Immortal in Death (In Death #3)(96)

“How the hell did she die?” Casto demanded. “Her system just give out? What?”

“In a manner of speaking. I’ll fill you in as we go.”

He started to speak, then controlled himself. “Can we get some coffee in here, Eve? I haven’t had my fix.”

“Try that.” She jerked her thumb at a battered AutoChef, then took her place behind the desk.

It didn’t get much better. By midday, Eve had personally questioned every staff member on duty in the wing, with nearly the same results each time. The VT in room 6027 had gotten out of his restraints, attacked his ward nurse, and all hell had broken loose. From what she could gather, people had poured down the hallway like a river, leaving Jerry’s room unattended for anywhere from twelve to eighteen minutes.

More than enough time, Eve supposed, for a desperate woman to flee. But how did she know where to find the drug she craved, and how did she gain access to it?

“Maybe some of the staff were talking about it in her room.” Casto shoveled in veggie pasta on their midday break in the center’s eatery. “A new blend always creates a big buzz. It’s not much of a stretch to figure that the ward nurse or a couple of orderlies were gossiping about it. Fitzgerald obviously wasn’t as sedated as anyone thought. She hears them, and when she sees her chance, goes for it.”

Eve chewed over the theory and a forkful of grilled chicken hash. “I can buy that. She had to hear it somewhere. And she was desperate, and smart. I can buy that she’d figure a way to get down to it undetected. But how the hell did she get past the locks? Where’d she get the code?”

He fumbled there and scowled down at his meal. A man wanted meat, damn it. Good red meat. And these pu**y health centers treated it like poison.

“Could she have gotten a master code somewhere?” Peabody speculated. She was sticking to green leaf salad, undressed, with the idea of shaving off a couple of pounds. “Or a code breaker.”

“Then where is it?” Eve shot back. “She was stone dead when they found her. The sweepers didn’t find any master code in the room.”

“Maybe the frigging door was open when she got there.” Disgusted, Casto shoved his plate aside. “That’s the kind of luck we’ve been having.”

“That’s a little too serendipitous for me. Okay, she hears a discussion about Immortality, how it’s being kept in the drug hold for research. She’s in acute withdrawal, with whatever they’ve plugged into her smoothing out the worst of the raw edges. But she needs it. Then, like a gift from God, there’s a commotion outside. I don’t like gifts from God,” Eve muttered. “But we’ll run with it for now. She gets up, the guard’s gone, and she’s out of there. She gets down to the drug hold, though I can’t see a couple of orderlies discussing directions to it. Still, she got there, we’ve established that. But getting in…”

“What are you thinking, Eve?”

She lifted her gaze to Casto’s. “That she had help. That somebody wanted her to get to it.”

“You think one of the staff led her down there so she could help herself?”

“It’s a possibility.” Eve shrugged off the doubt in Casto’s voice. “A bribe, a promise, a fan. And when we go through everyone’s records, we might hit on something that indicates a weak link. In the meantime — ” She broke off as her communicator sounded. “Dallas.”

“Lobar, sweeper. We found something interesting in the disposal hold down here, Lieutenant. It’s a master code, and its got Fitzgerald’s prints all over it.”

“Bag it, Lobar. I’ll be down shortly.”

“That explains a lot,” Casto began. The transmission perked up his appetite enough for him to dig into the pasta again. “Somebody helped her, like you said. Or she copped it from one of the nurses’ stations during the confusion.”

“Clever girl,” Eve murmured. “Very clever girl. Times it all like clockwork, goes down, unkeys what she wants, then takes the additional time to ditch the master. She sure was thinking clearly, wasn’t she?”

Peabody drummed her fingers on the table. “If she took a hit of the Immortality first — and it seems likely she would, it probably jolted her back on full. She probably realized she could be caught there, with the master. If she ditched it, she could claim she’d wandered off, that she was confused.”

“Yeah.” Casto flashed her a smile. “That works for me.”

“Then why stay?” Eve demanded. “She’d had her fix. Why didn’t she make a run for it?”

“Eve.” Casto’s voice was quiet, sober, as were his eyes. “There’s a possibility we haven’t touched on here. Maybe she wanted to die.”

“A deliberate OD?” She had thought of it, didn’t like what it did to her stomach muscles. Guilt descended like a clammy mist. “Why?”

Understanding her reaction, he laid a hand briefly over hers. “She was trapped. You had her. She had to know she was going to spend the rest of her life in a cage — in a cage,” he added, “with no access to the drug. She’d have gotten old, lost her looks, lost everything that mattered most to her. It was a way out, a way to die young and beautiful.”

“Suicide.” Peabody picked up the threads and wove them. “The combination she took was lethal. If she was clearheaded enough to get into the hold, she would have been clear-headed enough to know that. Why face the scandal, imprisonment, another withdrawal if you could go out quick and clean?”