Strangers In Death

It didn’t take long. Bebe came out of the house wearing a dull brown coat. Don’t notice me, it said to Eve. Just getting through here, just getting by.

Her gaze flashed to the car, to Eve, and her mouth folded into a sharp, thin line. The neighbor might’ve given her points for motherhood, but Eve gave her points for shooting up her middle finger. It took spine to flip off a couple of cops who were dogging you for murder.

Bebe stomped up the block. Giving her a few yards, Eve eased from the curb and slowly followed. Two and a half blocks to the bus stop, Eve thought. Had to be a bitch in the worst of the winter, in the rain, in the wind. Eve slid back to the curb as Bebe stood at the stop, arms folded, eyes straight ahead.

When the bus lumbered up, Bebe stomped on. And Eve pulled out to follow. It chugged to the next stop, then the next, belching its way out of the tattered neighborhood into the next. The houses grew brighter, the sidewalks smoother, the vehicles more plentiful and newer.

“Has to be hard,” Peabody said, “to come out of where you landed to work for somebody else in what you used to have.”

“Slap you in the face every day.” She watched Bebe get out at the next stop, shoot her a furious glare, then hurry down the block to a whitewashed restaurant with a bright yellow awning.

“Peabody, see what precinct covers this area. And let’s see if we can impose on a couple of our brothers from the Bronx to have Italian for lunch.”

“Going to keep the pressure on.”

“Yeah. She’s tough, but she’ll pop.”

“I don’t know. I think making another pair of cops is just going to piss her off, dig her in. Legal Aid lawyer’s going to call us whining about harassment.”

“She didn’t call Legal Aid. She’ll pop,” Eve repeated. “Twenty says she pops before end of shift today.”

“Today? With those DeSalvo genes?” Peabody snorted at the idea. “I can use twenty. You’re on.”

16

AT CENTRAL, EVE SIGNED ANDERS’S VITAMIN DISPENSER out of evidence. She set it on her desk, sat, studied it. A solid gold pill dispenser, she mused. Even Roarke didn’t have one of those to her knowledge. Of course, he wasn’t one for popping a bunch of pills every night of his life either.

If and when that day came, he’d probably have a platinum one, with diamond accents. Okay, no, he wouldn’t. That was entirely too fussy and girly.

Which, she thought, Anders’s certainly was.

More sports clothes than stylish ones. A man cave for an office.

“Bought this for him, didn’t you, Ava? Planting those seeds. The poor schmuck had to use it if it was a gift from you.”

Program it, she mused, turning the heavy gold box over in her hands, lift the ca

“Well, you liked your gadgets, Tommy, and she knew it.”

She put in a call to EDD expecting to get the acting captain, and was surprised to hit Feeney.

“So. You’re alive.”

“Back in the saddle.” He gri

“Glad to hear it. I’ve got this thing. Electronic pill dispenser.”

“Why in hell would anybody need that?”

“Your guess is as good as mine. It was Thomas Anders’s, and I’m working on the idea that his wife slipped a couple sleepers in here. All right if I bring it up?”

“Sure. I can send somebody down for it.”

“No, I’ll bring it. I want to run it by you anyway. Give me five.”

She clicked off, resealed the box, initialed it, then tucked it under her arm as she headed out and up. In EDD, she veered straight away from the color and sound, and into Feeney’s office.

With healthy color back in his basset hound face, Feeney sat at his desk. “I got work up the wazoo,” he told her, “and already had to kick a couple asses this morning. It’s good to be home.”

“I spent a couple hours this morning intimidating a widowed mother of two. I love this job.”

He laughed, then lifted his wiry eyebrows at the box she put on his desk. “Jesus, a gold pill spitter, with engraved initials?”

“For the man you want to kill who has everything.”

“You said a couple of sleepers. They wouldn’t do that much.”

“He had traces of over-the-counter in him, but nobody can confirm he took same routinely. Ingesting one would put him out good enough to let somebody get into the bedroom, shoot him up with barbs and cock hardener. Or groggy enough so he could be bound up before he came around enough to know what was going on, because I think the barbs weren’t on the order sheet. They threw the scene off from the jump. Our girl Ava isn’t going to make a wrong turn like that.”

“Wanted him awake for it.”

“Yeah. Killer was meant to come up, truss him up, noose him-throat starts to constrict, what do you do?”

“Open your mouth and try to suck air in.”

“And when he does, killer shoves the dick trick into him. The asphyxiation would get him going, then you ring the cock. Let him gasp and flop while you set the scene. If you do it right-and it wasn’t done right-it’s going to look like the vic was playing around on the side, dipping into the kink. Kink got out of hand. I bet part of the instructions were to loosen the scarfing after he was cooked, at least loosen it so it would appear some attempt was made to revive. Then you have your kinky cheater, a tragic, embarrassing, but fairly routine accident, and the panicked partner fleeing the scene.”

“Voi-fucking-là.”

“We’d look for her, sure, but we’d get nowhere. Because Anders didn’t cheat, wasn’t into the kink. But the scene and the evidence would read that way.”

That, Eve realized-taking his decent reputation as well as his life-gripped her guts. “But see, the killer shot him up with the dick hardener. It wasn’t taken orally. Shot him up with that, I’m betting, after she shot him up with the tranq.”

“You want me to see if the wife diddled with the box?”

“Yeah. If you can open it up, see if anything was taken out or added before his death. Couple of days before, probably. The wife left New York on March fifteen.”

“Let me play with it.” Feeney initialed the bag, unsealed it to draw the box out. “Bitch is heavy. It’s got voice or manual settings. She did it manually, it’s going to be tougher to pin. Even if she did it by voice, a lawyer’s going to argue she was his wife. She filled it or added to it at his request, even the sleeper. He’s not here to say different.”

“One step at a time.”

She left him to it, started back down. She needed to see if Peabody had contacted Petrelli’s tenant, then they needed to start working on the other possibles she’d culled from the files. Run some probabilities.

She had a feeling the computer would look favorably on Petrelli, given the data, but…

She paused when she spotted Benedict Forrest outside her bullpen. It was getting so she couldn’t scratch her ass without coming back and finding some civilian waiting for her.

He sprang to his feet. “Lieutenant Dallas, I need to talk to you.”

Since she wouldn’t mind having another round with him, she gestured. “Let’s take it in my office.” She led the way, caught Peabody’s eye as she moved through the bullpen. The gleam in it had her pointing Ben toward her office. “Go ahead in. I’ll be a minute.”

She skirted around desks to Peabody’s. “What do you have?”

“Charles and Louise are getting married.”

“I know. Did you-”

“I know you know because Charles just told me he told you, but you didn’t tell me. All morning you didn’t tell me.”

“It wasn’t the first thing on my mind.”