Delusion in Death

she sent a quick text as soon as she’d pulled into her spot at Central’s garage.
    Can’t talk, can’t explain. Just stay home until I contact you .
    Then she thought of her city, the millions inside it. Going into bars, restaurants, shops, museums, theaters. Using the subways, the buses, the trains.
    No way to protect them all, and there never had been. But unless one of the bodies in Morris’s house had caused more than eighty deaths, more people would die.
    Anywhere. Anytime.

3
    She went straight up to her office, ignoring everything else—and did what she rarely did. She shut the door.
    Inside the small space with its single skinny window, she dropped down at her desk. And ignored her flashing message light on her desk ’link.
    For the next fifteen minutes, if she could manage it, she wanted to concentrate on putting everything she knew, had seen, had confirmed, every detail, every conversation, every speculation into words.
    Narrowing her focus, she worked. She backtracked, changed angles, rechecked timing. She scanned a text from Peabody—her partner was on her way.
    No time to dump grunt work off, so she printed out stills from her record of the crime scene, of individual victims. She checked her incomings only to add to her list of names: victims and survivors.

    Notification of next of kin, she thought briefly, would be a nightmare. One, due to the number, she’d have to share.
    She didn’t glance up at the knock on the door, but started to snap out when it opened. Swallowed the harsh words as Roarke stepped in.
    He looked as tense and pissed off as she felt.
    “Word was you were back,” he said briefly. “I need some bloody coffee, and not that slop they have up in EDD.” He went straight to her AutoChef and programmed two cups as she didn’t have one on her desk.
    He knew she stocked the blend he supplied her with. And had wooed her with.
    “You’re busy, I know.” He set her cup down by her computer.
    “We all are.”
    “We’re not going to be able to tell you much more than you already know.” He glanced down at the stills she’d started to organize, sighed once. “Confirming the time it began, how long it lasted, and the fact all of it was concentrated inside the place. You hear them screaming,” he said quietly. “You hear a lot of them screaming.”
    “I could tell you you don’t have to do this, any of this.”
    “You could.”
    “I won’t.”
    “It’d be better that way. The fact I own the place is a small part of it. Too small to matter.”
    “I don’t know that yet. It may be you were the target, some kind of revenge or grievance.”
    He passed an absent hand over her hair. “You don’t think that. If it were, why not select a place where I might be? Some restaurant where I’m holding a meeting, or even the lobby area of my head-quarters?”He walked to the window, stared out at the busy world of New York. “It’s not me. It’s nothing to do with me, really.”
    “Odds are slim, but I can’t discount it yet. I can’t discount any single one of the vics was the reason. Or that none of them were. Not that much time’s passed. Someone, or some group, may take credit for it yet. Send us a message, or more likely send one to the media.”
    “You hope for that.” He turned back to her. “Once credit’s taken, you’ll have a line to tug, a direction.”
    “Yeah. Even better will be if we find some screwed-up suicide note on one of the vics, or at their residence, their work.”
    He knew her face, her tones, her inflections. “But you don’t think that either.”
    “I can’t discount it, yet. It would be the best answer.”
    “And you and I, cynics as we are, don’t believe in answers handed to us on a platter.”
    She could say to him what she’d say to few. “It’s not done. I felt it as soon as I understood what happened in that place. Maybe before when I talked to a couple of the survivors. Those who lived through this will carry it with them every day. It’s pretty fucking likely each of them killed someone they know, someone they liked. Maybe someone they loved. If and when they fully understand that, how do they cope?”
    The cruelty here, she thought, was so bright, so ugly.
    “Killing because you have to, to protect a life, to save your own or others? It’s hard enough to live with that. We have to start notifications after the briefing. A lot of families will be grieving by morning. So, I think, for whoever’s responsible,