Eve glanced up, saw her aide was perfectly serious, and didn’t quite muffle the laugh. ‘They’re not exactly jewelry, Peabody. Cock rings. You know, you put them over it, then—’
‘Sure.’ Peabody shrugged, tried not to stare. ‘I knew that. Just - a funny place to keep them.’
‘Yeah, sure is silly to keep sex toys in a box next to the bed. Anyway, where was I? She’s using, chasing the pills with champagne. Somebody’s going to pay for ruining her evening. That fucker Leonardo is going to crawl, he’s going to beg. She’ll make him pay for screwing some worthless slut behind her back, and for letting the little bitch come around to her house - her house, goddamn it - and fuck with her.’
Eve closed a drawer, opened another. ‘Her security tags her as leaving the place just after two. The door’s on automatic lock. She doesn’t call a car. It’s at least a sixty-block walk to Leonardo’s, she’s in ice-pick heels, but she doesn’t take a cab. There’s no record of any company picking her up or dropping her. She’s registered for a palm ’link, but we haven’t found it. If she had it with her and made a call, either she or someone else disposed of the unit.’
‘If she called her killer, he or she should have been smart enough to ditch it.’ Peabody began a search of the two-level closet and managed not to hyperventilate over the racks of clothes, many with price tags still attached. ‘She might have been wired on something, but no way would she walk downtown. Half the shoes in this closet aren’t even scraped on the soles. She wasn’t the walking kind.’
‘She was wired, all right. Damned if she’s taking some stinking cab. All she has to do is snap her fingers and she can have half a dozen eager slaves slathering to take her anywhere she wants to go. So she snaps them. Somebody picks her up. They go to Leonardo’s. Why?’
Fascinated by the way Eve juggled Pandora’s point of view with her own, Peabody stopped the search and watched Eve. ‘She insists. She demands. She threatens.’
‘Maybe it’s Leonardo she calls. Or maybe it’s somebody else. They get there, the security camera’s smashed. Or she smashes it.’
‘Or the killer smashes it.’ Peabody pushed her way through a sea of ivory silk. ‘Because he’s already planning to do her.’
‘Why take her to Leonardo’s if he’s already planning it??
? Eve demanded. ‘Or if it was Leonardo, why dirty your own nest? I’m not sure murder was the priority, not yet. They get there, and if Leonardo’s story holds, the place is empty. He’s off drinking himself into a stupor and looking for Mavis, who is drinking herself into a stupor. Pandora wants Leonardo there, she wants to punish him. She starts to wreck the place, maybe she takes out some of her rage on her companion. They fight. It escalates. He grabs the cane, maybe to defend himself, maybe to attack. She’s shocked, hurt, afraid. Nobody hurts her. What the hell is this? Then he can’t stop, or doesn’t want to stop. She’s lying there, and there’s blood everywhere.’
Peabody said nothing. She’d seen the pictures of the scene. Could imagine it all happening just as Eve related.
‘He’s standing over her, breathing hard.’ Eyes half closed, Eve tried to bring the shadowy figure into focus. ‘Her blood’s all over him. The smell of it’s everywhere. But he doesn’t panic, can’t afford to panic, doesn’t let himself panic. What ties her to him? The palm ’link. He takes that, pockets it. If he’s smart, and he has to be smart now, he goes through her things, makes sure there’s nothing that can lead to him. He wipes off the cane where he gripped it, anything else he thinks he might have touched.’
In Eve’s mind it played like an old video, cloudy and full of shadows. The figure - male, female - hurrying to cover tracks, moving around the body, stepping around the pools of blood. ‘Have to be quick. Someone might come back. But have to be thorough. Almost clean now. Then he hears someone coming in. Mavis. She calls out for Leonardo, rushes back, sees the body, kneels beside it. Now it’s even more perfect. He knocks her out, then he curls her fingers around the cane, maybe he even gives Pandora a few extra whacks. He takes that dead hand and rakes its nails over Mavis’s face, uses it to tear her clothes. He puts on something, one of Leonardo’s robes, to conceal his own clothes.’
She straightened from her search of a bottom drawer and found Peabody staring at her. ‘It’s like you were there,’ Peabody murmured. ‘I want to be able to do that, to go in the way you do.’
‘Walk in to a few more murder scenes, and you will. The hard part’s getting out again. Where the hell is the box?’
‘She could have taken it with her.’
‘I don’t buy that. Where’s the key, Peabody? She locked this drawer. Where’s the key?’
In silence, Peabody took out her field unit, requested the list of items found in the victim’s purse or on her person. ‘There was no key taken into evidence.’
‘So he got the key, didn’t he? And he came back here and took the box and anything else he needed. Let’s check the security disc.’
‘Wouldn’t the sweepers have done that?’
‘Why? She wasn’t killed here. All they were required to do was verify her time of departure.’ Eve walked over to the security monitor, ordered a replay for the date and time in question. She watched Pandora storm out of the house, stride quickly out of range. ‘Two oh eight. Okay, let’s see what shakes. Time of death was about three. Computer, advance to oh three hundred, proceed at triple real time.’ She focused on the chronometer. ‘Freeze image. Sonofabitch. See that, Peabody.’
‘I see it, time skipped from four oh three to four thirty-five. Someone disengaged the camera. Had to do it by remote. Had to know what they were doing.’
‘Someone wanted to get in bad enough, get something out bad enough, to risk it. For a box of illegals.’ Her smile was grim. ‘I’ve got a feeling dead in the gut, Peabody. Let’s go hassle the lab boys.’
Chapter Nine
‘Why you wanna give me grief, Dallas?’
Huddled in his lab coat, Chief Tech Dickie Berenski - Dickhead to those who knew and loathed him - tested a strand of pubic hair. He was a meticulous man, as well as a monster pain in the ass. Though notoriously slow in testing, his batting average in court was high enough to make him the MVP of the police and security lab.
‘Can’t you see I’m buried here? Jesus.’ With his fussy spider fingers he adjusted the focus on his micro-goggles. ‘Got us ten homicides, six rapes, a load of suspicious and unattended deaths, and too many B and Es to think about. I’m not a fucking robot.’
‘Closest thing to,’ Eve muttered. She didn’t like coming to the lab with its antiseptic air and white walls. It was too much like a hospital, or worse, Testing. Any cop who used maximum force resulting in termination was required to undergo Testing. Her experiences with that particular intrusive routine hadn’t been pleasant. ‘Look, Dickie, you’ve had plenty of time to analyze the substance.’
‘Plenty of time.’ He pushed back from the counter, and his eyes behind the goggles were big and bold as an owl’s. ‘You and every other cop in the city figures your shit’s a priority. Like we should drop every other thing and devote every minute to you. You know what happens when the temperature rises, Dallas? People go bat shit, that’s what happens. All you gotta do is take them down, but me and my team, we gotta shift through every hair and fiber. It takes time.’