Fantasy in Death (In Death #30)(70)

As they started for the glide, she spotted Reineke at one of the machines in Vending. “Good work, Detective.”

“Thanks, Lieutenant. Jenkinson’s walking them through processing.” He drew a very sad-looking Danish out of the slot. “You know, turns out in the end they were just a couple of idiots. He still had the clone phone he used to tag her before he went out and bashed the dead husband, and the pizza box hadn’t run through his recycler yet. And her? She bought fancy underwear online a couple hours after she’s notified she’s got a dead husband. Stupidity shoulda gotten them more than ten and twenty.”

“I bet they don’t come out any smarter. Good work,” she said again. “And I don’t want to find out you and Jenkinson shared the surveillance doc around the bullpen.”

“It’s too bad because they may be stupid, but they’re damn flexible.”

She waited until she was on the glide to grin.

“We’re not looking at the girlfriend? CeeCee?” Peabody asked.

“No. It’s one of the partners, but she may know more than she thinks. She’s had some time to settle. I want to poke at her memory, and impressions.”

They found CeeCee at home, in a tidy little apartment she shared with a trio of goldfish in a glass bowl.

Eve wondered about people who kept fish. Did they like to watch them circle, circle, staring out with those weird eyes? What was the appeal?

“I took some time off work.” CeeCee sat in a high-backed scoop chair. She’d pulled her hair back in a tail and hadn’t bothered with enhancements. She looked pale and tired. “I just can’t go back yet. It feels like if I do, it’s saying Bart didn’t matter enough for me to stay home. And he did.”

“Have you called a counselor?”

“No. I guess... I guess I’m not ready to feel better. That sounds stupid.”

“No, it doesn’t,” Peabody told her.

“I don’t know if we’d have stuck. I mean, things were good, and I think maybe... But I don’t know, and I keep thinking about that. Would we have moved in together, or even gotten married? I don’t know.”

“Did you ever talk about it?” Eve wondered. “Moving in together?”

CeeCee managed a little smile. “We sort of circled around it. I don’t think either of us was ready for that. I think if we’d stayed together a few more months, we’d have talked about it, seriously. We weren’t in a hurry, you know? We thought we had plenty of time.”

“And you each had your own interests,” Eve prompted. “Your own routines and your own friends.”

“That’s true. I had a boyfriend once, and he crowded me. It was like if we weren’t together twenty-four/seven, I didn’t care enough. It wasn’t like that with Bart. We did a lot together, and he liked my friends, I liked his. But we didn’t have to be together every minute.”

“You got along well with his partners. His closest friends.”

“Sure. They’re great. Good thing,” she added with a smile that warmed her tired eyes. “I don’t think I’d’ve been Bart’s girl if I hadn’t liked his friends, and they hadn’t liked me back.”

“Oh?”

“Well, they’re like family. Some people have trouble with family. I could tell you about my sister.” She rolled her eyes now, and Eve began to see some of the charm and energy that must have attracted Bart eke through the grief. “But I guess, I don’t know, when you choose your family it’s different. You can still disagree or argue, but you’re always going to stand up for each other, too. I guess that’s true with my sister, even when I’m mad at her.”

“It’d be natural for Bart to get mad at his partners sometimes.”

“Maybe, but he really didn’t. It was more like he’d shake his head and go, Jeez, what’s Cill thinking about this, or What’s Benny doing that for, or Var’s out of orbit on this one.”

“He’d talk to you about them.”

“Sure. I’d be a kind of decompression chamber for him, if they’d had a rough few days. I know they’d been working really hard on a new project. Long hours and lots of testing stuff. Maybe they argued a little, the way you do over stuff like that, especially when you’re overdoing it.”

“Anything specific? Every detail helps,” Eve added when CeeCee bit her lip. “One thing can lead to another, give us a better picture.”

“Oh. Well. I know he was miffed at Cill a couple weeks ago. Nothing big, but he was upset that she’d gone over budget for a marketing campaign proposal. And she was miffed because she put a lot of time into it and thought it was worth the extra. And he didn’t. She gets madder than he does. Did.”

She sighed, then shook it off.

“He said they yelled at each other, but he doesn’t—didn’t—really yell, so I’d say she did that part. But they made up, like always. He bought her flowers. He liked giving flowers. And he and Var got into it about the direction of this new game. It was technical, so Bart didn’t really say what. Just about how they weren’t going off mission statement, and not everything should reach its full potential. That’s a weird thing to say, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. What did he mean?”