Holiday In Death

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

"Jesus, Dallas." Feeney shrugged the shoulder she was leaning over. "Stop breathing down my neck."

"Sorry." She leaned back one stingy inch. "How long does it take to program the print into this thing?"

"Twice as long as it would if you weren't nagging on me."

"Okay, okay." She backed off, stalked to the window of the conference room. "It's sleeting," she said more to herself than him. "Traffic's going to be ugly later."

"Traffic's always ugly this time of year. Too many damn tourists. I tried to do a little shopping last night. Wife wants this sweater thing. People are like wolves on a dead deer out there. I'm not going back."

"Video shopping's easier."

"Yeah, but the fucking circuits are jammed. Everybody and his cousin's on trying to scoop up bargains. I don't come up with a dozen pretty boxes under the tree for her, I'm bunking in the den till spring."

"A dozen?" Mildly horrified, she swung back around. "You have to buy her more than one?"

"Man, Dallas, are you green in the marriage area." He snorted, working manually on the programming. "One present don't mean dick. Quantity, pal. Think quantity."

"Great, terrific. I'm sunk."

"You got a couple of days left. And here we are."

Her shopping dilemma cleared from her mind as she rushed back. "Run it."

"I'm getting to it. Here's our man on the 'link."

Is Mr. or Mrs. Kates available?

"I cut out the other voices. That's your pauses," Feeney explained.

Good morning, Ms. Kates. This is Nicholas Claus. I wondered how the work on my necklace is progressing.

"I can run the rest, but that's enough for a match."

"The accent's vague," Eve mused. "He doesn't put a lot on it. That's smart. You got Rudy in there?"

"Coming up. This is from the interview tape. Just him."

We advise all our clients to meet their matches in a public place. Any who agreed to meet him privately subsequent to that were making their own decision.

"Now we got prints. This baby computes everything: pitch, inflection, cadence, tonal quality. Don't matter a damn if you disguise your voice. It's as reliable as fingerprints and DNA. You can't fake it. Shift to Subject A, graft style, on screen and on audio."

Working…

Eve listened to the 'link call, watched the lines of color skim and jump along the screen. "Split the screen," she told him, "put the interview blurb up under that one."

"Just hold on." Feeney ordered the function, then pursed his lips. "Got a problem here."

"What? What's wrong with it?"

"Meld prints on screen," he ordered, then sighed as the points and valleys clashed. "They don't match, Dallas. They aren't even close. You got two different voices here."

"Shit." She tu

"He could mess it up a little, but I'd still get match points. Best I can do is ran a scan, search for any electronic masking, clean it out if I find it. But I've seen enough of these to know when I'm looking at two different guys."

He sighed and sent her one of his mournful looks. "Sorry, Dallas. This sets things back a ways."

"Yeah." She rubbed her eyes. "Run the scan anyway, will you, Feeney? How about the feature-by-feature from the videos?"

"It's coming – coming slow. I can run Rudy's ear shape, eye shape against it."

"Let's go that route, too. I'm going to check with Mira, see if the profile's done."

To save herself time, Eve called Mira's office. The doctor was gone for the day, but a preliminary report had been transmitted to Eve's office 'link. She headed over, trying to pick apart the voice prints as she went.

The guy was smart, she mused. Maybe he'd figured on a voice print analysis. Anticipated it and found a way around it. What if he'd had someone else call the jeweler's?

And that was reaching, she admitted. But it wasn't impossible.

She heard what she would have sworn was a giggle, and stepped inside her office to see Peabody chatting amiably with Charles Monroe.

"Peabody?"

"Sir." Peabody sprang instantly to her feet and to attention. "Charles, ah, Mr. Monroe has some… wanted to…"

"Restrain your hormones, Officer. Charles?"

"Dallas." He smiled, rising from his seat on the arm of her one pathetic chair. "Your aide kept me company, charmingly, while I waited for you."

"I bet. What's the deal?"

"It might be nothing, but – " He shrugged. "One of the women from my match list got in touch a couple of hours ago. It seems her date for a jaunt upstate this weekend hit a snag. She thought I might like to substitute, though we didn't really co

"That's fascinating, Charles." Impatient to get on with her work, Eve dropped into a chair. "But I don't feel qualified to give you advice on your social life."

"I can handle that on my own." As if to prove it, he winked at Peabody and had her going rosy pink with pleasure. "I was toying with the idea of taking her up on it, but knowing how things can go, I chatted her up awhile to get a feel for it."

"Is there a point to this?"

He leaned forward. "I like my moment in the sun, Lieutenant Sugar." Both of them ignored Peabody's gasping snort at the term. "She started unloading. She'd had a big bustup with the guy she'd been seeing. Dumped all the crap on me. She caught him cheating on her with some redhead. Then she tells me how he thought he could make up for it by having Santa bring her a present last night."

Eve sat up slowly, and now her attention focused in. "Keep going."

"I thought that would do it." With satisfaction, Charles leaned back. "She says the doorbell rings about ten last night, and when she looks out there's Santa with a big silver box." He shook his head. "I have to tell you, with what I knew, my heart just about stopped. But she's rambling on about how she wouldn't give the cheating bastard the satisfaction of opening the door. She didn't want his pitiful makeup gift."

"She didn't let him in," Eve murmured.

"And I figure that was why she was alive to call me and bitch."

"You happen to know what she does for a living?"

"She's a dancer. Ballet."

"Yeah, that works," Eve murmured. "I need a name and address. Peabody?"

"Ready."

"Cheryl Zapatta, she's on West Twenty-eighth. That's all I've got."

"We'll find her."

"Look, I don't know if I did the right thing, but I told her. Your one-on-one with Nadine Furst had just run, so I figured it was out. I told her to turn on her screen, and I filled her in." He blew out a breath. "She panicked. Big time. Said she was getting out. I don't know if you're going to find her for a while."

"If she's scrambled, we can get an order to enter and search. You did the right thing, Charles," Eve said after a moment. "If she hadn't heard the report, she might have had a change of heart and opened the door the next time. I appreciate you coming in."

"Anything for you, Lieutenant Sugar." He got to his feet. "Can you let me know what happens?"

"Watch your screen," Eve advised.

"Yeah. Uh, would you mind showing me the way out, Officer?" He sent a killer smile at Peabody. "I'm a little turned around."

"Sure. Lieutenant?"

"Go ahead." Eve waved them away, then dived into Mira's report. Engrossed and frustrated, she didn't notice that it took Peabody twenty minutes to show Charles to his choice of people glide or elevator.

"She's cleared the son of a bitch." Eve sat back, scrubbing her face over her hands when Peabody came back in. "I've got nothing to hang on him."

"Rudy?"

"His personality index doesn't fit the profile. His capacity for physical violence runs low on the scale. He's devious, intelligent, obsessive, possessive, and sexually limited, but in the doctor's opinion, he isn't our man. Damn it. His lawyer gets a copy of this, I won't be able to touch the little creep."