"Ah, Brian's down, and appears to have taken a table and lamp with him. Passed out flat on his face, poor sod. I'd best go try to haul his ass up and into bed. I'll ring you up tomorrow. See that you take care of my cop. I can't live without her."
"Take care of my drunk Irishman. I can't live without him either."
He blinked those blurry eyes in confusion. "What, Brian?"
"No, you idiot. You."
"Oh." He grinned at her again, so foolishly her throat burned. "That's good then. Makes us even. 'Night now."
"Good night." She stared at the blank screen, wishing she could just reach through it and haul him back to where he belonged.
The computer was just detailing her matches when Peabody and McNab strolled in. "Summerset's fine," Peabody told her. "He gets the skin cast off tomorrow and can start walking for short periods."
"Picture me doing handsprings. Matthew Brady, Ansel Adams, Jimmy Olsen, Luis Javert. Who are these guys?"
"Jimmy Olsen, cub reporter, theDaily Planet " McNab supplied.
"You know him?"
"Superman, Dallas. You've got to get more exposure to pop culture. Comics, graphic novels, vids, games, toys. See, Superman's this superhero from the planet Krypton who's sent to Earth as a baby, and-"
"Just the highlights, McNab."
"He disguises himself as mild-mannered reporter Clark Kent and comes to Metropolis to work at theDaily Planet, a newspaper. Jimmy Olsen's one of the characters, a young reporter and photographer."
"Photographer, check. And the other two?"
McNab shrugged his bony shoulders. "Got me."
"Ansel Adams was a photographer," Peabody supplied. "My father's got some of his prints. Nature stuff, powerful."
"And Matthew Brady." She went to the computer for that one. "Another photographer. Three for three. No other matches in family names, street address. And behind door number two?"
Her eyes went flat and hard. "We've got a winner. Not Luis but Henri Javert, photographer, primarily known for his portraits of the dead. Came to popularity early this century in Paris. Though Shadow Imagery, as this art form was termed, went quickly out of fashion, his work is considered the best of the style. Examples of his work can be viewed at the Louvre in Paris, the Image Museum in London, and the International Center of Photography in New York.
"McNab, get me everything you can on Henri Javert."
"On it."
"Peabody, there's a couple dozen matches here for Luis. Trim it down. Children," she said with a fierce grin, "we've got his scent."
She worked until she thought her eyes would bleed, worked long after she'd sent Peabody and McNab off to do whatever they were going to do on the gel bed.
When her thoughts began to blur as well as her vision, she crawled into the sleep chair for a few hours down. She didn't want another night alone in the big bed.
And still the dreams found her, and tugged her with icy hands from exhaustion to nightmare.
The room was familiar. Terrifyingly so. That hideous room in Dallas where the air was brutally cold and the light was washed with dirty red. She knew it was a dream and fought to will herself out of it. But she could already smell the blood-on her hands, on the knife clutched in them, splattered on the floor, seeping out of him.
She could smell his death, and the vision of it-of what she'd done, what she'd become to save herself-was etched on her mind.
Her arm screamed with pain. The child's arm in the dream, the woman's who was trapped in it. It was burning hot where he'd snapped the bone, burning cold up to the shoulder, down to the fingertips that dripped with red.
She would wash it off. That's what she had done then, that's what she would do now. Wash off the blood, wash away the death in the cold water.
She moved slowly, like an old woman, wincing at the sting between her legs, blocking out the reason for it.
It smelled metallic-the water, the blood-how could she know? She was only eight.
He'd beaten her again. He'd come home, not quite drunk enough to leave her be. So he'd beaten her again, raped her again, broken her again. But this time she'd stopped him.
The knife had stopped him.
She could go now, away from the cold, away from this room, away from him.
"You never get away, and you know it."
She looked up. There was a mirror over the sink. She could see her face in it-thin, white, eyes dark with shock and pain-and the face behind it.
So beautiful, with those magic blue eyes, the silky black hair, that full mouth. Like a picture in a book.
Roarke. She knew him. She loved him. He'd come with her to Dallas, and now he'd take her away. When she turned to him she wasn't a child anymore, but a woman. And still, the man who'd been her father lay bloody between them.
"I don't want to stay here. I need to go home now. I'm so glad you're here to take me home."
"You've done Richie in, haven't you?"
"He hurt me. He wouldn't stop hurting me."
"Well now, a father has to hurt the child now and again to teach them some respect." He crouched, and taking a grip on her father's hair, lifted the head to examine it. "I knew him, you know. Wheeled some deals. We're two of a kind."
"No, you're nothing like him. You never met him."
Those blue eyes sparked with something that made her stomach clutch like a fist. "I don't like being called a liar by a woman."
"Roarke-"
He picked up the knife, rose slowly. "You've got the wrong Roarke. I'm Patrick Roarke." Smiling, smiling, he turned the knife in his hand as he stepped toward her. "And I think it's time you learned a little respect for fatherhood."
She woke with the scream trapped in her throat, and sweat pouring off her like blood.
By the time her team arrived, she was steady. Bad dreams, worries about Roarke, even the conversation she knew she needed to have with Summerset were all locked away.
"We're looking for this Luis Javert, listed as Hastings's assistant during the period in January the photographs of Rachel Howard were taken at a wedding. Going off profile, we're going to assume he's between twenty-five and sixty years of age. Highly functional, artistic, intelligent. Odds are he lives alone and owns or has access to imaging equipment. I'm saying owns. These are his tools, his work, his art.
"Feeney, I want you to work Browning on this angle. The name doesn't appear on her list of students sent to Hastings, but he might have changed it. I'm banking that he studied under her, and that she covered Javert in some of the class-work at one time or another. She's tired of looking at me at this point, and maybe a fresh face will jog something loose."
"First time I've been called a fresh face in two decades." Feeney munched on a danish.
"McNab, I want you at Columbia. Work on students, play up the Javert angle. Who's interested in that kind of work."
"Cops are." His mouth was full of scrambled eggs. "Homicide cops are always photographing the dead."
"They don't generally take pictures of them before they're dead."
"How about doctors?" He scooped up bacon. "They take imaging records of patients, right? Then there's the before and after records. Mostly it's to cover their asses in case somebody decides to sue, but-"
"You may not be as stupid as you look." Eve snitched one of his slices of bacon. "Hard to believe, but you may not be. Light. Energy, health, vitality. I was playing with it last night, and got distracted. Maybe our boy's sick. What if he's convinced himself that by absorbing vital life through photography, he can be cured?"
"It's out there."
"Yeah, well, so is he. Peabody and I will follow this up. Baxter and Trueheart stick with the clubs."
"It's a tough job." Baxter drained his coffee. "Hanging out in clubs, watching all the nubile young bodies." He winked at Trueheart. "Right, kid."
Trueheart's blush turned his young, smooth face rosy pink. "There's a lot going on there. The dancing, the music, the bar scene, the data flood."