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“But, what if I need help with all those women? I don’t even know what they’re planning because Peabody and Nadine are doing all that, so what if—”
“You could easily find out the plans instead of pretending it won’t actually happen. And you’ll be just fine. They’re your friends.” He tapped her chin with a fingertip. “Eat your dinner before it gets cold.”
“I’m going to take it up, eat at my desk.”
“Fine. Then you can tell me what happened to Morris’s lady, and what I can do to help you find her killer. He’s my friend, too,” Roarke added.
“Yeah, yeah, I know.” She gave in for a moment, moved into him, dropped her forehead on his shoulder. “God. Oh, God, it was horrible. The hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. It made me sick inside, just sick to knock on his door. To know I was about to break a friend in two. I have to find the answers for him. It’s more than the job.”
“It is, yes.” He held her close and tight, and as Mavis had with Belle, rested his cheek on her head. Battled back his own fears. “Whatever you need from me.”
She nodded, drew back. “Let’s take it upstairs. It always helps me see things clearer, or from other angles, when I run the case by you.”
They started up. “Tell me a little about her first. Did you know her well?”
“No. I ran into her a couple of times at the morgue. She transferred here a few months ago. From Atlanta. Mavis had it—the vibe thing. He was in love with her, Roarke, and with everything I’ve learned since this morning, she felt the same about him. I get that she was a good cop, detail-oriented. She didn’t live the job.” She glanced over at him. “I guess you get what I mean by that.”
He smiled a little. “I do.”
“Organized, feminine. She had eight years on the job. No big flash in her jacket, no big lows. Steady. People liked her, a lot. Her squad, her main weasel, hell, the woman who owns the Chinese place where she ordered her takeout. I can’t figure out what she did, who she twisted, to be targeted like this.”
“It was target specific?”
“Yeah.” In her office, she sat behind her desk, told him the details while she ate.
“The locks were checked for tampering?”
“Yeah, and they say no. Could’ve used a master, could be another tenant in the same building. Could have managed to dupe her key card, or someone else’s in the building. Or he could be as good as you, and didn’t leave a trace.”
“She was taken down with a stunner,” Roarke mused. “They’re not easy to come by, and very pricey. Could he have disarmed her first and used her own weapon both times?”
“It doesn’t play. No defensive wounds, and other than the kill burns, and the bumps on the back of her head, her shoulder blades, no offensive wounds. No cop turns over her weapon like that, not even to someone she knows.”
“You’d give yours to me,” he pointed out. “If I asked to see it for a moment, you’d give it to me.”
Eve considered that. “Okay, maybe she would, to someone she was really tight with. But it still doesn’t stream that way for me. She was heading out, sidearm and clutch piece. Taking the stairs, because she always did. That’s a setup. And it had to be done fast and smooth. No time to ask her nice if she’d let you hold her stunner.”
She pushed up, began to pace. After, Roarke noted, she’d eaten only half her meal. “We ran all the tenants. Got a few criminal pops, but nothing major. We’ll interview everyone again who came up with any sort of a sheet, but I have to ask myself why she’d be going out, armed, to meet one of her neighbors.”
“She might have been using the stairs simply to get to one of the other floors rather than the exit.”
Eve stopped, frowned. “Okay, that’s a thought. She arms herself first, though, so it’s not a neighborly visit. It wouldn’t be smart, going to another apartment for a meet when it’s on the shady. Then why did the killer, if he’s inside, need to jam the rear door security camera? Maybe to throw us off,” she said, answering herself. “So we’re looking outside the building.”
She paced again. “Unnecessary complication. But we’ll interview the tenants again. It just feels like an extra step to take, when SOP would be to run and interview everyone anyway.”
“I can help with the electronics.”
“That’s Feeney’s call. He’s always happy to have the uber e-geek on board, but he may have it well under control. I’ve got a lot of case files to wade through. I need to study her currents, her closed, her open, and what I got from Atlanta. You can—yeah, yeah, it’s an insult to you—but you can think like a cop. Maybe you can take a look at Atlanta while I do New York. Plus, they need to be cross-referenced. I need to know if anything from before connects with now.”
“And I can do that faster than you.”
“Yeah, you can.” She angled her head. “You can also think like a criminal, which is handy. Would you have sent her weapons to the primary? Why or why not?”
“I wouldn’t have taken them in the first place. A smart criminal takes nothing—unless it’s straight thievery, which this wasn’t—and leaves nothing of himself behind. Otherwise, there’s that connection.”
“But he did take them. And I don’t think he’s stupid.”
“They must have served a purpose. Leaving them—especially if he used one to kill her—would be, in my opinion, more of an insult to her. And you, or whoever caught the case. So taking them served another purpose, even if it was just the jab to you by sending them back. He’s not a pro.”
