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“Get a new one. Like . . . bird-watching or something.”
“Bird-watching? In New York?”
“You could count pigeons. It would take the rest of your life.”
“I like ass-watching.” Peabody settled herself in comfortably. “When I see one bigger than mine, it makes me feel good. When I see one smaller, it helps me resist eating a whole bunch of cookies. It’s a productive hobby, my ass-watching. And there’s no record on file rescinding the court order to remove Shelby Ann Stubacker from the home. No record of any petition filed by the mother to get her back.”
“Which means, despite the notation in her records that she was placed back in the parental home, she went missing from either The Sanctuary or the new digs. Interesting.”
“I guess Jones and Jones go back on the list.”
“They were never off. But now they bump up to the lead.”
She pushed and threaded her way through traffic, considering new angles. “Tag HPCCY, tell them we need the documentation on Shelby’s court order. We need the CPS docs, the recommendation to send her back home.”
“On that.”
While she was, Eve parked again.
“Ms. Jones says she’ll pull the files up out of storage,” Peabody said as they went inside, worked through the maze to DeWinter’s sector. “She asks if we’ve ID’d anyone else.”
“Tell her that information will be forthcoming.”
She found DeWinter—an emerald green lab coat today, open over another body-conscious dress, this one hot pink and white checkerboard.
She stood with Morris, who was just as snappily dressed in deep, dark plum. Together they studied a screen displaying indecipherable shapes—to her—in colors as bold as their wardrobes.
“It’s cause of death,” DeWinter said. “Do you agree?”
“I do.”
“What’s cause of death?” Eve demanded.
Both turned toward her so they stood with a trio of slabs, a trio of remains, between them.
“They drowned,” DeWinter said.
“Drowned.” Eve stepped in, looked down at the remains, up at the screen. “You can determine that, conclusively, from bones.”
“I can. You see on screen a sample of the diatoms I extracted from the bone marrow of the third victim identified. That would be—”
“Lupa Dison.”
“Yes. I also have similar samples from the first two victims, and the fourth. I’ll continue to conduct the procedure on all the remains. But I can conclude for the four on which I’ve conducted the tests, these girls drowned. The diatoms here reached the lungs and penetrated the alveolar wall, and the bone marrow. Comparing these samples to samples of water I took from the crime scene—”
Eve tossed up a hand to stop the flow. “You went back to the crime scene? Without notifying the primary?”
“I didn’t think it was necessary until I’d reached my conclusions, which indeed—in consultation with Dr. Morris—I have. Now, these unicellular organisms have a silica shell, and as you can see, truly gorgeous sculpturing. The aquatic diatom—”
“Stop.” Eve held up a hand again, added the other, and caught Morris grinning out of the corner of her eye. “I don’t want a science lesson. I need to know if you’ve found COD.”
DeWinter just frowned at her. “As I just said, drowning, in city water. While certain additives have changed or been deleted from the city’s water in the last fifteen years, the basic biology remains. Such as—”
“Stop there, too. City water? No chance of, say, pool water, river water, seawater?”
“No, again, aquatic diatoms—”
“Just no’s enough. The bathtub then. It’s not impossible to drown a girl in a sink, or just pour water down her throat, stick her head in the john. But with the lack of injury at or around time of death, the bathtub makes more sense. Plus, it’s right there if you want to drown a bunch of girls.”
