Dark in Death (In Death 46)

“He can be my yarn boyfriend. McNab will understand.”

“Where’s the skank’s apartment, and pull your damn nose out of the bag I don’t see.”

“A block past where we parked.”

“Good, then you can put that bag I don’t see and you’re not carrying in the car before you fall into an alpaca coma.”

“I think I’ve had a couple of alpaca orgasms, but no coma.”

“Keep your weird wool orgasms to yourself.”

“Actually, it’s hair—alpaca hair into fiber into—”

“Shut up, and put that damn bag I don’t see in the car. She bought an extra yard,” Eve continued, “because of the discount. So she falls for sales. Or she figured she’d use the other yard for something. She’s not a regular, but she knew the place, heard about it, saw an ad, whatever, and hit it on a major sale day.”

Peabody secured the bag. “It’s covering her tracks. She doesn’t think the cops are going to put it together, but just in case we do, she buys the material in a place where she’s not familiar, and on a day not only for bargains, but crowds. When the clerks are slammed. The odds are, if we got this far, we’d dead-end. And that’s where we are.”

“But smarter to buy something plain, something unremarkable we’d never have been able to trace to a vendor. She buys something unique, noticeable. Because under it all, she craves just that. Being noticed.

“It’s a weakness. It’ll break her down in the end.”

“If her next target’s on the list of people we’ve notified, and if they actually listen, we’ll have more time.” Peabody gestured toward a building.

“Working the names, I narrowed the clubs, too. They do club crawls and hit off-places, but mostly all of them stick to the hot spots.”

“Narrow those down by the book.” Eve opted to master her way into the building. “It’ll be licensed for consensual sex and have privacy rooms. Licensed for performance nudity—live performances, not holos. Add the high-dollar drinks, celebrity sightings, VIP sections.”

“I’ll whittle it down.”

Considering the brownie she’d devoured, Peabody didn’t complain even in her head about using the stairs. Plus Yola Bloomfield lived on the second floor.

Yola had decorated her door with a hex sign and an artful little drawing of two scaly skinned demons copulating.

“She paints,” Peabody explained. “Calls her work Op-X-Art, as in the opposite of the expected.”

“On the other hand, that’s just what I expect demons to do when they’re not munching human intestines,” Eve pointed out. “Unexpected would be to have them dancing under a rainbow in a meadow.”

She hit the buzzer.

“It could be a series,” Peabody considered. “First they munch, then they dance, then they have demon sex.”

“Expected again. Standard date, any species.”

“I’m probably going to have nightmares.”

Eve buzzed again, longer.

On the second, she got a “What the fuck do you want?” from the speaker.

“NYPSD.” She held up her badge. “We need to speak with Yola Bloomfield.”

She heard the snick of locks, the rattle of chains, the slide of bolts.

If you dismissed the orange and black hair tied with some sort of rag on top of her head, the woman who opened the door didn’t look like a skank.

She wore a shapeless, paint-splattered shirt over ragged jeans and ratty house skids. Other than the trio of hoops through her right eyebrow, her face was unadorned and unpainted.

She smelled of paint and soap.