street for a desk and a top-level position in the
Electronics Detection Division. "So, they're sending
computer pluckers these days."
"They wanted brass, and the best." His lips curved in his
wide, rumpled face, but his eyes remained sober. He was a
small, stubby man with small, stubby hands and rust-
colored hair. "You look beat."
"Rough night."
"So I heard." He offered her one of the sugared nuts from
the bag he habitually carried, studying her, and measuring
if she was up to what was waiting in the bedroom beyond.
She was young for her rank, barely thirty, with wide brown
eyes that had never had a chance to be naive. Her doe-
brown hair was cropped short, for convenience rather than
style, but suited her triangular face with its razor-edge
cheekbones and slight dent in the chin.
She was tall, rangy, with a tendency to look thin, but
Feeney knew there were solid muscles beneath the leather
jacket. But Eve had more-there was also a brain, and a
heart.
"This one's going to be touchy, Dallas."
"I picked that up already. Who's the victim?"
"Sharon DeBlass, granddaughter of Senator DeBlass."
Neither meant anything to her. "Politics isn't my forte,
Feeney."
"The gentleman from Virginia, extreme right, old money.
The granddaughter took a sharp left a few years back,
moved to New York and became a licensed companion."
"She was a hooker." Dallas glanced around the apartment.
It was furnished in obsessive modern-glass and thin
chrome, signed holograms on the walls, recessed bar in
bold red. The wide mood screen behind the bar bled with
mixing and merging shapes and colors in cool pastels.
Neat as a virgin, Eve mused, and cold as a whore. "No
surprise, given her choice of real estate."
"Politics makes it delicate. Victim was twenty-four,
Caucasian female. She bought it in bed."
Eve only lifted a brow. "Seems poetic, since she'd been
bought there. How'd she die?"
"That's the next problem. I want you to see for yourself."
As they crossed the room, each took out a slim container,
sprayed their hands front and back to seal in oils and
fingerprints. At the doorway, Eve sprayed the bottom of
her boots to slicken them so that she would pick up no
fibers, stray hairs, or skin.
Eve was already wary. Under normal circumstances there
would have been two other investigators on a homicide
scene, with recorders for sound and pictures. Forensics
would have been waiting with their usual snarly impatience
to sweep the scene.
The fact that only Feeney had been assigned with her meant
that there were a lot of eggshells to be walked over.
"Security cameras in the lobby, elevator, and hallways,"
Eve commented.
"I've already tagged the discs." Feeney opened the bedroom
door and let her enter first.
It wasn't pretty. Death rarely was a peaceful, religious
experience to Eve's mind. It was the nasty end,
indifferent to saint and sinner. But this was shocking,
like a stage deliberately set to offend.
The bed was huge, slicked with what appeared to be genuine
satin sheets the color of ripe peaches. Small, soft
focused spotlights were trained on its center where the
naked woman was cupped in the gentle dip of the floating
mattress.
The mattress moved with obscenely graceful undulations to
the rhythm of programmed music slipping through the
headboard.
She was beautiful still, a cameo face with a tumbling
waterfall of flaming red hair, emerald eyes that stared
glassily at the mirrored ceiling, long, milk-white limbs
that called to mind visions of Swan Lake as the motion of
the bed gently rocked them.
They weren't artistically arranged now, but spread lewdly
so that the dead woman formed a final X dead-center of the
bed.
There was a hole in her forehead, one in her chest,
another horribly gaping between the open thighs. Blood had
splattered on the glossy sheets, pooled, dripped, and
stained.
There were splashes of it on the lacquered walls, like
lethal paintings scrawled by an evil child.
So much blood was a rare thing, and she had seen much too
much of it the night before to take the scene as calmly as
she would have preferred.
She had to swallow once, hard, and force herself to block
out the image of a small child.
"You got the scene on record?"
"Yep."
"Then turn that damn thing off." She let out a breath
after Feeney located the controls that silenced the music.
The bed flowed to stillness. "The wounds," Eve murmured,
stepping closer to examine them. "Too neat for a knife.
Too messy for a laser." A flash came to her-old training
films, old videos, old viciousness.
"Christ, Feeney, these look like bullet wounds."
Feeney reached into his pocket and drew out a sealed
bag. "Whoever did it left a souvenir." He passed the bag
to Eve. "An antique like this has to go for eight, ten
thousand for a legal collection, twice that on the black
market."
Fascinated, Eve turned the sealed revolver over in her
hand. "It's heavy," she said half to herself. "Bulky."
"Thirty-eight caliber," he told her. "First one I've seen
outside of a museum. This one's a Smith and Wesson, Model
Ten, blue steel." He looked at it with some
affection. "Real classic piece, used to be standard police
issue up until the latter part of the twentieth. They
stopped making them in about twenty-two, twenty-three,
when the gun ban was passed."
"You're the history buff." Which explained why he was with
her. "Looks new." She sniffed through the bag, caught the
scent of oil and burning. "Somebody took good care of
this. Steel fired into flesh," she mused as she passed the
bag back to Feeney. "Ugly way to die, and the first I've
seen it in my ten years with the department."
"Second for me. About fifteen years ago, Lower East Side,
party got out of hand. Guy shot five people with a twenty-
two before he realized it wasn't a toy. Hell of a mess."
"Fun and games," Eve murmured. "We'll scan the collectors,
see how many we can locate who own one like this. Somebody
might have reported a robbery."
"Might have."
"It's more likely it came through the black market." Eve
glanced back at the body. "If she's been in the business
for a few years, she'd have discs, records of her clients,
her trick books." She frowned. "With Code Five, I'll have
to do the door-to-door myself. Not a simple sex crime,"
she said with a sigh. "Whoever did it set it up. The
antique weapon, the wounds themselves, almost ruler
straight down the body, the lights, the pose. Who called
it in, Feeney?"
"The killer." He waited until her eyes came back to
him. "From right here. Called the station. See how the
bedside unit's aimed at her face? That's what came in.
Video, no audio."
"He's into showmanship." Eve let out a breath. "Clever
bastard, arrogant, cocky. He had sex with her first. I'd
bet my badge on it. Then he gets up and does it." She
lifted her arm, aiming, lowering it as she counted
off, "One, two, three."
"That's cold," murmured Feeney.
"He's cold. He smooths down the sheets after. See how neat
they are? He arranges her, spreads her open so nobody can
have any doubts as to how she made her living. He does it
carefully, practically measuring, so that she's perfectly
aligned. Center of the bed, arms and legs equally apart.
Doesn't turn off the bed 'cause it's part of the show. He
leaves the gun because he wants us to know right away he's
no ordinary man. He's got an ego. He doesn't want to waste
time letting the body be discovered eventually. He wants
it now. That instant gratification."
"She was licensed for men and women," Feeny pointed out,
but Eve shook her head.
"It's not a woman. A woman wouldn't have left her looking
both beautiful and obscene. No, I don't think it's a
woman. Let's see what we can find. Have you gone into her
computer yet?"
"No. It's your case, Dallas. I'm only authorized to
assist."
"See if you can access her client files." Eve went to the
dresser and began to carefully search drawers.
Expensive taste, Eve reflected. There were several items
of real silk, the kind no simulation could match. The
bottle of scent on the dresser was exclusive, and smelled,
after a quick sniff, like expensive sex.
The contents of the drawers were meticulously ordered,
lingerie folded precisely, sweaters arranged according to
color and material. The closet was the same.
Obviously the victim had a love affair with clothes and a
taste for the best and took scrupulous care of what she
owned.
And she'd died naked.
"Kept good records," Feeney called out. "It's all here.
Her client list, appointments-including her required
monthly health exam and her weekly trip to the beauty
salon. She used the Trident Clinic for the first and
Paradise for the second."
"Both top of the line. I've got a friend who saved for a
year so she could have one day for the works at Paradise.
Takes all kinds."
"My wife's sister went for it for her twenty-fifth
anniversary. Cost damn near as much as my kid's wedding.
Hello, we've got her personal address book."
"Good.
Continues...
© 2003-2026