“Thanks. A full hour weekly, and I can call my own shots. I’m going to have a staff. Jesus, I can’t get over it. My own staff, my own show.” Laughing, she patted her heart. “I’m sticking with the crime beat, it’s what I know and what I’m known for. We’re calling it Now , as I’m going to deal with what’s happening up to the minute we air, every week. Dallas, I want you to be my first interview.”
“Nadine, congrats and blah-blah. Seriously. But you know I hate that crap.”
“It’ll be great, it’ll be good. You can take us into the mind of the NYPSD’s hottest cop.”
“Oh, shit.”
“How you work, how you think, the routine. The steps and stages of an investigation. We’ll talk about the Icove case—”
“Hasn’t that horse been beaten dead yet?”
“Not as long as people are interested, and they are. I’m going to start working with a writer on the book, and the vid script. I need you to meet with her.”
Eve lifted a finger, slashed it through the air. “Line drawn.”
Nadine’s smile was sly. “It’s going to get done with or without you, Dallas. You want to make sure it’s done right, don’t you?”
“Who’s playing you in the vid?” Peabody wanted to know, and attacked the orange blossom chicken on her plate the minute it was in front of her.
“Don’t know yet. We’re just getting started.”
“Am I in it?”
“Sure. The young, steady detective who hunts murderers alongside her sexy, seasoned partner.”
“I’m going to boot,” Eve muttered, and was ignored.
“This is too frosty! Entirely. Wait ‘til I tell McNab.”
“Nadine, this is good for you. Another round of big congrats and all that.” Eve shook her head. “But it’s not the kind of thing I want to get tangled in. It’s not what I do, what I am.”
“Be iced if we could do some of the shoot for the show and the vid at your house. Dallas at home.”
“Not in this lifetime.”
Nadine grinned. “Figured as much. Think about some of it, anyway, will you? I’m not going to push it on you.”
Eve sampled pasta, gave Nadine a wary look. “No?”
“No. I’ll nag a little, finagle where I can, but I won’t push. Here’s why,” she said, tapping her fork in the air. “Remember that time you saved my life? When that psycho Morse had me in the park, ready to slice me to pieces?”
“I have a vague recollection.”
“This is bigger.” Nadine signaled the waiter. “Another round here. So I’m not going to push,” she continued. “Much. But if you could catch a juicy case mid-February when we debut, it wouldn’t hurt.”
“Mavis is due then,” Peabody commented.
“God, that’s right. Mama Mavis,” Nadine added with a laugh. “Still can’t get around it. You and Roarke started your coaching classes yet, Dallas?”
“Shut up. Never mention it again.”
“They’re dragging butt over it,” Peabody told her. “Procrastinating.”
“The word’s ‘avoiding,’” Eve corrected. “People always want you to do stuff that’s not natural.”
“Childbirth’s natural,” Peabody put in.
“Not when I’m involved.”
* * *
Going to the lab to boot some ass, Eve thought. That was natural. She found Dick Berenski, of the spidery fingers and egg-shaped head, at a work station, slurping coffee through his flabby lips.
“Gimme data.”
“It’s always ‘gimme’ with you cops. Always think your shit’s the priority.”
“Where are my fibers?”
“In the fiber department.” He snorted, obviously amused with himself as he rolled on his stool to a screen, gave a few taps. “Harvo’s working on it. Go hound her. She did your hair already. Out of the drains, out of both the rooms. Must not clean out the pipes in that shithole but every decade. Got the vic’s, and other unidentified—for now—on crime scene. No Wood traces in the drains of the second room, just the vic’s on crime scene, bathroom sink. ID’d hair from vic, son of vic, daughter-in-law of vic, hotel maid, couple of former tenants already listed on your report. All the blood on crime scene was the vic’s. Surprise, surprise.”
“In other words you can’t tell me anything I don’t already know.”
“Not my fault. I can only work with what you give me.”
“Let me know when you’ve compared hair and prints from the hotel scene and the bar.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.”
“Cheery today,” Peabody muttered as they headed through the glass-wall maze of the lab.
They found Harvo at her station studying the screen. Her red hair was stiff with spikes that contrasted with her pale, almost translucent skin. There were little Santas dangling from her ears.
“Yo,” she said.
“That my fiber?”
“One and the same. Hair’s turned in.”
“Yeah, I got that from Dickhead. I thought you were the Queen of Hair, not fiber.”
“Queen of Hair,” Harvo agreed with a snap of her chewing gum. “Goddess of Fiber. Fact of it is, I’m just fucking brilliant.”
“Good to know. What’ve we got?”
“Synthetic white poly with traces of elastizine. Same constitution as the particles found in the unfortunate vic’s bone and gray matter. What you’re looking for is either a sock or a tummy tamer. But I’d say not a girdle—not enough elastizine.”
“Sock,” Eve said.
“And you’d win the prize. Compared fibers to a lone white sock taken from the scene. You got your match. New sock, never worn, never washed. Still traces of gum on the lone one, from the tag, and I got me a tiny bit of plastic jammed in the toe. You know how they snap the socks together with thelittle plastic string?”
“Yeah, I hate those.”
“Everyone does. You got to cut them apart, and who’s got a knife or scissors handy when you want to wear your new socks?” Harvo snapped the gum in her mouth and circled a finger in the air. The nail was painted Christmas red with little green trees. “Freaking nobody. So you—” She fisted her hands together, twisted. “And half the time you snag the socks, or end up with a little bit of plastic inside that stabs you in the foot.”
“Pisser.”
“Yeah.”
“How about the tag?”
“It’s your lucky day—the sweepers were thorough and brought in the contents of the trash can. Came from the bathroom. I took it since I was doing the fibers anyway.”
She scooted, showed Eve the tag.
“It was balled up, like you do, and a piece of it torn. Fibers stuck to the gummy side. Anyways, got it straightened out, put together, and you can see our handy bar code, and the type.”
She tapped the protective shield over the evidence.
“Women’s athletic socks, size seven to nine. Which is another pisser on my personal bitch list. See I wear a seven myself, and when I buy socks like this, I always got too much length in the foot. Why can’t they just make them fit? We have the technology, we have the skill. We have the feet.”
“That’s a puzzler,” Eve agreed. “Prints?”
“Vic’s, tag and sock. Got another on the tag. Ran it.” She bumped back to the screen. “Hitch, Jayne. Employed by Blossom Boutique on Seventh, sales clerk. I don’t know, call me crazy, but I bet Jayne sold the vic a pair of socks recently.”
“Nice job, Harvo.”
“Yeah, I awe myself regular.”
* * *
It was a simple matter to track down Jayne. She was behind the counter at the boutique ringing up sales with the focused determination of a soldier on the front lines.
The shop was jammed with customers, drawn, Eve imagined, by the big orange sale signs on every rack, table, and wall. The noise level, punched upward by incessent holiday music, was awesome.
You could shop online, Eve thought, if you were desperate to shop. Why people insisted on pushing into retail outlets with other people who probably wanted the same merchandise, where the lines roped around in endlessly confusing misery and torture, and where the sales clerks were bitter as raw spinach, was beyond her.
When she said the same to Peabody, her partner’s answer was a chipper “Because it’s fun!”