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Still holding him off the floor, she turned her head. Her mouth fell open seconds before she dropped Lewis in a heap and leaped on the industrial gray shell of the computer. “Mine. It’s mine.”
“Yes, sir, Lieutenant sir. She’s all yours.”
With her arms possessively circled around the unit, she looked back at him. “Look, maintenance boy, if you’re toying with me, I’ll bite your ears off and make them into stew.”
“I got the order right here.” Moving cautiously, he reached in his pocket for his logbook, punched in the code. “See, here, Dallas, Lieutenant Eve, Homicide Division. You got yourself a new XE-5000. You requisitioned it yourself.”
“I requisitioned it two goddamn years ago.”
“Yeah. Well.” He smiled hopefully. “Here she is. I was just hooking her to the mainframe. You want I should finish?”
“Yeah, I want you should finish.”
“Okay. Have it done in a wink, then get right out of your way.” He all but dived under the desk.
“What the hell kind of name is Tomjohn?”
“It’s my name, Lieutenant. You got your complete owner’s manual and user’s guide in that box over there.”
She looked over, snorted at the foot-high box. “I know how it works. I have this model at home.”
“It’s a good machine. Once you’re linked to the main, all we gotta do is transfer your code and data from your old equipment. Take about thirty minutes, tops.”
“I got time.” She skimmed her eyes over her old unit, dented, battered, despised. Some of the dents had been put into it by her own frustrated fist. “What happens to my old equipment?”
“I can haul it out for you, take it down to recycle.”
“Fine—no. No, I want it. I want to take it home.” She’d perform a ritual extermination, she decided. She hoped it suffered.
“Okay by me.” Since he figured his tongue and his ears were safe again, he began to whistle with his work. “That thing’s been obsolete for five years. Don’t know how you managed to get anything done with it.”
Her only response to that was a low, throaty growl.
• • •
When Peabody came in an hour later, Eve was sitting at her crowded desk, grinning. “Look, Peabody. It’s Christmas.”
“Whoa.” Peabody came in, circled around. “Whoa squared. It’s beautiful.”
“Yeah. It’s mine. Tomjohn Lewis, my new best friend, hooked it up for me. It listens to me, Peabody. It does what I tell it to do.”
“That’s great, sir. I know you’ll be very happy together.”
“Okay, fun’s over.” She picked up her coffee, jerking her thumb toward the AutoChef so Peabody knew she was welcome to a cup of her own. “I did a run-through on Draco’s apartment last night.”
“I didn’t know you planned to do that. I would have adjusted my personal time.”
“It wasn’t necessary.” Eve had a nasty image of the scene in Areena’s apartment if Peabody had come along.
“Draco kept a stash of illegals in his penthouse. A variety pack that included nearly an ounce of pure Wild Rabbit.”
“Creep.”
“You bet. Also a number of inventive sex toys, some of which were out of the scope of even my wide range of experience. He had a collection of video discs, and a large percentage of them are personal sexual encounters.”
“So we have a dead sexual deviant.”
“The toys and the discs are personal choice, but the Rabbit shuffles him over into SD territory. It could go to motive, or motives, since they’re piling up like Free-Agers at a protest rally. No offense.”
