Judgment in Death (In Death 11)

“Okay, thanks.”

“How’d Mills go down?”

She sat, drank her coffee, and told him. It was still raw inside her, but by the time she’d finished, it was easier.

“He was an asshole,” Feeney said. “But that’s ugly. Somebody he knew. You’re not going to get that close in on a cop, open him up that way, without some solid resistance unless the cop’s relaxed.”

“He’d been drinking. My hunch is he’d been drinking with somebody. Just like Kohli. Taking a meet in his ride maybe, having a drink. He gets sloppy, gets drugged, gets dead.”

“Yeah, most likely. You did good putting McNab on the traffic scans. He’ll do the job.”

“I’ve got him and Peabody in my home office at eight. Can you come in on it?”

He looked at her, smiled his sorrowful basset-hound smile. “I thought I already was.”

It was nearly four when she got home, and a soft spring rain had started to fall. In the dark she showered off the greasiness of the night. Resting her forehead on the tiles until she stopped smelling blood and bile.

She set her wrist alarm for five. She meant to hit at Lewis again, and that meant another trip to Central in just over an hour. For that hour, she promised herself she’d sleep.

She climbed into bed, grateful for Roarke’s warmth. He’d be awake, she thought. Even if he’d slept before she got home, he slept like a cat and would have sensed her.

But he didn’t turn to her as he usually did, didn’t reach out or say her name to help her slip into comfort.

She closed her eyes, willed her mind to blank and her body to sleep.

And when she woke an hour later, she was alone.

She was out in her car, nearly ready to pull out, when Peabody ran out of the house behind her.

“Nearly missed you.”

“Missed me? What are you doing here?”

“I bunked here last night. Me and McNab.” In a bedroom, she thought, she’d dream about for the rest of her life. “We brought the traffic discs back here. Roarke said it’d be easier to do that instead of running us back to McNab’s, then all of us coming here this morning.”

“Roarke said?”

“Well, yeah.” She settled into the passenger’s seat, strapped in. “He rode along with us to pick up the discs, then he’d called for a car, so we drove back here with him and got to work.”

“Who got to work?”

Peabody’s brain had engaged enough now to catch the edginess in Eve’s tone. She’d have squirmed if it hadn’t been so undignified. “Well, me and McNab . . . and Roarke. He’s done some tech consults with us before, so I didn’t think anything of it. Are we in trouble?”

“No. What would be the point?”

There was a weariness in the answer Peabody didn’t like. “We broke off about three.” She infused her voice with cheer as they headed down the drive. “I never slept in a gel bed before. It’s like sleeping on a cloud, except I guess you’d fall through a cloud. McNab was snoring like a cargo tram, but I fell out about two seconds after I hit the bed anyway. Are you mad at Roarke?” she blurted out.

“No.” But he’s mad at me. Still. “Did you spot Mills’s vehicle on the disc?”

“Oh, man, I can’t believe I didn’t tell you. Yeah, we got it. Passed the toll through the e-pass at twenty-eighteen. You’d swear he was just sleeping until you enhance and see the blood.”

“The driver, Peabody?”

“That’s the not-so-good news. There was no driver. McNab said you’d need to go over the in-dash computer, but it looks like it was on auto.”

“He programmed it.” She hadn’t thought of that. Very slick, very confident. Took Mills out somewhere else, then programmed the auto. If it ran into a snag and there was nobody in the vehicle to correct, what did he care?

“Yeah, that’s what we came to. McNab started calling it the Meteor of Death. You know, it was a Meteor model,” Peabody said lamely. “Gets to be that late, you start making stupid jokes, I guess.”