In Death 25 - Creation in Death

in the center of a fresh board.
    “We’re not losing her. As of now we’re round the clock for the duration. As of now, she’s the only victim in this city. As of now, she is the single most important person in our lives. Officer Newkirk?”
    “Sir.”
    “You and the officers you’ve been working with will take this first twelve-hour shift. You’ll be relieved by officers I’ve assigned at…” She checked her wrist unit. “Nineteen hundred. Captain Feeney, I’ll use your recommendation for another pair of e-men to take the second shift. Field detectives, I’ll have your relief lined up shortly.”
    “Lieutenant.” Trueheart cleared his throat, and Eve could see him fighting the urge to raise his hand. “Detective Baxter and I have worked out a crib rotation. I mean to say we discussed same on the way back from notifying next of kin. With your permission, we’d prefer not to be relieved, but to handle the twenty-four-hour cycle ourselves.”
    “You need more men,” Baxter added, “you get more men. But we don’t go off the clock. How about you, Sick Bastard?” He used Jenkinson’s nickname.
    “We’ll sleep when we get him.”
    “All right,” Eve agreed. “We’ll try it that way. I’ve done a global search for mutilations, murders, and missings meeting the targets’ descriptions. We concluded in the first investigation that it was likely the killer had killed before, practiced before. I widened the search,” she told Feeney, “went global and back five years, and netted thousands of results.”
    She held up the disc copy of the run, tossed it to Feeney. “We need to whittle it down, refine it. And we need to find one or more that could be his—and find his mistakes.
    “Item second,” she continued, and worked through her list.
     
    A s Eve briefed her team, listened to their reports and coordinated the duties, Ariel Greenfeld came awake. She’d surfaced twice before, barely registering her surroundings before he’d come in. Small room, glass walls, medical equipment? Was she in the hospital?
    She struggled to see him clearly, but everything was so blurry. As if her eyes, and her mind, had been smeared with oil. She thought she heard music, high trilling voices. Angels? Was she dead?
    Then she’d gone under again, sliding down and down to nothing.
    This time when she awoke, the room was larger. It seemed larger to her. The lights were very bright, almost painful to her eyes. She felt weak and queasy, as though she’d been sick a very long time, and again thought, “Hospital.”
    Had she been in an accident? She couldn’t remember, and as she lay still to take stock, felt no pain. She ordered herself to think back, to think back to the last thing she could remember.
    “Wedding cakes,” she murmured.
    Mr. Gaines. Mr. Gaines’s granddaughter’s wedding. She had a chance for the job, a good job, designing and baking the cake, standing as dessert chef for the reception.
    Mr. Gaines’s house—big, beautiful old house, pretty parlor with a fireplace. Warm and cozy. Yes! She remembered. He’d picked her up, driven her to his house for a meeting with his granddaughter. And then…
    It wanted to fade on her, but she pushed the fog away. When it cleared, her heart began to hammer. Tea and cookies. The tea, something in the tea. Something in his eyes when she’d tried to stand.
    Not the hospital. God, oh God no, she wasn’t in the hospital. He’d drugged her tea, and he’d taken her somewhere. She had to get away, had to get away now.
    She tried to sit up, but her arms, her legs were pinned. Panicked, sucking back a scream, she pushed up as far as she could. And felt terror run through her like a river.
    She was naked, tied, hands and feet, to a table. Some sort of metal table with rope restraints that looped through openings and bit into her skin when she strained against them. As her eyes wheeled around the room she saw monitors, screens, cameras, and tables holding metal trays.
    There were sharp things on the trays. Sharp, terrifying things.
    As her body began to shake, her mind wanted to deny, to reject. Tears leaked when she twisted and writhed in a desperate attempt to free herself.
    The woman in the park. Another woman missing. She’d seen the media reports. Horrible, that’s what she’d thought. Isn’t that horrible. But then she’d gone off to work without another thought. It didn’t have anything to do with her. Just another horrible thing that happened to