Loyalty in Death (In Death #9)(54)

“Yes, sir.”

“McNab.” She turned, stopping when Feeney stepped into the doorway. His face was drawn, his eyes too dark. “Oh hell. What did they hit?”

“Plaza Hotel. The tea room.” He walked slowly to the AutoChef, jabbed his finger into the controls for coffee. “They took it out, and the lobby shops, most of the goddamn lobby, too. Malloy’s headed to the scene. We don’t have a body count yet.”

He took out the coffee, drank it down like medicine. “They’ll need us.”

She’d never lived through war. Not the kind that killed in indiscriminate masses. Her dealings with death had always been more personal, more individual. Somehow intimate. The body, the blood, the motive, the humanity.

What she saw now had no intimacy. Wholesale destruction accomplished from a distance erased even that nasty bond between killer and victim.

There was chaos, the screams of sirens, the wails of the injured, the shouts of onlookers who stood nearby, both shocked and fascinated.

Smoke continued to stream out of the once-elegant Fifth Avenue entrance of the revered hotel to sting the air and the eyes. Hunks of brick and concrete, jagged spears of metal and wood, glittering remnants of marble and stone lay heaped with grim pieces of flesh and gore scattered over them.

She saw tattered rags of colorful cloth, severed limbs, hills of ash. And a single shoe — black with a silver buckle. A child’s shoe, she thought, unable to stop herself from crouching down to study it. It would have been shiny, a little girl’s dress-up-for-tea shoe. Now it was dull and splattered with blood.

She straightened, ordered her heart to chill and her mind to clear, then began to make her way over, around the rubble and waste.

“Dallas!”

Eve turned, saw Nadine picking her way through the filth in lady heels and thin hose. “Get back behind the press line, Nadine.”

“No one’s put up a line.” Nadine lifted a hand to push at her hair while the wind blew it back in her face. “Dallas. Sweet God. I was finishing up a luncheon speech deal over at the Waldorf when this came through.”

“Busy day,” Eve muttered.

“Yeah. All around. I had to pass on the Radio City story because I was committed to the lunch. But the station kept me updated. What the hell’s going on? Word was you evacuated over there.”

She paused, scanned over the destruction. “It wasn’t any water main problem. And neither was this.”

“I don’t have time for you now.”

“Dallas.” Nadine caught at her sleeve, held firm. Her eyes, when they met Eve’s, were ripe with horror. “People have got to know.” She said it quietly. “They have a right to.”

Eve jerked her arm free. She’d seen the camera behind Nadine and the remote mike pinned to her lapel. Everyone had their jobs. She knew it, understood it.

“I don’t have anything to add to what you see here, Nadine. This isn’t the time or the place for statements.” She looked down again at the small shoe, the silver buckle. “The dead make their own.”

Nadine held up a hand to signal her camera operator back. Lifting a hand, she closed it over her mike and spoke softly. “You’re right, and so am I. And just now, it doesn’t matter a damn. If there’s anything I can do — any sources I can tap for you, just let me know. This time, it’s for free.”

Nodding, Eve turned away. She saw the MTs scurrying, a team of them working frantically on the bloody mess that must have been one of the doormen. Most of him had been blown clear, a good fifteen feet from the entrance.

She wondered if they’d ever find his arm.

She stepped away and through the blackened hole into what was left of the lobby.

The fire sprinklers had gone off so that streams and puddles of wet ran through the waste. Her feet squelched as she pushed through. The stench was bad, very bad. Blood and smoke and ripe gore. She forced herself not to think about what littered the floor, ordered herself to ignore the two emergency workers who were weeping silently as they marked the dead, and looked for Anne.

“We’ll need extra shifts at the morgue and the labs, to deal with IDs.” Her voice was rusty, so she cleared it. “Can you clear that with Central, Feeney?”

“Yeah, goddamn it. I brought my daughter here on her sixteenth birthday. Fucking pigs.” He yanked out his communicator and turned away.

Eve kept going. The closer she came to point of impact, the worse it got. She’d been there once before, with Roarke. She remembered the opulence, the elegance. Cool colors, beautiful people, wide-eyed tourists, excited young girls, groups of shoppers crowding at tables to experience the old tradition of tea at The Plaza.

She fought her way through rubble then stared, cold-eyed, at the blackened crater.

“They never had a chance.” Anne stepped up beside her. Her eyes were wet and hot. “Not a f**king chance, Dallas. An hour ago there were people in here, sitting at pretty tables, listening to a violinist, drinking tea or wine and eating frosted cakes.”

“Do you know what they used?”

“There were children.” Anne’s voice rose, broke. “Babies in strollers. It just didn’t mean a damn. Not one damn to them.”

Eve could see it, and much too well. She already knew it would come back to her in dreams. But she turned, faced Anne. “We can’t help them. We can’t go back and stop it. It’s done. All we can do is move forward and try to stop the next. I need your report.”