Vendetta in Death (In Death 49)

“Let’s roll him—Wait,” she added as she heard a voice—firm and impatient—call her name. “Crap. McNab! You and McNab roll him, finish with the body. Contact the sweepers, the morgue. I’ll deal with this.”

“Good luck with that,” Peabody said under her breath as Eve walked to the barricades and the camera-ready and chin-jutted Nadine Furst.

The crime beat reporter might have ranked as friend—and a good one—but that didn’t make her less of a pain in the ass at the moment.

Glancing past her, Eve noted she’d brought the rock star with her. Looking casually scruffy, a streak of royal blue through his jet-black hair, Jake stood with Roarke. The two of them chatted as if they held freaking martinis at some high-class bar.

“I tagged you a half a dozen times yesterday,” Nadine began.

“I was busy.”

Nadine narrowed feline-green eyes. “You’re never too busy when you can use me, and my research team, on an investigation.”

“I was really busy, and you don’t want to shove into my face right now.”

“Oh, don’t I?”

“No, you fucking don’t.” Eve gestured her through the barricades, then gripped her arm—hard—pulled her away from the body toward the corner of the building.

Watching them, Jake rocked back on the heels of his scarred boots. “Think it’ll come to blows?”

“Odd, I always wonder the same.”

“Nadine’s pretty steamed. So’s your cop from the looks of it. You come to many of these … events?”

“Too many. Your first?”

“Yeah. Pulled an all-nighter at the studio. Thought: Hey, I’ll head over to Nadine’s, wake her up. She’s already up, dressed, and here I am.”

A tall man, he easily looked over the heads of people still pressing at the barricade. “I don’t get it. I gotta say, I don’t get why anybody wants a line of work where they deal with something like what’s lying out there. But both our women do. Can’t figure it.”

“The one who put him there thinks she stands for justice. She doesn’t, but, in their different ways, our women do.”

While they talked, their women bumped heads in a pitched battle.

“I want a one-on-one, right here. Now.”

“You can’t have one,” Eve tossed back. “And you don’t even have a camera with you.”

“I can have a camera here in ten frigging minutes.”

“Nadine, did you happen to notice the dead guy back there?”

“I noticed the dead guy. The third of his specific type of dead guy. I set an alert to signal me when you landed another naked, castrated dead guy. You’re giving the media the runaround when the public—”

“Don’t throw the right-to-know bullshit on me now. Three in three days. Do you think we’ve been sitting around playing goddamn mah-jongg or something?”

“I think you don’t even know what mah-jongg is, and you could have returned a tag from someone you know you can trust.”

“I didn’t have time!” Eve threw up her hands, paced in a circle. “I don’t have time now to stand here and argue with you. I didn’t have time to give you some damn sound bites. You need to back off.”

“I’m doing my job just like you’re doing yours,” Nadine shot back. “You know damn well I can get the information you feed me on the air, I get it out, and it might help. Just like you know I’ll hold anything you tell me to hold.”

“It’s not that. It’s not fucking that. It’s not about you, not about the you-and-me deal. Sometimes it’s just about the work. About the bodies piling up. About not having enough left over to deal with anything else.”

Nadine paused, held up a finger. Paced in her own circle. “Okay, all right. Here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to go get coffee—for everybody. Then I’m coming back, with a camera. If you can’t give me a one-on-one or a statement, I’ll take one from Peabody or McNab. With three bodies in three days, you need media support to get public support, whether you admit it or not.”

She did know it. Didn’t like it, but knew it. “I don’t know when I or the detectives involved will be available.”