Haunted in Death (In Death #22.5)(29)

“How did you know where the remains were?“

“Who’d know better? Do you know what he wanted to do? He wanted to bring in the media, to make another fortune off me. He had it all worked out. He’d bring the media in, let them put my poor bones on-screen, give interviews – at a hefty fee, of course. Using me again, like he always did. Not this time.“

“You believed Rad Hopkins was Hop Hopkins reincarnated?“ Peabody asked.

“Of course. It’s obvious. Only this time I played him. Told him my father would pay and pay and pay for the letters I’d written. I told him where we had to open the wall. He didn’t believe that part, but he wanted under my skirt.“

She wrinkled her nose to show her mild distaste. “I could make him do what I wanted. We worked for hours cutting that brick. Then he believed.“

“You took the hair clips and the gun.“

“Later. We left them while he worked on his plan. While, basically, he dug his own grave. I cleaned them up. I really loved those hair clips. Oh, there were ammunition clips, too. I took them. I was there.“

Her face changed, hardened, and her voice went raw, went throaty. “In me, in the building. So sad, so cold, so lost. Singing, singing every night. Why should I sing for him? Murdering bastard. I gave him a child, and he didn’t want it.“

“Did you?“ Eve asked her.

“I was messed up. He got me hooked – the drugs, the life, the buzz, you know? Prime shit, always the prime shit for Hop. But I was going to get straight, give it up, go back for my kid. I was gonna – had my stuff packed up. I wrote and told my old lady, and I was walking on Hop. But he didn’t want that. Big ticket, that’s what I was. He never wanted the kid. Only me, only what I could bring in. Singing and singing.“

“You sent Rad a message, to get him to Number Twelve.“

“Sure. Public ‘link, easy and quick. I told him to come, and when to come. He liked when I used Bobbie’s voice – spliced from old recordings – in the messages I sent him. He thought it was sexy. Asshole. He stood there, grinning at me. I brought it, he said.“

“What was it?“

“His watch. The watch he had on the night he shot me. The one I bought him when my album hit number one. He had it on his wrist and was grinning at me. I shot him, and I kept shooting him until the clip was empty. Then I pushed the murdering bastard over, and I put the gun right against his head, right against it, and I shot him again. Like he did to me.“

She sat back a little, smiled a little. “Now he can wander around in that damn place night after night after night. Let’s see how he likes it.“

Epilogue

When Eve stepped out, rubbed her hands over her face, Mira slipped out of observation.

“Don’t tell me,“ Eve began. “Crazy as a shithouse rat. ”

“That might not be my precise diagnosis, but I believe we’ll find with testing that Maeve Buchanan is legally insane and in desperate need of treatment.”

“As long as she gets it in a cage. Not a bit of remorse. Not a bit of fear. No hedging.”

“She believes everything she did was justified, even necessary. My impression, at least from observing this initial interview, is she’s telling you the truth exactly as she knows it. There’s the history of mental illness on both sides of her family. This may very well be genetic. Then discovering who her great-grandmother was helped push her over some edge she may very well have been teetering on. ”

“How did she discover it?” Eve added. “There’s a question. Father must have let something slip.”

“Possibly. Haven’t you ever simply known something?

Or felt it? Of course, you have. And from what I’m told happened tonight, you had an encounter. ”

Frowning, Eve ran her fingers over her sore cheek. “I’m not going to stand here and say I was clocked by a ghost. I’m sure as hell not putting that in my report. ”

“Regardless, you may at the end of this discover the only reasonable way Maeve learned of her heritage was from Bobbie Bray herself. That she also learned of the location of the remains from the same source. ”

“That tips out of the reasonable.”

“But not the plausible. And that learning these things snapped something inside her. Her way of coping was to make herself Bobbie. To believe she’s the reincarnation of a woman who was killed before her full potential was realized. And who, if she’d lived – if she’d come back to claim her child – would have changed everything. ”

“Putting a lot of faith in a junkie,” Eve commented. “And using, if you ask me, a woman who was used, exploited and murdered, to make your life a little more important.”

Now she rubbed her eyes. “I’m going to get some coffee, then hit the father again. Thanks for coming down.”

“It’s been fascinating. I’d like to do the testing on her personally. If you’ve no objection.”

“When I’m done, she’s all yours.”

Because her own AutoChef had the only real coffee in all of cop central, Eve detoured there first.

There he was, sitting at her desk, fiddling with his ppc.

“You should go home,” Eve told Roarke. “I’m going to have an all-nighter on this.”