Festive in Death (In Death #39)(37)

“Well, yeah. In part anyway. Didn’t you?”

“I didn’t not like her. As for the claim of previous date rape, she also indicated she never reported it. We can’t confirm it ever happened.”

“No, we can’t, and, yeah, it could’ve been a bid for sympathy. But I believed her.” Still brooding, Peabody stepped out of the elevator, crossed the lobby with Eve. “I guess you didn’t.”

“Actually, I did. Going through that humiliation and trauma a second time? Adds to the motive.”

“I didn’t think of it that way.” Peabody glanced up at Robbins’s windows as they walked to the car. “Damn it.”

“We’ve got an ass**le, f**khead, serial date ra**st as a vic, Peabody. We’re going to feel sorry for pretty much all the suspects. The women he used, the spouses, boyfriends, fathers, brothers, friends who learned about it. And now we veer off to yet another angle.”

“Another angle?”

“Competitors.” She slid behind the wheel. “David ‘Rock’ Britton also has a personal motive. The vic banged his baby sister—and maybe, who knows, he slipped her something to get her between the sheets.”

“Well, hell.” Peabody pulled the address of the gym off her PPC, plugged it into the dash comp. “I hope I don’t like him.”

8

Eve liked him, or more accurately liked his gym. A lot.

She saw Rock Hard as a bare-bones, sweat-and-grunt facility. Clean, well-lit, and without a single frill. Top-of-the-line equipment—including heavy bags, speed bags, and a sparring ring that took center stage appealed to those who came in to put in their time, shower off the sweat, and move on with their day.

No music played, so the sound of fists striking bags, of jump ropes whizzing through the air, and feet slapping the floor played all the tunes necessary. Lyrics? Grunts, curses, insults, and orders not to drop your guard, don’t be such a pu**y, sang out.

She liked the industrial beige walls, the no-nonsense gray floor, the filmy windows that blocked out the street and sidewalk. This wasn’t a place to preen. It was a place to work.

She made Rock from his ID photo, watched him holding a heavy bag, spitting out hard-line encouragement to the woman—stripped down to sports bra, shorts, and sweat—who pummeled it.

“From the shoulder, Angie, fer chrissakes. Use your hip. Switch it up. Right cross! Left cross! Right cross! Jab, jab, jab!”

Though she hated to break it up—the woman was game—Eve crossed over. She palmed her badge behind the woman’s back, waited for Rock’s dark brown eyes to skim over it, lift to her face.

“Finish him off, Ang. Pepper him. Pepper him. Go, go, go! Okay, okay, take a breather.”

“Thank Jesus and his loving mother,” Angie said in a Brooklyn accent thick as a brick. She hugged the bag, swayed with it while she caught her breath.

“I want ten minutes with the rope,” Rock told her.

“You’re a freaking sadist, Rock.”

“You’re damn straight.” He tossed her a towel, jerked his head to Eve and started back toward what she saw was an office even smaller than her own.

He grabbed a power drink off a skinny shelf, the contents of which too closely resembled infected urine for her taste. But he glugged it down.

“Ziegler?” he said in a voice that suited his name. Hard, with rough edges.

“That’s right.”

He shrugged, wiggled a thumb toward a ratty-looking folding chair.

“We’re fine,” she told him. “You and Ziegler were top contenders for the personal trainer award coming up this spring.”

“Maybe.” He shrugged excellent shoulders, naked but for the straps of a black tank. A tattoo of a dragon, breathing fire, coiled around his impressive biceps. “There’s a long winter between now and spring. Things change. I guess things have seeing the f**ker’s dead. I got no problem with him being dead. Didn’t make him that way, but I got no problem with it.”

“You had an altercation with him.”

“We weren’t buds.” His smile hinted toward a sneer before he guzzled down some more urine-colored liquid. “I hated his ever-f*cking guts, but he wasn’t somebody I thought about much.”

“The altercation was due to his sexual relationship with your sister.”

Now those dark eyes fired. “Tricking a drunk girl into bed, then booting her out when she’s half sick and confused, then bragging on it, ain’t no relationship. He knew she was my sister. He did it to rile me. He riled me.”

“In your place, I’d’ve wanted to kick his ass.”

“Considered it. Maybe I would’ve, but you can add coward to his other sins. In the end I got in his face, I told him if he ever touched her again, ever said her name again, and I heard about it, I’d break that pretty face he was so proud of.”

“Maybe he did . . . mention her name again.”

“Not that I ever heard.” Rock rested a hip on the corner of his dented metal desk.

He was a big man with strong, defined arms, a broad chest, a face that sported a couple of scars and a nose that listed to the left. Attractive, she thought, in a rough, hard-edged way.

“You box?” Eve asked.

“Used to do some. I liked it okay, but I got tired of punching people, so I switched it up. Ziegler, he had that sweet gig at Buff Bodies, but he liked to give me the zing over my place here. Juice—he’s the one told me you’d be coming—said how Ziegler was jealous because he wanted his own place. No reason for him to go after my baby sister. Did it for spite. Did it because he could.”