“Isn’t it always?”
The machine hummed on hold, mercifully without hideous background music or updated news reports, for a full three minutes before the commander came on.
“Dallas.”
“Commander, I need to send you something over a coded line.”
“It better be urgent, Dallas. My wife’s going to make me pay for this.”
“Yes, sir.” Cops, she thought as she prepared to send the image to his monitor, should stay single.
She waited, folding her restless hands on the table. As the images played again, she watched again, ignoring the clenching in her gut. When it was over, Whitney came back on-screen. His eyes were grim.
“Where did you get this?”
“He sent it to me. A disc was here, in my apartment, when I got back from the station.” Her voice was flat and careful. “He knows who I am, where I am, and what I’m doing.”
Whitney was silent for a moment. “My office, oh seven hundred. Bring the disc, lieutenant.”
“Yes, sir.”
When the transmission ended, she did the two things her instincts dictated. She made herself a copy of the disc, and she poured another glass of wine.
She woke at three, shuddering, clammy, fighting for the breath to scream. Whimpers sounded in her throat as she croaked out an order for lights. Dreams were always more frightening in the dark.
Trembling, she lay back. This one had been worse, much worse, than any she’d experienced before.
She’d killed the man. What choice had she had? He’d been too buzzed on chemicals to be stunned. Christ, she’d tried, but he’d just keep coming, and coming, and coming, with that wild look in his eyes and the already bloodied knife in his hand.
The little girl had already been dead. There was nothing Eve could have done to stop it. Please God, don’t let there have been anything that could have been done.
The little body hacked to pieces, the frenzied man with the dripping knife. Then the look in his eyes when she’d fired on full, and the life had slipped out of them.
But that hadn’t been all. Not this time. This time he’d kept coming. And she’d been naked, kneeling in a pool of satin. The knife had become a gun, held by the man whose face she’d studied hours before. The man called Roarke.
He’d smiled, and she’d wanted him. Her body had tingled with terror and sexual desperation even as he’d shot her. Head, heart, and loins.
And somewhere through it all, the little girl, the poor little girl, had been screaming for help.
Too tired to fight it, Eve simply rolled over, pressed her face into her pillow and wept.
“Lieutenant.” At precisely seven A.M., Commander Whitney gestured Eve toward a chair in his office. Despite the fact, or perhaps due to the fact that he’d been riding a desk for twelve years, he had sharp eyes.
He could see that she’d slept badly and had worked to disguise the signs of a disturbed night. In silence, he held out a hand.
She’d put the disc and its cover into an evidence bag. Whitney glanced at it, then laid it in the center of his desk.
“According to protocol, I’m obliged to ask you if you want to be relieved from this case.” He waited a beat. “We’ll pretend I did.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Is your residence secure, Dallas?”
“I thought so.” She took hard copy out of her briefcase. “I reviewed the security discs after I contacted you. There’s a ten minute time lapse. As you’ll see in my report, he has the capability of undermining security, a knowledge of videos, editing, and, of course, antique weapons.”
Whitney took her report, set it aside. “That doesn’t narrow the field overmuch.”
“No, sir. I have several more people I need to interview. With this perpetrator, electronic investigation isn’t primary, though Captain Feeney’s help is invaluable. This guy covers his tracks. We have no physical evidence other than the weapon he chose to leave at the scene. Feeney hadn’t been able to trace it through normal channels. We have to assume it was black market. I’ve started on her trick books and her personal appointments, but she wasn’t the retiring kind. It’s going to take time.”