J. Robb: New York to Dallas

And she could see them still, every one.

“The remaining four have never been found, nor have their bodies been recovered. Even their identities are unknown as he often preyed on runaways.

“He is a highly intelligent and organized sociopath, a predatory pedophile, a narcissist with the ability to assume numerous personas. He uses his mother-substitutes for support, cover, for ego, then eliminates them. Nancy Draper’s body was recovered from the Hudson River two days after his capture. She’d been dead for three days. It’s likely McQueen was preparing to move on, either out of New York or simply to a new partner.”

She favored the new-partner theory, always had.

“He confessed to nothing, even after intense interrogation. He was convicted on multiple counts of kidnapping, forced imprisonment, rape, battery, and was sentenced to consecutive life sentences without possibility of parole on-planet, at Rikers, where the reports state he was a model prisoner.”

She heard one of her men give a sound of disgust and derision, and since she felt the same, made no comment.

“Right up until yesterday when he slit the throat of a medical and escaped. Since that time he returned to his former apartment, bound the couple living there, threatened them, and after forcing the male vic to leave to find me, beat and raped the female, leaving her with the heart tattoo numbered twenty-seven.

“He left them alive because he wanted them to deliver messages. He’s back, and he intends to pick up where he left off. This isn’t homicide,” she added. “It’s not officially our investigation.”

She saw Baxter straighten at his desk. “LT—”

“But,” she continued in the same tone, “when a fuck like McQueen sends me a message, I’m going to pay attention. I expect every one of you to do the same. Read his file. Take his picture. Whatever you’re working on, whoever you’re talking to—a wit, a weasel, a vic, a suspect, another cop, the guy selling you a soy dog from the corner glidecart, you show it. Keep your eyes and ears open. He’s already hunting for number twenty-eight.”

She headed to her office—she needed a minute—and only closed her eyes briefly when she heard Peabody’s footfalls behind her.

“I have to write up the report, Peabody, and touch base with the commander. Read the file.”

“I’ve read the file. I studied the case, in depth, when I was at the Academy. You were barely out of the Academy yourself when you found him. Still in uniform. It was your first major collar. You—”

“I was there, Peabody. I remember the details.”

Peabody’s dark eyes stayed steady, her square face sober. “You know who he is, what he is, how he is. So you know he broke pattern to send you a message. You cost him twelve years, Dallas. He’s going to come after you.”

“Maybe, but I’m not his type. I went through puberty a long time ago. I’m not naive, stupid, or defenseless. It’s a lot more likely he’ll consider it a competition—he needs to beat me. And there’s a city full of young girls for him to pluck from to make me pay for those dozen years.”

Tired, she sat. “He doesn’t want me dead, Peabody, at least not right off. He wants to show me he’s smarter than I am. He wants to humiliate me, at least for a while. That’s how he’d see this, a humiliation for me when he starts his new collection.”

“He’d have studied you. He thinks he knows you, but he doesn’t.”

“He will, before it’s over. Look, we’re getting tight on time. Go change into your uniform.”

“We can postpone the ceremony, start working the case.”

Though having a medal pinned on her chest was the last thing Eve wanted with Tray Schuster’s grieving face and Julie Kopeski’s shockglazed eyes in her head, she shook her head.

“We’re not postponing anything, and it’s not our case.” But she intended to make a hard pitch for it. “Now get out of my hair. I have to change, too. You’re not the only one getting a medal today.”

“I know it’s not your first. Is it still a big to you?”

“This one is. This one’s a big. Now go away.”

Alone, she sat a moment. Peabody was right, she thought, McQueen didn’t know her. She wasn’t humiliated. She was sick—in the heart and the belly, in the mind. And thank God, she realized, she was working her way toward pissed.

She’d work better pissed.

In the locker room with its familiar perfume of sweat and soap and someone’s cheap aftershave, Eve tied on the hard black uniform shoes. She hated them—always had—but regulation was regulation. She flexed her toes a moment, then pushed off the bench, reached for her uniform cap. Turning to the mirror, she fixed it squarely on her head.

She could see herself as she’d been a dozen years before, green as spring, with a shine on her shield and on those damned hard black shoes.

A cop, then and now, without any question, any hesitation over what she was meant to be. Had to be. She’d thought she’d known, but she hadn’t known, really hadn’t begun to know what she would see and do, what she would learn and come to accept. What she would live through and live with.

A lot of corners turned, she thought, and one sharp, jagged corner had been turned the moment she’d stepped into apartment 303 at 258 Murray one sweltering day in late September barely six weeks after she’d graduated from the Academy.

She remembered the fear, the coppery smear of it in her throat, and she remembered the horror like a red haze.

Would she do anything differently now, now that she did know, now that she was no longer green? She couldn’t say, she decided, and wondered why she’d ask herself the question.

She’d done the job. That was all any cop could do.

She heard the outer door open, stepped away from the mirror, shut her locker. And when she turned, there he was.

She’d told him not to change his schedule, but then Roarke most often did what suited him. Seeing him settled her, brushed away the question she couldn’t answer, dimmed the light on the past she wished she could will away.

He smiled at her—beautiful, just fucking beautiful in his slick business suit, the black mane of his hair gleaming nearly to his shoulders.

She knew every plane and angle of that amazing face, every line of the long, rangy body. And still, there were times just looking at him stole her breath as nimbly as the thief he’d once been.

“I love a woman in uniform.” Ireland wove through his voice like a shimmer of silver.

“The shoes suck. I told you that you didn’t have to come. It’s just a formality.”

“It’s so much more, Lieutenant, and I wouldn’t miss it for worlds. When I think of all the years I spent dodging cops, and never once considered how bloody sexy a woman could be in dress blues. Or maybe it’s just my woman. My cop.”

He stepped forward, brushing his thumb over the shallow dent in her chin as he lifted her face. He kissed her, very lightly, and his stunning blue eyes searched hers. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s just work.” He saw, she knew, what others didn’t. “Something came up.”

“You’ve caught a case?”

“Not exactly. I don’t have time to get into it right now. But I’m glad you came. It won’t take long. You’ll only have to put off buying a couple third-world countries and listen to the mayor make a boring speech.”

“Well worth the price.” He kept his hand on her face a moment. “You’ll tell me later then.”

“Yes.” She would. She could. He was another corner turned, the biggest and the best. She’d met him at another ceremony, one for the dead, she the primary investigator on a murder, he a suspect with a shady past, a dubious present. A man with the face of a fallen angel and more money and power than the devil himself.