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“Follows, doesn’t it? A squatter’s an easy hit. Not tough to get to, and nobody cares too much. It’d be a good place to perfect your technique.”
“My thinking. I’ll send these to you. Haven’t got any hits on the mutilation. Plenty of slash and gash in the good old U.S. of A., but nothing that hums along with your guy. I’m widening to international.”
“Thanks, Feeney. You got some vacation time coming, don’t you?”
His mournful face drooped. “Wife’s nagging my ass red about putting in for a week. Frigging holiday brochures all over the damn house. Thinks we should rent some big beach house or some shit,
take the whole damn family. Kids, grand-kids.”
“How about Bimini?”
“Who?”
“Where, Feeney.”
“Oh. Bimini. What about it?”
“Roarke’s got a place there, big house, staffed. Beach, waterfall, blah blah. I can clear it with him, have your whole damn family fly down on one of his transports. Interested?”
“Jesus Christ, I go home and tell the wife we’re taking the whole herd to Bimini for a week, she’ll keel over. Shit, yeah, I’m interested, but we don’t have to play payback.”
“I’m not playing. Place is just sitting there. He flipped a deal to Peabody and McNab awhile back, so I figure I can flip one to you. Especially since I’m going to ask you to keep an eye on things when I do some out-of-town work.”
“Sounds like I’m getting the shiny end of the deal. Data coming through.”
She read it through, and felt that quick little buzz in the blood. A cop buzz. She was looking at his work. Practice strokes. Not that sort of thing that merited a signature, she thought, but a building of style and skill he preferred not to add to his credits.
He’d have been sloppier, less cautious. There’d have been mistakes, and though the trail was cold, she might still find a shadow of them.
She took the time to organize the data before taking it to Whitney for her pitch.
With her commander’s go-ahead under her belt, she made tracks back to Homicide, already formulating her next pitch in her head. She breezed through the bull pen, giving Baxter a with-me signal when he called out her name.
“So, you get a look at the guy she’s boinking on the side?”
“She’s not boinking a guy on the side.”
The rush Eve was still riding on drained. “Gotta be. Damn it, Baxter, she had big, secret affair written all over her. I could almost smell the sex.”
“Please, you’re giving me a woody. I’m just going to have some of your coffee and calm myself down.”
“If you couldn’t keep a tail on her—”
“I kept a tail on her.” He ordered up an enormous mug, two sugars, splash of cream. Taking it, he leaned back against her filing cabinet to enjoy the first jolt. “Goddamn, this is coffee. Speaking of tails, which you were, the blonde had a superior one.”
“Take your woody and your idiot brain out of my office. She’s screwing somebody on the side.”
“Did I say she wasn’t?” He smiled, sipped again, and wiggled his eyebrows at Eve over the rim. “She just ain’t driving a stick.”
“She’s . . . Oh. Well, well, well, this is interesting.” She lowered to the corner of her desk, thought it through. “Not just a side dish, a girl side dish. That has to be a real pisser for a guy.”
“And the dish was prime. Tall, lanky, black, and beautiful. The kind you just want to start slurping on from the toes up. Waste from my point of view—two superior examples of the species, and they’re sliding all over each other. Of course, thinking about them sliding all over each other is entertaining. I had a good time with that, and have to thank you for the duty.”
“You’re a sick perv.”
“And proud of it.”
“Do you think you could defer your lesbian fantasies until you give me a report?”
