Obsession in Death (In Death #40)(102)

“Thea.” Bocco came back with two glasses filled with ice and Coke. “Try real English, just for right now.”

“Dad.” Savannah whispered it. “It’s absotively Roarke and Dallas. Don’t be lame, you know. The Icove Agenda.”

“Right. I didn’t put it together. I haven’t been to a vid in… who knows? I’m reading the book when I get time. Not a lot of that around here.”

“Nadine Furst lives right upstairs,” Savannah said. “I’ve talked to her and everything, a couple of times. Somebody tried to totally kill her. We rode on the elevator with him. The killer,” Savannah added in dramatic undertones.

“Her,” Eve corrected, and Thea sent Savannah a smug smile.

“Told you it was a woman. She was all covered up, but she looked like a girl to me. Dork outfit for sure, and abso dullstown.”

“Did she say anything to you?”

“Not a peep. We’d just pranked on Rizz, and were in hilarity over it. She was all pinched and sour.”

“Gave us the trout eye,” Savannah added.

“The what?”

“Fish eye, I’d say,” Roarke put in, amused.

“Yeah, like…” Savannah glowered, tightening her mouth, lowering her eyebrows. “And I thought bite me – like you say in the vid. I thought that. Bite me, mister, we’re in hilarity. Except you say he was a she. And I… it’s not because we know she’s bad now, honest it’s not. But she looked mean. Like she wanted to be mean to us.”

“That’s a true.”

“I didn’t look at her much because she gave me a wills.” Savannah gave a full-body shudder. “But Thea said, even before the cop came and all that, how the lady – I thought guy – but she said lady – in the elevator was like psycho. How if she hadn’t been with me or somebody, she’d’ve gotten off just to do the distance.”

“It’s a true,” Thea said.

“Thea’s a sensitive,” Bocco put in.

“Mr. B! Am not!”

“Let’s just say you get feelings, have good instincts.”

“Yeah, okay. I’m not weird. I just got a feeling, and I was glad to get off and away. Plus she smelled funny.”

“How?” Eve asked.

“I didn’t smell anything.” Savannah shrugged. “But Thea’s got super nose.”

“She smelled funny,” Thea repeated, and hunched her shoulders.

A teenage sensitive who didn’t want to be one, be any different from the other teenage girls. Just how, Eve wondered, did she press the right buttons?

“I’ve a young nephew with super ears.” Roarke pumped the Irish, just a tad, added a quick, charming smile.

Eve all but heard the two teenage hearts shudder and shake.

“You could be speaking in a whisper two rooms away, and he’d catch every word. I expect it’s like that with a canny nose such as yours, Thea. What did the smell make you think of?”

“The bathroom at school after somebody boots. I don’t mean the booting part, because if she’d smelled like that we wouldn’t have gotten on with her.”

“Sick!” Savannah giggled.

“Complete. It’s like it smells after they clean it up. Sort of like a hospital smells. All sterile and chemically.”

“That’s good. That’s good information,” Eve told her. “Can you think of anything else? Any other details?”

The girls shrugged in unison.

“Did you ever see her before? In the building, on the street?”

“I don’t think so.” Savannah looked at Thea, who shook her head. “She was on the dull train so you don’t notice, and we were all about telling Flo-lo about pranking Rizz since she couldn’t be on it.”

“Flo-lo’s grounded,” Bocca explained.

“Way bogus, but she’s getting sprung tomorrow. Her mom said, so can we go to the ball drop, Dad? Please?”

“Sure, when you’re twenty-one.”

“Dad!”

“Totally negativo.” He smiled in the way Eve imagined a weary and indulgent father might. “And Thea’s parents already nixed that, so don’t push it.”

“Then can Flo-lo sleep over?”

“Sure, why not?” He rubbed his eyes again. “The more the merrier.”

As they rode down to street level, Eve gave Roarke an elbow poke. “Sure and me young nephew back in Ireland has the ears of a two-headed bat.”

“Your Irish accent’s mired in a bog, Lieutenant.”

“Yours bumped up a couple notches – worked, too, so that’s good thinking.”

“She wants to be like everyone else, as is typical, I suppose, for the age.”

“I don’t know. At that age I was sick of being like everyone else and was counting the days until I could be on my own.”

“At that age I was boosting rides, lifting locks, and picking pockets. But then we never were like everyone else at the core, were we?” He grabbed her hand, kissed it.

“She can make herself look like, behave like everyone else, but she’s not. And she doesn’t want to be.”

“The killer, not Thea, I’m guessing.”