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By the time she’d finished, rounded up Peabody, and gone back to Central, she had a new batch of photos for her board.
“Post these,” she told Peabody, “then check in with the lab.”
She moved straight into the bullpen, to Baxter’s desk.
“Still working on it,” he said before she could speak. “You were right. We’ve already found some vics who worked at the same places previous vics worked. Crossing survivors, too. There’s a decent percentage, so far, who live in the area you designated.”
“Any connections between the vics in the two locations? Personal connections.”
“Still working on it.”
“Bring in a couple of e-men Feeney picks to help you run it. And tell him I’m heading up to talk to Callendar.”
She went straight up. Easier to go to, she calculated, then to send for.
She pushed into the color and chaos of EDD, scanned the neons and patterns, the busy movements for Callendar. When she didn’t see her, Eve turned toward Feeney’s office.
One of the e-geeks jogged by her. “He’s in the lab.”
She veered out again, turned toward the e-lab. She saw Feeney hunkered at a station on one end of the big, glass-walled area, and Callendar standing, doing some sort of dance, in front of another.
“Yo, Dallas. Got some bits and pieces.” Callendar stopped dancing, gestured toward a screen. “Putting it together.”
“Anything I should know now?”
“Other than the Red Horse cult was full of crazy sickheads? Not so much, but I’m working on it. I dug up a handful of names—abducted kids who got out or were recovered. Moving on it.”
“Keep moving.”
Taking her literally, Callendar went back to dancing.
“What do you see?” she asked Feeney.
“Something that might be interesting.” He, too, gestured to a screen.
“See for yourself.”
She watched him play back the door security disc, noted the time stamp. The busy sidewalk, people moving, moving, moving. Then the woman—brown and brown, early twenties, in a Café West shirt, unzipped navy jacket—came into the frame. She stopped, grinned at someone to the left; her mouth moved as she called out something. And she waved as she walked inside.
“Time’s right,” Eve murmured.
“Yeah. It’s fourteen minutes, thirty-nine seconds after the wit and the two with her went in. Wit leaves …” He ran it forward, and Eve watched Lydia, her teeth clenched, her face rigid with fury, stomp out.
“Five minutes, fifty-eight seconds after the woman in the Café West shirt goes in. Gets bitchy, gets headache, gets out. Yeah, the time’s right.”
“I’m guessing if the wit had stayed inside another ten, twenty seconds, she wouldn’t be a wit.”
“Her lucky day. Go back to the woman going in. What’s she saying? Did you translate?”
“We don’t have her full face, but the program reads her lips at eighty-five percent probability.”
He ordered it up.
No prob. I’ll put it in for you.
“Okay. Do we have an ID on her?”
He toggled over to an ID shot. “Jeni Curve, twenty-one. Part-time delivery girl, part-time student. No priors, no shaky known associates. Shares an apartment with two other females. And she’s one of the vics. I checked.”
