Glory in Death

"It was over quickly. I've got the time she left from the security desk. She waved to the guard. We've got Morse stumbling over her ten minutes later. Either it was timed extremely well, or our killer was cocky. And you can bet your ass he wanted to see it on the news before she'd gotten cold."

"We accommodated him, didn't we?"

"Yeah." Eve nodded. "You did."

"You think it was easy for me?" Nadine's voice, raspy and thick, burst out. "You think it was easy to sit there and give a report knowing she was still lying outside?"

"I don't know," Eve said mildly. "Was it?"

"She was my friend." Nadine began to weep, tears rushing out, pouring down her cheeks and leaving trails in her camera makeup. "I cared about her. Damn it, she mattered to me, not just a story. She isn't just a fucking story."

Struggling to carry her own guilt, Eve nudged the glass toward Nadine. "Drink," she ordered. "Take a minute."

Nadine had to use both hands to keep the glass even partially steady. She would, she realized, have preferred brandy, but that would have to wait. "I see this kind of thing all the time, not so different from you."

"You saw the body," Eve snapped. "You went out on the scene."

"I had to see." With eyes still swimming, she looked back at Eve. "That was personal, Dallas. I had to see. I didn't want to believe it when word came up."

"How did word come up?"

"Somebody heard Morse yelling to the guard that somebody was dead, that somebody had been murdered right outside. That drew a lot of attention, " she said, rubbing her temples. "Word travels. I hadn't finished my second call before I caught the buzz. I hung up on my source and went down. And I saw her." Her smile was grim and humorless. "I beat the cameras – and the cops."

"And you and your pals risked contaminating a crime scene." Eve swiped a hand through the air. "That's done. Did anybody touch her? Did you see anybody touch her?"

"No, nobody was that stupid. It was obvious she was dead. You could see – you could see the wound, the blood. We sent for an ambulance anyway. The first police unit was there within minutes, ordered us back inside, sealed the door. I talked to somebody. Peabody." She rubbed fingers over her temples. Not because they hurt; because they were numb. "I told her it was Louise, then I went up to prep for broadcast. And the whole time I was thinking, It was supposed to be me. I was alive, facing the camera, and she was dead. It was supposed to be me."

"It wasn't supposed to be anyone."

"We killed her, Dallas." Nadine's voice was steady again. "You and me. "

"I guess we'll have to live with that." Eve drew a breath and leaned forward. "Let's go over the timing again, Nadine. Step by step."

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Sometimes, Eve thought, the drudge of routine police work payed off. Like a slot machine, fed habitually, mindlessly, monotonously, so that you're almost shocked when the jackpot falls in your lap.

That's just the way it was when David Angelini fell into hers.

She'd had several questions on small details of the Kirski case. The timing was one of them.

Nadine skips her usual break, Kirksi goes out instead, passing the lobby desk at approximately 23:04. She steps out into the rain, and into a knife. Minutes later, ru

All of it, she mused, quick, fast, and in a hurry.

As a matter of course, she ran the discs from the security gate at Cha

An assailant could just as easily have cut across the property from Third on foot, just as Louise had intended to do. Gate security was to make sure that there were parking facilities for station employees and that guests weren't infringed upon by every frustrated driver looking for a place to stick his car or minishuttle off the street.

Eve reviewed the discs because it was a matter of routine, and because, she admitted to herself, she hoped Morse's story wouldn't gel. He'd have recognized Nadine's raincoat, and he'd have known her habit of cutting out for some solo time before the midnight broadcast.

There was nothing she'd have enjoyed more, on a basic, even primal personal level, than nailing his ski

And that's when she saw the sleek little two-passenger Italian model cruise like a shiny cat to the gate. She'd seen that car before, parked outside of the commander's home after the memorial service.

"Stop," she ordered, and the image on screen froze. "Enhance sector twenty-three through thirty, full screen." The machine clicked, then clunked, wobbling the image. With an impatient snarl, Eve smacked the screen with the heel of her hand, jarring it back on course. "Goddamn budget cuts," she muttered, and then her smile began, slow and savoring. "Well, well, Mr. Angelini."

She took a deep breath as David's face filled her screen. He looked impatient, she thought. Distracted. Nervous.

"What were you doing there?" she murmured, flicking her glance down to the digital time frozen at the bottom left corner. "At twenty-three oh two and five seconds?"

She leaned back in her chair, rifling through a drawer with one hand as she continued to study the screen. Absently, she bit into a candy bar that was going to pass for breakfast. She'd yet to go home.

"Hard copy," she ordered. "Then go back to original view and hard copy. " She waited patiently while her machine wheezed its way through the process. "Continue disc run, normal speed."

Nibbling on her breakfast, she watched the pricey sports car whiz past camera range. The image blinked. Cha

"Interesting," she murmured. "Copy disc, transfer copy to file 47833-K, Kirski, Louise. Homicide. Cross reference to case file 47801-T, Towers, Cicely and 47815-M, Metcalf, Yvo

Turning from the screen, she engaged her 'link. "Feeney."

"Dallas." He stuffed the last of a danish into his mouth. "I'm working on it. Christ, it's barely seven A. M."

"I know what time it is. I've got a sensitive matter here, Feeney."

"Hell." His already rumpled face grew more wrinkles. "I hate when you say that."

"I've got David Angelini on the gate security disc at Cha

"Shit, shit, shit. Who's going to tell the commander?"

"I am – after I've had a talk with Angelini. I need you to cover for me, Feeney. I'm going to transmit what I've got, excluding Angelini. You take it in to the commander. Tell him I'm hooking a couple hours of personal time."

"Yeah, like he'll buy that one."

"Feeney, tell me I need some sleep. Tell me you'll report to the commander, and to go home and catch a couple hours of sleep."

Feeney heaved a long sigh. "Dallas, you need some sleep. I'll report to the commander. Go home and catch a couple hours."

"Now you can tell him you told me," she said, and flicked off.

Like routine police work, a cop's gut often paid off. Eve's told her that David Angelini would close himself in with family. Her first stop was the Angelini pied-a-terre, cozied in an affluent East Side neighborhood.

Here the brownstones had been constructed barely thirty years before, reproductions of those designed during the nineteenth, and destroyed during the dawn of the twenty-first when most of New York's infrastructure had failed. A large portion of New York's posher homes in this area had been condemned and razed. After much debate, this area had been rebuilt in the old tradition – a tradition only the very wealthy had been able to afford.