Obsession in Death (29 page)

“She’ll never be what she wanted to be, could’ve been. She traded that for money. It doesn’t matter if it was ten dollars or ten thousand.” Peabody hunched her shoulders. “She knows it.”

Eve passed the harmonica player again. A jumpy tune now. She didn’t know how he had it in him to play something so insanely cheerful while he huddled in the cold.

She doubled back, dug into her pocket for what she thought of as her bribe cash, pulled out a fifty, crouched so he could see it, her badge, her eyes.

“Get a goddamn meal. If I find out you took this to the liquor store down the block, I’ll kick your ass. Got that? No,” she said when she saw Peabody reach in her own pocket. “This is enough – and you still owe me on payday. Got that?” she repeated to the sidewalk sleeper.

“’Preciate it.” He tucked the fifty into a fold of his coat.

“Get a meal,” she repeated.

Annoyed with herself – why not just light a match and burn the fifty? – she headed to the overpriced lot and her vehicle.

“Now I’m short till payday,” she muttered, and swiped her card, got the receipt for parking for her expense report.

“I’ll spring for lunch, if we get it. As long as it’s cheap.”

With a half laugh Eve stopped at a light. Then just lowered her head to the wheel a moment. “You weren’t wrong – about Tortelli. I can’t feel it, but you’re not wrong to. Fourth-generation cop, and she’s taking vids of some woman diddling her brother-in-law. You think, maybe they were all dirty along the way – that’s what she’s done, that’s the smear on her family legacy, and she knows that, too.”

“You weren’t wrong either. Her badge should’ve been worth more.”

The light changed; Eve drove.

“I can’t remember ever wanting to be anything but a cop. When I woke up in that hospital in Dallas, everything that happened blurry, or too bright to look at, the cops were there. They scared me some – he’d put that in me, how the cops would throw me in a dark hole with spiders. But they were careful with me, and nobody had been. The doctors, the nurses, they were careful, too, but I didn’t think how maybe they’d fix everything the way I thought about the cops. One of them brought me a stuffed bear. I’d forgotten that,” she realized. “How could I have forgotten that? Lost in the blur.”

She shook her head, made a turn. “I can’t remember ever wanting to be anything but a cop,” she repeated. “I’m betting it was the same for Tortelli. Maybe the difference is she thought it was her right, the badge was just her right. So she didn’t value it until she lost it.”

Though it involved another hunt for a street slot, and another overpriced lot, they tracked Hilda Farmer, formerly Officer Farmer out of the Twelfth Precinct, to a basement unit a few blocks from the bail bondsman she worked for.

Eve pressed the buzzer. Moments later, she saw the electronic peep – a costly addition to security – blink. Hearing the distinct
eek!
through the door, Eve brushed back her coat, laid a hand on the butt of her weapon.

Locks thudded, snicked, clunked, then opened.

The tall, curvy brunette said, “Dallas! Finally! Hey, Peabody, how’s it going? Come on in!”

“Hilda Farmer?” Eve glanced around the small, tidy living space serving as an office. No clunky equipment here. A pair of slick D&C units sat on a central workstation facing a trio of wall screens.

One of the screens displayed the photo and data of one Carlos Montoya, a hard-faced man with a thick mustache and scowling eyes.

“Skip I’m tracing.” Farmer waved a hand at the screen. “Spine breaker. Assault with a deadly. He beat some schmuck half to death with a ball bat because he couldn’t come up with the vig. Should never have made bail, you ask me, but if he hadn’t, I wouldn’t be working. Have a seat! I’ll make coffee. I’ve got some of your brand for special occasions.”

“Hold off on that.”

“Sure, whatever you want. Hell of a thing, isn’t it, Bastwick and Ledo – and that attack last night on the photographer. Assholes in the media trying to work an angle that ties you up in it. I’m here to help.”

She patted the seat of a chair, took another for herself. “I don’t have as much of a jump on the research as I’d like, but I’ve been on another job for a couple days. Whatever I have is yours. You got my e-mails. You know I’m more than ready to work for you.”

“You’re not a cop anymore.”

“I admire you – both of you, really – for sticking it out, working against the rampant sexual harassment in the department. I stood up for myself. I mean, even my lieutenant made remarks and overtures. Go out and bust some balls? Is that any way to talk to a female officer? Telling me I needed to clear any OT with him – like I didn’t know he meant I’d have to put out for him to clear it? And he wasn’t even the worst.”

“Imagine that,” Eve mumbled.

“You know what it’s like. I like the work I’m doing. A skip tries anything like that, a kick in the groin takes care of it. You can’t take care of things like that on the job. But I’d come back in a heartbeat under you, Dallas. You don’t have an aide since you made Peabody your partner.

“I’ll give you my résumé,” she continued before Eve could speak. “You can talk to Charlie – Charlie Kent, the bondsman I work for. Charlie’s okay, so far, but I work out of my own place so he doesn’t get the idea he can move in on me.”

“Like everybody does.”

Farmer rolled her eyes, cast them to the ceiling. “I don’t know what’s wrong with people. But back to you and me, I’m willing to work as a civilian aide or we can request I be reinstated. I’m not picky on it. Clearly, the important thing is that we work together. But I’ll thank you not to stare at my breasts. My face is up here.”

With a thin smile, Farmer tapped her cheeks.

As Eve had been looking at her face, and only her face, she just lifted her eyebrows. “Okay. You’ve been researching my current investigation.”

“As always. You’re the reason I joined the force. I requested assignment to Central, to you, but didn’t get it. A lot of jealous people in the department, but I accepted that. Pay the dues, I told myself. But the harassment was so relentless. I actually think it was deliberate, a way to push me out before I could be reassigned to you.

“So! We should have that coffee if you want to discuss the investigation. I’ll bring up my notes.”

“We’ll pass on the coffee,” Eve told her. “Regarding the investigation, I have a couple of questions that should wrap this up.”

“I’m at your disposal. Professionally,” Farmer added, ticking her finger at Eve.

“Since you’ve followed the investigation, I’d like your whereabouts at the time of the two murders and the assault on Hastings.”

“Dallas.” Huffing out a breath, Farmer sat back. “Let me make this
very
clear. My personal life is personal. However closely we’ll work together, however intimate that relationship is, I won’t allow the line into personal to be crossed. I realize you and Peabody bend those rules, and while I don’t approve of the sexual free-for-all between a detective and her direct superior, I can overlook it.”

Peabody said, “Huh?”

“You don’t have to worry I’ll usurp your… dynamic, we’ll call it in polite company. I’m not interested. There will be no threesomes here.”

“Gosh, I was counting on that. I even had the outfit.”

“Peabody.” Eve’s voice remained firm and flat despite the laugh tickling the back of her throat.

“Let’s put all the sex aside,” Eve began.

“I couldn’t agree more! Now —”

“No, now,” Eve corrected. “Your whereabouts for the times in question are pertinent to the investigation. I have no personal interest in you whatsoever. If you’d check your calendar, we’ll wait.”

“Are you suggesting I’m a suspect?”

“I’m suggesting you state your whereabouts so we can stop wasting each other’s time.”

“Fine. I don’t have to check anything.” Farmer tapped her head. “On the evening of the twenty-seventh, I was in Miami, tracking, and apprehending, Janet Beaver. I returned with her to New York on the eight-fifteen shuttle – North-South Transportation. On the night of the twenty-eighth through the morning of the twenty-ninth, I was following up a lead on Montoya, which turned out to be a dead end. I stayed in the Motor Court Lodge, off Exit 112 on 68 in Pennsylvania. I used my credit card for expenses, and I did the same when I had breakfast in their coffee shop at six hundred on the twenty-ninth. For the last, I was here, working, but I ordered a pizza – personal size, pepperoni and mushroom. It was delivered about seven-thirty. The delivery girl was about eighteen, five feet, four inches, one twenty, pink hair, green eyes. Mama Mia’s Pizzeria, West Twenty-third off Seventh.”

“We’ll verify, and that should be that.” Eve got to her feet.

“I can see I misplaced my admiration and ambitions with you.”

“Yeah, you did. You should seek help, Farmer. It might clue you in you’re just not an irresistible sex magnet. Besides” – on impulse she slung an arm around Peabody, cuddled her stunned partner in – “my partner’s got the better tits.”

“I’m filing a complaint!” Farmer shouted.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

Eve strode out, pleased to be amused this time instead of depressed and angry. “Let’s check in with Charlie, just to close the door, but she’s not who we’re after.”

“Everybody’s after her.”

“Must be a constant trial.” Eve opted to walk, let the cold blow her brain clear again. “She’s smart enough, and she has strong e-skills, but she’s too obsessed with sex. No sexual component at all in the kills, and with her there would be.”

Eve stopped at a cart along the walk. “I’ve still got enough to spring for a cart lunch.”

“You’re just paying to distract me. Because you want to ogle my tits.”

“Always, Peabody. Always.”

16

By sixteen hundred, Eve felt she’d covered all the ground and all the potentials that made sense.

She considered her options, didn’t care for any of them.

“Peabody, book a holoroom at Central.”

“Really?” Surprised delight flashed over Peabody’s face. “You never use frosty tech like a holoroom.”

“I’ve used Roarke’s a few times. I want to walk through it, all three scenes. One, two, three. Something might pop out rolling through them one after the other.”

“Checking on it… There’s one, and only one, open in ten minutes for forty minutes. The big one’s booked straight through until twenty hundred hours, and the second one’s out of order – again. McNab says it’s glitchy more than not. Booking it now. We’ve got a couple of the booths free, but that’s the only room.”

She only needed one.

Because she wanted the full time, Eve headed straight there, suffered the elevators jammed by the eight-to-four, four-to-midnight changes of shift.

The Holo and VR sector was quiet, and clean. No Vending was offered, and signs were posted along the corridor as reminders that food and drink were forbidden in the rooms.

Others warned that all activity in said rooms would be monitored and recorded.

One way to discourage personal use if a cop had an urge to virtually lie naked on a beach, or get it on with a fellow officer, visitor, or tech.

There were ways around it, of course, and rumor was the second holoroom was routinely glitchy because somebody messed with the monitors so they could lie on the beach or get it on.

As Eve rarely used the facilities, she didn’t much care.

She swiped her master in the slot, waited while it was scanned and approved.

Dallas, Lieutenant Eve approved. Time and facility booked by Peabody, Officer Delia. Approved
,
the computer announced after Peabody also swiped in.

They stepped into the empty room with its white, windowless walls and white floors. Eve moved to the wall comp as Peabody secured the door.

Eve keyed in the three case files, in order, programmed a reenactment, most probable, in sequential order.

Elements accepted, system analyzing. Facial details on suspect incomplete.

“Use the sketches.”

Coordinating artist renditions, merging. Remaining data is being uploaded.

“I saw this vid where these four people were fooling around in a holoroom and got stuck there in like this swampy jungle place – except one of them who got tossed in some urban underworld. And there was this guy with an ax who…”

Peabody trailed off as she looked around the white room. “And maybe I shouldn’t be thinking about that right now. We could end up in a swampy jungle. Anyway it was called
HoloHell
. They’re doing the sequel now.”

“If some guy comes at you with an ax, stun him,” Eve suggested.

Upload complete, program to commence in ten seconds. You have thirty-four minutes, eighteen seconds remaining on your reservation.

“Fine, fine, fine. Go.”

Program to commence in three seconds, two seconds, one second.

Eve followed the killer to the door of Bastwick’s building. She noted the fading light of the late December evening, the computer-generated traffic noises. She watched the gloved hand press the buzzer, and the casual ease of the door opening.

“What do you suppose she’s feeling?” Eve wondered as she stepped onto the elevator with the killer. “If this is the first time – and we’ve got no reason to believe it isn’t, doesn’t she feel nerves? Excitement? Something? But her hands are steady. She shifts and angles the box so easy, like it’s choreographed in her head.”

“No hesitation,” Peabody commented. “No rush either.”

“Everything about her says pay no attention, and no one did. But attention’s what she wants. Maybe most of all.”

“Yours.”

“Yeah, to start.”

Bastwick, in her classy loungewear, opened the door. Bastwick’s mouth moved, and the program gave her voice.

All right. Just put it on the

Her last words as the killer stepped in, drawing the stunner from the right pocket. Center mass, full stun. Bastwick’s nervous system went haywire so her body convulsed, perfectly manicured hands flapping. She crumpled, fell back, went down. The head smacked against the floor. Eyes stared for a second, another, before rolling up white, then the lids came down.