Random in Death, page 13
“Both medicals and police responded quickly once contacted. Moses, corroborated by Nikki and Dawn, stated Arlie thought, and said, she’d been stung by a wasp.”
“A wasp.” Now Tisha closed her eyes. “She’s afraid of wasps. One got into her bed somehow. She was just a little thing, about six. It stung her four times. I ran in because she was screaming, grabbed her up, and it was still on her arm. I killed the hell out of it. She’s been afraid of them since.”
“Believing that, she more or less ignored it. When Moses looked at her arm, it was very red at the site. He went to get her ice.”
“He’s a sweet boy,” Tisha murmured.
“It was a few minutes after the injection, and he was getting the ice, when the reaction set in. Nikki stated that was when she herself looked at the arm, and believed it was a needle stick.”
“Nikki wants to be a doctor.”
“Yes. She acted quickly, Ms. Dillon. I want to stress that. She directed Dawn to call for help, and tried to help Arlie, including administering CPR.”
“They tried to help her.”
“They did.”
Her eyes filled as she nodded. Eve could all but see the force of will that held the tears back. “They tried to help her. It’s good to know that.”
“I understand how difficult this is, but I need to ask you some questions. And at some point, I’d like to go through Arlie’s room.”
“Why her room?”
“I may find something to help find who took her from you, Ms. Dillon.”
“She doesn’t know any killers. You can look all you want. Arlie’s a miracle. My miracle. I don’t mean she’s perfect. I wouldn’t want that for her. Just like I know she and Moses had sex. She’s seventeen. I remember what it’s like. I was twenty-two when I had her. The boy I thought I loved and loved me said we’d get married. I believed him, and we made plans for a wedding, for a baby.
“Then he left. Arlie’s more careful and a lot smarter than I was. She has ambitions, good friends, she’s working hard to try to get scholarships. She didn’t know anyone who’d do such a horrible thing.”
“Sometimes you don’t realize you know something. Did she ever indicate someone pressured her?”
“Not Arlie. She’d have told me. Not because she told me everything, God knows, but because for Arlie, she said when, how much, yes, no. She makes her own choices and doesn’t tolerate bullies.”
She folded her hands in her lap. “I could use that water now, if you don’t mind. Over in the kitchen there. I’m sorry. I should’ve offered you both something.”
“We’re fine,” Eve assured her as Roarke rose to get the water.
“When did Arlie decide to go to the event tonight?”
“It’s been a couple weeks, I think. Moses has a friend whose group made the finals. So once that happened, I think she wanted to go more for Moses than herself, really. Not that she didn’t want to go. Thank you.”
She looked up at Roarke as she took the water. “You look very familiar. Have I tailored for you?”
“You haven’t, no. You taught Arlie your craft.”
“Like my mama taught me. She had the touch, too, and the eye. More, she wanted to design clothes, go to school to learn more. She’d draw and draw her ideas. Sometimes she’d draw something for me or herself and we’d make it. A Dillon original.”
“Ms. Dillon, is there someone I could contact for you? Your mother?” Roarke suggested.
“No, let her sleep. It’ll be hard tomorrow. She dotes on Arlie so. I don’t want anyone right now. I don’t want to talk to anyone, not right now. I need to be alone with her because she’s here and here.” She pressed a hand to her heart, her head. “That’s what I need.”
“If I could give you my contact? You could let me know when it’s best for us to go through her room.”
“All right. But I need to see her. I know her spirit’s flown. I think that’s why my heart hurt. But I still need to see my daughter.”
“I’ve requested that the chief medical examiner take care of her. He’ll contact you tomorrow, so you can go see her.”
“Chief? He’s the best?”
“Yes. In every way.” Eve dug out a card. “You can contact me anytime. If you have questions, if you think of anything, however insignificant it might seem.”
Eve rose. “We’re very sorry for your loss, Ms. Dillon.”
“Yes. Thank you.”
Halfway to the elevator, Eve heard the first keening wail.
* * *
Despite the hour, when they got home, she updated her board, her book.
“Lieutenant, you need sleep.”
“I need sleep. I need thinking time and I can’t think. I’m sending a request to Mira—she’ll get it in the morning. I need a consult on this. I need a profile, and no one’s better.
“I can’t see him, and I need to. I don’t mean how he looks, but—”
“I know what you mean.”
She sent the request to arrive at eight, then shut down.
“At least it’s not Sunday anymore.” As she rose, she pushed at her hair. “So I can start badgering the lab, have this consult, start working on chem labs, chem students. He’s going to at least look like a teenager or college kid,” she added as Roarke steered her out of the office.
“He blends, so … I need to find out what other events like these two are coming up. Geared to that age group. Crowded events. Maybe I should pull in Detective Willowby. She can pass for that age group.”
“You’ll decide tomorrow.”
“I’ll decide tomorrow,” she agreed, and began to undress. While she did, she planned out her agenda.
Then, as she had her command center, she did her best to shut down her brain as she got into bed.
“Make room, Tubbo,” she told the cat, then sighed when Roarke wrapped an arm around her. “I can’t see him.”
“But you will.”
“I will.”
* * *
The dreams took their time weaving into sleep. They came with music, crashing guitars, pounding drums. With lights flashing.
The two dead girls danced with the crowd around them no more than a frantic blur of motion and energy.
“We’re young!” Jenna said.
“And we’ll never get old.”
“I wanted to write songs that made everybody want to dance. I’d be a rock star.”
“I’d design your costumes,” Arlie told her. “You’d look so frigging mag in Dillon originals.”
“We had another hundred years coming, right?”
“Damn right. We got screwed, totally.”
“It hurt when he jabbed me.” Jenna pointed at the needle in her arm.
“Tell me! It hurt when he stung me.” A wasp the size of a golf ball sat on Arlie’s arm.
“Asshole.”
“Jerk.”
“Dooser!” the girls said together, and laughed as they danced.
“You saw him. Give me something,” Eve demanded. “I need to see him.”
“Asshole. Jerk. Dooser,” they said together.
“Why should we pay attention?” Jenna shrugged.
“He’s not in our club.”
“What club?” Too hot, Eve thought. Just too hot in here. Out here. Where was here?
“Like normal.” Jenna bopped her shoulders, her hips.
“No wheezes, weebs, flakers allowed. Normal, living our life, so no you, either, Boss Cop.”
“She’s old,” Jenna reminded Arlie. “We’re not.”
“Wasn’t a normie when she wasn’t old. I mean Jee-sus! Just skulking around when she was our age. No friends, no fam, no nothing. No normie.”
“No normie,” Jenna conceded.
“It’s not about me,” Eve began, and the music stopped; the light held bright.
Then she stood in that bright light in the buzzing hallway of her state school.
She could smell it: sweat, cheap cologne that couldn’t cover the sweat, hints of—forbidden—gum and candy. Whiffs of the even-more-forbidden Zoner wafting from the bathrooms along with the faint aroma of piss.
Other kids brushed past her. Some sneered, some snickered, some ignored her as beneath notice.
She preferred being ignored.
She wore the ugly blue uniform—the pants too short because her legs kept growing, the top baggy because her frame stayed too thin.
She’d tried to cut her hair, and made a mess of it, so even pulled back it looked ragged and uneven.
She just wanted to get to class. Get through the next class, and the next. Get through the day, get through the night. And mark another off. One day closer to freedom.
Freedom came in twenty-two months, one week, and three days.
She’d take the money she’d saved from the stingy monthly stipend—the money most of the others blew on snacks or smuggled-in Zoner—and she’d go to New York. Into the Academy.
She’d be a cop, and when she was a cop, she’d be somebody.
She could get through twenty-two months, one week, and three days more, as long as at the end of it she climbed on a bus headed for New York.
Thinking of it, dreaming within the dream of it, she didn’t pay attention. She knew better.
“Uh-oh,” Jenna said, and snagged her attention.
“Here it comes.” Arlie winced. “No bruisers allowed, either. But you’ll live through it. We didn’t.”
She saw the bruiser, a girl who’d earn the title at five-ten and a solid one-sixty of muscle and mean.
“Shouldn’ta sassed me, bitch.”
She didn’t have time to block the punch before it landed and shot waves of pain from her jaw to her toes.
It shoved her out of sleep so that she reared up, a hand on the jaw she swore felt that fist.
“Lights on, ten percent. What the fuck time is it? Display.”
The lights glowed low. On the display she saw five-twenty-two.
“Okay, fine.” Galahad crawled into her lap, bumped his head on her arm. “It’s fine, it’s fine.” She gave him long, slow strokes to comfort them both. “Should get up anyway.”
Seconds later, wearing one of his king-of-the-world suits, Roarke rushed in.
“I’m okay, I’m okay. God, you didn’t have to break off from buying Australia or whatever. I’m fine.”
“I’d just broken off—though I still lack owning a continent.”
“Only a matter of time.”
“You … well now, you yelped.” He sat beside her, stroked her hair as she had the cat. “Grabbed your face and shot up in bed like an arrow out of a bow. A dream, I take it.”
“Yeah, ending with Big Bitch Brenda—she called herself that—sucker punching me in the face.”
She wiggled her jaw. “I swear, I felt it.”
Because he believed her—her dreams came so lucidly—he brushed a kiss over her jaw.
“And is this Big Bitch Brenda real, or just a dream person?”
“Oh, she was real. Back at school. She bloodied me a few times. Me and whoever else she decided needed bloodying. She had a low threshold there,” Eve remembered. “So hardly a day went by without somebody getting bashed.”
“Ah.” Leaning in, he kissed her jaw again. “And what did you do about that?”
“Nothing for the better part of a year, hoping she’d get tired of it. She didn’t. So I spent a few weeks studying boxing vids, practicing, trying some martial arts. The next time she went at me, I kicked her ass. Mostly, I think, because it threw her off I fought back. But she tried again later, and since I kept practicing, I kicked her ass again. She didn’t have any form. Just force.
“After that? She left me alone.”
“And where is Big Bitch Brenda now? You know.”
“Doing fifteen—her second round inside. Felony assault. Anyway, since I’m awake, I should get moving.”
“I’ll get your coffee, as I want some myself.”
“Hold mine till I shower.”
He turned to stare at her. “Did you say hold the coffee? Did the dream punch from Big Bitch Brenda knock something loose?”
“The dream punch woke me up. Bang. So yeah, hold that.”
She rolled out, jumped in the shower. Maybe she was running more on adrenaline than sleep, but she was running.
When she came out, he not only had coffee but breakfast under warming domes.
“You don’t have another meeting?”
“I do, and it’s breakfast with my wife. Pancakes, because whoever topples Big Bitch Brenda deserves them.”
“I’m in.” She plopped down beside him, and when he removed the warming domes, drowned her pancakes in butter and syrup.
“Is that all you dreamed?”
“No. The girls, both of them.”
She ran it through for him while she ate, and since it was right there, hit the bacon.
And he kissed her cheek, so damn sweetly.
“Okay, yeah, it tossed me back. They had it right. I wasn’t a normie. No club for me back then. He’s not in one, either.”
“Bullied, you think?”
“Maybe, and probably, but not by those two.”
No, she thought, she’d have gotten the sense of that if they had been.
“They’re not the type. Ignore, shrug off, not see, maybe snicker at. Yeah, that might play. But they weren’t bullies. And they didn’t know him. I’m coming down on the pretty damn sure he didn’t know them.”
“Back to the type then?”
“Possibly a popular, pretty girl bullied him, or ignored him, or broke what he thinks of as his heart. But he’s wrong, he’s wired wrong, Roarke. Not just that he kills, but how he does it.”
“You’re thinking again.”
“Like I said, the punch woke me up. So here’s to Big Bitch Brenda.” She lifted her coffee in toast. “He needs the venue—one that offers easy escape. He needs the crowd to blend into, and a selection of targets to choose from.”
She polished off the pancakes. “At least that’s my current morning thinking.”
“You’re starting to see him.”
“Maybe. I’m not sure. I was bullied, Mavis was bullied. Neither of us would’ve been welcomed into Club Normal. It takes more to hunt and kill, to plan and follow through. The drugs, that plays in. Access or ability to create. He understands chemistry, even if it’s just a dealer’s understanding.”
She rose, went into her closet, and considered the fact she had to put the work deal together herself.
“It’s raining, and will be most of the day,” Roarke told her.
“Great.”
She grabbed black pants—because, damn it—and a simple black tee, also because. But to avoid The Look, pulled out a light blue jacket.
She dressed, avoiding The Look primarily, in her opinion, as Roarke was busy warning the cat not to try the feline combat crawl and pounce on the breakfast plates.
“I’m going to head out.”
“I have another meeting shortly. Hold a minute.”
He stacked both plates under one dome, then put them on top of a highboy.
“He can’t jump that high.”
And yet, halfway to the stairs they both heard the dome rattle to the floor.
“Bloody hell. He’s relentless.”
“He should get points for figuring out how to get up there.”
“I’m leaving him to Summerset.” He grabbed Eve’s shoulders, pulled her into a kiss. “See you take care of my cop.”
“I’m too old for him. Plus, I’m the one who took down Big Bitch Brenda.”
“You are indeed. There’s an umbrella in your car, not that you’ll use it.”
“Nice to know it’s there.” She paused, looked back. “If you walked by and saw a sidewalk sleeper with his ass parked against one of your buildings while he played the harmonica, what would you do?”
“I’d give him a bit of the ready for the song and his situation. Why?”
“No reason.”
He would do exactly that, she thought. She’d seen him do exactly that. Because people weren’t invisible to him.
Who were you invisible to, Dooser? Who pulled your trigger? Or, hell, were you just born to kill?
She walked out into the rain—a warm, soaking one that only added to the humidity. In the car, she drove downtown through miserable traffic loaded with people she decided would never, ever learn how to drive in the rain.
She took her thinking time, but even when she got to the morgue, she still didn’t have a clear picture.
She sat a moment, listening to the rain.
She could see herself, as she had in the dream. Pants too short, frame too thin, hair all wrong. Trying to be invisible.
Don’t notice me, don’t talk to me, just let me get through this and get out.
“But that’s not you, is it? No,” she muttered. “No, that’s not you. You want people to notice, to look at you. You want attention. You’re craving it. And from girls—has to be from girls most especially.”
Sex, she thought. Sure, especially if he hit in that same age range. But attention, admiration, too. But you’re blocked from the club you want into so bad.
Attention, she thought again.
“Well, hell, you’re getting plenty of it now. The venues? Maybe not just for convenience. For the attention.”
Nodding to herself, she got out of the car. Not a clear picture, not yet.
But it was coming.
Chapter Ten
She’d grabbed Morris coffee from the in-dash AutoChef before she headed down the tunnel.
Another day, she thought, another teenage girl on a slab.
The ME wore a suit under his protective cape, one in pale, pale blue with a white shirt that had that same tender blue in needle-thin stripes. His tie, a bolder blue, coordinated with the cord he’d woven through the braid he’d rolled into a loop at the back of his neck.
She wondered if he dressed with such stylish formality for himself, for his position, or out of respect for the dead.
And decided all three.
He played rock again, but lowered the volume when Eve came in.
