J Robb - Imitation in Death

“Last gasp of summer in New York. What else can you expect?”

“Teach me to stay in London.” She offered her hand. “I’d still love for you and Roarke to come to the play. Just contact me anytime and I’ll arrange for seats.”

“Soon as things cool off for me a bit, we’ll take you up on it.”

She watched the driver get out, open the rear door of the small town limo. And waited until a breathless and sweaty Peabody rushed up the steps.

“Sir. Sorry. Overslept, then the subway… breakdown. Should’ve contacted you, but didn’t realize-”

“Inside, before you fall over with heatstroke.”

“I think I’m a little dehydrated.” Peabody’s face was lobster-red and starting to drip. “Can I have a minute? Splash some water on my face.”

“Go. Christ, next time take a cab!” she called out as she jogged upstairs to get her jacket and what she needed for the day.

She grabbed two bottles of water from her kitchen, and met Peabody coming out of the powder room. Her aide’s color had calmed down, her uniform was straightened, her hair neatly combed and dry again.

“Thanks.” Peabody took the water, and glugged at the bottle to add to the water she’d slurped up in the powder room. “Hate to oversleep. I was up late studying.”

“Didn’t I tell you that you can over-study? You won’t do yourself any good going into the exam burned out.”

“I just gave it a couple hours. Wanted to make up the time I took checking out apartments with McNab. I didn’t realize we had a meet with Pepper Franklin.”

“We didn’t. She stopped by to defend Fortney.” Eve headed out the door and around to the garage. She hadn’t thought to tell one of the droids to have her car brought out in front. Summerset did it without her asking. The fact that it was the sort of detail that slipped her mind, and never slipped his, just annoyed her.

“Well, at least I know I’m not losing my mind,” Peabody managed as she quickened her pace to match Eve’s. “So much going on right now. Jesus, Dallas, we signed a lease. It’s a good space. Got an extra bedroom we can set up as a shared office, and it’s close to Central. It’s in your old building, so Mavis and Leonardo will be neighbors, and that’s mag, and it was really great of Roarke to put us on to it, but…”

“But what?”

“I signed a lease, with McNab. It’s like, huge. We’re going to be moving in together in thirty days.”

Eve coded into the garage, waited for the doors to open. “I thought you were already cohabitating.”

“Yeah, but informally. Real informally. He just hangs at my place most of the time. This is the real deal. I got the jitters.” She pressed a hand to her stomach as she walked to Eve’s police issue. “So I dove into studying as soon as we got back, then I got the jitters from that. Then I couldn’t sleep because of the jitters, so I jumped McNab to sort of remind myself why I’m doing this, and that took a while because, you know, I was pretty jittery-”

“I don’t want to hear that part.”

“Right. Well, I didn’t settle down until pretty late, and was so conked I must’ve deactivated the alarm before I was fully awake. Next thing I knew it was an hour later.”

“If you got up an hour late, why are you only…” She checked her wrist unit. “Fifteen minutes behind?”

“I skipped some of my usual morning stuff. Was okay until the subway breakdown. That threw me off, and now I’ve got the jitters again.”

“You can just forget about jumping me to take your mind off them. Look, Peabody, if you’re not prepped for the exam by now, you’re not going to be.”

“That doesn’t do a lot to calm me down.” She brooded out the window as Eve drove through the gates. “I don’t want to tank. Embarrass myself, you.”

“Shut up, you’re giving me the damn jitters. You’re not going to embarrass anybody. You’re going to do your best, and it’s going to be good enough. Now pull yourself together so I can brief you on Smith before we talk to him again.”

Listening, making her own notes, Peabody shook her head. “None of this stuff is in his official biographical data, or on any of the unofficial fan sites. I don’t get it. Guy’s a total publicity hound, and he likes to go for the heartstrings. So why not play up how he came from an abusive home, overcame it, and believes in the power of love, cha-cha-cha.”

“Cha-cha-cha?” Eve repeated. “I can think of a couple reasons. First, it doesn’t fit his image. Strong, handsome, romantic male of the so-clean-I-squeak variety. Doesn’t mesh with the poverty level, physically abused son of a part-time LC-who’s still tapping him for money.”

“I get that, but you could play that angle and sell discs out the yang.”

“Yang. Does that go with cha-cha-cha?” Eve wondered. “Okay, yeah, it might make some women feel sorry for him, even respect him, and plunk down the price of a disc. But that’s not what he wants.”

“What does he want?” Peabody asked, though she thought she was beginning to connect the dots.

“It’s not money. That’s just a handy byproduct. He wants adulation, hero worship, and fantasy. He boinks young groupies because they’re less likely to be critical, and he plays to older women because they’re more forgiving.”

“And he surrounds himself with female staff because he needs to be taken care of by women, because he wasn’t taken care of by the woman who should have done so when he was a kid.”

“That’s how it shakes for me.” Eve turned a corner and swung around a maxibus that was lumbering its contingent of commuters to their hives and cubes. “The public image doesn’t want to have to overcome anything, but just to be. The man of your dreams isn’t some kid who got knocked around by his mother after she turned a trick. Or I should say, his view of the man of your dreams isn’t. He’s built himself into an image, and he has to stick with it.”

“So, theoretically, the pressure of concealing all that, his resentment, and the cycle of violence could have caused him to snap. And snapping, he killed two parts of the person who abused him. The LC and the mother.”

“Now you’re thinking.”

It was kind of like a sim, Peabody thought. She was a little slow, but she hoped she was picking her way through it. “You said a couple reasons. What’s another?”

“Another is he just wants to bury it, put it away. This isn’t relevant to his life now-that’s what he tells himself. He’s wrong, it’s always part of the whole, but it’s private. It’s one thing he doesn’t want chewed over by a lip-smacking public.”

Peabody slid her gaze toward Eve, but there was nothing to read on her lieutenant’s face. “So he could just be an abuse survivor who’s made a successful life for himself despite all the trauma and the violence.”

“You’re feeling sorry for him.”

“Yeah, maybe. Not enough to spring for a disc,” she added with a chuckle. “But maybe some. He didn’t ask to be hurt, and by the one person who should have been looking out for him most of all. I don’t know what it’s like to have a parent turn on you like that. Mine… well, you’ve met mine. My mom, she can pin your ears back with a look, but she’d never have hurt any of us. And my parents may be nonviolent New Agers, but you can believe they’d have ripped into anybody who tried to hurt us. That’s what I know,” Peabody added. “But it’s not all I know, because I’ve seen the other side. Handling double Ds before I transferred to you. Just being on the streets in uniform. And what I’ve worked on since I’ve been in Homicide.”

“Nothing wipes the All-American family image out of a cop’s head faster than their first couple of domestic disturbances.”