“Nice, but there’s a lot of spin in there. The media’s going to come at you hard. You’re going to take hits.”
“You really think I give a rat’s ass about a few publicity bruises right now, Nadine? Air the statement. What I want is for him to know we’re coming, and to worry about what we might have. Don’t release Rossi’s name until the eight o’clock airing.”
“How about this? Will the NYPSD source confirm or deny that the investigation is focused on a specific suspect?”
“The source won’t confirm or deny, but stated that members of the task force are seeking or have located and interviewed persons of interest.”
“Okay.” Nadine nodded as she scribbled. “Still doesn’t really say anything, but it sounds like it says something.”
“Do you still have your researchers on tap?”
“Sure.”
“I may have something for them to play with later. That’s it, Nadine. You want the official department statement, go to the liaison.”
Eve clicked off, got coffee. Though it annoyed her, she used it to chase an energy pill. Better jumpy than sluggish, she decided, then called up the results from the global search she’d done from home.
As the names began rolling on, she sat back, closed her eyes. Thousands, she thought. Well, what had she expected given the search elements she’d had Roarke input.
So she had to narrow them, refine it.
Her ’link beeped. “Yeah, yeah.”
“Team’s in the house,” Peabody told her.
“I’ll be there.”
T ired cops, Eve thought when she stepped into the war room. Her team now consisted of tired, frustrated, and pissed off cops. Sometimes, she thought, cops did their best work that way. They’d be running on adrenaline and irritation-and in a lot of cases the boost of energy pills.
No bullshit, she thought again. No evasions.
“We lost her.” The room fell instantly silent. “We’ve got the full resources of the top police and security departments in the country behind us. We’ve got the experience, the brains, the bullheadedness of every cop in this room. But we lost her. You’ve got thirty seconds to brood about that, to feel crappy about it, to shoulder the guilt. Then that’s done.”
She set down her file bag, walked over to get more coffee. When she came back, she took out the copy she’d made of Ariel Greenfeld’s photo, pinned it in the center of a fresh board.
“We’re not losing her. As of now we’re round the clock for the duration. As of now, she’s the only victim in this city. As of now, she is the single most important person in our lives. Officer Newkirk?”
“Sir.”
“You and the officers you’ve been working with will take this first twelve-hour shift. You’ll be relieved by officers I’ve assigned at…” She checked her wrist unit. “Nineteen hundred. Captain Feeney, I’ll use your recommendation for another pair of e-men to take the second shift. Field detectives, I’ll have your relief lined up shortly.”
“Lieutenant.” Trueheart cleared his throat, and Eve could see him fighting the urge to raise his hand. “Detective Baxter and I have worked out a crib rotation. I mean to say we discussed same on the way back from notifying next of kin. With your permission, we’d prefer not to be relieved, but to handle the twenty-four-hour cycle ourselves.”
“You need more men,” Baxter added, “you get more men. But we don’t go off the clock. How about you, Sick Bastard?” He used Jenkinson’s nickname.
“We’ll sleep when we get him.”
“All right,” Eve agreed. “We’ll try it that way. I’ve done a global search for mutilations, murders, and missings meeting the targets’ descriptions. We concluded in the first investigation that it was likely the killer had killed before, practiced before. I widened the search,” she told Feeney, “went global and back five years, and netted thousands of results.”
She held up the disc copy of the run, tossed it to Feeney. “We need to whittle it down, refine it. And we need to find one or more that could be his-and find his mistakes.
“Item second,” she continued, and worked through her list.
A s Eve briefed her team, listened to their reports and coordinated the duties, Ariel Greenfeld came awake. She’d surfaced twice before, barely registering her surroundings before he’d come in. Small room, glass walls, medical equipment? Was she in the hospital?
She struggled to see him clearly, but everything was so blurry. As if her eyes, and her mind, had been smeared with oil. She thought she heard music, high trilling voices. Angels? Was she dead?
Then she’d gone under again, sliding down and down to nothing.
This time when she awoke, the room was larger. It seemed larger to her. The lights were very bright, almost painful to her eyes. She felt weak and queasy, as though she’d been sick a very long time, and again thought, “Hospital.”
Had she been in an accident? She couldn’t remember, and as she lay still to take stock, felt no pain. She ordered herself to think back, to think back to the last thing she could remember.
“Wedding cakes,” she murmured.
Mr. Gaines. Mr. Gaines’s granddaughter’s wedding. She had a chance for the job, a good job, designing and baking the cake, standing as dessert chef for the reception.
Mr. Gaines’s house-big, beautiful old house, pretty parlor with a fireplace. Warm and cozy. Yes! She remembered. He’d picked her up, driven her to his house for a meeting with his granddaughter. And then…
It wanted to fade on her, but she pushed the fog away. When it cleared, her heart began to hammer. Tea and cookies. The tea, something in the tea. Something in his eyes when she’d tried to stand.
Not the hospital. God, oh God no, she wasn’t in the hospital. He’d drugged her tea, and he’d taken her somewhere. She had to get away, had to get away now.
She tried to sit up, but her arms, her legs were pinned. Panicked, sucking back a scream, she pushed up as far as she could. And felt terror run through her like a river.
She was naked, tied, hands and feet, to a table. Some sort of metal table with rope restraints that looped through openings and bit into her skin when she strained against them. As her eyes wheeled around the room she saw monitors, screens, cameras, and tables holding metal trays.
There were sharp things on the trays. Sharp, terrifying things.
As her body began to shake, her mind wanted to deny, to reject. Tears leaked when she twisted and writhed in a desperate attempt to free herself.
The woman in the park. Another woman missing. She’d seen the media reports. Horrible, that’s what she’d thought. Isn’t that horrible. But then she’d gone off to work without another thought. It didn’t have anything to do with her. Just another horrible thing that happened to someone else.
It always happened to someone else.
Until now.
She dragged in her breath, let it out in a scream. She screamed for help until her lungs burned and her throat felt scorched. Then she screamed some more.
Someone had to hear, someone had to come.
But when someone heard, when someone came, fear choked off her screams like a throttling hand.
“Ah, you’re awake,” he said, and smiled at her.
E ve input the names on the list Roarke had generated of season ticket holders. Her first search requested highlighting males between sixty and eighty years of age.
She’d expand that, if necessary, she thought. He may have created a bogus company for this particular purpose, or any type of persona.
No guarantee he sprang for season tickets, she mused. He could cherry pick the performances that appealed to him rather than just blanket the whole season.