Caucasian.”
“The women, especially, get married really young.”
“Yeah, that’s a pattern I’m seeing,” Peabody agreed. “Early to midtwenties. Another pattern is having a child inside the first year to year and a half. Then professional mother status or some sort of work connected to the group.”
“Follows.” Eve considered as they worked their way down. “Women are made to have and raise kids, serve their husbands as well as the order. The younger they are, the easier they are to indoctrinate—if they didn’t grow up in a Natural Order family—and manipulate.”
“Wow. I’m digging back—and she’s just gorgeous. Being gorgeous and photogenic earned her six and a half to seven million a year the last couple years before she got married. Now, with her PM status and what her husband makes with New Order, they pull in less than a quarter of that. Not chump change, sure, but a lot to give up. Not just the money, but the career, you know?”
“Using your face and body to shill products? Probably not on the approved list for women.” When they reached the garage, Eve gestured to Peabody’s PPC, took a look at the woman she hoped to interview.
“Yeah, she’s got the looks. It’s probably not approved to model half-naked, either.”
With sun-kissed red hair flowing to her waist, Marcia Piper wore nothing but strategically placed black straps as she posed—pouty lips, slumberous eyes, milk-white skin, and the slim, angular body models sold.
“Plug in the address,” Eve told Peabody as they got into the car.
After she had, Peabody continued to read about Marcia’s modeling career. “She traveled all over the world, and talked about moving into acting. Then bang, that’s that.”
Pondering it, she sat back. “I can see giving it all up if you just want to be a mom, or you burned out on all the travel and hype and all that. You fall in love, and everything changes for you. A lot of women choose that—men, too—and focus in on making a home, raising kids.”
“But she fits the pattern. Meet the guy, join the order, get married, give up everything outside that.”
“Yeah. I guess we’ll find out which it is.”
Peabody paused to glance at her signaling ’link.
“McNab. No texts, e- or v-mails, no calls or contacts on Gwen’s ’link after her texts with Merit Caine.”
“That’s looking like a rabbit hole. What about a tracker? Did he find anything?”
“He did, and he’s working on extracting it. The ’link’s chewed up some, and he doesn’t want to damage the tracker. He’s working on it.”
“Good enough,” Eve decided, and drove to Tribeca.
The Pipers had a skinny post-Urban townhouse in a row of skinny post-Urban townhouses. Someone had tried to cheer theirs up by painting the door a bold blue and adding window boxes full of flowers to the windows that flanked it.
At the moment, Eve could see someone in one of those windows spraying something on the glass and vigorously rubbing it.
With only a handful of cars on the block, she found a spot easily and pulled to the curb.
Regularly spaced trees, tall and slim, ran along the sidewalk.
“Not what you’d call a pretty or bustling neighborhood,” Peabody remarked. “But it’s really clean and really quiet.”
“Barely feels like New York.”
Eve saw another woman scrubbing her front stoop as if she would shortly dine on it, and another with a kid in a pack on her back carrying two bulging cloth bags into the house next-door to the Pipers’.
“What do you bet this whole block is members? It’s uniform, cleaner than clean. Nobody’s hanging out or strolling along on a really nice day.”
Peabody looked around and hunched her shoulders. “That would be just creepy.”
“Yeah, it would. I bet it is.”
The woman in the window stopped, stared when Eve and Peabody walked toward the blue door.
Distress ran over her face. Not curiosity, not irritation, clear distress.
And, Eve thought, she looked like the tired ghost of the woman in the black straps.
She wore an oversize striped shirt over black workout pants. She’d hacked off what seemed like a yard of that red hair. What was left she’d dragged back in a tail.
The bones were still there, Eve noted, that foundation of beauty, but rather than luminous, the skin looked pallid; instead of bold, the eyes carried shadows.
Rather than knock, since Marcia clearly saw her, Eve just held up her badge.
She saw fear first, then Marcia rushed from the window. The door, after several locks disengaged, burst open.
“What is it? What’s wrong? Did Larry have an accident?”
“No, Ms. Piper. I’m sure