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She’d been propped up on the pillows so that she reclined, half-sitting, facing the camera. Probably her own PPC or ’link, Eve thought. Her eyes were dull, ravaged, defeated. Her voice, when she spoke, slurred with exhaustion and shock.
“Please. Please don’t make me.”
The image faded, then bloomed again.
“Okay. Okay. Dad, this is your fault. Everything is your fault. And, and, oh God. Oh God. Okay. I will never forgive you. And I hate you. Dad. Daddy. Please. Okay. You’ll never know why. You won’t know, and I won’t. But—but I have to pay for what you did. Daddy, help me. Why doesn’t somebody help me?”
The image faded again, and the music changed. Eve heard the cliché of the funeral dirge as the camera came back, panned up, slowly, from Deena’s feet, up her legs, her torso, to her face. To the empty eyes.
It held on the face as text began to scroll.
It may take you a while to find this, play this. Your dead daughter sure liked her music! I played it for her while I raped the shit out of her. Oh, btw, she was an idiot, but a decent piece of ass. I hope our little video causes you to stick your weapon in your mouth and blow your brains out.
She didn’t deliver her lines very well, but that doesn’t diminish the truth. Your fault, asshole. If it wasn’t for you, your deeply stupid daughter would still be alive.
How long can you live with that?
Payback is rocking-A!
For the crescendo, the audio blasted with Deena’s screams.
“Computer, replay, same segment.”
“Christ Jesus, Eve.”
“I need to see it again,” she snapped. “I need it analyzed. Maybe he said something that we can pick up, maybe there’s something that picks up his reflection.” She moved closer to the screen as it began its replay.
Roarke crossed over to open the wall panel. He pulled out a bottle of wine, uncorked it.
“There’s no mirror, no reflective surface. Her eyes? The way he’s got her sitting, maybe he can get a reflection off her eyes.”
“Alive or dead? I’m sorry,” Roarke said immediately. “I’m sorry for that. Truly.”
“It’s okay.”
“It’s not. She’s so young, and so afraid, so helpless.”
“She’s not me.”
“No. Not you, nor Marlena. But . . .” He handed her a glass of wine, then took a long drink from his own. “I’ll see if I can get something off it. I’d have a better chance with the original than a copy.”
“I need to log that in, in Central, run it through Feeney.” Time, she thought, it all took time, but . . . “No shortcuts on this.”
“All right then.” Roarke gestured to the screen. “You won’t show this to the father.”
“No.” She drank because her throat was dry. “He doesn’t need to see this.”
Because he needed to, needed the contact, Roarke took her hand in his as they studied the screen together. “It seems revenge, your payback, holds as motive.”
“It had to. I couldn’t see it any other way.” Again, and again, she read the final text, that ugly message from the killer.
“It’s boasting,” she said quietly. “He couldn’t resist digging in the knife. Leaving the music disc wasn’t the mistake. But adding this, that’s a big one. He doesn’t care about that, but it’s a mistake.”
“It wasn’t enough even to torture that child, to force her to say those words—her last—to her father. He had to add his own.”
“Exactly right. That’s a crack in control, in logic, even in patience.”
“The kill,” Roarke suggested. “For some it’s a spike, a rush.”
