Vendetta in Death (In Death #49)(81)

“Don’t throw the right-to-know bullshit on me now. Three in three days. Do you think we’ve been sitting around playing goddamn mah-jongg or something?”

“I think you don’t even know what mah-jongg is, and you could have returned a tag from someone you know you can trust.”

“I didn’t have time!” Eve threw up her hands, paced in a circle. “I don’t have time now to stand here and argue with you. I didn’t have time to give you some damn sound bites. You need to back off.”

“I’m doing my job just like you’re doing yours,” Nadine shot back. “You know damn well I can get the information you feed me on the air, I get it out, and it might help. Just like you know I’ll hold anything you tell me to hold.”

“It’s not that. It’s not fucking that. It’s not about you, not about the you-and-me deal. Sometimes it’s just about the work. About the bodies piling up. About not having enough left over to deal with anything else.”

Nadine paused, held up a finger. Paced in her own circle. “Okay, all right. Here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to go get coffee—for everybody. Then I’m coming back, with a camera. If you can’t give me a one-on-one or a statement, I’ll take one from Peabody or McNab. With three bodies in three days, you need media support to get public support, whether you admit it or not.”

She did know it. Didn’t like it, but knew it. “I don’t know when I or the detectives involved will be available.”

“I’ll wait.”

She would, Eve thought. And since neither of them was wrong, she eased back herself.

“I’m not drinking any fake coffee. I have high standards. Where are you going to get real coffee?”

“I have my ways. And besides being an Oscar-winning screenwriter—”

“Yeah, that’s going to get old.”

“Never.” The annoyance, frustration shifted to a smug smirk. “Plus a bestselling author and Emmy-winning newscaster, I have a goddamn rock star with me. We can get real.”

“No real, no camera time. That’s a deal breaker.”

“We’ll get real.”

“Meanwhile, off my crime scene. And tell Roarke to come through.”

She turned on her heel, walked back to Peabody and McNab.

“McNab, you and Roarke can move into the building. Check the door cam feed, start on the vic’s apartment.”

She stopped, frowned. “What’s that?”

Peabody held up the evidence bag. “A hair, a black hair—not the vic’s, he’s medium brown. It was stuck to the dried blood on the back of his shoulder. We got a hair, Dallas.”

“Good work, good catch. They get sloppy,” she murmured, and felt a turn in the investigation as a physical twist in her gut. “They almost always get sloppy.”

“The wagon’s on the way,” McNab told her. “Sweepers, too.”

He shot a wave to Roarke, pointed toward the building. Eve glanced around to see them walk off—Roarke in his king-of-the-business-world suit, McNab in his mint-green baggies and shiny electric-blue jacket, toward the dead man’s apartment building.

“Let’s flag the hair priority for Harvo.”

“Already did. I can get one of the sweepers to get it to her first thing. It’s probably wig hair, but even then, the queen of hair and fiber will ID it”

“Yeah. Pull one of the support uniforms to sit on the body until the wagon gets here. We need to hit the apartment. When we’re done here, you’re doing a one-on-one with Nadine.”

“Me? She’ll want you, and—”

“She’s not getting me, not for the camera. I’m going to give her a little more on the side. She’ll hold it, and maybe dig in enough to find something we’ve missed.”

“Okay. Jeez, I wish I’d done something with my face.”

“Your face is your face,” Eve said as they walked. “Live with it.”

“You can live with it and make it a little better. So, really weird time to say it, but it’s great about Mavis, Leonardo, and a baby coming, right? We celebrated our asses off when she told us. Leonardo’s walking about six inches above the ground.”

“They’re good at it, all of it. The couple thing, the family thing, the parent thing.”

They moved into the building. The claustrophobic lobby wasn’t nearly as clean as the vic’s ex’s, and smelled more like old piss than pine. Still, it had reasonable security, so she had hope for the door cam feed.

She ignored the elevator. The vic had lived on the third floor.

“We got lucky with the nine-one-one caller,” she told Peabody as they climbed. “Used to be on the job, works a security night shift. Made sure the scene stayed secure until we had cops on-site.”

“I know Keller and Andrew a little, and they’re solid.”

“Struck me the same,” Eve agreed.

“I feel like our luck’s turned.”

“Yeah. So did Kagen’s—the wrong way. I talked to Kagen’s ex last night. Might have been talking to her when he got taken. Fuck it.” She wanted to scrub her hands over her face, to yank at her own hair. Barely resisted. “I hauled Baxter and Trueheart out of bed to check on her—and her neighbor, who’s also in the group.”