“Yost?”

“Oh, sorry. You’re not up-to-date.” She corrected that oversight with her back to the room and her eyes on the sky.

“Captain Feeney’s coming in on the investigation? Are you going to pull in McNab?”

Eve glanced over her shoulder. Peabody was working hard to look casual, but that square, earnest face wasn’t fashioned for bluffing. “Not so long ago if I’d hinted about pulling McNab into an investigation, you’d have whined and bitched.”

“No, sir. I’d have started to whine and bitch, then you’d have slapped me down. After that I’d have whined and bitched mentally.” She broke into a grin. “Anyway, times change. McNab and I get along better now, mostly since we’re having sex. Except . . .”

“Oh, don’t. Don’t tell me stuff about it.”

“I was just going to say he’s been acting a little weird.”

“If you look up McNab in the dictionary, weird is the common definition.”

“Different weird,” Peabody corrected, but filed that little gem away to use on him at the first opportunity. “He’s . . . nice. Really nice. Sort of sweet and attentive. He brings me flowers. I think he’s stealing them out of the park, but still. And just a few days ago, he took me to the movies. A chick flick I’d made noises about wanting to see. He hated it, and made sure I knew it after, but he sprang for the admission and everything.”

“Oh, man.”

“So anyway, I think—” Peabody stopped, snorted out a laugh as her cool-eyed and courageous lieutenant let out a short shriek and stuck her fingers in her ears.

“I can’t hear you. I don’t want to hear you. I’m not going to hear you. Go do the run on Barry Collins. Now. That’s an order.”

Peabody simply moved her mouth.

“What?”

“I said, ‘Yes, sir,’” Peabody explained when Eve unplugged her ears. She walked to the door, judged her timing. “I think he’s setting me up for something,” she said and fled.

“I’ll set you up,” Eve muttered and dropped behind her desk. “I’d like to set both of you up, then drop-kick your asses.” Since she was in the mood to kick someone’s, she called the lab and harassed the chief tech over verifying the DNA.

By the time she met with Feeney, she had conclusive DNA evidence that the man who had raped and murdered Darlene French was Sylvester Yost.

When she told him, he nodded, sat on her desk, and took his habitual bag of nuts from the sagging pocket of his wrinkled suit. “Never doubted it. I ran a scan for like crimes. Nothing in the past seven, eight months. He’s been on vacation.”

“Or somebody didn’t want the bodies found. Any indication that he ever acts on his own? Personal reasons?”

“Nope.” Feeney crunched on a nut. “Pattern’s for profit. I’ve got McNab running

the interplanetary and off planet scan. Might find something there.”

“You’re bringing McNab in?”

Her tone had him lifting his eyebrows. “Yeah. You got a problem with him?”

“No, no. He does good work.” Even as she spoke she drummed her fingers on the desk. “It’s just this thing with him and Peabody.”

Feeney hunched his shoulders. “I don’t want to think about that.”

“Well, me neither.” But if she was going to suffer, so was he. “He took her to a girl movie.”

“What?” Feeney paled, and the nut currently in his mouth almost rolled off his tongue. “He went to a skirt movie? Took her?”

“That’s what I said.”

“Ah, Christ.” He got off the desk, took a quick turn around the room on short, bandy legs. “That’s it, you know. That’s the finish. Boy’s sunk. Next thing you know he’ll be picking her flowers.”

“Already done.”

Tags: J.D. Robb In Death Mystery
Source: readsnovelonline.net