Devoted in Death (In Death #41)(110)

“I want to see her. You have to let me see her. We swore we’d never be parted again.”

“No, I don’t have to let you see her. But…” She paused, as if thinking. “I will if you choose wisely. Now, she’s already told me some of it because she’s looking out for herself, and for you, but this is only going to work if both of you cooperate.”

“What’d she say?”

“She loves you, Darryl, anybody can see that.”

“We’re two people, but inside one heart.”

“Right. I know that’s why you carved the heart with your initials into the people you killed for each other. Now, I can’t tell you what she said or I’d be influencing your statement. I can only say she explained some of it to me. Like how you borrowed the van you’ve been using from long-term parking in Newark.”

“That’s right. We just borrowed it. Nobody was using it.”

“And she told me about Samuel Zed. The man whose apartment you’ve been living in. You have to tell us what you did to him, Darryl. If you lie, that’s it. It’s over. The prosecuting attorney, she’s pushing this hard. It’s going to be what I told you before. Off-planet, forever, for both of you. The place they’ll put her, Darryl, if this goes to trial in New York? If our PA takes it?”

Eve shook her head.

“The other inmates, the guards? They’re going to look at a beautiful woman like Ella-Loo, somebody like her, and they’re going to hurt her. They’re going to do terrible things to her. I know you don’t want that. I know you want to protect her. She told me how you protect her, always.”

“I do! And I will.”

“Then protect her now, Darryl, and I can work this with the State of New York, I can try to keep the two of you together. You’re going in, that’s something I can’t do anything about. But if you give me what I need, I’ll go to bat for both of you with the PA.”

“If I could just see her —”

“When we’re done, I’ll fix it so you see her.”

“Promise?”

“On the record, I promise when we’re done, you’ll see each other.”

“And we’ll be together after?”

“As long as I’m in charge, you’ll be together. But you have to tell us everything, on the record. If you lie, it’s done. We’re going to start with Zed, the one you dumped in the river.”

“Okay. You gotta understand. It’s all about love. Our love is bigger than anything else in the world. Ella-Loo really wanted to come to New York. It was her dream. And we needed a place to stay, a place to have our life here. She was talking up this guy, this guy here.” He tapped the picture. “In the bar, and she got him to say where he lived, how he lived by himself and all that. It was meant, you see. It was like fate. After a while, she said how she’d like to see his place, and they went. Just a couple blocks away. And she made sure the door stayed unlocked.”

“Okay,” Eve prompted. “That’s good. Then what happened?”

“When I went in after them, he had his hands all over her. It just brought on the fury. We didn’t mean to kill him so quick. It happened fast. We were going to keep him around, see how it all went, but he had his hands on her, so I hurt him more than I meant.”

“But you still kept him alive for a bit, right?”

“For a little while, yeah. He had to tell us some stuff so I could go on into his computer and send off an email to where he worked. Said he had a family emergency and had to be away for a while. Then we had to get rid of him, and we talked it over, and we took his fingers off, ’cause of the prints.”

“Was he still alive when you cut off his fingers? Remember, if you lie, I can’t keep you and Ella-Loo together.”

Darryl wet his lips. “Might be he was still alive for some of it. And when we beat up his face some, but he was dead pretty quick. Then I went out, and got some bricks from this place I saw where we were maybe going to stay. But it was too cold in there for Ella-Loo, so that’s why we needed a real place.

“If you’re going to start a life together, you need a place.”

“And you wanted Zed’s.”

“It was fate. Just like me and Ella-Loo finding each other. So we loaded him into a bag with the bricks, tied it up, and took him out to the river.”

“That’s good, Darryl. Telling the truth’s going to help. But I think you left something out. Something you and Ella-Loo did, together? After you killed Zed, before you dumped his body. Did you use his bed for it?”

He grinned now, wide. “We couldn’t wait for the bed. We’ve got such a powerful need for each other, and we were all keyed up from killing him so fast. The floor’s a featherbed when you’re in love.”

“So you… made love,” Banner said, “on the floor by the body?”

“Then we got the bag and the bricks.”

Sensing Banner’s rage, Eve squeezed his wrist under the table. “Okay, Darryl, we’re on track now. Let’s go back to the beginning. You can’t leave anything out, or I can’t protect Ella-Loo. Was Jansen, on Highway 12, the first person you killed together?”

“That guy in Arkansas? We didn’t set out to kill him. We just needed a car as the truck was finished. Ella-Loo got him to stop, but then he started to fight me, and she had to hit him with the tire iron, and he fell hard. It was pure accident that time, that’s the truth. We had to give him another whack or two, just to be sure, then we dragged him off into the brush, and we wiped down the truck real good, loaded our things into the car. Ella-Loo was all keyed up, you know. The blood and all. And we pulled off a ways down the road, and when we made love…”