Rapture in Death

Along the north and south walls, banks of computers were set up. Workstations, she assumed, cluttered with all ma

She saw clothes heaped on the sofa, VR goggles lying on the coffee table with three tubes of Asian beer – two of them flattened and already rolled for the recycler – and a bowl of spiced pretzels.

And she saw Drew Mathias's naked body swaying gently from a makeshift noose of sheets hitched to the glittering tier of a blue glass chandelier.

"Ah, hell." She sighed it out. "What is he, Roarke, twenty?"

"Not much more than." Roarke's mouth thi

"All right, let's do what we can. Dallas, Lieutenant Eve, NYPSD, standing in until proper interspace authorities can be contacted and transported. Suspicious, unattended death. Mathias, Drew, Olympus Grand Hotel, Room ten thirty-six, August 1, 2058, one hundred hours."

"I want to take him down," Roarke said. It shouldn't have surprised him how quickly, how seamlessly she'd shifted from woman to cop.

"Not yet. It doesn't make any difference to him now, and I need the scene recorded before anything's moved." She turned in the doorway. "Did you touch anything, Carter?"

"No." He scrubbed the back of his hand over his mouth. "I opened the door, just like now, and walked in. I saw him right away. You… you see him right away. I guess I stood there a minute. Just stood there. I knew he was dead. I saw his face."

"Why don't you go through the other door into the bedroom." She gestured to the left. "You can lie down for a while. I'll need to talk to you."

"Okay."

"Don't call anyone," she ordered.

"No. No, I won't call anyone."

She turned away again, secured the door. Her gaze shifted to Roarke's, and their eyes held. She knew he was thinking, as she was, that there were some – like her – who had no escape from death.

"Let's get started," she told him.

CHAPTER TWO

The doctor's name was Wang, and he was old, as most medicals were on off planet projects. He could have retired at ninety, but like others of his ilk, he had chosen to bump from site to site, tending the scrapes and bruises, passing out drugs for space sickness and gravity balance, delivering the occasional baby, ru

But he knew a dead body when he saw one.

"Dead." His voice was clipped, faintly exotic. His skin was parchment yellow and as wrinkled as an old map. His eyes were black, almond shaped. His head was glossy and slick, lending him the appearance of an ancient, somewhat battered billiard ball.

"Yeah, I got that much." Eve rubbed her eyes. She'd never had to deal with a space med, but she'd heard about them. They didn't care to have their cushy routine interrupted. "Give me the cause and the time."

"Strangulation." Wang tapped one long finger against the vicious marks on Mathias's neck. "Self-induced. Time of death I would say between ten and eleven p.m. on this day, in this month, in this year."

She offered a thin smile. "Thank you, Doctor. There aren't any other signs of violence on the body, so I lean toward your diagnosis of self-termination. But I want the results of the drug run. Let's see if it was chemically induced. Did you treat the deceased for anything?"

"I ca

"I'll want those as well."

"I will do my best to accommodate you, Mrs. Roarke."

Her eyes narrowed. "Dallas, Lieutenant Dallas. Put a rush on it, Wang." She looked down at the body again. Small man, she thought, thin, pale. Dead.

Pursing her lips, she studied the face. She'd seen what odd tricks death, particularly violent death, could play with expressions, but she'd never seen anything like that wide, goggle-eyed grin. It made her shudder.

The waste, the pathetic waste of such a young life made her unbearably sad.

"Take him with you, Wang. Get me the reports. You can shoot his basic paperwork to the tele-link in my suite. I need the next of kin."

"Assuredly." He smiled at her. "Lieutenant Roarke."

She smiled back, showed her teeth, and decided she didn't want to play the name game. Standing, she put her hands on her hips as Wang directed his two assistants to transport the body.

"You find that amusing," she muttered to Roarke.

He blinked, all i

"Lieutenant Roarke."

Roarke touched her face because he needed to. "Why not? Both of us could use some comic relief."

"Yeah, your Dr. Wang's a chuckle a minute." She watched the doctor sail out in front of the dead boy on a gurney. "It pisses me off. It fucking pisses me off."

"It's not such a bad name."

"No." She nearly did laugh as she rubbed her hands over her face. "Not that. The boy. A kid like that tossing out his next hundred years of life. That pisses me off."

"I know." He reached out to rub her shoulders. "You're sure it was suicide?"

"No sign of struggle. No additional insults to the body." She shrugged under his hands. "I'll interview Carter and talk to some others, but the way I see it, Drew Mathias came home, turned on the lights, the music. He drank himself a couple beers, maybe took a VR trip, ate a few pretzels. Then he went in, stripped the sheets off his bed, made himself a rope, fashioned a very precise, professional noose."

She turned away, sca

She picked up the remote she'd already bagged for evidence. "It wouldn't have been quick. It's a slow ascent, not enough to give him a nice clean broken neck, but he didn't struggle, didn't change his mind. If he had, you'd see scrapes from his nails on his neck and throat from where he'd tried to claw free."

Roarke's brow knit. "But wouldn't it be instinctive, involuntary to do just that?"

"I don't know. I'd say it depended on how strong a will he had, how much he wanted to die. And why. Could have been cruising on drugs. We'll know that soon enough. The right mix of chemicals, the mind doesn't register pain. He might even have enjoyed it."

"I won't deny there's some illegals floating around here. It's impossible to regulate and supervise every staff member's habits and personal choices." Roarke shrugged, frowned up at the gorgeous blue chandelier. "Mathias doesn't strike me as the type for a habitual, even an occasional user."

"People are a constant surprise, and it's an unending wonder what they'll pump into their bloodstreams." Eve jerked her own shoulders in turn. "I'll give the place the standard toss for illegals, and I'll see what I can find out from Carter." She dragged her hair back with a hand. "Why don't you go back up, get some sleep?"

"No, I'll stay. Eve," he said before she could argue, "you deputized me."

It made her smile a little. "Any decent adjutant would know I need coffee to get through this."

"Then I'll see that you get some." He framed her face in his hands. "I wanted you away from this for a while." He let her go and walked into the adjoining kitchen to see about her coffee.

Eve stepped into the bedroom. The lights were low and Carter was sitting on the side of the bed, his head in his hands. He jerked straight when he heard her come in.