Witness in Death (In Death #10)(46)

Trapped, Eve gripped the wheel, closed her eyes. She felt the quick, biting sting of the antiseptic before the numbing properties took hold. The smell of it spun in her head, rolled into her belly.

She heard the low hum of the suture wand.

She started to make some sarcastic comment to take her mind off the annoyance of the procedure. Then suddenly, she was sucked back.

The dim and dingy health center ward. The hundreds of stings as hundreds of cuts were treated. The vile buzz of the machines as her broken arm was examined.

"What's your name? You have to give us your name. Tell us who hurt you? What's your name? What happened to you?"

I don't know. In her mind she screamed it, again and again. But she lay still, she lay silent, trapped in terror as strangers poked and prodded, as they stared and they questioned.

"What's your name?"

"I don't know!"

"Sir. Dallas. Hey."

Eve opened her eyes, stared into Peabody's wide ones. "What? What is it?"

"You're really pale. Dallas, you look a little sick. Maybe we should swing by a health center after all."

"I'm all right." Her hands fisted hard until she felt herself steady again. "I'm okay. Just need some air." She ordered the window down, started the car.

And pushed the helpless young girl back into the darkest corner of her mind.

CHAPTER TEN

Needs must when the devil drives. I can't remember who said that, but I don't suppose it's important. Whoever it was is long dead now. As Linus Quint is dead now.

Needs must. My needs must. But who was the devil in this coupling? Foolish, greedy Quim or myself?

Perhaps that's not important either, for it's done. There can be no going back, no staging events to another outcome. I can only hope events were staged convincingly enough to satisfy those sharp eyes of Lieutenant Dallas.

She is an exacting audience and, I fear, the most severe of critics.

Yes, with her in the house, I fear. My performance must be perfection in every way. Every line, every gesture, every nuance. Or her view will no doubt ruin me.

Motive and opportunity, Eve thought as she walked to her own front door. Too many people had both. Richard Draco would be memorialized the next day, and she had no doubt there would be a lavish display of grief, passionate and emotional eulogies, copious tears.

And it would all be just another show.

He'd helped seduce Areena Mansfield into drugs and put a smear on her rise to stardom.

He'd stood in the spotlight Michael Proctor desperately wanted for his own.

He'd humiliated and used Carly Landsdowne in a very public fashion.

He'd been a splinter under the well-manicured fingernail of Kenneth Stiles.

He'd considered Eliza Rothchild too old and unattractive to bother with.

There had been others, so many others it was impossible to count, who had reason to wish Richard Draco ill.

But whoever had acted on it, planned and executed the murder, had enough cool, enough will to have lured a greedy theater tech into a hangman's noose.

She wasn't looking for brutality or rage but for cold blood and a clear mind. Those qualities in a killer were much more difficult to root out.

She wasn't moving forward, she thought with frustration. Every step she took simply pushed her further into the artifice of a world she found mildly annoying.

What kind of people spent their lives dressing up and playing make-believe?

Children. It struck her as she closed her hand around the doorknob. On some level, wasn't she looking for a very clever, very angry child?

She gave a half laugh. Great. What she knew about children wouldn't fill the pinhole made by a laser drill.

She flung open the front door, intending to throw herself into a blisteringly hot shower, then back into work.

The music pierced her ears, rattled her teeth. She all but felt her eyes jiggle in her head. It was a screech of sound, punctuated by a blast of noise, layered with braying waves of chaos.

It was Mavis.

The irritable mood that had come through the door with Eve didn't have a chance. It exploded in the sheer volume and exuberance of Mavis Freestone's unique musical style. Eve found herself grinning as she stepped up to the doorway of what Roarke referred to as the parlor.

There in all the splendor, the elegance, the antiquity, Mavis danced -- Eve supposed that was the closest word for it -- bouncing and jiggling atop graduated stacked heels that lifted her tiny frame a full six inches from the floor. Their swirling pink and green pattern matched the hair that flew in yard-long braids around her flushed, delighted face and fairy body.

Her slim legs were green, with little pink butterflies fluttering up in a spiral pattern, then disappearing under the tiny, flippy skirt of fuschia that barely covered her crotch. Her torso was decorated in a crisscross of the two colors with one pretty breast in pink, another in green.

Eve could only be relieved that Mavis had chosen to go with the green for both eyes. You just never knew.

Roarke sat in one of his lovely antique chairs, a glass of straw-colored wine in one hand. He was either relaxing into the show, Eve thought, or he'd lapsed into a protective coma.

The music, such as it was, crescendoed, led by a long, plaintive wail from the singer. Blessed silence fell like a cargo ship of bricks.

"What do you think?" Mavis tossed back the mop of bicolored braids. "It's a good follow-up number for the new video. Not too tame, is it?"