"Dizzy," she murmured. "I was so dizzy, and I couldn't see very well. Have to lie down, feel so strange. I hear him, hear him talking to me, but I don't understand. I can't move, can't open my eyes. I can't think."

"Can you remember anything he said then? Anything at all?"

"I was beautiful. He knew how to make me more beautiful. Something cool on my leg, tickling my thigh, and he's talking to me. He loves me, only me. True love, he wants me to be his true love. I wasn't the one, but I could be. The others don't matter. Only me. He keeps talking, but I can't answer. All the other loves are dead because they weren't true. Not pure, not innocent. No!" Abruptly she ripped her hand out of Eve's and tried to roll aside.

"It's all right. You're safe. I know he hurt you, Piper. I know how much it hurt you, and you were so afraid. But you don't have to be afraid now." Firmly now, Eve took her hand. "Look at me, talk to me. I won't let him hurt you again."

"He tied me up." Tears streamed down her face now. "He tied me up on the bed. He took my clothes. I begged him not to. He was my friend. He dressed up. Horrible. There was a camera and he posed and smiled and told me I'd been a bad girl. His eyes, something was wrong with his eyes. I was screaming, but no one could hear me. Where's Rudy?"

"I'm here." He choked out the words, pressed his lips to her brow, her temple. "I'm here."

"He did things to me. He raped me, and it hurt so much. He said I was a whore. Most women were whores, actresses who pretended to be different but were just whores. And most men just used them then left them. I was a whore and he could do whatever he wanted. And he did, he kept hurting me. Rudy, I kept calling for you to make him stop. Make him stop!"

"Rudy came," Eve told her. "Rudy came and made him stop."

"Rudy came?"

"Yes, he heard you and he came and he took care of you."

"He stopped. Yes, he stopped." She closed her eyes again. "There was shouting and noise and someone's crying, very hard. Crying for his mother. I don't remember any more."

"Okay. You did fine."

"You're not going to let him come back?" Her fingers tightened on Eve's. "You won't let him find me?"

"No, I won't let him come back."

"He put stuff on me," Piper remembered. "He sprayed something all over me." She bit her lip. "Into me. His body, it's been waxed. It's hairless. He has a tattoo on his hip."

That was new, Eve mused. He'd had no tattoo in the videos she'd screened. "Do you remember what it looked like?"

"It said, 'My True Love.' He showed it to me, wanted me to look at it. He said it was new, permanent, not a temp. Because he was tired of being temporary to everyone he loved. And I was crying, telling him I'd never hurt him. Then he cried, too. He said he knew, he was sorry. He didn't know what else to do."

"Can you remember anything else?"

"He said I would always love him, because he'd be my last. And that he'd always remember me, because I'd been his friend." The glaze had cleared out of her eyes. Now they just seemed weary. "He was going to kill me. He wasn't Simon anymore, Lieutenant. The man who did this to me, I didn't know him. He became someone else in that room. And I think it frightened him almost as much as it frightened me."

"You don't have to be frightened now. I promise you." Stepping back, Eve looked over at Rudy. "Let's step outside a minute and let the doctor examine your sister."

"I'll be right back." He pressed his lips to Piper's knuckles. "I'm just outside the door. I don't want to leave her," he said to Eve as soon as the door closed behind them.

"She's going to need to talk to someone."

"She's talked enough. She told you everything, for God's sake – "

"She'll need counseling," Eve interrupted. "She'll need treatment. Taking her away isn't going to help her cope. I gave her a card a couple of days ago, one of mine with a name and number on the back. Contact Dr. Mira, Rudy. Let her help your sister."

He opened his mouth, then closed it again and seemed to make an effort to level himself. "You were very kind to her in there, Lieutenant. Very gentle. And hearing her describe what happened to her, I understand why you were neither kind nor gentle with me when you believed I was responsible for… what was done to the others. I'm grateful to you."

"You can be grateful when I've taken him down." She rocked back on her heels. "You know him pretty well, right?"

"I thought I did."

"Where would he go? Is there a place, a person?"

"I would have said he'd come to me or Piper. We spent a great deal of time in each other's company, professionally and personally." He closed his eyes. "Which explains how he was able to access the match lists. He wouldn't have been questioned by anyone in the organization. If I had told you that, if I had opened those doors to you freely rather than trying to protect myself and my business, I might have prevented this."

"Open them now. Tell me about him, his mother."

"She self-terminated. I don't know if anyone's aware of that but me." Absently, Rudy pinched the bridge of his nose. "He broke down one night and told me. She was a troubled woman, mentally unstable. He blamed his father. There was a divorce when Simon was a child and his mother never got over it. She was certain that her husband would come back one day."

"Her one true love?"

"Oh God." Now he covered his face. "Yes, yes, I suppose. She was an actress, not a particularly successful one, but Simon thought she was marvelous, stunning. He worshipped her. But he was often distressed by her behavior. She would slide into a depression and there were men. She used men to bolster her moods. He was the most tolerant of men, but in this area, he was very close-minded. She was his mother and had no right to give herself sexually. He only spoke about it to me once, shortly after her death when he was lost in grief. She'd hanged herself. He found her Christmas morning."

"It's a perfect fit." Peabody sat rigidly in the passenger seat as Eve fought through traffic. "He has a mother complex, and he's replacing her, punishing her, loving her, every time he picks out a victim. The two males either represent his father, or his own dominant sexual preferences."

"Thanks for the bulletin," Eve said dryly, then rapped the wheel with the heel of her hand as she was jammed in once again on all sides. "This fucking Christmas shit! No wonder hospitals and mental clinics do booming business in December."

"It's Christmas Eve."

"I know what the hell day it is, goddamn it." She jammed the controls into straight vertical, veered sharply to the left, and zipped across the roofs of stopped cars.

"Uh, the maxibus."

"I got eyes." Eve skimmed past the bus with a stingy inch to spare.

"That Rapid Cab's going to – " Peabody braced and shut her eyes as the cab, obviously in the same mood as Eve, shot up out of the line of traffic.

Eve swore, swerved, skinned bumpers, and hit the siren full blast. "Set it down, you stupid son of a bitch." She tipped, squeezed over, and dumped her car so that it teetered half on the street, half on the sidewalk in front of a mass of irritated pedestrians.

She slammed out and stalked toward the cab. The driver slammed out and stalked toward her. Peabody could have told him if he wanted to go nose-to-nose with a cop, he'd picked the wrong one.

But, she thought, as she climbed out and elbowed through the crowd, maybe kicking a cabbie's ass would put Eve in a better mood.

"I signaled. I gotta right to a vertical lift same as you. You didn't have your lights or siren going, did ya? The city's gonna pay for that bumper, right? You cops don't own the road. I ain't taking the credit dip on the damage here, sister."