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“I don’t bounce. McNab bounces.”
“Yeah.” Peabody stifled a yawn as they walked out the front door. “I guess you plow, and I’m down to a crawl.” She flopped down in the passenger seat of the vehicle parked at the base of the stairs. “So, the side dish isn’t on your suspect list?”
“Dumb as a cornstalk. Roarke says sweet, and I guess I see that, too. Loyal, I’d say. She may be part of the motive, but she wasn’t part of the execution.”
“You said how we may intersect lines with the Flores case. But I don’t see it.”
“Why?”
“Well, I know it looks like they should cross, or merge. Same method, same basic victim type. Except they’re not basically the same victim type. And if it’s a killer on a mission, why is he keeping the mission to himself? Maybe the vics are connected in another way, but I can’t find it. I spent some time doing background on Jenkins. I just can’t see where he’d have run into the guy posing as Flores, where they’d have common ground.”
“You may not bounce or plow, but you’re crawling pretty well on a couple hours.” She made it nearly five blocks before she hit the first hideous traffic snarl. “Crap. Crap. Why do they call it rush hour when it lasts days and nobody can rush anywhere?”
She engaged her dash ’link to tag Feeney.
She’d barely finished securing McNab to the team when her ’link signaled an incoming.
“Dallas.”
“Lieutenant.” Mira’s admin sniffed on-screen. “Dr. Mira’s schedule is fully booked today.”
“I just need—”
“However, the doctor would be happy to discuss your current cases over her lunch break. Twelve o’clock. Ernest’s.”
“I’ll be there.”
“Be on time. The doctor doesn’t have time to wait.”
Before Eve could work up a scowl, the screen went blank. “Like I sit around and play mahjong all frigging day.”
“What is mahjong, exactly?”
“How the hell do I know? Am I playing it? Screw this.” If nothing else, Mira’s dragon’s attitude annoyed Eve enough to have her slapping on the sirens and going vertical.
Peabody gritted her teeth and gripped the chicken stick as Eve skimmed over the roofs of honking Rapid Cabs and compact commuters, as she veered around the hulk of a maxibus, veered back around the dingy wedge of a delivery van.
“He’s still going to be dead when we get there,” Peabody pointed out in a squeak. Then huffed out a breath of relief when Eve landed the vehicle in a short span of clear road.
“Look at that.” Eve pointed a finger at one of the animated billboards running news headlines.
There, looming over the circus of Times Square, was Jimmy Jay Jenkins, choking out his last breaths, falling like a huge white pine under the ax.
“They’ll be running that clip for days,” Peabody predicted. “And any time they do a story on him for the next forever, they’ll run it. Whoever had the rights to that feed is now a really rich bastard.”
“Stupid!” Eve rapped her fist on the wheel, hit vertical again to zip over another, smaller jam. “Moron. Idiot.”
“Who? What?”
“Me. Who owns the fucking feed? Who gets the juice? Find out. Now.”
“Hold on. Hold on.” Concentrating on her PPC, Peabody stopped visualizing her own mangled body trapped in the police issue after a violent midair collision.
“If it’s not the church, I’m even a bigger moron. Why pass that revenue on to someone else? Even if it’s a different arm, it’s going to be the same body. It has to be the same damn body.”
“I get Good Shepherd Productions.”
“That’s a church thing. Good Shepherd. They aren’t talking sheep. Tag Roarke. He can get it faster.” Eve’s eyes stayed hot and hard on the road as she maneuvered. “Tag Roarke, ask if he can find out if Good Shepherd Productions is an arm of the Church of the Eternal Light.”
