Memory in Death (In Death #22)(98)

"You had them made for me." That touched her, most of all. She picked up the magnifying glass. "Let's check them out," she said, and pretended to inspect the gems. "Nice job."

"You can think of them as medals."

"A lot jazzier than any medals the department hands out." She put them on, knowing it would please him. Seeing the way it did.

"They suit you."

"Glitters like these would work on anybody." But she wrapped her arms around him, snuggled in. "Knowing where they came from, why you had them made for me, that means a lot. I—"

She jerked back, eyes wide. "You bought them all, didn't you?"

He cocked his head. "Well, aren't you greedy."

"No, but you are. You bought them all. I know it."

He smoothed a finger down the dent in her chin. "I think we need more champagne. You're entirely too sober."

She started to speak again, then buttoned it. The man was entitled to spend his money as he liked. And he was right about one thing. Big Jack's diamonds deserved better than a departmental vault.

"There's one more under there," he noticed as he started to rise. "The one you brought in today."

"Oh. Right." Part of her had hoped he'd forget that one. "Yeah, well, it's nothing much. No big."

"I'm greedy, remember? Hand it over."

"Okay, sure." She stretched out for it, dumped it in his lap. "I'll get the champagne."

He grabbed her arm before she could get up. "Just hold on a minute, until I see what I have here."

He shoved aside tissue paper, drew it out, and said only, "Oh."

She struggled not to squirm. "You said you wanted a picture, you know, like from before."

"Oh," he repeated, and the expression on his face had color rising up her neck. "Look at you." His eyes moved from image to woman, so full of pleasure, of surprise, of love, her throat went tight.

"I just dug it out, and picked up a frame."

"When was it taken?"

"Right after I went into the Academy. This girl I hung with a little, she was always taking pictures.

I was trying to study, and she—"

"Your hair."

She shifted, a little uncomfortable. In the picture she was sitting at a desk, discs piled around her. She wore a dull gray Police Academy sweatshirt. Her hair was long, pulled back in a tail.

"Yeah, I used to wear it long back then. Figured it was less trouble because I could just tie it back out of my way. Then in hand-to-hand training, my opponent grabbed it, yanked, and took me down. I lopped it off."

"Look at your eyes. Cop's eyes even then. Hardly more than a child, and you knew."

"I knew if she didn't get that camera out of my face so I could study, I was going to clock her."

He laughed, took her hand, but remained riveted on the photograph. "What happened to her?"

"She washed out, made it about a month. She was okay. She just wasn't—"

"A cop," he finished. "Thank you for this. It's so exactly what I wanted."

She leaned her head on his shoulder, let the lights of the tree dazzle her and thought, Who needs champagne?

19

SHE WOKE, THOUGHT SHE WOKE, IN THE brilliantly lit room with the glass wall. She was wearing her diamonds, and the cashmere robe. There was a towering pine in the corner, rising up to the ceiling. The ornaments draping its arching boughs, she saw, were corpses. Hundreds of bodies hung, covered with blood red as Christmas.

All the women, only women, were gathered around it.

"Not very celebratory," Maxie, the lawyer, said, and gave Eve a little elbow poke. "But you've got to make do, right? How many of those are yours?"

She didn't need the magnifying glass weighing down her pocket to identify the faces, the bodies, the dead. "All of them."

"That's a little greedy, don't you think?" Maxie turned, nodded toward the body splayed in the center of the room. "She hasn't been put up yet."

"No, she can't go up yet. She isn't finished."

"Looks done to me. But here." She tossed Eve a white sock weighed with credits. "Go ahead."

"That's not the answer."

"Maybe you just haven't asked the right question."

She found herself in the glass room with the children. The child she'd been sat on the floor and looked up at her with tired eyes.

"I don't have any presents. I don't care."

"You can have this." Eve crouched down, held out her badge. "You'll need it."

"She has all the presents."

Eve looked through the glass and saw that gifts were piled now around the body. "Lot of good they'll do her now."

"It's one of us, you know."

Eve glanced back, studied the room full of little girls. Then looked into her own eyes. "Yes, I know."

"What will you do?"

"Take the one who did it away. That's what happens when you kill someone. You have to pay. There has to be payment."

The girl she'd been held up her hands, and they were smeared with blood. "Am I going, too?"