Obsession in Death (In Death #40)(112)

Now two high red flags bloomed on her olive-toned cheeks. “Crap. We polished off the mini-vaca with some clubbing the next night. I met somebody, and she came home with me. She didn’t leave until about eight the next morning. Look, I’ve got her name and contact, but if she gets a call from the cops on me, it might screw things up. I really like her.”

“How about the evening of the twenty-ninth? About nineteen hundred?”

“I took her out to dinner. The Olive Branch, on Reade. Seven o’clock reservations. I’ve got the receipt on that, and they’d have the booking. Jesus, Lieutenant.”

“Just elimination, Messner. We’ll check the first, the last, and when they check out, we’ll leave out the middle.”

“I’d appreciate it. I don’t get how I popped in this.”

“It’s a broad search, and we’re following every lead. Give the contact information to Detective Peabody. And Messner, I’m sorry about your father.”

“He was a good cop. A great dad. Miss him every day. Okay, you want to talk to Marisol Butler,” Messner began.

“That bombed,” Peabody said as they exited the courthouse.

“We can cross her off, and that’s something. The alibis are going to hold, but check them anyway.”

She listened with half an ear as she drove and Peabody spoke with Messner’s alibis.

The check on health clinics had tanked, the first really promising lead, another tank.

She’d try again, Eve thought. She had to. Bigger this time? More violent, more bloody? Or would she go the other way, with the misses shaking her confidence? Go smaller, simpler. Go back to someone like Ledo, which was like stepping on an ant.

“That’s not what I’d do.”

“What?”

Eve shook her head. “I’d go bigger on my next target. Make a statement. She has to prove herself, to me, to herself. I let her down, right? I wasn’t who she thought I was, who she wanted me to be. All that time and emotion invested, and I screw with her. She should come after me now.”

“It’s a big jump to you. She profiles as a coward.”

“People evolve.”

And things change, she remembered, no matter how hard you try to hold them in place.

“She didn’t run from Nadine – not until she was hurt. Now she’s been wounded in battle. She didn’t go crawling away, and I’d say that’s some evolution, but headed straight over to Jamie’s, tried for another. She’s found her passion, her courage. She should come after me.”

Eve pulled into Central. “Keep running the search. Pull anybody who looks good. We follow up. We’ll take the top five, say, from everybody’s results. Scattershot, but we’ll cover it.

“We’re not wrong on this,” she added as they rode up the elevator. “I can almost see her.”

“If I wanted to do something big, I’d do it tonight. Times Square.”

“For what? Oh, right, right. New Year’s Eve. Ball drop.” Mavis, she thought, and felt her stomach clutch. “Too much security. Cameras and people everywhere. But… if you’re going big, you want that, don’t you? You want to prove you can get through security, you’re not afraid of crowds, of cameras.”

“You’d go big, but trying something like that? Something in front of, basically, the world? Suicide mission.”

“You’d be important,” Eve considered, rolling it through as they pushed off the elevator. “Is that what she’s been missing? She’s not important to anyone. She was supposed to be important to me, but I twisted that on her.

“But she should come at me – that’s the logic. And I’m not going to be at the ball drop.”

“You’re really going to miss it.”

“A few million people, a lot of whom are drunk or stoned despite the restrictions, and have no place to pee. Yeah, it’s breaking my heart not to be there. But she could figure I would be. Mavis is one of the headliners, so maybe…”

She rolled that around in turn as she stepped into Homicide.

Baxter was back, she noted, eyes closed, feet on his desk. She walked over, shoved his feet down.

“Hey! Oh, hey.” He changed tones when he saw her. “Just a little catnap to prep for the all-nighter I’ve got planned.”

“It’s nice you can take a little downtime on the job.”

“We got the bad guy.” He jerked a thumb back at Trueheart. “My boy’s writing it up. Guy mugs this young, foolish couple in Greenpeace Park. They hand it all over, nobody gets hurt, and the mugger takes off. Young, foolish couple go home, bang to settle their nerves, then report the mugging. Turns out the mugger was the DB we caught. He takes off running with his ill-gotten gains, and tox is going to show he was more flying anyway, crashed, burned, hit his head on a rock. Case – or should I say cases – closed. He still had their wrist units and plastic on him.”

“Lucky break, so you’ve got time for grunt work.”

“Got some running, boss, as we speak. Lead didn’t pan out?”

“Not such a lucky break. Work now, sleep later.”

She went into her office, thought: process, routine, so got coffee before she sat at her desk. The time out hadn’t been completely wasted, she noted, as her comp had tossed out a few more maybes.