by J. D. Robb
“Please, have her come up.”
“I—” Eliza lifted a hand to her hair, patted it. “Yes, yes, please send her up.”
“Does Carly often drop by?” Eve asked.
“Not really. She’s been here, of course. I enjoy entertaining. I don’t recall her simply popping in this way. I’m really not up to chatting with her at the moment.”
“That’s all right. I am. I’ll get the door,” Eve said when the buzzer sounded.
Eve took a moment to study Carly’s face on the security screen. Frantic would have been her description. She watched it change to shock, then smooth out quickly to careless curiosity after she opened the door.
“Lieutenant. I didn’t realize you were here. Apparently I’ve chosen a bad time to pay a call on Eliza.”
“Saves me tracking you down for a follow-up interview.”
“Too bad I don’t have my lawyer in my pocket.” She stepped inside. “I was just out shopping and decided to drop by.” She caught Eve’s speculative look at her empty hands. “I had a few things sent on to my apartment. I do hate lugging parcels. Eliza.”
Carly swept in, arms spread, and met Eliza in the center of the living area. They exchanged light hugs and double-cheeked air kisses. “I didn’t realize you were entertaining the NYPSD. Shall I leave you alone?”
“No.” Eliza gripped her arm. “Carly, the lieutenant’s just told me Quim’s dead. Linus Quim.”
“I know.” Turning, she linked arms with Eliza. “I caught the news on-screen.”
“I thought you were shopping.”
“I was.” Carly nodded at Eve. “There was a young man entertaining himself with a palm unit while his young woman tried on half the wardrobe in sportswear and separates. I heard the name.”
She lifted a hand, appeared to struggle with herself briefly. “It upset me—panicked me, frankly. I didn’t know what to think when I heard the report. I was just a few blocks away, and I came here. I wanted to tell someone who’d understand.”
“Understand what?” Eve prompted.
“The report said it’s believed his death is linked to Richard’s. I don’t see how it could be. Richard never took notice of techs or crew. As far as he was concerned, the sets were dressed and changed by magic. Unless there was a problem. Then he’d abuse them verbally or physically. Quim never missed a cue, so Richard wouldn’t have known he existed. How could there be a link?”
“But you noticed him?”
“Of course. Creepy little man.” She gave a delicate shudder. “Eliza, I hate to impose, but I could really use a drink.”
“I could use one myself,” she decided and rang for a serving droid.
“Did you notice Quim on opening night?” Eve asked.
“Just that he was doing what he did in his usual silent, scowling way.”
“Did you speak to him?”
“I may have. I don’t recall. I’d like a vodka, rocks,” Carly added when the droid appeared. “A double.”
“You didn’t appear this upset when Draco was killed, and in front of your eyes.”
“I can think of a dozen reasons any number of people would want to kill Richard,” Carly snapped back.
“Including yourself.”
“Yes.” She took the glass from the droid, took one quick sip. “Most definitely including myself. But Quim changes everything. If their deaths are connected, I want to know. Because the idea scares me.”
“Tragedies happen in threes,” Eliza stated, her voice round and full and passionate.
“Oh, thanks, darling. Just what I needed to hear.” Carly lifted her glass, drained the contents.
• • •
“Weird. These people are fucking weird.” Eve got in her vehicle and headed back to Central. “One of their associates gets stuck in the heart basically at their feet, and they’re like—my goodness, would you look at that. A tech is hanged, and they fall apart.”
She flipped on her car link and contacted Feeney.
“No home ‘link calls in or out in a forty-eight-hour period,” he reported. “No calls to anyone on your list, period. He had biweekly contact with a bookie for bets on arena ball, kept it under the legal limit.”
“Tell me something interesting, I’m dozing off here.”
“He put a hold on a royal-class ticket to Tahiti but didn’t book it. One way, heading out a week from Tuesday. Also put a hold on a VIP suite at the Island Pleasure Resort. A full month’s stay. Made some inquiries about real estate, looking into some cliff-side house in the neighborhood of two mil. The guy’s financials add up to about a quarter of that. The ticket and the suite would have gobbled most of that up.”
“So he was looking to come into a nice pile.”
“Or he was a hell of a dreamer. Can’t find anything on his unit to indicate he did previous scans, you know, like a hobby.”
“Blackmailing a murderer might net you a nice pile.”
“Or a noose,” Feeney added.
“Yeah. I’m heading by the morgue to nag Morse.”
“Nobody does it better,” Feeney said before Eve cut him off.
*** CHAPTER NINE ***
“Ah, Lieutenant Dallas.” Chief Medical Examiner Morse’s dark eyes glittered behind his microgoggles. Above the serviceable lenses, his eyebrows arched in two long, slim triangles. At the peak of the left was a small, shiny silver hoop.
He snapped his fingers, held out his sealed hand, palm up. A grumbling assistant flipped a twenty-dollar credit into it. “Dallas, you never disappoint me. You see, Rochinsky, never bet against the house.”
The credit disappeared into one of the pockets of his puke-green protective jumpsuit.
“Win a bet?” Eve asked.
“Oh, yes indeed. A small wager with my associate that you would show up in our happy home before five P.M.”
“It’s nice to be predictable.” She looked down at the middle-aged, mixed-race woman currently stretched out under Morse’s laser scalpel. The Y cut had already been made.
“That’s not my dead guy.”
“Very observant. Meet Allyanne Preen, Detective Harrison’s dead gal, who was several slots ahead of yours. Licensed companion, street level. She was found stretched out in an abandoned ‘49 Lexus coupe, in the great automotive morgue we call long-term parking, La Guardia.”
“Trouble with a John?”
“No outward signs of violence, no recent sexual encounters.” He scooped out her liver, weighed and logged it.
“She’s got a faint blue tinge to her skin.” Eve bent down to examine the hands. “Most noticeable under the nails. Looks like an OD, probably Exotica and Jumper.”
“Very good. Any time you want to switch to my side of the slab, just let me know. I can promise, we have a lot more fun around here.”
“Yeah, word’s out on you party animals.”
“The reports of the Saint Patrick’s Day celebration in the ice room were…” His eyes laughed behind his goggles. “Accurate.”
“Sorry I missed it. Where’s my guy? I need his tox report.”
“Mmm-hmm.” Morse poked at a kidney before removing it. His hands were quick and skilled and seemed to keep time to the beat of the rebel rock music playing over the speakers. “I assumed you’d be in a hurry. I gave your guy to young Finestein. He just started here last month. Has potential.”
“You gave mine to some rookie?”
“We were all rookies once, Dallas. Speaking of which, where’s the stalwart Peabody?”
“She’s outside, doing some runs. Listen, Morse, this is a tricky one.”
“So they say, all the time, every time.”
“I’m betting on homicide, but it was set up to look like self-termination. I need good hands and eyes on my guy.”
“I don’t take on anyone without them. Relax, Dallas. Stress can kill you.” Unruffled, he strolled over to a ‘link, put out a call for Herbert Finestein. “He’ll be right along. Rochinsky, run this young lady’s internals to the lab. Start th
e blood work.”
“Morse, I’ve got two bodies, and the probability is that they’re linked.”
“Yes, yes, but that’s your area.” He wandered to a detox bowl, washed the soiled sealant from his hands, ran them under the radiant heat in the drying hood. “I’ll look over the boy’s work, Dallas, but give him a chance.”
“Yeah, yeah, fine.”
Morse pulled off his goggles and mask, smiled. His black hair was intricately braided to hang down to the middle of his back. He disposed of his protective suit to reveal the stunning pink of his shirt and electric blue of his trousers.
“Nice threads,” Eve said dryly. “Going to another party?”
“I’m telling you, every day’s a party around here.”
She imagined he habitually chose snazzy clothes to distance himself from the starkness of his job, the brutality of it. Whatever works, Eve thought. Wading through blood and gore and the misery human beings inflicted on each other on a daily basis wore on you. Without an escape valve, you’d explode.
And what was hers?
“And how’s Roarke?” Morse asked.
“Good. Fine.” Roarke. Yes, he was hers. Before him there had just been work. Only been work. And would she have, one day, reached the limit, felt her own soul shatter?
Hell of a thought.
“Ah, here’s Finestein. Be nice,” Morse murmured to Eve.
“What am I?”
“An ass-kicker,” Morse said pleasantly and laid a friendly hand on her shoulder. “Herbert, Lieutenant Dallas would like an update on the DOS I assigned to you this afternoon.”
“Yes, the Dead on-Scene. Quim, Linus, white male, fifty-six years. Cause of death strangulation by hanging.” Finestein, a skinny mixed race with black skin and pale eyes, spoke in quick, piping tones and fiddled nervously with a small forest of pencils tucked in a breast pocket protector.
Not only a rookie, Eve thought with frustration, a nerd rookie.
“Did you want to review the body?”
“I’m standing here, aren’t I?” Eve began, then relented with a quick gnashing of teeth when Morse’s long fingers squeezed her shoulder. “Yes, thank you, I’d like to review the body and your report. Please.”
“Just this way.”
Eve rolled her eyes at Morse as Finestein hurried across the room. “He’s fucking twelve years old.”
“He’s twenty-six. Patience, Dallas.”
“I hate patience. Slows everything down.” But she walked over to the floor-to-ceiling line of drawers, waited while Finestein uncoded one, pulled it open with a frigid puff of cold gas.
“As you can see…” Finestein cleared his throat. “There are no marks of violence on the body other than those caused by the strangulation. No offensive or defensive wounds. There were microscopic fibers of the rope found under the subject’s nails, indicating he secured the rope personally. By all appearances, the subject willingly hanged himself.”
“You’re handing me self-termination?” Eve demanded. “Just like that? Where’s the tox report, the blood work?”
“I’m—I’m getting to that, Lieutenant. There were traces of ageloxite and—”
“Give her the street names, Herbert,” Morse said mildly. “She’s a cop, not a scientist.”
“Oh, yes, sir. Sorry. Traces of um…Ease-Up were found in the victim’s system, along with a small amount of home brew. This mix is quite commonly ingested by self-terminators to calm any nerves.”
“This guy didn’t pull his own plug, damn it.”
“Yes, sir, I agree.” Finestein’s quiet agreement cut off Eve’s tirade before it could begin.
“You agree?”
“Yes. The victim also ingested a large pretzel with considerable mustard less than an hour before death. Prior to this, he enjoyed a breakfast of wheat wafers, powdered eggs, and the equivalent of three cups of coffee.”
“So?”
“If the subject knew enough to mix a cocktail of Ease-Up and alcohol before termination, he would have known that coffee can potentially counteract and cause anxiety. This, and the fact that the alcohol consumed was in very small proportion to the drug casts some doubt on self-termination.”
“So, you’re ruling homicide.”
“I’m ruling suspicious death—undetermined.” He swallowed as Eve’s eyes bored into him. “Until more evidence weighs in on either side, I feel it’s impossible to make the call.”
“Just so. Well done, Herbert.” Morse nodded. “The lieutenant will feed you details as she finds them.”
Finestein looked relieved, and he fled.
“You give me nothing,” Eve complained.
“On the contrary. Herbert’s given you a window. Most MEs would have slammed it shut, ruling ST. Instead, he’s cautious, exacting, and thorough, and he considers the attitude of the victim rather than only the cold facts. Medically, undetermined was the best you were going to get.”
• • •
“Undetermined,” Eve muttered as she slid behind the wheel.
“Well, it gives us a window.” Peabody glanced up from her palm unit, caught the coldly narrowed stare Eve aimed at her. “What? What did I say?”
“Next person says that, I’m throwing them out the goddamn window.” She started the car. “Peabody, am I an ass-kicker?”
“Are you asking to see my scars, or is that a trick question?”
“Shut up, Peabody,” Eve suggested, and headed back to Central.
“Quim had a hundred on tonight’s arena ball game.” Peabody’s smile was thin and self-satisfied. “McNab just relayed the data. A hundred’s his top bet. Odd he’d place a bet a few hours before offing himself, then not even wait around to see if he won. I’ve got the name and address of his bookie here. Oh, but I’m supposed to shut up. Sorry, sir.”
“You want more scars?”
“I really don’t. Now that I have a sex life, they’re embarrassing. Maylou Jorgensen. She’s got a hole in the West Village.”
• • •
Peabody loved the West Village. She loved the way it ran from bohemian chic to pinstriped drones who wanted to be bohemian chic. She liked to watch the street traffic stroll by in ankle dusters or buttoned-up jumpsuits. The shaved heads, the wild tangles of multicolored curls. She liked watching the sidewalk artists pretend they were too cool to worry about selling their work.
Even the street thieves had a veneer of polish.
The glide-cart operators sold veggie kabobs plucked fresh from the fields of Greenpeace Park.
She thought longingly of dinner.
Eve pulled up in front of a tidy, rehabbed warehouse, double-parked, and turned on her On Duty sign.
“One of these days, I’d like to live in one of these lofts. All that space and a view of the street.” Peabody scanned the area as she climbed from the car. “Look, there’s a nice, clean deli on the corner there, and a 24/7 market on the other.”
“You look for living quarters due to the proximity of food?”
“It’s a consideration.”
Eve flashed her badge at a security screen in working order, then entered the building. The tiny foyer boasted an elevator and four mail slots. All freshly scrubbed.
“Four units in a building this size.” Peabody heaved a sigh. “Imagine.”
“I’m imagining a bookie shouldn’t be able to afford a place in here.” On a hunch, Eve bypassed the buzzer for 2-A and used her shield to gain access to stairs. “We’ll go up this way, surprise Maylou.”
The building was utterly silent, telling her the soundproofing was first-rate. She thought of Quim’s miserable flop a few telling blocks away. Bookies apparently did a lot better than the majority of their clients.
“Never bet against the house,” Morse had said.
Truer words.
She pressed the buzzer on 2-A, waited. Moments later, the door swung open in front of an enormous redhead and a small, white, yapping dog.
“About time you—” The woman blinked hard
gold eyes, narrowed them in a wild and striking face the tone and texture of alabaster. “I thought you were the dog walker. He’s late. If you’re selling, I’m not buying.”
“Maylou Jorgensen?”
“So what?”
“NYPSD.” Eve held up her badge then found her arms full of barking fur.
“Well, hell.” Eve tossed the yelping dog at Peabody, then charged into the loft. Leaping, she tackled the redhead as the woman scrambled for a wide console, studded with controls and facing a wall of busy screens.
They went down like felled trees.
Before Eve could catch her breath, she was flipped to her back, pinned under a hundred eighty-five pounds of panicked female. She took a knee to the groin, spit in the eye, and only through lightning reflexes managed to avoid the rake of inch-long blue nails down her face.
Instead, they dug rivers in the side of her neck.
The smell of her own blood irritated her.
She bucked once, swore, then swung up, elbow in the lead. It slammed satisfactorily into Maylou’s white face. Her nose erupted with blood.
She said, quite clearly: “Eek!”
Her gold eyes rolled up white, and her considerable weight flopped lifelessly on Eve.
“Get her off of me, for Christ’s sake. There’s a ton of her, and all of it’s smothering me.”
“Give me a hand. Dallas, she’s like a slab of granite. Must be six-three. Push!”
Sweating, liberally sprayed with blood, Eve shoved. Peabody pulled. Eventually, Maylou was rolled onto her back, and Eve came up, gasping for air. “It was like being buried under a mountain. Jesus, shut that dog up.”
“I can’t. He’s terrified.” Peabody glanced over, with some sympathy, as the little dog backed his white butt into a corner and sent out high, ear-piercing barks.
“Stun it.”
“Oh, Dallas.” Peabody’s tone was a whisper of utter horror.
“Never mind.” Eve looked down at the blood spray on her shirt and jacket, gingerly lifted a hand to her raw neck. “Is much of this mine?”
“She made some mag grooves,” Peabody announced after a quick exam. “I’ll get the first aid kit.”
“Later.” Eve crouched down, frowned at the unconscious woman. “Let’s roll her over and get the restraints on her before she wakes up.”