Devoted in Death

9

She arranged to meet Peabody at Mattio Diaz’s building, on the west edge of Greenwich Village. She didn’t have the same happy luck with parking, and had to settle on a price-gouging underground lot three snow-packed blocks away.

The hike convinced her Roarke had been right – as usual – about the boots.

The snow kept the traffic, pedestrian and vehicular – thinner than normal in the trendy neighborhood, and she noted several stores had opted to close, at least for the morning.

She spotted a glide-cart operator dressed for exploring Siberia, down to the goggles. A couple of indeterminate sex huddled in the steam of his grill over a bag of chestnuts that scented the air. And a gang of kids raced by with the manic energy that told her schools had taken a snow day.

She spotted Peabody – pink coat ridiculously cheerful through the thick curtain of snow – and McNab with her. He wore atomic cherry with an earflap hat of such eye-burning colors she imagined it had come from Peabody’s oddly skilled hands.

They, too, huddled over a bag of chestnuts.

“Hey, Dallas!” Like the coats, Peabody’s voice was ripe with cheer. “Did you hear?”

“Hear what?”

“We’re going to get six to eight inches!”

“Well, whoopee.”

“I didn’t have anything cooking,” McNab began, and held out the bag to share. “I asked Feeney, and he said to come on along.”

She shook her head at the chestnuts which then vanished into one of his half a million pockets. “Fine. I’m going to talk to the reputed dickwad about what happened last night. I could use you to triangulate. Peabody’s got the locations of the snatch and dump on Kuper. Let’s see how it plays with the area where Campbell sent the text last night.”

“I can be all over that and back in no time.”

“Let’s get the hell out of this damn snow.”

“It’s so pretty.” Peabody turned her face up to it, let it catch on her eyelashes.

“It’s also going to make it harder for us to dig up anybody who might have seen Campbell or the people I strongly suspect grabbed her. What did you get from the party people?”

“Nothing much. A couple of guys threw the party – good space for one. Neither of them even realized she was gone. Didn’t know her anyway. But there was another guy there this morning – stayed over.”

“Had a threesome,” McNab put in as Eve used her master to get into the building. “Definitely.”

“I have to say yes to that,” Peabody confirmed. “The third guy talked with her some. He wants to get into modeling. He’s got the looks. She gave him her card. And he noticed she had some words with Diaz – who’d been sexy dancing – with a lot of hands on various body parts – with a blonde. Wit says she was really steamed, and he couldn’t blame her as it was pretty in-your-face. He said something to the blonde after he saw Campbell grab her coat and take off. The blonde’s name is Misty Lane.”

“The hell it is.” Eve shook snow off her coat.

“Yeah, professional name. A model/actress/cocktail waitress. The blonde just laughed it off, and said guys like Mattio were for fun, not for keeps. He says it was after midnight, but couldn’t pin it down.”

“Good enough.”

The converted-to-lofts warehouse boasted a freight elevator some people found charming. Eve considered them death traps and opted for the stairs.

“Nadine’s thinking about a place like this,” Peabody said.

“Like this?”

“On her list of possibilities. Big, trendy loft space. The others are a brownstone – a la Charles and Louise. And the third’s a multilevel penthouse type condo in some slick building.”

“Number three,” Eve said.

“Oh, did she decide? Last I talked to her Roarke had given her some different properties to look over, but that’s as far as she’d gotten.”

“That’s what she will decide.”

“Maybe, but whichever way she goes, she’s after full, top-of-the-line security. That near-miss with Roebuck scared her.”

“Good. I told her not to open the damn door. Next time she won’t.” Eve paused on the third floor. Despite the momentary stupidity, Nadine Furst was a friend. “She’s doing okay?”

“Yeah. She took a delayed vacation – solo this time. Just a few days. She’s already back – mostly, I think, because she wants to move as soon as she can.”

And, Eve imagined, because the top on-screen crime-beat reporter couldn’t stay away from the action for long.

She knew the feeling.

She buzzed at Diaz’s door, and got a tinny computerized voice.

Mr. Diaz has engaged the Do Not Disturb option. There was a jumble of noise, a sort of wheeze – as if the comp had asthma. Please leave your name.

“Cheap tech,” McNab commented. “Bottom of the barrel.”

Cheap tech or not, it currently stood in her way. Eve took out her badge. “Scan this,” she ordered. “This is official police business. Inform Diaz now.”

The scanning function is currently inactivated. Please leave your name.

Eve pressed the buzzer, held it down.

The Do Not Disturb – through the speaker came the equivalent of a computer death rattle – Name leave unable to process.

Ruthlessly, Eve ignored the dying gasps, kept her finger on the buzzer.

It took more than a few of McNab’s mo’s, but the next sound was human.

“What the fuck!”

“NYPSD. Open the door, Mr. Diaz.”

“Well, Jesus, it’s barely morning.”

Things rattled and thunked, and the door cracked open.

Yeah, he was a looker, Eve thought, even half asleep and obviously strung-out. Unearthly green eyes, thick black lashes, chiseled cheeks covered with scruff and a tumble of dark hair streaked with red gave him the kind of polished sexy used on billboards.

“You can let us in, Mr. Diaz, or we’ll arrange to have this conversation at Central.”

“Central what?”

Apparently the gods had used up their quota on his face, and hadn’t had much left over for brains.

“We’re cops, so that would be Cop Central.”

“What the fuck!”

“The fuck will be explained in the course of the conversation.”

“Well, Jesus,” he said again, and opened the door.

He hadn’t bothered with clothes – apparently the quota had included the body that matched the face on the scale.

Beside her Peabody gulped audibly.

“I was sleeping,” he said, and gave a king of the jungle stretch. “What’s the prob?”

Eve bent down, picked up a pair of fake leather pants. “Are these yours?”

“Yeah, so?”

“Put them on.”

“Sure, if it bothers you.” He smirked. “But naked’s natural. Anybody got any coffee?”

“Gee, fresh out.”

Clothes – a shirt, a couple of thongs – his and hers, Eve supposed, and a very skimpy black dress littered the floor. Knee-high black boots, and mile-high glittery heels lumped together in another pile.

“I take it you weren’t sleeping alone,” Eve said.

The smirk reappeared as he tugged on the pants. “Don’t usually.” Then he yawned, managed to look sexy doing so. “I need a Vitasmooth.”

So saying, he sort of glided off through an opening framed in wavy glass block. Eve heard kitchen rummaging.

“Asshole,” McNab muttered, and Peabody only cleared her throat and gulped again.

He came back with a jumbo tube filled with spinach-green liquid. “Sorry, last one.” And took three big gulps. “Wow, head rush. Nice. So what’s this about?”

“Jayla Campbell.”

“Jay-jay?” He shrugged, glided again to one of the two chairs in the big space, slumped down, drank again. “What about her? Last I heard dancing with somebody wasn’t a cop deal. She’s pissed, fine. No reason to call in the cops.”

“She’s missing.”

“Missing what?”

Eve strode over, slapped her hands on the arms of the chair and leaned in. “Listen carefully.”

“Sure. You’ve got mag eyes. Anybody ever tell you? You could model with those eyes, your build. I’ve got connections.”

“Shut up and listen. Jayla Campbell left the party she attended with you last night and hasn’t been seen or heard from since.”

“She’s probably just sulking somewhere. She’s moody.”

“We have reason to believe otherwise. You were one of the last people to see her. When did you last see or speak with her?”

“I don’t know, at the party, when she got the bug up her ass about Misty. We were just dancing.” His gaze shifted toward another opening covered by a gauzy black curtain.

“And you and Misty danced back here?”

The smirk came back, as if it couldn’t help itself. “No crime there.”

“What time?”

“Jesus, I don’t know, exactly. We partied till about two, I guess. Then we walked back here – couldn’t get a damn cab – and we had a lot of sex.” He smiled now, full, showing perfect white teeth. “Jayla said we were done so, you know, free agent. She’s just sulking somewhere,” he repeated. “Wouldn’t want to go home where her bitch of a roommate would rub her nose in it, right? That one took it way wrong when I said how maybe the three of us could get it together.”

“You really are a fuckhead.”

“Hey!”

Eve shoved back. “Consider this, I could get a warrant, come through here and turn the place inside out. That would turn up all the illegals you didn’t already consume.”

“I don’t use! You can’t prove it.”

“Yes, I could, but you’re not worth it. Listen up, dickwad, the woman you’ve been involved with for several months, the one who helped put that face you’re so proud of out there, is missing. She may be hurt, she may be dead. Pretend to care.”

“It’s not my fault she got a bug up her ass. What do you mean ‘dead’?”

For the first time he looked concerned. Eve merely turned, signaled to Peabody and McNab.

“What do you mean ‘dead’?” he repeated, as she walked out.

“Let him stew on that,” she said.

“He’s really, really pretty,” Peabody said, “and he’s really, really a fuckhead.”

“The pretty fuckhead didn’t have anything to do with Campbell going missing – other than piss her off so she was out alone. I’d give him a couple weeks in a cage for that, if I could.”

“He wouldn’t last a couple,” McNab muttered.

“Exactly.”

“You were staring.” He scowled at Peabody as they trooped downstairs. “When he was naked.”

“Well, duh. Naked. And built. If he’d been a girl, you’d have been staring.”

Eve cast her eyes to the ceiling, quickened her pace from a walk to a jog down the steps. But she could still hear them.

“I bet he bought that body.”

“He got a really sweet deal if he did. But I like yours, right down to your bony ass.”

Eve didn’t have to see – thank God – to know Peabody gave that bony ass a squeeze to highlight her point.

“Total skeeze.” Apparently McNab couldn’t give it up. “And he totally hit on you, Dallas. Roarke would squash him into skeeze juice.”

“If he was worth being squashed, I’d have squashed him myself.” She stopped at the bottom of the stairs, bringing both of them up short. “A skeeze (she kind of liked the word), a fuckhead, a dickwad. He’s all of that and a bag of rice cakes.”

“Chips. It’s a bag of chips,” Peabody told her.

“Chips are good. Rice cakes are crap. He doesn’t get chips.”

“Oh.” Peabody frowned over it before she nodded. “That makes sense.”

“And the point is he doesn’t know or care where Jayla Campbell is. We don’t know, either, but we do care. Forget him. We’ve got about a three-block hike to where I’m parked. Considering the weather, I’m going to pull in some beat droids, shoot them Jayla’s ID shot, have them canvass the area between the party and her apartment, using the most likely route that would take her through where she texted her roommate.”

“I can do that.”

“Then do it,” she told Peabody. “And you, put the locations together. The first snatch, the first dump, and the last known location of Campbell.”

She pulled out her ’link when it signaled, saw Baxter’s ID, and pushed her way out into the world of snow. “Dallas.”

“Hey. You’ve got a Deputy William T. Banner out of someplace called Silby’s Pond, Arkansas, in here. He wants to talk to you about our spree killers. I checked, and he’s legit – been with the sheriff’s office there for five years. I put him in the lounge since he’s pretty firm about talking to you first.”

“Silby’s Pond?” She tried to remember if she knew the name, but there had been so many on the choices of routes. “I’m on my way in from Greenwich Village. We’ve got another missing. Take this data, get the wheels turning.”

“Shoot it at me.”

“Jayla Campbell,” she began, and filled him in.

She drove through abominable traffic with the scent of McNab and Peabody’s roasted chestnuts and the hot chocolate they helped themselves to from the backseat AutoChef.

Snow and homey scents were one thing during the holidays, she thought, but those were over. Why couldn’t they be done with it all now?

By the time she pulled into her slot at Central, she felt as if she’d trekked across the Arctic Circle.

“Why are they even out there?” she demanded. “The people, especially the people who can’t drive? NY tag number Echo-Charlie-Charlie-eight-seven-three. Issue an auto ticket.”

“An ‘auto ticket’?” Peabody repeated as they all climbed out.

“That’s what I said. Didn’t you see that idiot woman? Creeping along at twelve miles an hour?”

“Um. Well, it sort of pays to be cautious when —”

“While she was slapping on lip dye with her vanity mirror down, so she’s looking at herself instead of the damn road – and babbling on her ’link while she’s at it. Could’ve put it on auto if she needed to admire herself instead of fucking drive, but no, she’s creeping and weaving and doing her christing makeup.”

“Oh. Well. Do you really want to fine her? I always felt sort of crappy issuing autos when I worked Traffic.”

“Get over it. Slap her with driving while stupid.”

With McNab giving her butt a pat for support, Peabody issued an auto-citation while they took the elevator up.

“They don’t stalk the vics,” Eve said, shifting gears. “There’s not enough time for that. It’s luck of the draw. It doesn’t matter who – rich, poor, young, old, male, female. If the pattern holds we’ve got two days to find them before they finish Jayla Campbell.”

“The weather’s helping them now,” McNab commented. “Cold, wind, snow, sleet. People spring for a cab or take public. Or stick close to home. They’ve just got to find a solo walker in a relatively quiet spot.”

“Right now they’re two for two in New York.”

As the elevator began to stop and start floor-by-floor with cops and civilians piling in, Eve pushed out.

“Odds are they boosted this dark all-terrain or van they’re using. Peabody, run a search for stolen vehicles fitting that, try New Jersey and Pennsylvania. And, yeah, it’s a general type in a big area,” she said before Peabody could point it out. “But we start, and maybe whittle it down before they decide to switch again. They may have taken it from another victim.”

She wove her way through people on the glides, moving up and up.

“McNab, get me that triangulation. They’re downtown somewhere. They have to have a place to live, to take the vics. Low security – can’t have cams picking them up carting in a vic. Nothing popped yet on the canvass of abandoned, so either we haven’t hit there yet, or they’ve found somewhere private.”

When she turned into Homicide, Baxter signaled from his desk. “Alerts on Campbell are out, Loo. The media’s already doing bulletins.”

“Okay.” She saw his gaze flick up to her snowflake hat. Eve yanked it off, stuffed it in her pocket. “What’s the deal with this Arkansas badge?”

“Well, he’s mannerly, but he was pretty firm he needed to talk to you.”

She pulled off her gloves, scarf. “Still in the lounge?”

“Last I checked.”

With a nod, she shoved the gloves in one pocket, the scarf in another, and headed out still wearing her coat.

She wanted coffee like she wanted to live. She wanted to sit down in the quiet, write everything up. Update, analyze, think.

In her head a clock was ticking, and there were less than forty-eight hours left.

She paused at the door to the lounge with its lines of vending, its tiny tables and hard chairs. She spotted him quickly.

A half mile of leg stretched out under the table. Long, narrow hands worked a PPC while a vending cup of something sat neglected in front of him.

A lot of wavy hair the color of a wheat field, a long narrow face to match the hands. He either hadn’t shaved recently or wore the scruff on purpose.

He wore jeans, boots that had seen a lot of miles, a flannel shirt that made her think of lumberjacks even though she wasn’t entirely sure what a lumberjack was.

A black parka hung over his chair back, and a duffel bag was under the table.

He looked up when she started toward the table. Blue eyes, she noted. Not Roarke-blue, but few were. His hinted at gray, showed smudges of fatigue under them, and a cop alertness in them.

“Deputy Banner.”

“Yes, ma’am. Will Banner.” He shifted his long legs, rose. Unfolded was more like it, she thought. He was an easy six-five with a build like a beanpole.

“Lieutenant. Lieutenant Dallas.”

He took the hand she extended in one with a rough, hard palm. “I sure do appreciate you meeting with me, Lieutenant.”

“You’re a long way from home, Deputy Banner.”

“That’s the God’s truth. Farthest I’ve ever been.”

“Where’s Silby’s Pond?”

“We’re in the Ozarks, ma’am, not —”

“Lieutenant. Sir if you want. Dallas will do.”

“Sorry. Y’all do things different here. We’re in the north of Arkansas, Lieutenant, not far from the Missouri border. Prettiest country you could ask for.”

His voice was caught somewhere between drawl and twang – leaning toward the drawl.

“What brings you here?”

“I’m hunting the same two you are. The same who killed this Dorian Kuper. He’s their latest. You did a search last night through IRCCA on missings and homicides in my area.”

“How do you know that?”

“I get alerted whenever there’s another victim, whenever there’s an official search through for more.” Though he shifted his feet his eyes stayed steady on hers. “Lieutenant Dallas, I understand you’re working with the feds, and they’ve given you their profiles and data and whatnot, but they don’t have all of it.”

“And you do?”

“If I did, your victim would likely still be playing his cello. But I believe – I know I have more. If you could just spare me fifteen minutes. I understand you’re busy, and you’re on an active investigation, but I’m asking you for fifteen minutes. I’ve come a hell of a long way.”

“Let’s take it in my office.”

She could all but see relief slide through him before he bent down for his duffel. “I’m grateful.”

“We don’t usually shove fellow law enforcement out the door.”

“You do hear things about New York City.”

“I bet. When did you get in?”

“That’s a story.”

She imagined that easy, heading toward lazy, drawl worked well on stories.

“I didn’t get the alert about your victim until into the afternoon. I talked to Special Agent Zweck, like I did with the one right before, and before that. They’ve been working their way to you, Lieutenant, for months now. It seemed to me with the search you started last night you’re leaning that way.”

“It’s an angle.”

“It’s the right angle, and because I saw how it seemed you might be leaning, and – I hope you’ll understand – after I did some research on you – I figured you might be open to a face-to-face with me.”

He paused just inside the bull pen, looked around. “You sure are busy around here. Back home, there’s the chief, me and two other deputies and our dispatcher.”

“How many people in Silby’s Pond?”

“Right about thirty-two hundred.”

“There’s more than that in this sector of this building.”

She gestured him toward her office. He stopped again inside it, studied her board as she shrugged out of her coat.

“You know there’s more. Half again more maybe.”

“It hasn’t been updated since I left yesterday. I’m late getting in because we have another missing person.”

“Jayla Campbell. I was reading the bulletin,” he said when she narrowed her eyes, “when you came in. The timing’s right, I see you know that, too. They’ve got her. They’d’ve started right in on her last night, too. Excited to have another. They’d’ve already started hurting her.”

“There’s no official victim in Silby’s Pond. I’d remember.”

“No, ma’am. Sir. Lieutenant. Sorry.” He scrubbed at his eyes a moment. “I was saying how I figured you’d be willing to talk with me, so I drove up to Branson, as it’d be the best place to get a shuttle through to New York. I got the last one heading out, figured I’d hit lucky. Until they dumped us in Cleveland ’cause of the weather. So I rented a truck, and drove the rest.”

“From Cleveland, in this weather.”

“The only way to catch them is to catch up to them. I haven’t managed that yet.”

“Have a seat. You want coffee?”

“All I can get. Black would be just fine, thanks.”

She got two from the AutoChef.

“Who do you think they killed in your town?”

“Melvin Little. He’s what you might call a fixture around those parts. He served in the Urban Wars, and he never could get through that, if you know what I mean. He came home, to his parents, a younger brother and a sweetheart. What my own daddy tells me, is Little Mel – as he was called, being small in stature – used about any substance he could get his hands on to muffle the nightmares, the voices, the memories. I know this doesn’t matter, but I want you to know him.”

“You’re getting your fifteen,” she told him.

Nodding, Banner took a hit of caffeine. His eyes went wide and glassy. “Sweet Baby Jesus, what is this? Is this New York coffee?”

“Not exactly. It’s real coffee. I’ve got a connection.”

“Real coffee.” He said it like a prayer, with awe and reverence.

Remembering her first taste of Roarke’s coffee, she smiled. “Need a minute?”

“It could take days.” He smiled back, and she saw, beneath the fatigue, a great deal of charm. “Wait till I tell the boys back home.” Then he sighed. “Little Mel, he couldn’t adjust back. They tried what they try, but he was just one of the lost. There were too many, I guess. He didn’t like being indoors much, so he took to sleeping out in the hills, in the woods. You have what you call here sidewalk sleepers.”

“Yeah.”

“And they, some of them, they make a kind of home for themselves out of what they scavenge. He did that. His family took him food and supplies, but after some time, it was clear enough he wasn’t coming back. Most times he was drunk or high. He never hurt anybody but himself.”

She could see Melvin Little – Banner painted him well. And she sensed more. “What was he to you?”

“His sweetheart? That’s my grandmother. She loved him, loved the boy he’d been, but she couldn’t reach the man who’d come back. She married my grandfather, but she still went out to see Little Mel from time to time, take him food and fresh clothes. I got in the habit of going out to check on him every week or two.”

“So you looked out for him.”

“We did what we could. It’s true he might go rifling through a car or a cabin or shed now and then if it wasn’t locked up, take what caught his eye. More often in the last couple of years. Not when anyone was in them, you understand, and he never did a break-in. If it was locked, he left it be. Otherwise, he’d just go on in, poke around, take something to add to what he called his collection. Might be a fork or a doorknob, a broken clock.”

“You considered him harmless.”

“He was harmless.” Banner took a moment, another hit of coffee. “We had a boy go missing once. The family had gone camping, and the boy wandered off. We were putting the search team together when Little Mel comes walking into the campsite with the boy riding on his shoulders. The boy said how he’d been chasing a rabbit, and he got lost, and was crying and hurt his foot. And Little Mel came along, gave him a candy bar, wrapped up his foot in a handkerchief that was, truth be told, none too clean, and said how he’d give him a ride back to his mama. And he did. He never hurt anybody.”

“What happened to him?”

“I knew when I went out to check on him something was wrong. Not that he wasn’t there, but his things, they were jumbled up.” Banner paused, shaking his head. “He took pride in his collection, and there was an organization to it. And that day, there wasn’t.”

He looked up again, into Eve’s eyes. “You know how you get that pull in your belly?”

“I do.”

“I had that. I went looking for him, at his usual places. Where he liked to fish, where he’d take what he called his preambles. I didn’t find him until the next day. I went back the next morning, took his nephew’s son who’s a friend of mine so we could cover more ground. I found him in a gully, all broken up. You’d have thought how maybe he’d slipped off the track above, taken a long, bad fall. But he was a damn mountain goat, I swear. He’d been dead three days.”

“Evidence of torture, of binding?”

“Broken bones, cuts, bruises, some burns. But… they ruled it an accident. Burns could’ve come from him smoking whatever he managed to smoke, or his campfire. Breaks and cuts and bruises from the fall. We got a report a cabin had been broken into. Lock smashed. A few things taken – not really what Little Mel tended to take – and like I said, he never broke in. They found a little blood, and it was his, so it looked like he’d gone on in, just cut himself on something. Not a lot of blood. But we didn’t find anything that was missing in his collection, or along the way he’d have taken if he’d gone up that ridge and taken a fall.

“It could’ve happened that way, he broke in, cut himself, was maybe careless on the track and fell. You can see the logic to it, if you didn’t know him. But just over a week later, a boy went missing up in Missouri.”

“Noah Paston.”

“Yes, ma’am – Lieutenant,” he corrected. “You’ll have to give me time to break a lifetime habit. No question he was taken. There was no accident there. And clear signs he’d been bound, cut and burned and smashed up. A young, athletic boy and poor lost Little Mel don’t seem to have much in common, but they were both alone, both in what you’d call remote areas, both with cuts, burns, broken bones. I couldn’t let it go.

“I can show you the list I have, the names and locations I’ve been putting together since last August.”

Arkansas, she thought. It fell right into her route. “I’d be interested in that, in comparing it with my own list. Not updated,” she repeated when he glanced toward her board. “Not just with Jayla Campbell, but with the possible victims I put together last night. Is Ava Enderson on your list?”

“She surely is.”

When she named more, he shut his eyes like a man who’d found home, nodding, just nodding until she came to Jacob Fastbinder.

“That one’s a heartbreaker. Jennifer – Ms. Fastbinder – she’s pushed all she can push on it, but he doesn’t fit the FBI’s victimology. And like Little Mel, it reads just as easy as an accident.”

“Do you know her?”

“Never met, as such, but we’ve had a number of conversations and correspondence.”

“I intended to contact her today, request she allow the body to be exhumed and transported here to our forensic anthropologist.”

“If you’d let me talk to her, I think I can make that happen. I don’t suppose you could have a look at Little Mel.”

“Are there remains to look at?”

“He’s buried in the family cemetery, like his mama wanted.”

“Having two would give DeWinter comparisons,” Eve considered, and made the call on the spot. “We’ll take him. I need to speak with my commander, but we’re going to take both of them if you can pull it off.”

“Little Mel’s mama’s going to take more talking to than Jennifer Fastbinder, but I can be persuasive. I’m hoping I can persuade you to let me have another cup of this coffee.”

Eve wagged a thumb at the AutoChef. “Do you know how to work one of those?”

“They’re about the same wherever you go.”

“Then help yourself. Take it back to the lounge – can you find it again?”

“I’ve got a good sense of direction.”

“Start persuading. I need some time here to do the same, then I’m going to set up a conference room. When are you due back in Arkansas?”

“I’m on my own time. I took leave.”

That put a hitch in things. “Does your chief know you’re here, what you’re doing?”

“He does.” Banner poked at the AutoChef. “He doesn’t see this the way I do, but he’s given me a lot of room. And I’ve got leave coming.”

“Okay. Go work on clearing the exhumations, and I’ll work on getting the forensics here.”

She sat, and when he’d cleared the room, did a quick and thorough run on him before she contacted Whitney’s office and asked for a window.