Creation In Death

Can’t you hear us screaming?

“And he knows it’s on him.”

“How can you say that?” Roarke demanded. “He did everything that could be done.”

“No, because there’s always something else. You missed it, or you didn’t look at it from just the right angle, or ask just the right question at exactly the right time. And maybe someone else would have. Doesn’t make them better or mean they worked harder at it. It just means they…” She lifted a hand, swiveled it like a door. “Means they turned something, opened something, and you didn’t. He was in command, so it’s on him.”

“And now it’s on you?”

“Now it’s on me. And that hurts him because, well, he brought me up. As far as being a cop goes, he brought me up. I didn’t want to bring him into this,” she said and sat again. “And I couldn’t leave him out.”

“He’s tough and he’s hardheaded,” Roarke reminded her. “Just like the cop he brought up. He’ll handle it, Eve.”

“Yeah.” She sighed, looked back at the wall screen. “How does he pick them? We know, this time, part of his requirement is that they work for you in some capacity. He’s so fucking smart he had to figure we’d click to that. So he wants us to know that much. He gives us the information he wants us to have. The type he prefers, how long he worked on them. He doesn’t mind if we know what products he used to clean them up. But this time, he’s given us a little more. Here’s a new piece, what do you make of that?”

She looked back at Roarke. “Does he know you? Personally, professionally? Has he done business with you? Did you buy him out, and maybe he didn’t want to be bought out? Did you underbid him on some contract? Did you fire him, or overlook him for promotion? Nothing’s random with him, so his choice here is deliberate.”

He’d inched all those same questions through his mind, turning them over from every angle. “If he works for me, I can find out. The travel,” Roarke said. “Whether it was business-related or personal time, I can search files for employees who were sent to the locations of the other murders in that time period, or who took personal leave.”

“How many employees would you figure you have?”

His lips curved again. “I honestly couldn’t say.”

“Exactly. But using Mira’s profile-and we’ll have an updated one tomorrow-we can cut that back considerably.”

Following the usual arrangement when he dealt with the meal, Eve rose to clear the dishes. “I’ll run a probability, but I think there’s a low percentage he works for you. He doesn’t strike me as a disgruntled employee.”

“Agreed. I can check the same information on major competitors and subcontractors. Using my private equipment.”

She said nothing at first, just carted the dishes into the kitchen, loaded them into the machine. His private office, with its unregistered equipment, would allow him to evade CompuGuard and the privacy laws.

Whatever he found, she couldn’t use it in court, couldn’t reveal where she’d gotten the data. Illegal means, she thought, crossing the line. Such maneuvers gave a defense attorney that flea-ass opening.

Can’t you hear us screaming?

She walked back into the office. “Run it.”

“All right. It’ll take considerable time.”

“Then you’d better get started.”

Alone, she began to set up her murder board while her computer read off the progress reports from her team.

Board’s too small, she thought. Too small to hold all the faces, all the data. All the death.

“Lieutenant.”

“Computer pause,” she ordered, then turned to Summerset. “What? I’m working.”

“As I can see. Roarke asked I bring you this data.” He held out a disc. “The employee search he asked I run.”

“Good.” She took it, walked over to put it on her desk. Glanced back. “You still here? Go away.”

Ignoring her, he stood in his funereal black suit, his back stiff as a poker. “I remember this. I remember the media reports on these women. But there was nothing about these numbers carved into them.”

“Civilians don’t need to know everything.”

“He takes great care in how he forms them, each number, each letter so precise. I’ve seen this before.”

Her eyes sharpened. “What do you mean?”

“Not this, not exactly this, but something similar. During the Urban Wars.”

“The torture methods?”

“No, no. Though, of course, there was plenty of that. Torture’s a classic means of eliciting information or dealing out punishment. Though it’s rarely so…tidy as this.”

“Tell me something I don’t know.”

He looked over at her. “You’re too young to have experienced the Urbans, or to remember the dregs of them that settled in some parts of Europe after they ended here. In any case, there were elements there, too, that civilians-so to speak-didn’t need to know.”

He had her full attention now. “Such as?”

“When I served as a medic, the injured and the dead would be brought in. Sometimes in piles, in pieces. We’d hold the dead, or those who succumbed to their injuries-for family members if such existed, and if the body could be identified. Or for burial or cremation. Those who didn’t have identification, or were beyond being identified, would be listed by number until disposal. We kept logs, listing them by any description possible, any personal effects, the location where they’d been killed, and so on. And we would write the number on them, and the date of their death, or as close as we could come to it.”

“Was that SOP?”

“It was what we did when I worked in London. There were other methods in other areas, and in some of the worst areas only mass burials and cremations without any record.”

She walked back over to the board, studied the carving. It wasn’t the same, she thought. But it was an angle.

“He knows their names,” she said. “The name’s not an issue. But the data’s important. It has to be recorded. The data’s what identifies them. The time is what names them for him. I need another board.”

“Excuse me?”

“I need another board. I don’t have enough room with one. We got anything around here that’ll work?”

“I imagine I can find what you need.”

“Good. Go do that.”

When he left, she went to her desk, added the Urban Wars data to her notes, then continued to jot down her speculations.

Soldier, medic, doctor. Maybe someone who lost a family member or lover…No, no, she didn’t like that one. Why would he torture and desecrate the symbol, you could say, of anyone who’d mattered to him? Then again, if a loved one had been tortured, killed, identified in that ma

Maybe he’d been tortured, survived it. Tortured by a female with brown hair, within the age span.

Or maybe he’d been the torturer.

She rose, paced. Then why wait decades to re-create? Did some event trigger it? Or had he been experimenting all along, until he found the method that suited him?

And maybe he was just a fucking lunatic.

But the Urbans were an angle, yes they were. Mira’s profile had indicated he was mature, even nine years back. Male, likely Caucasian, she remembered, between the ages of thirty-five and sixty.

So go high-end, and yeah, he could’ve seen some of the wars as a young man.

She sat again and, adding in new speculations, ran probabilities.

While they ran, she plugged in the disc Summerset had brought in. “Computer, display results, wall screen two.”

Acknowledged. Working…

As they began to scroll, her jaw simply dropped. “Well, Jesus. Jesus.” There were hundreds of names. Maybe hundreds of hundreds.

She couldn’t complain that Summerset wasn’t efficient. The names were grouped according to where they worked, where they lived. Apparently, there were just one hell of a lot of women with brown hair between twenty-eight and thirty-three who worked in some capacity for Roarke Enterprises.

“Talk about a big, honking octopus.”