The In Death Collection 06-10 (91 page)

How many times had she heard the door open and prayed to a God she didn’t understand to help
her. To spare her. To save her.

“I don’t know if this is the room. There were so many rooms. But it was one like it.
It’s not so different from the last room, in Dallas. Where I killed him. But I was younger here. That’s all I know for
sure. I get a faded image of myself in my head. And of him. His hands around my throat.”

Absently, she reached up, soothed the memory of the ache. “Over my mouth. The shock of him
pushing himself inside me. Not knowing, not knowing at first, what that meant. Except pain. Then you know what it means. You know
you can’t stop it. And as much as it hurts when he beats you, you hope when you hear the door open that’s all
he’ll do. Sometimes it is.”

Eyes closed now, she rested her brow on the cracked glass. “I thought maybe I’d remember
something from before. Before it all started. I had to come from somewhere. Some woman had to carry me inside her the way
Karen’s carrying her goddamn miracle. For God’s sake, how could she leave me with him?”

He turned her, wrapped his arms around her, drew her in. “She might not have had a
choice.”

Eve swallowed back the grief and the rage, and finally the questions. “You always have a
choice.” She stepped back, but kept her hands on his shoulders. “None of this matters now. Let’s go
home.”

There wasn’t any point in pretending to unwind. Nor was there any point in thinking about what she
had to face the next day. Work was the answer. Before she could tell Roarke her intentions, he was making arrangements to have a
meal sent up to his private office.

“It makes more sense to use that equipment,” he said simply. “It’s faster,
more efficient, and more thoroughly cloaked.” He arched a brow. “That’s what you want, isn’t
it?”

“Yeah. I want to tag Feeney first,” she began as they started upstairs. “Fill him in on
my conversation with McRae.”

“I’ll input the disc he gave you while you’re doing that, do a quick
cross-reference.”

“You’re almost as good as Peabody.”

He stopped at the door, grabbed her up in a steaming kiss. “You can’t get that from
Peabody.”

“I could if I wanted.” But it made her grin as he uncoded the locks. “But I like you
better for sex.”

“I’m relieved to hear it. Use the minilink. It’s fully jammed and
untraceable.”

“What’s one more com-tech violation?” she muttered.

“That’s what I always say.” He sat behind the console, slid into the U, and got to
work.

“Feeney, Dallas. I’m back from Chicago.”

“I was just about to tag you. We got a hit on the lapel pin.”

“When?”

“Just came in. Gold caduceus purchased less than one hour ago at Tiffany’s, charged to the
account of Dr. Tia Wo. I’m picking Peabody up for a little overtime. We’re going to go have a chat with the
doctor.”

“Good. Great.” Everything inside her yearned to be there at the sticking point. “You
track Vanderhaven?”

“He’s skipping around Europe. He’s not landing. You ask me, he’s
running.”

“He can’t run forever. I’m about to run some data I got from a source in Chicago.
I’ll see what else we can find on her. Anything looks like weight, I’ll pass it through Peabody’s
personal.”

“We’ll fill you in when we’re done. I’ve got to get moving
here.”

“Good luck.”

He was already gone. She stared for a moment at the black screen, then shoved away from the console.
“Goddamn it.”

She hissed, balled her fists, then snarled when the AutoChef beeped to signal meal delivery.
“It’s a pisser all right,” Roarke murmured.

“It’s stupid. The point is to close the case, not to be the one to snap the locks on
it.”

“The hell it isn’t.”

She looked at him, shrugged violently, then strode across the room to get the food. “Well,
I’ve just got to get over it.” She grabbed a plate, dropped it noisily on a table. “I
will
get over it. When
this is done, I might just let you pay me a maxibus load of money to refine your security. The hell with them.”

He left the computer doing its scan and rose to pour wine. “Mmm-hmm,” was his only
comment.

“Why the hell should I bust my ass the way I do? Work
with equipment
that’s not fit for the recycling heap, play politics, take orders, log in eighteen-hour days, to have them spit in my
face.”

“It’s a puzzle all right. Have some wine.”

“Yeah.” She took the glass, gulped down a healthy swallow of six-hundred-dollar-a-bottle
wine like tap water, and continued to prowl. “I don’t need their stinking regulations and procedures. Why the hell
should I spend my life walking through blood and shit? Fuck all of them. Is there any more of this?” she demanded, gesturing
with her empty glass.

If she meant to get drunk, he decided, he could hardly blame her. But she’d blame herself.
“Why don’t we have a little food to go with it?”

“I’m not hungry.” She spun around. The gleam that came into her eyes was a flash,
dangerous and dark. She was on him in one leap, fast and rough, with her hands dragging at his hair and her mouth brutal.

“That seems hungry enough to me.” He murmured it, his hands skimming down her to
soothe. “We’ll eat later.” So saying, he jabbed a mechanism and had the bed sliding out of the wall seconds
before they fell onto it.

“No, not that way.” She strained, bucking under him as his mouth shifted to her throat to
nibble. She reared up, sank her teeth into his shoulder, tore at his shirt. “This way.”

The hot stream of lust flooded through him, clawed at his throat and loins. In one rough move, he caged her
wrists in his hand and yanked her arms over her head.

Even as she struggled for freedom, he crushed his mouth to hers, devouring, taking greedy swallows of her
ragged breaths until they turned to moans.

“Let go of my hands.”

“You want to use, but you’ll take what I give you now.” He leaned back, his eyes
wildly blue and burning into hers. “And you won’t think of anything but what I’m doing to you.” With
his free hand, he opened the buttons of her shirt, one at a time, letting his fingertip graze flesh as he moved from one to the next, as he
exposed her. “If
you’re afraid, tell me to stop.” His hand cupped her breast, covered,
molded. Possessed.

“I’m not afraid of you.” But she trembled, nonetheless, her breath catching as he
circled his thumb, light, whisper light, over her nipple until it seemed every nerve in her body was centered just there. “I want to
touch you.”

“You need to be pleasured.” He dipped his head, licked delicately at her nipple.
“You need to go where I can take you. I want you naked.” He flipped open the button of her jeans, slid his hand down,
scraped his nails lightly over her so that she arched against him helplessly. Quivered. “I want you writhing.” He lowered
his head, took the sensitized point of her breast gently in his teeth, bit down with an exquisite control that sent her heart hammering
against that marvelous mouth. “And later. . . screaming,” he said and sent her stumbling over the edge
with teeth and fingers.

Flames burst in her body, seared her mind clean as glass. There was nothing but the feel of his hands and
mouth on her, the violent glory of being driven slowly, thoroughly, then brutally to peak again and again while her trapped hands flexed
helplessly, then finally went limp.

There was nothing he couldn’t take from her. Nothing she wouldn’t give. The sensation of
his skin sliding and slipping over hers made her breath catch, her heart stutter.

He dazed her, delighted and destroyed her.

He knew there was nothing, nothing more arousing than the surrender of a strong woman, that melted-bone
yielding of a tough body. He took, tender and patient until he felt her float, heard her sigh. Then, ruthless and greedy, so that she
shuddered and moaned. The arrow point of purpose now was to pleasure her. To make that long, limber body pulse and glow. To
feed it as he fed on it.

He dragged her clothes aside, spread her wide. And feasted.

Her breath sobbed out, became his name repeated mindlessly, again and again, as she came in a long, hot
gush. Her hands, free now, clutched and clawed at the
sheets, at his hair, his shoulders. The desire to taste him
was a desperate ache. The blood burned in her head, hammered her heart toward pain.

She reared up, bowed back as his mouth began to travel up her, scraping teeth against her hip, sliding
tongue along her torso. Then she was rolling with him, her fingers digging into damp flesh, scraping viciously along the muscled ridge
of his shoulders, her mouth wild and willful as it found his.

With one hard thrust, he was deep inside her, with each violent plunge, he seemed to go deeper, stroking
into her fast and fierce. Still, the thirst couldn’t be slaked.

Once again her body bowed, forming a bridge with muscles quivering from strain and pleasure. His fingers
dug into her hips, his eyes were slits of wicked blue that never left her face.

Her body gleamed with sweat. Her head thrown back in full abandon as she absorbed each violent stroke.
He watched it build one last time, felt the power of it swarming into her, into him, that surge of outrageous energy, the one shivering
stab of fear that came when control was about to snap.

“Scream.” He panted it out with the madness of her swallowing him whole. “Scream
now.”

And when she did, he went blind and emptied himself into her.

He’d bruised her. He could see the marks of his own fingers on her skin as she lay facedown on the
rumpled bed. Her skin had a surprising delicacy she was never aware of and that he forgot at times. There was such toughness under
it.

When he started to draw the sheet over her, she stirred.

“No, I’m not sleeping.”

“Why don’t you?”

She shifted, balled the pillow under her head. “I did want to use you.”

He sat beside her, sighed heavily. “Now I feel so cheap.”

She turned her head to look at him, nearly managed a smile. “I guess it’s okay, since you got
off on it.”

“You’re such a romantic, Eve.” He gave her a playful swat on the butt and rose.
“Do you want to eat in bed or while you work?”

He glanced back from the AutoChef, intending on heating up their meal. Seeing her studying him with
narrowed eyes, he lifted a brow. “Again?”

“I don’t think about sex every time I look at you.” She scooped back her hair and
wondered idly if she had any clothes left that could still be worn. “Even if you are naked and built and just finished fucking my
brains out. Where are my pants?”

“I have no idea. Then what were you thinking?”

“About sex,” she said easily, and, finding her jeans inside out and tangled, tried to unknot
them. “Philosophically.”

“Really.” He left the plates warming and came back to search out his own trousers, making
do with only them as she’d already confiscated his shirt. “And what is your philosophical opinion of
sex?”

“It really works.” She hitched on her jeans. “Let’s eat.”

She plowed her way through a rare steak and delicate new potatoes while she studied the data on-screen.
“The first thing we have are connections. Cagney and Friend in the same class at Harvard Medical. Vanderhaven and Friend
consulting at the center in London sixteen years ago, at the Paris center four years ago.” She chewed, swallowed, cut more
beef. “Wo and Friend serving on the same board and working the same surgical floor at Nordick in ’55, then her
continuing to be affiliated with that clinic to the present. Waverly and Friend both officers of the AMA. And Friend regularly
consulting at the Drake where Waverly is attached, and has been attached for nearly a decade.”

“And,” Roarke continued, topping off their wine-glasses, “you can follow the pattern
deeper and connect
the dots. Every one of them meshes in some manner with another. Links to links. I
imagine you can expand and find the same incestual type of relationship in the European centers.”

“I’m going to have McNab do the match, but yeah, we’ll find other names.”
The wine was cool and dry and perfect for her mood. “Now, we have Tia Wo, who does regular consults at Nordick. McRae
was checking public transpo to see if she’d traveled to Chicago on or around the date of his murder. He didn’t find
anything but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there.”

“I’m ahead of you,” Roarke told her and ordered up new data. “No records
of private or public transportation tickets in her name, but that wouldn’t include the mass shuttle that goes back and forth
hourly between the two cities. You just need credit tokens. I have her schedule at Drake showing she had rounds on the afternoon of
that date. Should have been finished by four o’clock. I’m pulling up her office log now.”

“I won’t be able to use it. I mean, Feeney won’t be able to use that data.
He’ll need a warrant.”

“I don’t. Her security’s rather pathetic,” Roarke added as he finessed
controls. “A five-year-old hacker with a toy scanner could break this. On-screen,” he ordered.

“Okay, rounds until four, office consult four-thirty. Logged out at five, and has a six o’clock
dinner with Waverly and Cagney. Feeney can check to see if she kept that appointment, but even if she did, it would give her time. She
didn’t have anything the next day until eight-thirty
A
.
M
.,
and that’s a lab consult with Bradley Young. What do we know about him?”

“What would you like to know? Computer, all available data on Young, Dr. Bradley.”

Eve pushed away from her plate and rose while the computer worked. “Dinner with Cagney and
Waverly. Cagney put pressure on Mira to shuffle the case back or drop it. Waverly just struck me wrong. There’s more than
one person involved in this deal. Could be the three of them. They have a dinner meeting, discuss the when and
how. One or all of them head over to Chicago, do the job, come back. Then Wo transports the sample to Young
in the lab.”

“It’s as good a theory as any. What you need is to find the buried records. We’ll
work on that.”

“Vanderhaven rabbits to Europe rather than face a routine interview. So. . . how many
of them?” Eve murmured. “And when did it start? Why did it start? What’s the motive? That’s the
hang-up here. What’s the point? One rogue doctor who’d gone over the edge would be one thing. That’s not
what we’ve got. We’ve got a team, a group, and that group has ties to East Washington, maybe to the NYPSD.
Weasels, anyway, in my department, maybe others. In health clinics. Somebody passing data. I need the why to find the
who.”

“Organs, human. No real money in them today. If not for profit,” Roarke mused,
“then for power.”

“What kind of power can you get from stealing flawed organs out of street people?”

“A power trip,” he said with a shrug. “I can, therefore I do. But if not for power,
then for glory.”

“Glory? Where’s the glory?” Impatient, she began to prowl again.
“They’re useless. Diseased, dying, defective. Where’s the glory factor?” Before he could speak, she
held up a hand, eyes going to slits in concentration. “Wait, wait. What if they’re not useless. If someone’s
figured out something that can be done with them.”

“Or to them,” Roarke suggested.

“To them.” She turned back to him. “Every bit of data I’ve scanned says
that all research points to the impracticality or impossibility of reconstruction or repair of seriously damaged organs. Artificial are
cheap, efficient, and outlast the body. The major facilities we’re dealing with haven’t funded research in that area in
years. Since Friend developed his implants.”