In Death 25 - Creation in Death

mused. “Covert might change that. Someone who was in military ops, or paramilitary at one time. He learned the methods somewhere, and developed the skill to manipulate his data.”
    “Or has the connections or the funds to hire someone to manipulate it,” Roarke reminded her.
    “Yeah, there’s that. So. Why do we torture someone?”
    “For information.”
    “Yeah, at least ostensibly. Why else do you torture? Kicks, sexual deviation, ritual sacrifice.”
    “Experimentation. Another tried and true rationale for inflicting pain.”
    She looked at him. “We eliminate the need or desire for information, and the sexual deviation. No doubt in my mind he gets personal gratification from inflicting pain, but it has to be more. Ritual’s part of it, but this isn’t some sick religious deal or cult. So, experimentation,” she repeated. “Fits. Factor in that he’s very good at it. Torture skills are specialized. He isn’t messy about it, he’s precise. Again, where did he learn?”
    “And you’re back to the Urbans.”
    “It keeps crossing there. Someone taught him, or he studied. Experimented before the experimentation. But not here, not in New York.”
    Circling her board, she studied, considered angles. “We ran searches for others before. I did a Missing Persons run on the victim type. But what if he experimented elsewhere? If he purposefully mutilated the bodies to eliminate the correlation, or disposed of them altogether?”
    “You’re going to do a global search on mutilations and missing persons involving the victim type.”
    “He might not have been as careful. If we find something…he might have left something behind.” She stopped, stared at the sketch of the man she hunted. “Still honing his craft, still finding his way. We did globals, but maybe we didn’t go back far enough.”
    “I’ll set it up. I can do it faster,” he said before she could argue. “Then it’ll take a good long while for any results you can actually work with. I’ll set it up, then we’re getting some sleep.”
    “All right. Okay.”
     
    T he dreams came in blurry spurts, as if she were swimming through fog that tore and re-formed, tore and re-formed. The clock ticked incessantly.
    Over that endless, echoing tick, she heard the sounds of a battle raging. A firefight, she thought. Blasts and bullets and the wild shouts and calls of the men and women who fought.
    She could smell the blood, the smoke, the burning flesh before she could see it. Carnage carried a sickly sweet aroma.
    As vision cleared, focused, she saw the battle was on a stage, and the stage was dressed to depict the city in a strange, stylized form. Buildings, all black and silver, were tipped and tilted above hard white streets that jagged into impossible angles or inexplicable dead ends.
    And the players on stage were dressed in bright, elaborate costumes that flowed through bloody pools and swirled in dirty smoke as they murdered each other.
    She looked down on it all with interest, from her gilded box seat. Below, in a pit where bodies lay twisted, she could see the orchestra madly playing their instruments. Their fingers ran with blood from razor-sharp strings.
    On stage, the shouts and calls were songs, she realized, fierce, violent. Vicious.
    War could never be otherwise.
    “The third act is nearly over.”
    She turned, looked into the face of the killer as he took a huge stopwatch out of the pocket of his formal black.
    “I don’t understand. It’s all death. Who writes these things?”
    “Death, yes. Passion and strength and life. Everything leads to death, doesn’t it? Who would know that better than you?”
    “Murder’s different.”
    “Oh, yes, it’s artful and it’s deliberate. It takes it out of the hands of fate and puts the power into the one who creates death. Who makes a gift of it.”
    “What gift? How is murder a gift?”
    “This…” He gestured to the stage as a woman, brown hair bloody, face and body battered, was borne in on a stretcher. “This is about immortality.”
    “Immortality’s for the dead. Who was she when she was alive?”
    He only smiled. “Time’s up.” He clicked the stopwatch, and the stage went black.
    Eve came rearing up in bed, sucking for air. Caught between the dream and reality, she closed her hands over her ears to muffle the ticking. “Why won’t it stop?”
    “Eve. Eve. It’s your ’link.” Roarke curled his fingers over her wrists, gently tugged her hands down.