Naked in Death (In Death #1)(2)

“Dallas.”

“Feeney.” She smiled, pleased to see a familiar face. Ryan Feeney was an old friend and former partner who’d traded the street for a desk and a top level position in the Electronics Detection Division. “So, they’re sending computer pluckers these days.”

“They wanted brass, and the best.” His lips curved in his wide, rumpled face, but his eyes remained sober. He was a small, stubby man with small, stubby hands and rust-colored hair. “You look beat.”

“Rough night.”

“So I heard.” He offered her one of the sugared nuts from the bag he habitually carried, studying her, and measuring if she was up to what was waiting in the bedroom beyond.

She was young for her rank, barely thirty, with wide brown eyes that had never had a chance to be naive. Her doe-brown hair was cropped short, for convenience rather than style, but suited her triangular face with its razor-edge cheekbones and slight dent in the chin.

She was tall, rangy, with a tendency to look thin, but Feeney knew there were solid muscles beneath the leather jacket. More, there was a brain, and a heart.

“This one’s going to be touchy, Dallas.”

“I picked that up already. Who’s the victim?”

“Sharon DeBlass, granddaughter of Senator DeBlass.”

Neither meant anything to her. “Politics isn’t my forte, Feeney.”

“The gentleman from Virginia, extreme right, old money. The granddaughter took a sharp left a few years back, moved to New York, and became a licensed companion.”

“She was a hooker.” Dallas glanced around the apartment. It was furnished in obsessive modern — glass and thin chrome, signed holograms on the walls, recessed bar in bold red. The wide mood screen behind the bar bled with mixing and merging shapes and colors in cool pastels.

Neat as a virgin, Eve mused, and cold as a whore. “No surprise, given her choice of real estate.”

“Politics makes it delicate. Victim was twenty-four, Caucasian female. She bought it in bed.”

Eve only lifted a brow. “Seems poetic, since she’d been bought there. How’d she die?”

“That’s the next problem. I want you to see for yourself.”

As they crossed the room, each took out a slim container, sprayed their hands front and back to seal in oils and fingerprints. At the doorway, Eve sprayed the bottom of her boots to slicken them so that she would pick up no fibers, stray hairs, or skin.

Eve was already wary. Under normal circumstances there would have been two other investigators on a homicide scene, with recorders for sound and pictures. Forensics would have been waiting with their usual snarly impatience to sweep the scene.

The fact that only Feeney had been assigned with her meant that there were a lot of eggshells to be walked over.

“Security cameras in the lobby, elevator, and hallways,” Eve commented.

“I’ve already tagged the discs.” Feeney opened the bedroom door and let her enter first.

It wasn’t pretty. Death rarely was a peaceful, religious experience to Eve’s mind. It was the nasty end, indifferent to saint and sinner. But this was shocking, like a stage deliberately set to offend.

The bed was huge, slicked with what appeared to be genuine satin sheets the color of ripe peaches. Small, soft focused spotlights were trained on its center where the naked woman was cupped in the gentle dip of the floating mattress.

The mattress moved with obscenely graceful undulations to the rhythm of programmed music slipping through the headboard.

She was beautiful still, a cameo face with a tumbling waterfall of flaming red hair, emerald eyes that stared glassily at the mirrored ceiling, long, milk white limbs that called to mind visions of Swan Lake as the motion of the bed gently rocked them.

They weren’t artistically arranged now, but spread lewdly so that the dead woman formed a final X dead center of the bed.

There was a hole in her forehead, one in her chest, another horribly gaping between the open thighs. Blood had splattered on the glossy sheets, pooled, dripped, and stained.

There were splashes of it on the lacquered walls, like lethal paintings scrawled by an evil child.

So much blood was a rare thing, and she had seen much too much of it the night before to take the scene as calmly as she would have preferred.

She had to swallow once, hard, and force herself to block out the image of a small child.

“You got the scene on record?”

“Yep.”

“Then turn that damn thing off.” She let out a breath after Feeney located the controls that silenced the music. The bed flowed to stillness. “The wounds,” Eve murmured, stepping closer to examine them. “Too neat for a knife. Too messy for a laser.” A flash came to her — old training films, old videos, old viciousness.

“Christ, Feeney, these look like bullet wounds.”

Feeney reached into his pocket and drew out a sealed bag. “Whoever did it left a souvenir.” He passed the bag to Eve. “An antique like this has to go for eight, ten thousand for a legal collection, twice that on the black market.”

Fascinated, Eve turned the sealed revolver over in her hand. “It’s heavy,” she said half to herself. “Bulky.”

“Thirty-eight caliber,” he told her. “First one I’ve seen outside of a museum. This one’s a Smith & Wesson, Model Ten, blue steel.” He looked at it with some affection. “Real classic piece, used to be standard police issue up until the latter part of the twentieth. They stopped making them in about twenty-two, twenty-three, when the gun ban was passed.”