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He hadn’t bothered with those. Unlikely he’d even looked. “No, I don’t think so. I think she was wearing a ring, a kind of wedding ring, and he took it off her finger. A symbol, a souvenir.”
“I thought she lived alone.”
“She did. Another reason he picked her.” She turned away from the box of pretty stones and metal, looked back at Lois Gregg. “He carries her in here. He’s got his equipment again, likely in a toolbox this time. Restraints for her hands and feet. Strips off her robe, ties her up. Finds what he wants to use to rape her. He’s going to wake her up then. He didn’t get to play with the other, but this one’s different.”
“Why?” Peabody set the jewelry box back on the dresser. “Why is she different?”
“Because that’s what he’s looking for. Variety. She screams when she comes around and realizes—when it comes into her like a flood what’s happened, and what will happen. Even though part of her rejects it, refuses to believe, she screams and struggles, and begs. They like it when you beg. When he starts on her, when the pain spurts into her, hot, cold, impossible, she screams more. He’d get off on that.”
Eve lifted one of Lois’s hands again, then moved down to her feet. “She bloodied her wrists and ankles trying to get free, straining and twisting against the restraints. She didn’t give up. He’d have enjoyed that, too. It’s exciting for them when you fight, makes their breath come fast in your face, makes them hard. It gives them power when you fight and can’t win.”
“Dallas.” Peabody kept her voice low, laid a hand on Eve’s shoulder as her lieutenant had gone pale and clammy.
Eve shrugged, carefully took a step back. She knew everything Lois Gregg had felt. But it wouldn’t take her down, not now, into the memory, into the nightmare. The blood and the cold and the pain.
Her voice was level and cool when she continued. “When he’s done raping her, he takes the sash from her robe. She’s incoherent now, from the pain and the shock. He gets on the bed, straddles her, looks into her eyes when he strangles her, listens to her fight to breathe, feels her body convulsing under his in that sick parody of sex. That’s when he comes, when her body bucks under his and her eyes bulge. That’s when he gets his release.
“When he comes back to himself, he ties the sash into a bow, wedges the note between her toes. He takes the ring off her finger, amused by it. Such a female thing, to wear the symbol when there’s no man to go with it. He slips the ring in his pocket, or puts it in his toolbox, then checks how it all looks, and he’s pleased. Just as it’s supposed to. An excellent imitation.”
“Of what?”
“Of who,” Eve corrected. “Albert DeSalvo. The Boston Strangler.”
She stepped out into the hallway, where cops were milling around, doing what they could to keep people from the neighboring apartments inside.
And there was Roarke, she thought. There was a man with more money than God sitting cross-legged on the hallway floor, his back supported by the wall as he worked with his PPC.
And would probably be content to do so, for reasons she could never understand, for hours.
She moved to him, squatted down so their eyes were level. “I’m going to be here awhile. You ought to go on home. I can catch a ride into Central.”
“Bad, is it?”
“Very. I’ve got to talk to the son, and he’s . . .” She let out a long breath. “They tell me the MT gave him something, but he’s still pretty messed up.”
“One is, when their mother’s murdered.”
Despite the presence of other cops, she laid a hand over his. “Roarke—”
“Demons don’t die, Eve, we just learn to live with them. We’ve both known that all along. I’ll deal with mine, in my way.”
She started to speak again, then looked up when McNab came off the elevator.
“Lieutenant, no disc run since eight this morning. Nothing from the outside unit, elevator, or the hall on this floor. Best I can tell, he jammed it by remote from outside before entering the building. I could verify, but I don’t have any tools on me.”
He held out his hands, a half-ass smile on his face, to indicate his baggy red shorts, blue cinch vest, and toeless airsneaks.
“Then go get some,” she began.
“I happen to have a few things in the car that might help with that,” Roarke interrupted. “Why don’t I give you a hand, Ian?”
“That would be mag. It’s pretty decent security, so I figure if he went remote, it had to be police-issue level or above. Can’t tell unless I can get into the panel and check the board.”
Eve straightened, then held out a hand. Roarke grasped her forearm, and she his, to help him to his feet. “Go ahead. Get me best guess on what he used.”
Oh eight hundred for entry, she thought. With the time of death she’d established, he’d spent no more than an hour on Lois Gregg. More time than Wooton, more time to play, but still fast.
She went back in, walked to the kitchen.
