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“Ava . . . I can’t . . . Ava works at the clinic.” Sweat shone on his face from the effort. “Ava, manages . . . Ava. We . . .” Then horror covered it. “No. No. No.”
“What happened to Ava, Jack?”
“No. No.”
“What happened in 606?”
“I don’t know. I don’t—”
“Stop!” She reached over, grabbed a fistful of his shirt. “You tell me what happened.”
“It’s not real. It didn’t happen.”
“What isn’t real?”
“The people, the people.” He surged to his feet, and Eve signaled Peabody to stay back. “The lights. The voices. Smoke and fire. And hell came.” He lurched around the interview room, holding his head. Tears leaked out of his eyes. “Laughing. Screaming. I couldn’t stop. Did I want to stop? We had sex. No. Yes. I don’t know. Bodies and hands and mouths. They hurt her. Did I hurt her? But she was smiling, smiling at me. Then her blood.”
His hands ran over his face as if wiping at it. “Her blood. All over me.”
His eyes rolled up in his head. Peabody managed to break the worst of his fall by going down with him. “Jesus, Dallas, no way this guy’s faking it.”
“No. Let’s get him into a cage. I want him on suicide watch. I want eyes on him.” She stepped to the door at the knock.
“Screening on your suspect, Lieutenant. They said you wanted it ASAP.”
“Thanks.” She took the report from a tech, scanned it. “Jesus, what doesn’t this guy have in him? Erotica, Rabbit, Zoner, Jive, Lucy.”
“Sleepy, Dopey, and Doc,” Peabody finished. Then shrugged at Eve’s frown. “Bad joke. No wonder his head’s screaming. Coming down off a cocktail like that’s gotta rip it up.”
“Get him into a cage, have a medic treat him. He’s had enough for one night.”
“He doesn’t come across like somebody who could do what was done to that woman tonight.”
“That much junk inside him, you don’t know what he could do. But he’s not a regular user. No way he could be a regular with that kind of habit and not have a single pop.”
Eve started back to her office. A couple of uniforms led a weeping woman away in the opposite direction. Outside the bullpen a guy wearing a torn and bloody shirt sat laughing quietly to himself while he rattled the restraints that chained him to the seat.
She swung into the bullpen while he went back to giggling. In her office she hit the AutoChef for coffee first, then sat at her desk. She gulped caffeine while she booted up the security discs from the hotel.
She ran the VIP check-in first, the elaborate parlor reserved for guests in the tonier suites and the triplexes. She ordered the computer to coordinate with the time stamped on the Asant Group’s check-in. And watched the parlor fuzz into white static. She ran it back, noted the glitch began thirty minutes before the log-in, and continued to twenty-three hundred.
The pattern repeated when she ran the security discs for the private elevator, and again when she ran the main lobby discs.
“Son of a bitch.” She turned to her interoffice ’link. “Peabody, wake up your cohab. I need McNab in here to dig into the security discs. They’re wiped.”
If the boy genius from the Electronic Detectives Division couldn’t dig out data, she had someone who could. She contacted Roarke.
“Why are you awake?” she demanded when her ’link screen showed him at his desk.
“Why are you?”
“Oh, just a little something about a ritual murder. I thought you’d want to know that all the security discs from your hotel are compromised. Nothing but static on all starting thirty minutes before the log-in for the Asant Group.”
“Are you bringing them to me or am I coming to you?”
“I’ve got McNab coming in, but—”
“I’m on my way.”
