ONE
Murder respects no traditions. It ignores sentiment. It takes no holidays.
Because murder was her business, Lieutenant Eve Dallas stood in the predawn freeze of Christmas morning coating the deerskin gloves her husband had given her only hours before with Seal-It.
The call had come in less than an hour before and less than six hours since she’d closed a case that had left her shaky and exhausted. Her first Christmas with Roarke wasn’t getting off to a rousing start.
Then again, it had taken a much nastier turn for Judge Harold Wainger.
His body had been dumped dead center in the ice rink at Rockefeller Center. Face up, so his glazed eyes could stare at the huge celebrational tree that was New York’s symbol of goodwill toward men.
His body was naked and already a deep shade of blue. The thick mane of silver hair that had been his trademark had been roughly chopped off. And though his face was severely battered, she had no trouble recognizing him.
She’d sat in his courtroom dozens of times in her ten years on the force. He had been, she thought, a solid and steady man, with as much understanding of the slippery channels of the law as respect for the heart of it.
She crouched down to get a closer look at the words that had been burned deeply into his chest.
JUDGE NOT, LEST YOU BE JUDGED
She hoped the burns had been inflicted postmortem, but she doubted it.
He had been mercilessly beaten, the fingers of both hands broken. Deep wounds around his wrists and ankles indicated that he’d been bound. But it hadn’t been the beating or the burns that killed him.
The rope used to hang him was still around his neck, digging deep into flesh. Even that wouldn’t have been quick, she decided. It didn’t appear that his neck had been broken, and the burst vessels in his eyes and face signaled slow strangulation.
“He wanted you alive as long as possible,” she murmured. “He wanted you to feel it all.”
Kneeling now, she studied the handwritten note that was flapping gaily in the wind. It had been fixed over the judge’s groin like an obscene loincloth. The list of names had been printed in careful square block letters.
JUDGE HAROLD WAINGER
PROSECUTING ATTORNEY STEPHANIE RING
PUBLIC DEFENDER CARL NEISSAN
JUSTINE POLINSKY
DOCTOR CHARLOTTE MIRA
LIEUTENANT EVE DALLAS
“Saving me for last, Dave?”
She recognized the style: gleefu
l infliction of pain followed by a slow, torturous death. David Palmer enjoyed his work. His experiments, as he’d called them when Eve had finally hunted him down three years before.
By the time she’d gotten him into a cage, he had eight victims to his credit, and with them an extensive file of discs recording his work. Since then he’d been serving the eight life-term sentences that Wainger had given him in a maximum-security ward for mental defectives.
“But you got out, didn’t you, Dave? This is your handiwork. The torture, the humiliations, the burns. Public dumping spot for the body. No copycat here. Bag him,” she ordered and got wearily to her feet.
It didn’t look as though the last days of December 2058 were going to be much of a party.
The minute she was back in her vehicle, Eve ordered the heat on full blast. She stripped off her gloves and rubbed her hands over her face. She would have to go in and file her report, but the first order of business couldn’t wait for her to drive to her home office. Damn if she was going to spend Christmas Day at Cop Central.
She used the in-dash ’link to contact Dispatch and arrange to have each name on the list notified of possible jeopardy. Christmas or not, she was ordering uniformed guards on each one.