Kindred in Death (In Death #29)(22)

“The pizza I ordered should help.”

“You ordered pizza?” The part of her that yearned warred against the part of her that wanted to maintain discipline. “I’ve told you not to keep buying food for my cops. You’ll spoil and corrupt them.”

“There’s only one cop I’m interested in spoiling and corrupting, and pizza happens to be a weakness of hers.”

She drank her coffee doing her best to scowl at him over the rim. “Did you get pepperoni?”

5

FEENEY CHOMPED DOWN ON A LOADED SLICE. He stood at the conference table, focused on the pie while Jamie and McNab attacked a second one. Her former partner, now captain of the Electronic Detectives Division managed to balance what was left of the slice and what appeared to be a tube of cream soda while studying crime scene photos Peabody had yet to tack to the murder board.

He’d had his hair chopped recently, Eve noted, but it did little to combat the spring of ginger and wires of gray that spooled through it. His face, weathered and worn, drooped like a sleepy hound’s. She figured he’d bought the shit-brown jacket he’d paired with wrinkled trousers before his best boy, McNab, had been weaned from his mother’s tit.

In contrast, the young EDD ace and Peabody’s cohab sizzled in atomic red cargos and a tee the color of radioactive egg yolks scrambled with lightning bolts. His long blond hair was tucked back from his thin, pretty face in a slinky braid.

Since it was there, Eve scooped up a slice.

“You okay having Jamie work on this?” she asked Feeney.

“He’s going to push on it anyway. It’s better if he does it where I can keep my eye on him.” He took a swig of cream soda. “He’s going to be rocky right off, but he’ll steady up. I knew Deena, too. Good kid.” He kept his eyes on the crime scene photos. “Sick f**k. This one’s going to spread through the department. You’ll have more cops lining up for detail on this than you can use.”

“How well do you know MacMasters?”

“We worked a few together, knocked back some brews together. Good cop.”

It was, she knew, Feeney’s highest praise.

“You look at this, Dallas, and you think—as a cop, as a father—you can do everything right, do the job, keep it clean, and you still can’t protect your own kid from something like this. You think you can, even though you know what’s out there, you have to think you can. Then something like this brings it right home, right in the front door. And you know you can’t.”

He shook his head, but it didn’t budge the anger on his face. “We want to believe we can protect our own.” Then he paused, took another long drink. “I was going to head out with the wife to New Jersey this afternoon, a cookout at our boy’s. New Jersey for Christ’s sake,” he added with the deliberate disdain of a native New Yorker.

“Well, look at it this way, traffic would’ve been a total bitch.”

“That’s f**king A. Anyway, the wife’s bringing me back a plate.” He looked down at Deena again. “This little girl had a lot more than a holiday barbecue taken from her.”

“He went for her, Feeney, knew how to get to her. There has to be a reason. We work from there.”

“Payback.” Feeney nodded. “Could be. He’s been a cop a long time, LT of Illegals near ten years, I guess. Captain now. He closes cases and doesn’t take any bullshit. Good cop,” he repeated. “Good cops make enemies, but—”

“Yeah, I’ve been working on the ‘buts.’ Let’s get started here, and we’ll go through them. Screen on,” she ordered.

The command signaled the others, and the briefing began.

“The victim is Deena MacMasters, female, age sixteen. ME has confirmed homicide by manual strangulation. The victim was raped and sodomized multiple times over a period between six and eight hours. Traces of barbiturate—street name Slider—mixed with a small amount of powdered Zoner found during tox screen indicate she was drugged.”

“That’s Wig.”

Eve paused, lifted her eyebrows at Jamie.

“Sorry, Lieutenant. I wanted to inform you the freaks call that cocktail Wig because it, well, wigs you out. If you take enough to conk, you go into weird-ass nightmares. They’re supposed to be really real, and you have one bitch of a headache after.”

Feeney jabbed a finger at Jamie. “How do you know so much about it? If you’re playing around with that shit at college, I’m going—”

“Hey, don’t look at me. I’m clean. I get one bust I can lose my scholarship. Plus, Jesus, if I want a nightmare I’ll eat a burrito and watch a horror vid at midnight.”

“Damn right.”

“Jamie confirms what I learned from Dickhead at the lab. As there are no defensive wounds, no sign of struggle prior, we believe she was drugged with this combination, then taken to her bedroom where she was restrained. Cuffs on her hands, sheets used as ropes on her ankles.”

“He wanted it to start for her even when she was unconscious,” Peabody murmured.

“And while she was unconscious, he may have taken the time to run the plates and his glass through the sanitizer, may have accessed the control room. He would then have time to return to the bedroom before she’d come around.

“Except for her underwear, her clothes were not removed but pulled away during the assaults. There are some tears on her shirt, but they don’t indicate much force. This shows a lack of rage, of frenzy, and a deliberation.”