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“They won’t keep it. No, Dallas, they won’t. I’m not going to believe most people really want something like this.” She gestured toward the body.
“We had legal executions for what, over two hundred years in the grand old U.S. of A.,” Eve reminded her. “Illegal ones have been going on since Cain bashed Abel. Under the polish, Peabody, we’re still a primitive species. A violent one.”
She thought of Roarke. And sighed. “Turn her over to the ME. Open the scene to the sweepers. I’ll be talking to Hippel.”
She turned on her own recorder as she walked into the small, cheerful office space off the living area. Officer Baker stood on post while a young black male with a muscular build sat with his head down and his hands dangling between his knees.
Eve wagged a thumb at the doorway, and Baker stepped out.
“Mr. Hippel?”
He lifted his head. His skin was a rich chocolate just now faintly tinged with the green of nausea.
“I’ve never seen . . . I’ve never . . . It’s the first . . .”
“Do you want some water, Mr. Hippel?”
“No, I . . . The officer got me a glass. My insides are too shaky to drink.”
“I need to ask you some questions. I’m Lieutenant Dallas.”
“Yeah. I saw you on-screen doing that deal with Nadine Furst.” He tried to get his lips to curve up, but they just trembled. “She’s hot. I always try to catch her segments.”
“She’ll be thrilled to hear that.” Eve sat down on a small, tufted chair. “Ms. George contacted you.”
“Yeah. I hadn’t heard from her in a couple weeks. We broke things off. Mutual,” he said quickly. “We didn’t fight or anything. Just time to move on, that’s all. Okay, maybe she was a little steamed. Maybe I wanted to move on more than she did, but we didn’t fight. Okay, maybe we had an argument.”
He choked on his own guilt, spit out information while Eve sat in silence and let him run through it. “Maybe we yelled at each other some. Jesus, Jesus, she didn’t do that because I dumped her, did she?”
“When did the dumping take place, Jay?”
“Maybe two weeks ago. It’d been coming on. I mean, hey, she’s a fine-looking, sexy lady and all. Plenty of coin, too. But I’m twenty-four, and she’s not. Guy needs a piece or two his own age once in a while, right? Only natural. And Mary Ellen, she was getting a little territorial. Crimping my style, got me?”
“Yeah. The last time you saw her, did you notice anything different about her?”
“Different? No. Same old Mary Ellen.”
“She didn’t complain of headaches or discomfort.”
“She was feeling fine. We went out to a club, had some laughs, got ourselves a privacy room and banged. Came back out for a couple drinks, and she sees me scoping out some skirts and gets steamed. So we had a kind of argument and broke it off.”
“And today, when she contacted you?”
“She looked bad. Man. Nose was bleeding, her eyes are all red. She’s crying and yelling. I didn’t know what the hell.”
“What did she say to you?”
“Said I had to help her. ‘Somebody’s got to help me.’ Said she couldn’t stand it anymore. ‘They’re screaming in my head’ is what she said. I tried to calm her down, but I don’t even think she heard me. I thought she said: ‘They’re killing me.’ But she was crying so hard, I’m not sure. I thought somebody must be hurting her, all that blood on her face. So I called emergency and got my ass over here. I work just around the corner at the Riverside Café. How I met her. I got here right before the cop, and I’m trying to get them to let me go up. Then the cop came, and we went up, came inside. There she was.”
He lowered his head again, this time all the way down between his knees.
When she finished at the scene, she swung by the morgue. Morris already had Mary Ellen George’s brain removed.
Even for a seasoned homicide cop, the sight of
that pulpy mass of gray matter on a sterile scale was a little off-putting.
“Definitely expanded her mind,” Morris said. “But it doesn’t appear she managed it by reading the great works of literature or exploring other cultures.”
