Dear Lieutenant Dallas,
You don’t know me – yet – but I’ve been following your career for some time, and with admiration and great respect. Up until now, I couldn’t find the courage to contact you, but the tragedy of the Swisher family, and the bravery of young Nixie compelled me. If an orphaned child has the courage to be heard, why can’t I?
You risked your life to bring the Swishers justice, as you have before and will again. You inspire me, and challenge me to work for justice, to take risks, to do what must be done.
It pains me to know how often those you seek to protect and serve give you no thanks, give you no respect. I know, too well, what it’s like to be unappreciated, not respected.
Yet you continue to do what must be done, within the confines of the system. A system, I know as you do, that often fails to mete out just punishment.
I feel I know you, that we share many of the same values and goals, and could be good friends. For now know I’ll continue to give you my admiration, my respect, and my support. The law has boundaries that are too often senseless. My friendship has none.
A humble friend
A little over the top, sure, but not threatening, Eve mused. Not batshit crazy. There’d been a considerable outpouring of sympathy for Nixie Swisher in the media. A kid who’d survived a home invasion that had slaughtered her entire family? Strong story, and it had had some legs, if Eve remembered.
An e-mail like this? She’d have tossed it straight to public relations. But now, she thought – and the computer backed her up – maybe, just maybe, this was first contact.
She’d need to find out if they’d answered it. Maybe the e-mail address had remained valid then – as it was no longer.
She read through the next, the next, seeing the gradual escalation. Still, nothing that would have set off alarms, not individually. And as the e-mail addresses varied, no one – including herself – would have paid much attention.
She’d have paid none, Eve admitted, after the Icove blast hit, fall of ’59, because she’d tossed pretty much everything to public relations.
She glanced up as Roarke came in.
“I think I’ve found her – not who she is or where, but where she started contacting me. The first one – and it’s the first – is up on screen. There were three more in ’59, and there’s been nine this year.
“The searches matched all these on every factor. Same writer, different e-mails, but the same person wrote them.”
“Different e-mails – you’d never have noticed,” he commented.
“I probably didn’t read them, or most of them. Different e-mails,” she repeated, “and until the last three, different signatures. She’s settled on Your True Friend for the last three.”
She needed coffee, and got up to program a pot while Roarke read.
“It’s the same writer. The comp agrees with me, and the probability is ninety-four-point-six.”
“Nixie,” Roarke said. “That seems to have been the launching point.”
“Innocent, defenseless kid, loses her entire family, crawls through her mother’s blood? It got play. And I talked about it some to the media. About her being a survivor, about her courage. I probably mouthed off about getting justice.”
“It’s not mouthing off,” he corrected. “And you’ll annoy me if you try to find some handhold for responsibility here.”
She’d annoy herself, Eve admitted. “I think we should contact Richard and Elizabeth.” Roarke’s friends – hers, too, she supposed – were Nixie’s foster parents. Nixie’s family now. “I don’t think there’s anything to worry about, but I don’t want to be wrong and have done nothing. It wouldn’t hurt for them to be a little more careful.”
“I’ll contact them, because I agree with you. Better safe.”
“I’ve done a search on all the e-mails. No account currently exists. For any of them. We’ll dig there, contact the server, hold their feet to the fire, see if we can get any account information.”
“I can work with McNab for a bit, try to dig out the IP, triangulate. Someone this careful would do some routing, some bouncing, but if we can find a few threads, we might be able to weave a bit of rope.”
“I’ll take anything you can do. She gets more intimate, I guess you could say. Starts calling me Dallas in the third, then shifts to Eve by the sixth.
“No threats, no talk about killing anyone – that would have sent up a flag. It’s more subtle, and in the one where she started calling me Eve, she talked about lawyers – no mention of Bastwick – just talking about lawyers who feather their nest with blood money, who undo, or try to undo, all the work I do, trampling on justice, badgering good cops. Like that. Just a few lines, and again on the imposed limits of the system that hamper my duty.”
“Is there anything about her, any personal details?”
“She’s too careful for much. Somewhere in her head this was always the plan. But she says she knows what it’s like to grow up without family, to have to carve out your own place. To be unappreciated, disrespected. There’s several mentions of being overlooked, not seen, unappreciated. She doesn’t mention the foster system, or use any of the code words foster kids use. But maybe a state school, or some nontraditional upbringing.” Eve blew out a breath. “Or she hated her family and pretends they don’t exist.”
She sat on the desk. “I’m going to admit, right out loud, it’s fucking creepy. She’ll write something about hoping I enjoyed my vacation, and how relaxed I looked, or how mag I looked at the vid premiere – and wasn’t she proud when I took down a killer and closed a case at the same time.
“I should know when someone’s watching me. I haven’t felt it.”
“A lot of the watching may be on screen, on the Internet,” he pointed out. “And if she’s involved in law enforcement, it might be someone you see as a matter of course.”
“See but don’t see. Just like she whines about in her correspondence.”
He shook his head. “You see everything. It’s part of your talent. And I think, when you catch her, you’ll know her. Maybe not her name, but her face.”
“Maybe that’s creepier,” Eve breathed out. “The last contact was right after the Sanctuary case. She had a lot to say – young girls again, I think that’s a trigger. Could be something happened to her when she was a kid. That’s something to dig into. Maybe…”
She rose, circled her board. “The abuse. Maybe she senses it. She’s studied me, read about me, watched, extrapolated for her own means. And maybe she senses some of it because she experienced some of it. Young girls. Maybe.”
She blew out another breath. “Reaching.”
“Maybe not. We knew each other, you and I, didn’t we? On some level.”
“Two lost souls, you said.”
“She’s another, isn’t she? One who’s chosen murder instead of the law, or money, as we did, respectively. Choices we made because we refused to be victims. A choice you made – though I believe you were born a cop – to stand for victims. In her warped way, so is she. Standing for victims, and for you.”
“She’s creating victims. But yeah, I get you. Here they come,” she added as she heard the clomp and prance that announced Peabody and McNab’s arrival.
“They’ll want food.”
“Crap.” Eve started to snarl, then remembered it was barely seven in the morning.
Her partner and the e-geek she loved came in.
“Get what you want out of the kitchen,” she said before either of them could speak. “And make it snappy.”
“Score!” McNab, still holding Peabody’s hand, dragged her along on his dash to the kitchen.
And all but blinded Eve with the blur of the kaleidoscope of stars decking his electric-blue shirt tucked into the screaming green of his cargos.
“I’ll leave you to fill them in while I finish up some work,” Roarke told her. “Then I can give you about an hour.”
“Appreciate it. Who was the sizzly French skirt?”
Roarke looked blank for a moment, then smiled. “You mean Cosette – Cosette Deveroix. Chief cyber engineer, Paris office.”
“What’s a cyber engineer?” she wondered, then held up a hand. “Never mind. I wouldn’t understand anyway, and don’t need to since I’ve got you. And him,” she added, jerking a thumb at McNab as he came out, shoveling in pancakes.
“Howzit going?”
“I’ll tell you both when Peabody gets the hell out here.”
“I meant more like how was Christmas and stuff.”
“Good, and done. Does that shirt run on batteries?”
He grinned around more pancakes, a man with a pretty face, clever green eyes, and a long tail of blond hair, all topping a skinny build. “Body heat. I get revved, they really shine.”
He turned his head, the spiral of silver rings along his earlobe sparkling as Peabody came out. She carried a plate holding a small scoop of scrambled eggs, two strips of bacon, and half a piece of unbuttered toast.
“Sorry, it took me a while to figure out what I wanted versus what I should have, and I compromised. I shouldn’t have the bacon, but… it’s bacon.”
But distracted, Eve continued to stare at Peabody’s feet. Not the pink cowboy boots, but still pink – hard-candy-pink boots that hit about mid-thigh with a thick fluff of snow-white furry stuff that glittered. The inch-wide soles were lime green.