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She bagged it.
She started to head back down, then thought she heard the floor creak overhead. Old buildings, she reminded herself, but drew her weapon. She moved to the back wall, which was partially caved in, and the old metal stairs behind it.
The sound came again, just a stealthy little creak. For a moment she thought she heard a woman’s voice, raw and throaty, singing about a bleeding heart.
At the top of the stairs the floors had been scrubbed clean. They were scarred and scorched, but no dust lay on them. There was old smoke and fire damage on some of the interior walls, but she could see the area had been set up into a large apartment, and what might have been an office.
She swept, light and weapon, but saw nothing but rubble. The only sound now was the steady inhale, exhale of her own breath, which came out in veritable plumes.
If heat was supposed to rise, why the hell was it so much colder up here? She moved through the doorless opening to the left to do a thorough search.
Floors are too clean, she thought. And there was no debris here as there was in the other smaller unit, no faded graffiti decorating the walls. Eve cocked her head at the large hole in the wall on the far right. It looked as though it had been measured and cut, neatly, as a doorway.
She crossed the room to shine her light into the dark.
The skeleton lay as if in repose. In the center of the skull’s forehead was a small, almost tidy hole.
Cupped in the yellowed fingers was the glittery mate to the diamond clip. And near the other was the chrome gleam of a semi-automatic.
"Well son of a bitch," Eve murmured, and pulled out her communicator to hail Peabody.
Two
"It’s her. It’s got to be her."
"Her being the current vic’s ancestor’s dead wife." Eve drove through spitting ice from the crime scene
to the victim’s home.
"Or lover. I’m not sure they were actually married now that I think about it. Gonna check on that," Peabody added, making a note in her memo book. "But here’s what must’ve gone down: Hopkins, the first one, kills Bobbie, then bricks the body up in the wall of the apartment he used over the club."
"And the cops at the time didn’t notice there was a spanking new brick wall in the apartment?"
"Maybe they didn’t look very hard. Hopkins had a lot of money, and a river of illegal substances. A lot
of connections, and probably a lot of information certain high connections wouldn’t want made public."
"He bought off the investigation." Whether it happened eighty-five years ago or yesterday, the smell of bad cops offended Eve’s senses. But… "Not impossible," she had to admit. "If it is the missing
wife/girlfriend, it could be she wasn’t reported missing until he had everything fairly tidied up. Then you got your payoff, or classic blackmail regarding the investigators, and he walks clean."
"He did sort of go crazy. Jeez, Dallas, he basically locked himself up there in that place for over ten years, with a body behind the wall."
"Maybe. Let’s get the bones dated and identified bef
ore we jump there. The crime scene guys were all but weeping with joy over those bones. While they’re having their fun, we’ve got an active case, from this century."
"But you’re curious, right? You gotta wonder if we just found Bobbie Bray. And the hair clips. Is that spooky or what?"
"Nothing spooky about a killer planting them. Wanted us to find the bones, that’s a given. So connecting the dots, the skeleton and our vic are linked, at least in the killer’s mind. What do we have on Hopkins so far?"
"Vic was sixty-two at TOD. Three marriages, three divorces. Only offspring - son from second marriage." Peabody scanned her memo book. "Bounced back and forth between New York and New L.A. with a couple of stints in Europe. Entertainment field, mostly fringe. Didn’t seem to have his grandfather’s flair. Parents died in a private plane crash twenty-five years back. No sibs."
Peabody glanced over. "The Hopkins line doesn’t go toward longevity and propagation. Part of the curse."
"Part of birth control practices and lousy luck," Eve corrected. "What else - salient - do we have?"
"You gotta wonder," Peabody went on. "I mean Hopkins number two was married four times. Four. One surviving son - or surviving until now. He had a daughter from another marriage who drowned when she was a teenager, and another son - still another marriage - who hanged himself when he was twenty-three. That’s the kind of consistent bad luck that says curse to me."
