Conspiracy in Death

She said nothing, knowing he'd wanted to assure her she wouldn't be sleeping alone, where the nightmares would chase her. "Um, how's the weather?"

"It's lovely. Su

"Do that. See you later."

"Stay out of pool halls, Lieutenant."

"Yeah." She watched the screen go blank and wished she didn't have this vague dissatisfaction that he wouldn't be there when she went home. In less than a year, she'd gotten much too used to him being there.

A

She called up the files from Snooks and Spindler, ordered both images on, split screen.

Used up, she thought. Self-abuse, neglect. It was there on both faces. But Snooks, well, there was a kind of pitiful sweetness in his face. As for Spindler, there was nothing sweet about her. There was some twenty years between them in age. Different sex, different races, different backgrounds.

"Display crime scene photos, Spindler," she ordered.

The room was a flop, small, crowded, with a single window the width of a spread hand in one wall. But, Eve noted, it was clean. Tidy.

Spindler lay on the bed, on faded sheets that were stained with blood. Her eyes were closed, her mouth lax. She was nude, and her body was no pretty picture. Eve could see that what appeared to be a nightgown was neatly folded and laid on the table beside the bed.

She might have been sleeping if not for the blood that stained the sheets.

They'd drugged her, Eve decided, then undressed her. Folded the gown. Tidy, organized, precise.

How had they chosen this one? she wondered. And why?

In the next shot, the crime scene team had turned the body. Dignity, modesty were cast aside as the camera zoomed in. Scrawny legs on a scrawny body. Sagging breasts, wrinkled skin. Spindler hadn't put her profits into body maintenance, which was probably wise, Eve mused, as her investment would have been cut short.

"Close-up of injury," she ordered, and the picture shifted. They had opened her, the slices narrower than Eve had imagined. Nearly delicate. And though no one had bothered to close her back up, they had used what she now knew was surgical freeze-coat to stop the flow of blood.

Routine again, she concluded. Pride. Didn't surgeons often allow an underling to close for them? The big, important work had already been done, so why not let someone less prominent do a little sewing?

She would ask someone, but she thought she'd seen that on-screen in videos.

"Computer, analyze surgical procedure on both subjects. Run probability scan thereafter. What probability percentage that both procedures were performed by the same person?"

Working… analysis will require approximately ten minutes.

"Fine." She rose, walked to her window to watch the air traffic sputter. The sky had gone the color of bruises. She could see one of the minicopters wavering as it tried to compensate for a gust of wind.

It would snow or sleet before the end of shift, she thought. The drive home would be hideous.

She thought of Roarke, three thousand miles away, with palm trees and blue skies.

She thought of those nameless lost souls struggling to find a little heat around an ugly fire in a rusted barrel and where they would be tonight when the snows came and the wind howled down the streets like a mad thing.

Absently, she pressed her fingers to the window, felt the chill on her skin.

And it came to her, sharp as a slap, a memory long buried with other memories of the girl she had been. Thin, hollow-eyed, and trapped in one of the endless horrid rooms where the windows were cracked and the heat broken so that the wind screamed and screamed against the damaged glass and shook the walls and burst over her skin like fists of ice.

Cold, so cold. So hungry. So afraid. Sitting in the dark, alone in the dark. All the while knowing he would come back. He always came back. And when he did, he might not be drunk enough to just fall on the bed and leave her be.

He might not leave her huddled behind the single ratty chair that smelled of smoke and sweat where she tried to hide from him and the brittle cold.

She fell asleep shivering, watching her breath form and fade in the dark.

But when he got home, he wasn't drunk enough, and she couldn't hide from him or the bitterness.

"Chicago." The word burst out of her, like a poison that burned the throat, and she came back to herself with both hands fisted hard against her heart.

And she was shivering, shivering again as she had in that freezing room during another winter.

Where had that come from? she asked herself as she fought to even her breathing, to swallow back the sickness that had gushed into her throat. How did she know it was Chicago? Why was she so sure?

And what did it matter? Furious now, she rapped one of her fists lightly, rhythmically against the window. It was done, it was over.

It had to be over.

Analysis complete… Begi

She closed her eyes a moment, rubbed her hands hard over her dry lips. This, she reminded herself, was what mattered. What she was now, what she did now. The job, the justice, the answers.

But her head was throbbing when she turned back to her computer, sat in her chair.

Probability ratio complete. Probability that the procedures on both subjects were done by the same person is 97.8%.

"Okay," Eve said softly. "Okay. He did them both. Now, how many more?"

Insufficient data to compute…

"I wasn't asking you, asshole." She spoke absently, then, leaning forward, forgot her queasy stomach, her aching head as she began to pick her way through data.

She'd worked through the bulk of it when Peabody knocked briskly and stuck her head in the door. "Rosswell's here."

"Great. Good."

There was a gleam in Eve's eyes as she rose that had Peabody feeling a stir of pity for Rosswell, and – she was human, after all – a ripple of anticipation for the show about to start. She was careful to hide both reactions as she followed Eve to the conference room.

Rosswell was fat and bald. A detective's salary would have covered standard body maintenance if he was too lazy or stupid to exercise. It would have covered elementary hair replacement treatment if he had any vanity. But self-image couldn't compete with Rosswell's deep and passionate love of gambling.

This love was very one-sided. Gambling didn't love Rosswell back. It punished him, laughed at him. It beat him over the head with his own inadequacies in the area. But he couldn't stay away.

So he lived in little more than a flop a block from his station house – and a two-minute walk from the nearest gaming dive. When he was lucky enough to beat the odds, his wi

Eve had some of these details from the data she'd just sca

He didn't rise when she came in but continued to slouch at the conference table. To establish dominance, Eve merely stared at him silently until he flushed and got to his feet.

And Peabody was right, she noted. Under the show of carelessness, there was a glint of fear in his eyes.

"Lieutenant Dallas?"

"That's right, Rosswell." She invited him to sit by jabbing a finger at the chair. Once again, she said nothing. Silence had a way of scraping the nerves raw. And raw nerves had a way of stuttering out the truth.

"Ah…" His eyes, a cloudy hazel in a doughy face, shifted from her to Feeney to Peabody, then back. "What's this about, Lieutenant?"