Memory in Death (In Death 22)

She shifted, a little uncomfortable. In the picture she was sitting at a desk, discs piled around her. She wore a dull gray Police Academy sweatshirt. Her hair was long, pulled back in a tail.

“Yeah, I used to wear it long back then. Figured it was less trouble because I could just tie it back out of my way. Then in hand-to-hand training, my opponent grabbed it, yanked, and took me down. I lopped it off.”

“Look at your eyes. Cop’s eyes even then. Hardly more than a child, and you knew.”

“I knew if she didn’t get that camera out of my face so I could study, I was going to clock her.”

He laughed, took her hand, but remained riveted on the photograph. “What happened to her?”

“She washed out, made it about a month. She was okay. She just wasn’t—”

“A cop,” he finished. “Thank you for this. It’s so exactly what I wanted.”

She leaned her head on his shoulder, let the lights of the tree dazzle her and thought, Who needs champagne?

* * *

Chapter 19

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SHE WOKE, THOUGHT SHE WOKE, IN THE brilliantly lit room with the glass wall. She was wearing her diamonds, and the cashmere robe. There was a towering pine in the corner, rising up to the ceiling. The ornaments draping its arching boughs, she saw, were corpses. Hundreds of bodies hung, covered with blood red as Christmas.

All the women, only women, were gathered around it.

“Not very celebratory,” Maxie, the lawyer, said, and gave Eve a little elbow poke. “But you’ve got to make do, right? How many of those are yours?”

She didn’t need the magnifying glass weighing down her pocket to identify the faces, the bodies, the dead. “All of them.”

“That’s a little greedy, don’t you think?” Maxie turned, nodded toward the body splayed in the center of the room. “She hasn’t been put up yet.”

“No, she can’t go up yet. She isn’t finished.”

“Looks done to me. But here.” She tossed Eve a white sock weighed with credits. “Go ahead.”

“That’s not the answer.”

“Maybe you just haven’t asked the right question.”

She found herself in the glass room with the children. The child she’d been sat on the floor and looked up at her with tired eyes.

“I don’t have any presents. I don’t care.”

“You can have this.” Eve crouched down, held out her badge. “You’ll need it.”

“She has all the presents.”

Eve looked through the glass and saw that gifts were piled now around the body. “Lot of good they’ll do her now.”

“It’s one of us, you know.”

Eve glanced back, studied the room full of little girls. Then looked into her own eyes. “Yes, I know.”

“What will you do?”

“Take the one who did it away. That’s what happens when you kill someone. You have to pay. There has to be payment.”

The girl she’d been held up her hands, and they were smeared with blood. “Am I going, too?”