by J. D. Robb
The tech pulled out his notebook, tapped keys. “Peabody, Delia.”
“Peabody.” For the first time, Eve smiled a little. “She gets around. Anybody asks for or about him, I want to know about it.”
On the way to Cop Central, Eve contacted Peabody. The uniform’s calm, serious face floated on screen. “Dallas.”
“Yes, Lieutenant.”
“You hauled in Johannsen.”
“Sir. I’m completing my report right now. I can send you a copy.”
“Appreciate it. How did you tag him?”
“I had a porta-ident in my field kit, sir. I ran his prints. The fingers were severely damaged, so I only managed a partial, but the indication was Johannsen. I’d heard he was one of your weasels.”
“Yeah, he was. Good work, Peabody.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Peabody, you interested in assisting the primary in this case?”
Control slipped for an instant, just long enough to show the glint in Peabody’s eyes. “Yes, sir. Are you the primary?”
“He was mine,” Eve said simply. “I’ll clear it. My office, Peabody. One hour.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”
“Dallas,” Eve muttered. “Just Dallas.” But Peabody had already broken transmission.
Eve scowled at the time, snarled at the traffic, and detoured three blocks to a drive-through café. The coffee was slightly less disgusting there than at Cop Central. Fueled with that and with what had probably been intended as a sweet roll, she stowed her vehicle and prepared to report to her commander.
As she rode up in the stifling excuse for an elevator, she could feel her back stiffening. Telling herself it was petty, that it should have been over, didn’t seem to matter. Resentment and hurt left over from a previous case wouldn’t completely fade.
She walked into the administration lobby with its busy consoles, dark walls, and threadbare carpeting. She announced herself at Commander Whitney’s reception station and was asked to wait by the bored voice of an office drone.
She remained where she was rather than wandering over to look out of the window or to while away time with one of the aging magazine discs. The all-news station on screen behind her had been turned to mute and didn’t interest her in any case.
A few weeks before, she had more than her fill of the media. At least, she thought, someone as low on the food chain as Boomer wouldn’t generate much publicity. The death of a weasel didn’t earn rating points.
“Commander Whitney will see you now, Dallas, Lieutenant Eve.”
She was buzzed through the security doors and turned left into Whitney’s office.
“Lieutenant.”
“Commander. Thank you for seeing me.”
“Have a seat.”
“No, thank you. I won’t keep you long. I just identified a John Doe floater at the morgue. He was Carter Johannsen. One of my weasels.”
An imposing man with a hard face and tired eyes, Whitney leaned back in his chair. “Boomer? He used to wire explosives for street thieves. Blew off his right index finger.”
“Left,” Eve corrected. “Sir.”
“Left.” Whitney folded his hands on the desk and studied her. He’d made a mistake with Eve, a mistake in a case that had affected him personally. He understood she had yet to set it aside. He had her obedience and her respect, but the nebulous friendship that could have existed between them was gone.
“I take it this was homicide.”
“I haven’t gotten the post mortem, but it appears the victim was beaten and strangled before entering the river. I’d like to pursue the matter.”
“Were you working with him on any ongoing investigation?”
“Nothing ongoing, no sir. He occasionally fed the Illegals with data. I need to find out who he worked with in that department.”
Whitney nodded. “Your caseload at the moment, Lieutenant?”
“Manageable.”
“Which means you’re overloaded.” He lifted his fingers, curled them down again. “Dallas, people like Johannsen court disaster, and they usually find it. You and I both know the murder rate rises in this kind of heat. I can’t waste one of my top investigators on this kind of case.”
Eve set her jaw. “He was mine. Whatever else he was, Commander, he was mine.”
Loyalty, he mused, was one of the values that made her one of his best. “You can shuffle it to the top for twenty-four hours,” he told her. “Keep it open, in your files, for seventy-two. After that, I’ll have to transfer the case to a junior investigator.”
It was no more than she expected. “I’d like to have Officer Peabody with me on it.”
He stared at her balefully. “You want me to approve an aide for a case like this?”
“I want Peabody,” Eve returned without flinching. “She’s proven herself excellent in the field. She’s aiming for detective. I believe she’ll get it quick with some hands-on training.”
“You can have her for three days. If something more vital comes through, you’re both off.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Dallas,” he began when she turned to leave. He bit down on his pride. “Eve . . . I haven’t had the chance to offer my best wishes, personally, for your upcoming marriage.”
Surprise flickered in her eyes before she controlled it. “Thank you.”
“I hope you’ll be happy.”
“So do I.”
A bit unsettled, she made her way through the maze of Cop Central to her office. She had another favor to call in. Wanting privacy, she closed her door before engaging her tele-link.
“Feeney, Captain Ryan. Electronic Detective Division.”
She was relieved when his rumpled face filled her screen. “You’re in early, Feeney.”
“Shit, didn’t even have time for breakfast.” He spoke mournfully and through a mouthful of Danish. “One of the terminals springs a leak, and nobody can fix it but me.”
“Being indispensable’s tough work. Can you fit in a search for me—unofficial?”
“My favorite kind. Shoot.”
“Somebody whacked Boomer.”
“Sorry to hear it.” He took another bite of Danish. “He was a shit, but he usually came through. When?”
“I’m not sure; he was fished out of the East River early this morning. I know he sometimes fed somebody over in Illegals. Can you find out for me?”
“Linking weasels and their trainers is dicey work, Dallas. You got to be real security conscious about that stuff.”
“Yes or no, Feeney?”
“I can do it, I can do it,” he muttered. “But don’t bring this back on me. Cops hate to have their files searched.”
“Tell me about it. I appreciate it, Feeney. Whoever did him worked him over hard. If he knew something worth killing him over, I don’t think it was one of my ongoings.”
“So maybe it was somebody else’s. I’ll get back to you.”
She leaned back from the blank screen and tried to clear her mind. Into it floated Boomer’s battered face. A pipe or a bat maybe, she mused. But fists, too. She knew what hard, bare knuckles could do to a face. She knew what they felt like.
Her father had had big hands.
It was one of the things she tried to pretend she didn’t remember. But she knew how they’d felt, how the blow would shock even before the brain registered the pain.
What had been worse? The beatings or the rapes? One was so mixed with the other in her mind, in her fears.
That odd angle of Boomer’s arm. Broken, she mused, and dislocated. She had a vague, hideous memory of the brittle sound of a bone snapping, the nausea that went above the agony, the high-pitched whine that substituted for a scream when a hand was clamped over your mouth.
The cold sweat, and the bowel-loosening terror of knowing those fists would come back, and come back until you were dead. Until you wished to God Almighty that you were.
The knock at her door had her jolting, had her swallowing a yelp. Through the glass she saw
Peabody, uniform pressed, shoulders straight.
Eve ran a hand over her mouth to steady herself. It was time to go to work.
chapter three
Boomer’s flop was better than some. The building had once been a low-rent hourly motel that had catered to hookers on a budget before prostitution had been licensed and legalized. It was four stories, and no one had ever bothered to put in an elevator or glide, but it did boast a dingy lobby and the dubious security of a surly-faced droid.
From the smell, the health department had recently ordered insect and rodent extermination.
The droid had a tick in her right eye from a faulty chip, but she focused her good one on Eve’s badge.
“We’re up to code,” she claimed, standing behind cloudy safety glass. “We have no trouble here.”
“Johannsen.” Eve tucked her shield away. “Anyone visit him lately?”
The droid’s dinky eye hitched and rolled. “I’m not programmed to monitor visitors, only to collect rents and maintain order.”
“I can confiscate your memory discs and play them back for myself.”
The droid said nothing, but a faint hum indicated she was running her own disc. “Johannsen, room 3C, has not returned in eight hours, twenty-eight minutes. He left alone. He had no visitors in the last two weeks.”
“Communications?”
“He does not use our communication system. He has his own.”
“We’re going to have a look at his room.”
“Third floor, second door left. Don’t alarm other tenants. We have no trouble here.”
“Yeah, it’s a paradise.” Eve headed up the steps, noting the crumbling wood, well gnawed by rodents. “Record, Peabody.”
“Yes, sir.” Dutifully, Peabody clipped her recorder to her shirt. “If he was here about eight hours ago, he didn’t last long after he left. Probably no more than a couple hours.”
“Long enough to get the shit beat out of him.” Idly Eve scanned the walls. Several illegal invitations and anatomically doubtful suggestions were inscribed. One of the authors had a spelling deficiency and consistently left the c out of fuck.
Still, the message was clear enough.
“Homey little place, huh?”
“Reminds me of my granny’s house.”
At the door of 3C, Eve glanced back. “Why, Peabody, I think you made a joke.”
While Eve chuckled and took out her master code, Peabody flushed scarlet. She had herself back in line by the time the locks disengaged.
“Bolted himself in, didn’t he?” Eve muttered as the last of the three Keligh-500s opened. “And didn’t go for cheap. These babies cost about a week of my pay each. For all the good they did him.” She let out a breath. “Dallas, Lieutenant Eve, entering victim’s residence.” She pushed the door open. “Damn, Boomer, you were a pig.”
The heat was enormous. Temperature control in the flop consisted of closing the window or opening it. Boomer had opted for closed, and had trapped stifling summer inside.
The room smelled of bad food gone over, stale clothes, and spilled whiskey. Leaving Peabody to do the initial scan, Eve walked into the center of what was little more than a box and shook her head.
The sheets on the narrow bed were stained with substances she wasn’t keen to analyze. Boxes of take-out food were piled beside it. From the small mountain of dirty clothes heaped in corners, she assumed laundry hadn’t been high on Boomer’s list of household chores. Her feet stuck to the floor and made little sucking sounds as she wandered the room.
In self-defense, she fought the single window open. The sounds of air and street traffic poured in like a flood.
“Jesus, what a place. He made decent money weaseling. No way he had to live like this.”
“He must have wanted to.”
“Yep.” Wrinkling her nose, Eve eased open a door and studied the bathroom. There was a stainless steel toilet and sink, a shower stall built for the height disadvantaged. The stench roiled her stomach. “Worse then a three-day corpse.” She breathed through her mouth, turned back. “There’s where he put his money.”
In agreement, Peabody joined Eve at a sturdy counter. On it was a pricey data and communication center. Attached to the wall above was a viewing screen and a shelf overflowing with discs. Eve chose one at random, read the label.
“Boomer was into culture, I see. Bodacious Boobs of Bimbo Bitches.”
“That took the Oscar last year.”
Eve snorted and tossed the disc back. “Good one, Peabody. You want to keep that sense of humor going, ’cause we’re going to have to run all this shit. Box up the discs, record number and labels. We’ll scan them back at Cop Central.”
Eve engaged the ’link and searched through for any calls Boomer had saved. She zipped through food orders, a session with a video prostitute that had cost him five thousand. There were two calls from a suspected dealer of illegals, but the men had merely chatted about sports, heavy on baseball and arena bash. With some curiosity, she noted that her office number was logged twice in the last thirty hours, but he’d left no message.
“He was trying to get in touch with me,” she murmured. “He disengaged without leaving a message. That’s not like him.” She pulled out the disc and handed it to Peabody to put in evidence.
“There’s nothing to indicate he was afraid or worried, Lieutenant.”
“No, he was a true weasel. If he’d thought someone was going to pin him, he’d have camped on my doorstep. Okay, Peabody, I hope your immunizations are up to date. Let’s start going through this mess.”
By the time they were finished, they were filthy, sweaty, and disgusted. At Eve’s direct order, Peabody had loosened the stiff collar of her uniform and rolled up the sleeves. Still, sweat rained down her face and had her hair curling madly.
“I thought my brothers were pigs.”
Eve toed aside dirty underwear. “How many you got?”
“Two. And a sister.”
“Four of you?”
“My parents are Free-Agers, sir,” Peabody explained with twin notes of apology and embarrassment in her voice. “They’re really into rural living and propagation.”
“You continue to surprise me, Peabody. A tough urbanite like you springing from Free-Agers. How come you’re not growing alfalfa, weaving mats, and raising a brood?”
“I like to kick ass. Sir.”
“Good reason.” Eve had left what she considered the worst for last. With unconcealed revulsion, she studied the bed. The thought of body parasites scrambled through her head. “We’ve got to deal with the mattress.”
Peabody swallowed hard. “Yes, sir.”
“I don’t know about you, Peabody, but I’m heading straight for a decontamination chamber when we’re done here.”
“I’ll be right behind you, Lieutenant.”
“Okay. Let’s do it.”
The sheets came first. There was nothing but smells and stains. Eve would leave them for the sweepers to analyze, but she’d already ruled out any possibility that Boomer had been killed in his own flop.
Still, she was thorough, shaking out the pillow, manipulating the foam. At her signal, Peabody hefted one end of the mattress and she the other. It was heavy as a rock, and with a grunt they flipped it.
“Maybe there is a God,” Eve murmured.
Affixed to the bottom of the mattress were two small packs. One was filled with pale blue powder, the other a sealed disc. She tugged both free. Clamping down on the urge to break open the powder, she studied the disc. It wasn’t labeled, but unlike the others, it had been carefully encased to keep it free of dust.
Ordinarily, she would have run it immediately in Boomer’s unit. She could stand the stench, the sweat, even the dirt. But she didn’t think she could maintain another minute wondering what microcosmic parasites were crawling over her skin.
“Let’s get the hell out of here.”
She waited until Peabody carried the evidence box out into the hall. With one last
glance at the way her man had lived, Eve shut the door, sealed it, and left the red police security light beaming.
Decontamination wasn’t painful, but it wasn’t particularly pleasant. It had the single virtue of being fairly short. Eve sat with Peabody, both of them stripped to the skin, in a two-seated chamber with curved white walls reflecting the hot white light.
“But it’s a dry heat,” Peabody stated and had Eve laughing.
“I always figured this is what Hell’s like.” She closed her eyes, willed herself to relax. She didn’t consider herself phobic, but closed-in spaces made her itchy. “You know, Peabody, I used Boomer about five years now. He wasn’t exactly the GQ type, but I wouldn’t have pegged him living like that.” She still had the smell in her nostrils. “He was clean. Tell me what you saw in the bathroom.”
“Filth, mold, scum, towels that hadn’t been washed. Two bars of soap, one unopened, a half tube of shampoo, tooth gel, an ultrasound brush and shaver. One hair comb, broken.”
“Grooming tools. He kept himself in shape, Peabody. Even liked to consider himself a lady’s man. My guess is the sweepers are going to tell me the food, the clothes, the grunge is all about two, maybe three weeks old. What does that tell you?”
“That he was holed up—worried, scared, or involved enough to let things go.”
“Exactly. Not desperate enough to come in and unload to me, but worried enough to hide a couple of things under his mattress.”
“Where no one would ever think of looking for them,” Peabody said dryly.
“He wasn’t terribly bright about some things. You got a guess on the substance?”
“An illegal.”
“I’ve never seen an illegal that color. Something new,” Eve mused. The light dimmed to gray and a beeper sounded. “Looks like we’re clean. Let’s dig up some fresh clothes and go run that disc.”
“What the hell is this?” Eve scowled at her monitor. Unconsciously she began to toy with the weighty diamond she wore around her neck.
“A formula?”
“I can figure that out, Peabody.”
“Yes, sir.” Chastised, Peabody eased back.