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“Fine.” Eve opted for a down glide rather than an elevator. “Better that way.”
“Is someone missing? Or dead?”
“Someone was missing, but now she’s not. Someone might be dead, but there’s no body. Passenger count is off by two on disembarking.”
“Which might equal victim and killer. How’d they get off the ferry?”
“That’s another question.” She stepped off the glide. “First, I’ve got a couple quarts of blood in a public restroom on the ferry. I need to find out who it belonged to.”
Five
She wound through the labyrinth bisected by glass walls. Behind them techs worked with scopes and holos, forensic droids, tiny vials and mysterious solutions.
The air hummed in a blend of machine and human into a single voice Eve found just slightly creepy. She would never understand how people worked, day after day, in a vast space without a single window.
She found the chief lab tech, Dick Berenski, sliding his stool soundlessly along his long white counter as he commanded various comps. Dickhead was an irritant, a pebble in the shoe on a personal level, but she couldn’t deny his almost preternatural skill with evidence.
He looked up, cocking his egg-shaped head as she approached, and she didn’t miss the light in his eyes when he recognized Roarke.
“Got yourself an entourage today, Dallas.”
“Don’t think about trying to hit up the civilian for liquor, tickets to sporting events or cash.”
“Hey.” Dickhead couldn’t quite pull off offended.
“Let’s talk blood.”
“Got enough of it. I got the initial sample a couple hours ago, and they’re bringing in the rest. We’ll run tests on samples of that, too. Could be more than one source. Got my blood guy reconstructing the scene, pool and spatter, from the record. That’s a fucking beaucoup of blood.”
“Fresh or frozen?”
He honked out a little laugh. “Fresh.” He tapped some keys and had squiggles and swirls in bold reds, yellows, blues, filling a comp screen. “No indication the sample had been stored, cold-boxed, flash-f rozen, thawed or rehydrated.”
He tapped again, brought up another screen of shapes and colors. “Coagulation rate and temp says it hit the air about two hours—maybe a little more—before I tested it. That’s consistent with the time it took to get here.”
“Concluding the sample came out of a live human, and came out of said human between one and two this afternoon.”
“What I said. A Neg, human blood, healthy platelets, cholesterol, no STD. We filtered out trace portions of other body fluid and flesh. Double X chromosomes.”
“Female.”
“You bet. We’ll keep separating other body fluids when we have the larger samples, and the sweepers tell me they’ve got some hair in there. We’ll be able to tell you pretty much everything. Fluids, flesh and hair.” He grinned widely. “I could freaking rebuild her with samples like that.”
“Nice thought. DNA.”
“I’m running it through. Takes some time, and there’s no guarantee she’s on the grid. Might get a relative. I programmed for full match and blood relations.”
Thorough, Eve thought. When Dickhead got his weird little teeth into something, he was thorough. “There were fibers.”
“Like I said, we’ll separate and filter. I’ll give hair and fiber to Harpo. She’s the queen. But I can’t pull the vic’s ID out of my ass. She’s either on the grid or—Hey!” He swiveled, scooted as the far comp beeped. “Son of a bitch, we got a match. I am so freaking good.”
Eve came around the counter to study the ID photo and data herself. “Copy to my unit,” she ordered. “And I want a printout. Dana Buckley, age forty-one, born in Sioux City, why are you dead?”
“Nice-looking skirt,” Berenski commented, and Eve ignored him.
Blue-eyed blonde, she thought, pale skin, pretty in a corn-fed sort of way. Five-six, a hundred thirty-eight, parents deceased, no sibs, no offspring, no marriage or cohab on record. “Current employment, freelance consultant. What does this personal data tell us smart investigators, Detective?”
“That the deceased has no family ties, no employer to verify identification or give further data on said deceased. Which makes a smart investigator go hmmm.”
