Vendetta in Death (In Death #49)(9)

She set her teeth as she heard his airboot prance coming her way.

“Hey, LT.”

“Start on the electronics,” she ordered. “Open what you can here, do a quick pass, tag and transport. Shit, shit, shit! Open the hell up! Take what you can’t open back to EDD.”

“On it. Hey, that’s a mag code reader. Is that a TTS-5?”

“How the hell do I know? Stop breathing on me.”

“Looks like you’re through everything but—”

She made a sound deep in her throat even a rabid dog would have backed away from. McNab just leaned closer.

When the pad blinked green, he tapped a fist to her shoulder. “Nice.”

“Fucking A,” she said, and used the master to swipe through the rest.

She figured McNab could have done it in half the time she’d taken, and Roarke? He probably could have slid through by his damn Irish charm.

But she’d done it.

She opened the door, saw the memo cubes, the discs, the other organized office supply paraphernalia—and a case she judged would hold the camera in the bedroom.

And a locked cabinet. “Jesus Christ. Is he storing the crown freaking jewels?”

“Just a key lock this time,” McNab noted. “We can pry it.”

“No property damage.” From the field kit she took lock picks—again courtesy of Roarke. She had a better hand with key locks than e-locks, and had the cabinet open in under five.

When she opened the door, McNab let out a low whistle. “Wowzer. Kink City.”

“I knew it.”

“Dude could practically open his own sex shop.” McNab slipped his hands into two of the many pockets on his plutonium-infused purple baggies.

She couldn’t disagree as she scanned the padded cuffs, the vibrators, the oils and lotions, the cock rings, nipple clamps, ticklers, silk cords, blindfolds, the supply of condoms, of Stay Up, feathers, gels.

She gestured at a bottle clearly marked ROHYPNOL, another marked RABBIT, and a small one labeled WHORE.

“Son of a bitch. He’s got travel vials. Go clubbing, take a vial, pick your target. Get her back here, do what you want. Lady Justice’s poem wasn’t wrong.”

“Poem?”

“We’ll get to it. Electronics, McNab.”

“On it.” He stepped back, a skinny guy with a pretty face, a long tail of blond hair, an earlobe weighed down by silver hoops. “The toys, you know, that’s one thing. No harm, no foul if everybody’s having fun. But the chemicals, that’s fucked-up.”

“And now so’s he.”

And whatever he’d done, whatever he’d been, now he was hers.

She went out, spoke to the head sweeper, rounded up Peabody.

“Let’s take his New York admin. That’s the best chance of getting his habits, his schedule, his friends, and his side pieces if he had repeats.”

“Lance Po,” Peabody read from her PPC as they started out. “Thirty-eight, mixed-race male, married five years to Westley Schupp, worked the New York base for just under eleven years, the last four as the vic’s admin. The apartment was so classy,” Peabody added as they rode down.

“Yeah, that’s how it looked. Nice, quiet, upper-class class. He had photos of his wife and kids on his desk ten feet from a locked cabinet full of sex toys and bottles of roofies, Rabbit, Whore. Not so goddamn classy.”

“So he didn’t just cheat on his wife in her own damn bed. He used rape drugs.”

“Hard to believe he had them—and not all the bottles were full—and didn’t use them. Let’s see if the admin knows where he was heading last night, and who—if anyone—he headed out to meet.”

They went outside, where life in New York hit full churn. Ad blimps blasting, traffic snarling, pedestrians surging. No body lay over the sidewalk now, and no sign remained that it had.

Inside the building was a different story. She had uniforms knocking on doors, sweepers spreading over a family home, an EDD geek who’d dig through what that family had documented, what they’d talked about on their ’links, what they’d keyboarded, what photos they’d saved on any device.

Death unearthed secrets.

When Eve slid behind the wheel, Peabody gave her the admin’s address. “It’s going to be a hard trip home for his wife and kids,” she commented.

“Yeah. Did she know?” Eve wondered. “Maybe, maybe she didn’t know about what he kept locked in a cabinet, but how could she not know about the cheating? A guy doesn’t have that kind of sex supply—out of the bedroom he shares with his spouse—and not cheat as a matter of habit. How could she not know?”

“Some women just believe, and some guys are really good at covering.”

Eve shook her head. “Nobody’s that good.”

She punched out, muscled her way into the snarling traffic.

Po and his husband lived in a Midtown unit over a Greek restaurant. A reasonable walk to work, if Po was inclined, Eve calculated. She buzzed in at the street-level door, and in seconds got a cheerful “Hey, yo!” through the intercom.

“Lieutenant Dallas, Detective Peabody, NYPSD. We need to speak to Mr. Po.”

“Yeah, right, and Roarke’s up here having a bagel. Is that you, Carrie?”