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“Six.”
“Got yer fruitade, got yer Pepsi, got yer Coke, got yer fizzy water. Whatcha want?”
“Just the chocolate.”
She tossed him the money, snagged the skinny sticks out of his hand. She bit fiercely into the first. They were already melting in the vicious fist of the heat.
Roarke bought a large water and grabbed a small mountain of napkins. “Hand one over. You’ll be sick if you eat them all.”
“I’m already sick.” But she proved her depthless love by giving him one. “Peachtree gives me the thirty-second lecture on teamwork, ending in the warm, we’re both just public servants arm squeeze. Then Chang and Franco jump on my ass about the statement I gave 75 this morning. Not screened, not approved. Let’s not confuse the public with the truth. I’m a cop, not a public relations puppet.”
“Which I’m sure you pointed out.”
“Yeah.” She smiled grimly, ate more chocolate. “There was that. Franco doesn’t seem to be an idiot, especially for a politician. But she—and all of them—sure seem to be more interested in perception, in image, in spins than in the investigation.”
“They wouldn’t understand the investigation the way they would perception, image, and spin.”
He drank water to wash down what was laughingly called chocolate by the city vendors, then dampened a napkin to get the smear of it off his fingers.
“And they wouldn’t understand you and the fact that you care less about media exposure than you do what shirt you put on in the morning,” he added, two-pointing the napkin into a recycler. “Which is not at all.”
Eve looked down at her shirt. It was white, she thought. It was clean. What else did you need to worry about?
“We’d all be better off if they did what they did, and left me alone to do what I do. I’ve got suspects, damn it. Price, Dwier, and now the Dukeses. I crack any one of them, and this breaks open.”
She started on the third stick. “Dukes called a lawyer. Jumped right on that. Whining harassment, making lawsuit noises that’ve put Franco and company into orbit.”
“Was that unexpected?”
“No, I expected it. I guess I hoped it would hold line until after the memorial.” She glanced back at the bereavement center. A few cops were heading out. Back to duty, she thought. Life didn’t always go on, but the job did.
“He’s in it, Roarke. Dukes. Slides into the profile like it was a tailor-made suit. You know how you handled Jamie this morning, what I said about knocking him back, grinding him into dust, then building him up again? Dukes wouldn’t trouble himself with the last part of that cycle. My impression is he made his kid’s life a small, personal hell. I’m going to bring him down, and the rest of them with him.”
She looked up, picked out the window of the room where she’d sat with Colleen Halloway. “I’m going to stop them. I need you to get me as much data and background on Donald Dukes as you can—within legal bounds.”
“If you want it within legal bounds, why ask me instead of Feeney or McNab?”
“Because I may be ordered to back off the Dukes, and if I am I can’t ask them. So I’m asking you in case it plays that way. Seems to me a guy with all your companies would always be on the lookout for a good computer scientist. You’d do a background check, employment check, and so on before you considered hiring anyone on, right?”
“I certainly would. And I might casually mention some of that information to my wife.” He stroked a finger down her chin. “That’s very clever, Lieutenant.”
“I want him in a box, and to get him there, I need all the angles. I’m going to have another talk with Clarissa Price this afternoon. She’s not going to be happy to see me. Then I may bounce on to Dwier.”
She looked down at her hand. The remaining stick was now a blob, and a dead loss. “Well, yuck.”
She dumped it in a recycler, cleaned her fingers with the water and napkins Roarke provided.
“Hey, lady!” A man stuck his head out of his car window and shouted at her over the horns. “Why don’t you blast that asshole up there, give the resta us a fricking break?”
“Your weapon’s showing,” Roarke told her, and she hitched the thin black jacket back over it.
A quick scan and she spotted a couple of uniforms coming out of the center. “Yo!” She held up her badge. “Roust that delivery jerk up there. He doesn’t move along in one, slap him a ticket.”
“You a fricking cop?” the man shouted.
“No, I just like carrying a fricking badge and a blaster. Lay off the horn.” She turned back to Roarke, caught him grinning at her. “What?”
“You’ve got chocolate on your fricking badge, Lieutenant.”
