Kindred in Death (In Death #29)(20)

“You’ve gone pale.” Morris touched her arm. “Step back, sit.”

She shook her head, brushed him off. She would get through it. Staring into her own past as much as Deena’s, Eve swiped the cold tube over her brow.

“Then what he does, when he’s finished, however many times he feels inclined, when she’s lying there, quivering or when she’s gone somewhere else, somewhere she can’t feel the pain, he pushes her face into the pillow, holds her down, smothering her until she passes out again. Then he can turn her over, tie her again. He worked her for about eight hours, a full day’s work. So he could let her lie there a while until he could get it up again.

“Maybe he promised to let her go if she gave him the passcode for the control room. But I think he may have already taken care of that. Either way, lots of time. She’d ask him why, why he was doing this. He’d tell her, tell her exactly. Because he was going to kill her, and he’d enjoy telling her why.”

“Why?” Morris spoke softly, watching her face.

“Don’t know. Not yet. But he’d make sure she knew it wasn’t because he wanted her. Not because he liked her. If he made all this time, took all this effort to hurt her physically, again and again, wouldn’t he want to hurt her emotionally, mentally? Break her down, carve her away, every inch. In addition to the rape, and all that does to your body, your mind, your f**king soul, he’d want to make sure she knew she meant nothing. That he’d played her. Taking her out, holding her hand, being a shy guy. Making her feel like a fool? Nice bonus.”

She kept her breathing even, she could do that, even if she couldn’t stop the pulse from hammering in her head.

“Mask’s off. No need for it now. He’d want her to see who he was. He’d want her to know what’s inside her when he rapes her, what’s tearing and ripping her. Young healthy girl, strong girl, so he can drag it out for hours, until the last time he put his hands around her throat, the last time she looks in his eyes as he starts to squeeze. Until he ends it.”

She did step back now. She didn’t tremble, though she wanted to. Still, she took a long, slow drink of the now-lukewarm Pepsi. “He leaves the cuffs. Cop cuffs. Standard issue. He unties her legs, but leaves her hands cuffed. Because that’s a message to her father. That’s an extra punch to the gut. It wasn’t her, not about her. She was just an instrument. A weapon. He could’ve killed her dozens of times before this, in dozens of ways. He wanted it to be in that house, inside the house where the cop believed his little girl would always be safe.”

She studied the face. “The second dose, that was for MacMasters, too. He wanted to make sure we found the drug in her system. As far as he knew, at the time of the murder, her parents weren’t due back until the afternoon, mid- to late afternoon. We wouldn’t have gotten to a tox yet on that time frame. We wouldn’t have gotten to one until evening, even flagged and expedited. Just another boost to make sure we found it. That’s why he left the glass.”

“Glass?”

“It’ll be her glass he left on the counter in the kitchen, and there’ll be traces of the barb there for the lab to find. It’s like . . . thumbing his nose. An insult to kick it all down. Look what I can do in the sanctity of your own home, to your precious daughter, using the very thing you work against every day of your life. It wasn’t about her, about Deena. That’s worse, isn’t it?”

She looked at Morris again, composed again. “It’s worse for MacMasters knowing it wasn’t about her. She was just the conduit.”

“Yes. It would be worse.” And what were you? he wondered. What were you to the one who used you this way?

But he didn’t ask. He knew her too well, understood her too well, to ask.

Later, she stood outside, breathing in New York, drawing in the sticky heat of a day that decided to soar to summer. She’d gotten through it, she told herself, gotten through what should be the worst of it. She got back in her car and drove to the lab.

She expected to butt heads with Chief Lab Tech Dick Berinksi. In fact, she looked forward to the tension relieving ass-kicking she hoped to give the man not so affectionately known as Dickhead. “He’s a f**k, but he’s the best,” she’d say about him.

She found the lab empty but for a handful of lab rats tucked in their glass cubes or dozing over paperwork. And the egg-shaped head plastered with thin black hair of the chief bent toward a comp screen while his clever, if creepy, fingers played over both screen and keyboard.

“Status.” She said it like a dare.

He shot her a resentful glare. “I had tickets to the ball game. Boxed seats.”

Bribes, no doubt. “Captain MacMasters had a daughter. Now ask me if I give a flying shit about your box seat.”

“She wouldn’t be less dead if I was chowing on a dog, sucking down a brew, and watching the Yankees on freaking Peace Day.”

“Gee, you’re right. It’s too bad she got raped, sodomized, raped again, terrorized, and choked to death on freaking Peace Day just to inconvenience you.”

“Jesus, chill.” The murderous gleam in her eye must have gotten through his own ire as he waved those spider fingers in the air. “I’m here, aren’t I? And I already ran the glass. You got cherry fizzy and barbs. The mickey comes up as Slider, liquid form, with a small kick of powdered Zoner.”