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“That’s right.” Eve pulled up a chair. “I’m very sorry for your loss.”
“Thank you. Will I be able to see her?”
“I’ll arrange that for you.”
“Can you tell me how she…what happened to her?” Iris’s breath hitched, and she took two slow ones to smooth it out. “They won’t tell me anything really. It’s worse not knowing.”
“She was killed last night, in her apartment. We believe she knew her killer, and let him in herself. Some pieces of her jewelry are missing.”
“Was she raped?”
They would always ask, Eve knew. For a daughter, they would always ask, and with their eyes pleading for the answer to be no. “She’d had sexual relations, but we don’t believe there was rape.”
“An accident?” There was another plea in Iris’s voice now, as if death wouldn’t be as horrible somehow if it were accidental. “Something that got out of hand?”
“No, I’m sorry. We don’t believe it was an accident. What do you know about your daughter’s activities recently, her companions? The men in her life?”
“Next to nothing.” Iris closed her eyes. “We didn’t communicate much, or often. I wasn’t a good mother.”
“Cara.”
“I wasn’t.” She shook her head at her husband’s quiet protest. “I was only twenty when she was born, and I wasn’t a good mother. I wasn’t a good anything.” The words were bitter with regret. “It was all parties and fun and where can we go next. When Tiara’s father had an affair, I had one to pay him back. And on and on, until we loathed each other and used her as a weapon.”
She turned her shimmering eyes to her husband as he lifted their joined hands, pressed his lips to her fingers. “Long ago,” he said softly. “That was long ago.”
“She never forgave me. Why should she? When we divorced, Tee’s father and I, I married again like that.” Iris snapped her fingers. “Just to show him he didn’t matter. I paid for that mistake six months later, but I didn’t learn. When I finally grew up, it was too late. She preferred her father, who’d let her do whatever she liked,
with whomever she liked.”
“You made mistakes,” Georgio told her. “You tried to fix them.”
“Not hard enough, not soon enough. We have an eight-year-old daughter,” she told Eve. “I’m a good mother to her. But I lost Tiara long ago. Now I can never get her back. The last time we spoke, more than a month ago, we argued. I can never get that back either.”
“What did you argue about?”
“Her lifestyle, primarily. I hated that she was wasting herself the way I did. She was pushing, pushing the boundaries more all the time. Her father’s engaged again, and this one’s younger than Tee. It enraged her, had her obsessing about getting older, losing her looks. Can you imagine, worried about such things at twenty-three?”
“No.” Eve thought of the mirrors again, the clothes, the body work Tiara had done. Obviously, this was a young woman who obsessed about anything that had to do with herself. “Did she have any particular interest in the occult?”
“The occult? I can’t say. She went through a period several years ago where she paid psychics great gobs of money. She dabbled in Wicca when she was a teenager—so many girls do—but she said there were too many rules. She was always looking for the easy way, for some magic potion to make everything perfect. Will you find who killed her?”
“I’ll find him.”
Even as Eve made arrangements to have the Francines transported to the morgue, she saw Mira come in. After an acknowledging nod, Mira wandered to a vending machine.
She’d cut her hair again, Eve noted, so it was short and springy at the nape of her neck, and she’d done something to that soft sable color so that little wisps of it around her face were a paler tone. She sat, trim and pretty in her bluebonnet-colored suit, with two tubes of Diet Pepsi.
“Iris Francine,” Mira stated when Eve came over. “I recognized her. Her face was everywhere a generation ago. I always thought her daughter was hell-bent on outdoing her mother’s youthful exploits. It seems she succeeded in the hardest possible way.”
“Yeah, dying will get you considerable face time, for a while.”
“Quite a while, I’ll wager in this case. Vampirism. I had a meeting one level up,” Mira explained, “and thought to catch you in your office. Peabody gave me the basics. Murder by vampire proponents is very rare. For the most part, it’s the danger, the thrill, the eroticism that draws people—primarily young people. There is a condition—”
“Renfield Syndrome. I’ve been reading up. What I’m getting from the people who knew the vic was a predilection to walk the edge, a desperation for fame, attention, a serious need to be and stay young and beautiful. She’d already had bodywork. And you have to add in sheer stupidity. I get her. She’s not unusual, she just had more money than most so she could indulge her every idiocy.”
Eve paused as she broke the seal on the Pepsi tube. “It’s him. The method of killing was very specific, planned out, and there was no attempt to disguise it. He took jewelry, but that was more of the moment than motive. He went there to do exactly what he did, in exactly the way he did it.”
“The compulsion may be his,” Mira considered. “A craving for the taste of blood, one that escalated to the need to drain his victim. Have you gotten the autopsy results as yet?”
