Desperation in Death (In Death #55)(16)

“What happened to me happened. I got through it. Whatever happened to Mina, she didn’t. We do the job and find out who and why.”

She waited another beat.

“That doesn’t mean my boot won’t meet your ass for other reasons.”

“I’m aware.” Then Peabody brightened. “But it’s a little bit of a smaller target now.”

Eve just smiled. “I have excellent aim.”





4





They found Dorian’s building on the sketchy edge of the city. The eight-story concrete block tower butted up against a strip mall and faced a road thick with grumbling traffic. It looked as if it had seen better, brighter days—and all of them had passed half a century earlier.

Considering the gray dinge over the peeling puke-green paint and the visible weeds growing out of sagging gutters, whoever owned the building didn’t trouble with pesky details like upkeep.

They parked at the strip mall, walked and stepped over a low, pitted concrete curb.

Eve mastered into a skinny lobby and eyed the pair of elevators. The skull and crossbones painted on one of the doors had her aiming for the stairs.

More dinge, she noted, some grime with it, and a lacing of trash. The tenants, at least some of them, didn’t appear to worry about upkeep, either.

They hiked to the fourth floor.

By her eye, she judged the industrial beige walls hadn’t seen a fresh coat of paint in over a decade. Most of the doors—army green—had numerous locks.

Not a camera or palm plate to be seen.

She knocked on 412.

It took several more knocks before the door across the hall creaked open a few inches and thumped against the security chain. Eve saw a single eye, the side of a nose, and the corner of a tight-lipped mouth.

“She’s in there all right.”

The door creaked shut again.

Taking the neighbor’s word for it, Eve gave the door a solid pounding. “Ms. Gregg, this is the police. We’re here about your daughter, Dorian. Open up, or we’ll come back with an entry warrant.”

An empty threat, but it got the desired result, as locks snicked and clacked, a chain rattled, a bar thumped.

The door opened, and Jewell Gregg barred the way. A tall, mixed-race woman with a headful of gold-tipped black twists, she folded her arms over her chest. She wore snug red shorts that showed off the snake tattoo slithering up the outside of her left leg, and a tight white tank.

Despite the pouches under her eyes smeared with yesterday’s mascara, she owned a dissipated sort of beauty. Behind her the apartment smelled of stale smoke and last night’s Chinese.

“That girl’s in trouble again, and it’s nothing to me. I’m done. So you can tell her, since she thinks she’s so smart, to figure it out herself.”

“Ms. Gregg.” Eve held up her badge. “I’m Lieutenant Dallas. This is Detective Peabody. We’re NYPSD.”

“This ain’t New York City.”

“We believe your daughter’s in New York. Can we come in?”

“I don’t have to let you in, do I?”

Not going to budge, Eve thought.

“No. We can talk right here in the hallway.”

“Fine by me. Can you hear all right, you nosy bitch!” Gregg shouted it as she sneered at the door across the hall.

To Eve’s amusement, the woman behind the door called back. “Yeah, I can hear just fine, thanks.”

“When’s the last time you saw or spoke with Dorian?”

“I don’t know. Last summer, maybe. Don’t know, don’t care. That girl’s been nothing but trouble to me since the day she was born. A thief’s what she is, a sneaky little thief.”

“Your—at the time—twelve-year-old daughter goes missing last summer—you think. You didn’t file a missing persons report, go to the authorities?”

“I said I’m done, didn’t I? They find her whiny ass, haul her back, she brings trouble before she takes off again. I got a life of my own, and I’m living it. She can live hers.”

Peabody tried to insert a little soothing balm with the placating tone of her question. “Does she have friends or other relatives she might go to?”

“Got some bitchy little sneaks for friends.”

“Names?”

Jewell sneered at Eve’s single, snapped word. “How the hell do I know? They don’t come around here. That girl says we live in a dump and how she doesn’t like who I date. Well, la di da, maybe she can go live in a palace like a princess.”

“Relatives?”

Gregg shrugged. “My grandmother’s somewhere. Queens, maybe Yonkers. She doesn’t approve of how I live my life, so fuck her. We don’t speak, maybe ten years now. Who needs that?”

“Would Dorian know how to contact her?”

“Don’t know how, don’t know why she would. That old lady’s got nothing except bad knees from scrubbing other people’s floors. Ran my own mother off, too, with all her ‘Do this, do that,’ and God knows where she ended up. I got away from the old bitch. Probably should have left the brat with her. I’d be better off.”

“If we could come in, see Dorian’s room, her things, it might help us locate her.”