Eternity in Death (In Death #24.5)(27)

“Bring me something. I’ll go to the wall for you, you know that. Bring me something I can use. Until you do, I’ll do some research on precedents for breaking through a religious objection. If you can wiggle something that rings on the use or possession of illegals, I’ll get you a warrant to search and seize on those grounds. It’s the best I can do, Dallas.”

“Okay. Okay.” Eve raked her hands through her hair. “I’ll get something.” She thought of Allesseria’s ex. Illegals passed around like party favors, he’d said. Add three cops and another civilian who had been in the club and they’d all swear they’d witnessed illegals bought, sold, and consumed. “Yeah, I can get something for an illegals raid.”

“Make it work. And you know,” Reo cast a glance at her office window, “I think I’m going to be damn sure I’m home and behind a locked door before sunset.”

Nine

Eve hunted up Feeney and Roarke in a lab in EDD. She could see them both standing, hands in pockets, as they studied a screen—in the same way she’d noted men often studied motors or other gadgets.

Physically, they couldn’t have been less alike with Feeney nearly a head shorter even with the explosion of the mixed ginger and silver bush of his hair. Feeney habitually slouched, just as he was habitually rumpled and wrinkled. Roarke may have ditched his suit jacket and rolled up the sleeves of his crisp white shirt, but the contrast remained very broad.

Inside, she knew they often ran on the same path, particularly when it came to e-work. Geeks born of the same motherboard, she thought.

It was a relief to see them, and not so hard to admit. A relief to see these two men—so essential to the life she’d made—after coming from her confrontation with Dorian, and the demons he woke in her.

She stepped in. “Did you clean up the transmission?”

Feeney turned to her, droopy eyes, mournful expression. Roarke shifted, eyes of an almost savage blue. There was a click here, too, but a good solid one, one that made her smile.

Roarke angled his head. “Lieutenant?”

“Nothing.” But she thought: Who needs crosses and holy water to fight demons when you have two men like this? Dorian would never have understood that bright and brilliant human link. Her father had never understood it.

“So.” She crossed to them, and because it amused her, slid her hands into her pockets to mirror their stances. “What’s the word?”

“Good news,” Feeney began. “We got her clean. Bad news, there’s not much of him.”

“I don’t need much.”

“Going to need more than what we’ve got. Computer, run enhanced transmission.”

Acknowledged…

Eve watched Allesseria’s face. It was crystal clear now, as was the night around her, as was her voice. A streetlight beamed over her. The movement—rather than the jerky bounce of her quick walk—had been smoothed out, slowed down.

There was a sound, a whoosh of air, a ripple of fabric on the breeze. Eve watched the gloved hand snake in, between the ’link and the victim’s face. There was an upward jerk, an instant of pain and terror in Allesseria’s eyes. Then the image flipped as the phone tumbled: sky, street, sidewalk. Black.

“Crap” was Eve’s comment, and her hands fisted in her pockets now. “Anything when you magnify and slow it down?”

“We can enhance so you can count the stitches in the seams of the glove,” Feeney told her. “Can use the scale program to get you the size of it. We can give you the attacker’s probable height calculated from the size, the angles. But we can’t put on screen what’s not there. Got some snatches of audio though, for what it’s worth.”

He set the comp again, made the adjustments, then played it back.

What she heard first was silence.

“We backed out her voice, her footsteps,” Roarke explained, “the ambient city noises. Now…”

She caught it. Feet on pavement, the faintest rustle, then the rush she identified as a run followed by a jump or leap. There was a breath, expelled in a kind of laugh as the hand shot out and clamped Allesseria’s throat. And as the images rolled and tumbled on screen, a single low word. You .

“Not enough for a voiceprint,” Feeney pointed out. “Never hold up in court even if we could match it on one syllable.”

“He doesn’t have to know that.” Eve narrowed her eyes at the screen. “Maybe what we’ve got is just enough to shake him, to make him think we have more.”

Feeney grinned at Roarke, tapped a finger to his temple. “She’s got something cooking up there.”

“Yeah, I do. This time, we con the con.”

Roarke stepped into Eve’s office, closed the door. “I don’t like it.”

She continued across the cramped little room to her AutoChef, programmed coffee. “It’s a good plan. It’ll work.” She took the two mugs of hot black out, passed him one. “And I didn’t figure you’d like it. That’s one of the drawbacks of having you inside an investigation.”

“There are other ways to run him to ground, Eve.”

“This is the quickest. There’s no putting standard surveillance on him,” she began. “There are dozens of ways in and out of those tunnels. I can’t know what kind of escape hatch he might have in that club, up in his apartment. He decides he’s bored here, or there’s too much heat, he’d be in the wind before we got close.”