Kindred in Death (In Death #29)(42)

“I didn’t care about any of that when I was sixteen. All I cared about was getting through the system and into the Academy.”

“You knew you were going to be a cop when you were sixteen?” The idea struck Peabody as nearly inconceivable. “I was obsessed with music, vid stars, and January Olsen when I was sixteen.”

“January Olsen?”

“This really adorable boy I had a crush on.” She could sigh over it now, fondly. “I figured we’d cohab, raise two adorable kids, and do important and world-changing social work. If he’d ever actually look at me or speak my name. You didn’t have a January Olsen?”

“No—which means it’s harder for me to get into her head than it is for you.”

“Well . . . I guess on some level Deena and I were kindred spirits. At least when I was sixteen. Kind of shy, awkward around guys, but casual pals with many. I was planning on doing big work. The stuff about her appearance? Her mother and the neighbor noticed she was taking more trouble. That’s a sure sign there’s a guy.”

Peabody began ticking off points on her fingers. “Updating your do, your wardrobe. That’s definitely one. Two, she wasn’t hanging with Jamie as much, something he didn’t think about until now. He’s busy with school and his college friends, so he didn’t give it much thought when she made excuses a couple of times when he tagged her to see if she wanted to catch a pizza or a vid. She was eking out her time for the guy, cutting herself off some from her core group.

“That’s three,” Peabody added. “A break or a little distance from your core. See you want your core group to meet the guy and like the guy, but part of you worries. What if they don’t? So keeping him to yourself is a way to avoid the possibility.”

“It’s awfully damn complicated.”

Sagely, Peabody nodded. “Being a teenager is hell and misery and wild delight. Thank God it’s only one decade out of all of them.”

Her own teenage years hadn’t been nearly as hellish or miserable as her first decade. But Eve understood.

“She got sneaky and secretive.”

“She was, in a way, having a rebellion. Only she was really quiet about it,” Peabody added. “I’m also inclined to think Jamie’s right about the guy not being on the stuff, or doing any of the hard. She’d have copped to it. And that kind of rebellion wasn’t in her. I don’t think he’s wrong there.”

“All this is telling us what kind of mask he wore. Not what’s under it. He’s taken it off now. No more need for it.”

She pulled into an illegal slot, activated her On Duty light.

“It’s worse than Coltraine.”

Eve got out, said nothing as Peabody walked around to meet her.

“We knew her.” Her eyes, dark and troubled, searched Eve’s face. “She was one of us. And she was Morris’s. I didn’t think it would ever hit home as hard as that one, working that one. But this? A cop’s kid, a girl like that, done like that? And I knew her. It’s worse.”

“He knows that,” Eve said. “He knows it’s worse than anything. He wants it to be, made sure it would be with the video. And he’s thinking he got away clean; he’s rocking on that. We’re going to prove him wrong, and take him down.”

“Yeah. Okay.” Peabody rolled her shoulders. “I guess that was a pep talk.”

“It was a fact. Go north. I’ll take south.”

A day made for strolling, Eve thought. Cotton-ball clouds dabbed across a sky of perfect and delicate blue. The air held the fragrance of flowers and flowering bushes she couldn’t name rioting in swirling islands. Green, green grass rolled like a carpet under tall, majestic trees. The wall of them and the madly flowering shrubs shut out the noise, the pace, the hurry of the city and opened a door to a sedate and verdant world.

The little pond sparkled like a liquid jewel under its pretty arch of bridge with the reflection of the trees and clouds a dreamy blur on its surface.

People sat on benches, drinking from go-cups, talking to each other or on ’links, consulting their PPCs. Business suits, sweats, summer dresses, beggar’s rags mixed together in the eclectic array that was New York, even in the green.

Nannies and professional parents took advantage of the weather and pushed kids and babies in strange wheeled devices, or carried them in stranger harnesses. Along the path joggers bowled along with their ear-buds, headsets, e-fitness pods tucked on, colorful shorts flapping or skin-suits showing off bodies already viciously toned.

She imagined Deena running along the brown path, her life spread out in front of her like the green, green grass and the brilliant islands of blossoms. Until she stopped to help a boy.

Since they were closer, Eve approached a knot of adults with kids first—warily.

She badged the group at large. “NYPSD. Have you seen this girl?”

She held up Deena’s photo.

She got a lot of automatic head shakes. One of the kids—about the age she judged of Mavis’s Bella, stared at her with that doll-eyed blankness Eve found creepy while it sucked busily on the plug somebody had stuck in its mouth.

“Maybe if you actually looked at it,” Eve said. “She jogged here in the mornings, about this time, several days a week.”

One of the women, with a very small, round-headed child strapped to her front, leaned closer. Eve had to force herself not to lean back as the kid waved arms and legs like a human metronome.