Loyalty in Death (In Death #9)(37)

“Hell.” Eve rubbed her eyes. “Run the wife and kids, McNab.”

“Sure, they’re on the list to do.”

“No, now. You’ve got the ID numbers there.” She glanced over as Peabody brought in coffee. “Do a quick run on date of death.”

“Shit, they’re not old,” McNab muttered, but he turned away to check the records. “Man, Dallas, they all bought it. Same DOD.”

“September 25, 2023, Arlington County, Virginia.”

“Yeah.” He let out a sigh. “They must have been taken out with the Pentagon. Christ, Dallas, the kids were only six and eight. That bites.”

“Yeah, I’m sure Fixer agreed with you. Now we know why he turned.”

And, she thought, why he ran. How could he expect to be safe, even in his dirty little fortress, if he was up against the kind of people who could wipe out the most secure military establishment in the country?

“Keep up the search,” she ordered. “See if you can find anybody he worked with who’s still around and no longer military. Somebody who got transferred with him, in his same unit. If he was STF, he probably had some part in dealing with Apollo.”

“I’m on it. Hey, Peabody.” He wiggled his brows when she came into view, and sliding his hand under his bright pink shirt mimed a thumping heart.

“Asshole,” she muttered and stepped aside.

Scowling, Eve cut him off. “Roarke thinks he’s got a thing for you.”

“He’s got a thing for br**sts,” Peabody corrected. “I happen to have a pair. I caught him eyeballing Sheila’s from Records, and hers aren’t as good as mine.”

Thoughtfully, Eve glanced down at her own. “He doesn’t look at my tits.”

“Yes, he does, but he’s careful because he fears you nearly as much as he fears Roarke.”

“Only nearly? I’m disappointed. Where’s my data on the vans?”

“Here.” With a smug smile, Peabody tapped a disc into the desk unit. “I used the one in the kitchen to run it. We’ve got fifty-eight hits, but that’s with factory-installed zappers. If we consider that they were installed privately, we more than triple that number.”

“We’ll start with the big number, check and see if anyone reported their vehicle stolen during the forty-eight hours around the murder. If we don’t hit there, eliminate families. I can’t see a professional mother running the kids to arena ball practice in the afternoon, then Daddy transporting corpses in it at night. Look for registration to companies and males. We’ll run females if we crap out on those.

“Use this unit,” Eve told her and rose. “I can make calls on the one in the other room.”

She contacted Mira and set up a meeting for the following day. The closest she could get to Feeney was his e-mail announcement that he was on a priority and could only take emergency transmissions.

Deciding to leave him to what he did best, she tagged Anne Malloy in the field.

“Hey, Dallas, your sexy husband just left.”

“Oh yeah.” Eve could see the rubble and the E and B teams sifting through it.

“He wanted to see what we had going here, which isn’t any more than you already know, at this point. We’ve transported fragments to the lab. We’re finding more. Your man took a look at a piece of one of the devices and said it was a chunk of high-impact politex, like they use in space construction. Probably from a remote. He could be right.”

He would be right, Eve thought. He was rarely otherwise.

“What does that tell you?”

“A couple of things,” Anne said. “One, at least some of the devices were made from space salvage or parts manufactured for that use. And two, your man’s got a sharp eye.”

“Okay.” She scooped a hand through her hair. “If he’s right, can you trace it?”

“It narrows the field. I’ll be in touch.”

Eve sat back, then out of curiosity looked up politex and its manufacturers.

It didn’t surprise her to see Roarke Industries as one of the four interplanetary companies that made the product. But it did have her rolling her eyes. She noted Branson Toys and Tools also manufactured it. Smaller scale, she noted. On planet only.

She decided to save time and simply ask Roarke for a rundown on the other two companies, then spent the next hour backtracking, picking through old data, weeding through the fresh data McNab transmitted. She was about to go in and harass Peabody for results on the vehicle search when her ‘link beeped.

“Dallas.”

“Hey, Dallas!” Mavis Freestone’s delighted smile filled the screen. “Catch this.”

Beside the table, a column of air shimmered, then, in a blink, the hologram image of Mavis standing in the kitchen on skinny ruby heels with bright pink feathers drifting over her toes. She wore a short robe in eye-watering swirls of the same two tones that drooped off one shoulder to display a tattoo of a silver angel playing a gilt harp.

Her hair tumbled in spiraling curls as fat as soy sausages in a mix of gold and silver and glinted with a metallic sheen.

“Mag, huh?” She laughed and did a little bump and grind dance around the kitchen. “My room’s got this way fine holo feature on the ‘link. How do I look?”