Delusion in Death (In Death #35)(49)

“Yo, Dallas. Got some bits and pieces.” Callendar stopped dancing, gestured toward a screen. “Putting it together.”

“Anything I should know now?”

“Other than the Red Horse cult was full of crazy sickheads? Not so much, but I’m working on it. I dug up a handful of names—abducted kids who got out or were recovered. Moving on it.”

“Keep moving.”

Taking her literally, Callendar went back to dancing.

“What do you see?” she asked Feeney.

“Something that might be interesting.” He, too, gestured to a screen.

“See for yourself.”

She watched him play back the door security disc, noted the time stamp. The busy sidewalk, people moving, moving, moving. Then the woman—brown and brown, early twenties, in a Café West shirt, unzipped navy jacket—came into the frame. She stopped, grinned at someone to the left; her mouth moved as she called out something. And she waved as she walked inside.

“Time’s right,” Eve murmured.

“Yeah. It’s fourteen minutes, thirty-nine seconds after the wit and the two with her went in. Wit leaves …” He ran it forward, and Eve watched Lydia, her teeth clenched, her face rigid with fury, stomp out.

“Five minutes, fifty-eight seconds after the woman in the Café West shirt goes in. Gets bitchy, gets headache, gets out. Yeah, the time’s right.”

“I’m guessing if the wit had stayed inside another ten, twenty seconds, she wouldn’t be a wit.”

“Her lucky day. Go back to the woman going in. What’s she saying? Did you translate?”

“We don’t have her full face, but the program reads her lips at eighty-five percent probability.”

He ordered it up.

No prob. I’ll put it in for you.

“Okay. Do we have an ID on her?”

He toggled over to an ID shot. “Jeni Curve, twenty-one. Part-time delivery girl, part-time student. No priors, no shaky known associates. Shares an apartment with two other females. And she’s one of the vics. I checked.”

“She doesn’t look suicidal,” Eve speculated. “Doesn’t look homicidal. Not nervous, not gathering her courage.”

“I’ve got others. Nothing’s popping. Some in, some out, some alone, most with somebody. But your wit’s the last out before this.”

He ran it forward six minutes. Eve watched the café door shudder, and the spiderweb spread over the glass. Most people on the street just kept going, one or two flicked the door a glance.

And one man bustled up, working his PPC as he pulled open the door. Distracted, he started to step in, stopped, goggled, stumbled back out of camera range.

“He’s the one who called it in,” Feeney told her. “Now you’ve got this guy, paying less attention, pulls the door open, goes on in. See the door there?”

“Yeah. Looks like he tried getting the hell out again. He didn’t make it.”

“Not his lucky day,” Feeney commented.

“Jeni Curve.” Eve stood, studying the ID shot. “I’ll look into it. Did you ID the people who left between Curve going in, Lydia coming out? We may get something from them.”

“Shot the data down to your unit. I ran them—standard—nothing pops there either.”

“I’ll add them all to Baxter’s cross. I’ll put it in for you,” she repeated. “Curve doesn’t look crazy.”

“A lot of people who don’t are.”

“Ain’t that the f**king truth? Maybe. Maybe. I’ll dig down.”

Halfway on the route between EDD and Homicide, her comm signaled. “Dallas.”

“Lieutenant,” Whitney’s admin spoke briskly, “the commander needs you in his office, immediately.”

“On my way.”

She backtracked, grabbed an up-glide. Idly studied a couple of women with battered faces she made as street LCs. To her way of thinking their line of work was nearly as dicey as hers. You just never knew when some ass**le would decide to punch you in the face.

In Whitney’s outer office, the admin merely signaled Eve to go straight in. Still she knocked briefly before stepping inside.

Whitney sat at his desk, his hands folded. Chief of Police Tibble, his long frame suited in black with subtle chalk stripes, stood at the window.

She didn’t know the third person, but made her as federal as quickly as she’d made the LCs on the glide.

She thought: Fuck, then settled into resignation.

It had to happen.

“Lieutenant Dallas,” Whitney began, “Agent Teasdale, HSO.”

“Agent.”

“Lieutenant.”

In the three or four beats of silence, they sized each other up.

Teasdale, a slight, delicate woman, wore her long, black hair slicked back in a tail. The forgettable black suit covered a compact body. Low-heeled black boots gleamed like mirrors. Her dark brown eyes tipped up slightly at the corners. The eyes and the porcelain complexion had Eve pegging her as mixed race, leaning Asian.

“The HSO, through Agent Teasdale, requests to be brought up to speed on the two incidents you’re investigating.”

“Requests?” Eve repeated.

“Requests,” Teasdale confirmed in a quiet voice. “Respectfully.” She spread her hands. “May we sit?”