Ceremony In Death

The kid's breath was coming in whistles, and his face was pale as a ghost. Roarke could hear the audible click in his throat as he swallowed. "You're Roarke." He stopped struggling and tried to smirk. "You've got pretty good security."

"I like to think so." Not a thief, Roarke decided, but ballsy, certainly. "How did you get past it?"

"I – " He broke off, eyes going huge as they shot over Roarke's shoulder. "Behind you!"

With a smoothness the boy would later appreciate, Roarke pivoted, keeping his grip unbreakable. "We have our intruder, Lieutenant."

"So I see." She lowered her weapon, ordered her heart to slow to normal. "Jesus, Roarke, it's just a kid. It's – " She stopped, narrowed her eyes. "I know this kid."

"Then perhaps you'd introduce us."

"It's Jamie, right? Jamie Lingstrom. Alice's brother."

"Good eye, Lieutenant. Now, you want to tell him to stop choking me?"

"I don't think so." She holstered her weapon, stepped up. "What the hell are you doing, breaking into private property in the middle of the night? You're a cop's grandson, for Christ's sake. You want to end up in juvie?"

"I'm not your big problem right now, Lieutenant Dallas." He made a valiant attempt to sound tough, but his voice wavered. "You've got a dead body outside the wall. Really dead," he added and began to shake.

"Did you kill someone, Jamie?" Roarke asked mildly.

"No, man. No way. He was there when I came by." Terrified his stomach would revolt and humiliate him, Jamie swallowed hard again. "I'll show you."

If it was a trick, Eve considered it a fine one. She couldn't take a chance. "All right. Let's go. And if you try to run, pal, I'll zap you."

"Wouldn't make any sense to run, would it, when I went to all this trouble to get in? This way." His legs were rubber, and he sincerely hoped neither of them noticed that his knees kept knocking together.

"I'd like to know how you got in," Roarke said as they headed for the main gate. "How you bypassed security."

"I fool around with electronics. A hobby. You've got a really high-grade system. The best."

"So I thought."

"I guess I didn't disengage all the alarms." Jamie turned his head, tried another weak smile. "You knew I was here."

"You got in," Roarke repeated. "How?"

"This." Jamie pulled a small palm-sized unit out of his pocket. "It's a jammer I've been working on for a couple of years. It'll read most systems," he began, frowning when Roarke plucked it out of his hand. "When you engage this," he continued, leaning over to point, "it'll scan the chips, run a cloning program. Then it's just a matter of backing out the program step by step. Takes some time, but it's pretty efficient."

Roarke stared at the mechanism. It was no bigger than one of the E-games one of his companies manufactured. Indeed, the casing looked distressingly familiar. "You adapted a game unit into a jammer. Yourself. One that read and cloned and breached my security."

"Well, most of it." Jamie's eyes clouded in a

"Not in this lifetime," Roarke muttered and shoved the unit into his pocket.

When they reached the gates, he disengaged and opened them manually, sliding a narrow look at Jamie as the boy craned over his shoulder to see.

"Way impressive," Jamie commented. "I didn't figure I could get through this way. That's why I had to come over the wall. Needed a ladder."

Roarke simply closed his eyes. "A ladder," he said to no one in particular. "He climbed up a ladder. Lovely. And the cameras?"

"Oh, I blanked them from across the street. The unit's got a range of ten yards."

"Lieutenant." Roarke snagged Jamie by the collar. "I want him punished."

"Later. Now, where's this body you're supposed to have seen?"

The cocky smile fell away from his face. "To the left," he told her, paling again.

"Keep a hold of him, Roarke. Stay here."

"I've got him," Roarke replied, but he'd be damned if he'd stay back. He tugged Jamie through the gate, met Eve's a

She said something nasty under her breath and turned left. She didn't have to go far. It wasn't hidden, it wasn't subtle.

The body was naked and strapped to a wooden form in the shape of a star. No, she realized. A pentagram. Inverted so that the head with its dead doll eyes and gaping throat hung over the bloody sidewalk. The arms were outstretched, the legs parted in a wide vee. The center of his chest was a mass of black blood and gore, the hole hacked out of it bigger than a man's fist.

She doubted the ME would find a heart inside when he opened the body for autopsy.

She heard the choked sound behind her and turned to see Roarke shift his grip on Jamie and step over to shield the boy from the view.

"Lobar," was all he said.

"Yeah." She stepped closer. Whoever had taken his heart had also plunged a knife through a sheet of paper and through his groin.

DEVIL WORSHIPPER BABY KILLER BURN IN HELL

"Take the boy inside, will you, Roarke?" She glanced at the collapsible ladder tilted against the wall. "And get rid of that. Pass the kid off to Summerset for now. I can't leave the scene." She turned, her face blank and impassive. Her cop face. "Will you bring me my field kit?''

"Yes. Come on, Jamie."

"I know who he is." Tears swam in Jamie's eyes and were viciously blinked away. "He's one of the bastards who killed my sister. I hope he rots."

Because his voice had broken at the end, Roarke slipped an arm around his shoulder. "He will. Come inside. Let the Lieutenant do her job." Roarke sent Eve one last look before hefting the ladder and leading Jamie back through the gates.

With her gaze still fixed on the body, Eve pulled out her communicator. "Dispatch, Dallas, Lieutenant Eve."

"Dispatch, acknowledged."

"Reporting homicide, requesting assistance." She gave the necessary data, then replaced her communicator. Turning, she stared across the wide, quiet street into the dark, shifting shadows of the great park. In the east the sky was stripping off the first layers of night, and the stars, such as they were, were blinking out.

Murder had come into her life before and would again. But someone would pay for bringing it into her home.

She turned as Roarke approached not only with her field kit but her battered leather jacket. "It gets chilly this close to dawn," he said and handed it to her.

"Thanks. Jamie all right?"

"He and Summerset are eyeing each other with mutual dislike and distrust."

"I knew I liked that kid. You can go inside and referee," she told him as she took out Seal-It and clear-coated her hands, her boots. "I've called it in."

"I'm staying."

Since she'd already figured he would, she didn't argue. "Then make yourself useful and record the scene." She took her recorder out of the kit, passed it to him, then covered his hand with hers. "I'm sorry."

"You're too smart to be sorry for something that isn't your responsibility. He wasn't killed here, was he?"

"No." Confident that Roarke could function as her aide until Peabody arrived, Eve approached the body again. "Not nearly enough blood. He'd have gushed from the jugular. That was likely the cause of death. We'll find the other wounds are postmortem. In any case, there'd be splatters all over hell and back. We'd be wading in it. Record on?"

"Yes."

"Victim identified as Robert Mathias, aka Lobar. White male, eighteen years of age. Preliminary visual exam indicates death was caused by a sharp-bladed instrument that severed the throat." Shutting off everything but training, she took out a pencil light, examined the chest wound. "Additional insults include a wound in the chest, probably inflicted by the same weapon. The victim's heart has been removed. The organ is not on scene. I need close-ups here," she said to Roarke.