Or the ploy Dahmer used – that classic had proven to do the job in all the decades following.
Lone woman struggling to lift something heavy into the back of a vehicle.
Can I give you a hand?
Oh, golly. Would you mind? I just can’t quite get it up there.
Vic does the good deed, and the male comes up behind, bashes him. They drag him into the back of the vehicle – van or all-terrain – one jumps in with him to restrain, the other gets behind the wheel.
She opened her eyes again, studied the board.
Can’t hold him in the vehicle for two days. Got a hole somewhere, got a place. How’d they get it? Downtown, highest probability. It’s where they took him, it’s where they dumped him.
She ran the route, the drive time from Perry to Mechanics Alley. Highlighted the sector on her map.
Possible kill location, she thought. Somewhere in that sector.
Abandoned building? Nothing stayed empty for long, she thought. Junkies, sidewalk sleepers, squatters, somebody moved in.
She did a search, found six potentials, arranged for uniforms to check them out.
Then she picked up where Peabody had left off, began to reach out to other cops with other victims.
Mid-afternoon, and looking a little hollow-eyed, Peabody came in, dropped a vending bag on Eve’s desk.
“What is that?”
“It a Vegalicious Pocket – it’s new. And, well, I’d call it Vegaterrible, but it fills the hole. Can I get coffee, my post-holiday-workout-daily butt is seriously dragging.”
Eve just wagged a thumb at the AutoChef, and filled Peabody in on the victim’s movements, the notes from other primaries.
“The one in Woodsbury, Ohio, is keeping it front and center. It’s the first murder in his town for over a decade, and he’s taking it personal. He may be a good resource as we progress, and – Jesus Christ.”
Eve managed – barely – to swallow the bite she’d taken out of the vending pocket, then grabbed Peabody’s coffee regular, gulped. “Oh, and nearly as bad. Who deliberately makes anything that tastes like that?”
“Maybe there are more sadists out there than we can possibly imagine.”
“Crap. Crap. I don’t even want to think about what’s in there, and now it’s inside me. Along with coffee murdered by milk and sugar. And now I’m hungry.”
Eve dumped the offensive pocket in the recycler where it belonged. “I wasn’t hungry, and now I am. Damn it.”
She went to the AutoChef, programmed a vitamin smoothie.
And was shocked when that’s exactly what she got.
It has worked for Feeney, she thought, bitterly, disguising his real coffee for a spinach smoothie in his office machine. But did she get the candy bar she’d disguised in ther
e?
No, she did not.
“Goddamn Candy Thief. I should’ve known he’d steal me blind while I was on leave.”
“You have candy in there? What kind of —”
“Not anymore.” In disgust, Eve went back to her desk, yanked out a drawer. “Bastard leaves the dumbass power bars, takes the really good chocolate.”
“Chocolate!”