“We’re walking. Next stop’s only six or seven blocks. Hike’ll do your ass good.”

“I knew it looked fat in these pants.” Then she stopped, squinted at Eve. “You just said that to pay me back for buying the socks. Right?”

“You’ll just never know, will you?” She kept walking, digging out her communicator when it signaled. “Dallas.”

“Got your first matches,” Feeney said over a mouthful of nuts. “We’re starting the next level, eliminating females, families, and those outside the profile parameters.”

She wound and swerved through foot traffic. “Shoot the initial matches to my office unit, in case I need to backtrack. Appreciate the rush job, Feeney.”

“My boys put in the time.”

“How about the discs from Transit?”

“Slow going there. No promises.”

“Okay. Lab ID’d the shoe. I’ve got a customer list from the first outlet. I’ll send it to you. You get a bang from that, I need to know ASAP.”

“On that. How many outlets altogether?”

“Too many, but we’ll knock them down.”

She paused at the intersection and ignored the steam from a nearby glide-cart that carried too much rehydrated onion, the pedestrian beside her who muttered under his breath about hell-demons, and the chatter, ladened with the Bronx, from the two women behind her that appeared to center on the purchase of an outfit that was going to make one of them look like a freaking goddess.

“He’s a New York guy,” she told Feeney, and strode into the street along with the horde an instant before the signal changed. “And I’m banking he does his buying in the city. We have to go outside—’burb, out of state, Net—it’s going to take days, if not weeks. And he’s stepped up the pace.”

“Yeah, so I hear. We’ll keep to the grindstone here. You need more feet in the field, let me know.”

“I will. Thanks.”

They hit two more retail outlets before Eve took pity on her partner and grabbed soy dogs at a glide-cart. It seemed like a good day to eat outdoors, to take advantage of the balmy weather.

So she sat on the grass of Central Park and studied the castle.

It hadn’t begun there, but it was her jumping point.

A king-sized man. King of the castle. Or was that just stretching things?

He’d placed the second victim on a bench, near a memorial that honored heroes. Men, particularly men, who’d done what needed to be done. Manly men. Men who were remembered for their actions in the face of great trauma and adversity.

He liked symbols. King of the castle. Strength in adversity.

The third laid out near a garden, under a statue of farmers.

Salt of the earth? Salt purified, or it flavored. And that was bullshit.

Making something grow. Using your own hands, your sweat, and muscle to bring life? To bring death.

She blew out a breath. It could play in with the crafts. It could. Self-reliance, then. Do it yourself.

Parks meant something to him. The parks themselves. Something had happened to him in a park, something he paid back every time he killed.

“We could go back,” she muttered. “Look back, see if there were any sexual assaults on a male in one of the city parks. No, a kid, that’s the key. He’s big now, nobody’s going to mess with me now. But when he was a kid, helpless, like a woman. How do you fight back when you’re a kid? So you’ve got to get strong, so it can’t happen again. You’d rather be dead than have it happen again.”

For a moment, Peabody said nothing. She wasn’t entirely sure Eve was speaking to her. “Could be he got beat up, or humiliated rather than assaulted sexually. Humiliated or hurt in some way by the female authority figure.”

“Yeah.” Eve rubbed absently at a headache at the base of her skull. “Most likely the female he’s killing symbolically now. And if it was his mother or sister, something along those lines, it probably wasn’t reported. We’ll check anyway.”

“If a woman who had charge of him, control of him, abused him—physically, sexually—it would have twisted him from a young age, and later, the trigger gets pressed and he pays her back.”

Tags: J.D. Robb In Death Mystery
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