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“Easterday,” she told Roarke. “He came here to hide. A brother would have access to a brother’s house, right?”
“He didn’t unpack, or repacked hastily.”
“I think didn’t unpack. Brought the suitcase up, got a bottle, laid down, and drank.”
“Feeling sorry for himself,” Roarke concluded.
“Yeah, poor, sad serial rapist had a fucking bad day. Let’s go down. If we box him, he’ll try to run. He may try to fight, but he won’t be much trouble.”
They turned out of the room, toward the stairs. And stopped halfway down when they saw Betz.
The first floor and its entranceway remained dark but for the beam of her flash. And that spotlighted the man hanging from the pendant light above the main floor hallway.
She’d known the chances were slim she’d find him alive, take him alive into the box and batter him into a shaking mass over what she knew. But she’d hoped. She’d hoped deeply after viewing the recording she’d have her chance at him.
“And that’s four of six,” she stated. “They didn’t wait to deal with him, took the chance and got him in here, finished him way before their usual time frame.
“Clear first. They’re not here, but Easterday might be.”
She found an overturned table and broken glass on the floor leading toward the rear of the house.
Then blood—some spatter, some smears.
She stepped around it, continued to clear, saw drag marks.
“The house is clear,” she told Roarke, “and they’ve got Easterday. It reads he was down here, probably a little drunk, when they came in. Maybe he figures his brother Betz is coming in, then he sees them, tries to run. They go after him, stun him. He goes down, takes that table with him, hits his head. They drag him back. I bet they wanted him to watch. Like he watched Betz rape them. Now he can watch while they execute Betz.”
She holstered her weapon, called for the lights. “I need to let the locals know what we’ve got here, but it’s our case. I’ll pull Peabody in after all.”
“If you suggest I go back home, you’ll make me very angry.”
“I should, but I won’t. And I don’t want to,” she admitted. “I can handle this. I will handle it. But I want you with me. It helps having you with me.”
“Always.”
“It helps knowing that, too. I think, unless they’re stupid—and so far, not a bit—they know
they don’t have much of a chance to get to the last one, to MacNamee. They might take more time with Easterday. They might because he’s the last one they’ll have. Otherwise, he’s already dead, and they’re in the wind.”
Because he knew her, he brushed a hand down her hair. “If it were me, and I’d come this far, was this determined, it would be the first. I’d want to . . . do justice to the last.”
She nodded, took out her ’link to tag her local contact. “This is Dallas, Lieutenant Eve, NYPSD. I’ve got a body.”
She contacted Whitney, leaving it to him to play politics with the Bronx brass, if necessary, called in her own sweepers, and had a conversation with the two local detectives who came in on the roll.
By the time Peabody and McNab arrived—riding in hot in a black-and-white—she had the latest victim lowered to the floor, and had established TOD.
“Twenty-fifteen. We didn’t miss them by a full hour. They had to get this address out of Betz—or one of the others. They went to town and back on him. Shorter time frame, bigger beating.”
“He’s the one who drugged them,” Roarke said.
“Drugged them?”
Eve glanced up at Peabody. “It’s on the recording from the bank box. We have all six of them. Gang rape, by turns—like a sporting event. This one injected the vic—their first the way it reads—with something that made her go from screaming, fighting, and begging them to stop to begging for more.”
“They injected her?” Under the bright splash of his watch cap, McNab’s green eyes went hard and cold. “With something like Whore?”
“Something like it, this one cooked it up himself. He’s got a lab upstairs here where he’s kept at it.”
