Seduction in Death (In Death #13)(11)

Eve stared down at the ruined face. She thought of the bathroom mirror, the ruthlessly organized drawer of enhancements. "Yeah. Tell me how she died, Morris."

"I think you know. Your time of death measurement was accurate. She was spared the fear of falling, the insult of the pavement, even the knowledge that she was dying." He touched sealed fingertips, very gently, to her hair. "She'd ingested, over a period of two and a half to three hours, more than two ounces of the synthetic hormonibital-six, an expensive and very difficult to acquire controlled substance."

"Street name Whore. An inhibition blocker," Eve murmured. "Commonly used in date rape once upon a time."

"Not commonly," Morris corrected. "Its derivatives are more common, and much less potent and effective. What she had in her was pure. Two ounces, Dallas, would have a street value of more than a quarter million. If you could find it on the street, which you can't. I haven't come across traces of it in a body for more than fifteen years."

"I heard about it when I was in school. Mostly urban legend shit."

"And most of it was urban legend shit."

"Did it kill her? An OD?"

"Not by itself. The combination with alcohol was dangerous, but not fatal. But our hero went overboard. Half the amount he slipped her would've been enough to ensure her full cooperation. What she had in her would, most likely, have kept her under for eight, maybe ten hours. And she'd wake up with the mother of all hangovers. Headache, vomiting, the shakes, blackouts, lost time. It would take up to seventy-two hours to purge her system."

It made Eve sick to think it. "She was spared that, too. How?"

"He gave her too much. It would make her lethargic. I'm assuming he wanted a more active f**k because he doctored the last glass of wine with a little cocktail of aneminiphine-colax-B. Wild Rabbit."

"Covered his bases, didn't he?" she said quietly.

"It bombards the nervous and respiratory systems, and hers was already compromised. The combination overtaxed her heart. It gave out on her within twenty minutes of ingestion. She'd have been too doped by the earlier doses of Whore to know what was happening."

"Could she have taken it willingly at that point?"

Gently, Morris lifted the sheet over Bryna's face. "After the first ounce of inhibition blocker, nothing this girl did was willing."

"He drugged her, he raped her, and the combination killed her," Eve said. "Then he tossed her out the window like a used doll in an attempt to cover up what happened."

"In my esteemed and renowned medical opinion, that's the scenario."

"Now make my day, Morris, and tell me he left sperm in her. Tell me you got his DNA."

Morris's face went bright as a boy's. "Oh yeah, I got it. You bring him in, Dallas, and I'll help you lock the cage."

CHAPTER THREE

"Sick bastard creep ought to have his balls scooped off with a rusty spoon."

Eve settled back in her car. "Don't hold back, Peabody. Tell me how you really feel."

"Goddamn it, Dallas, it got to me in there, looking at her on that slab, remembering how pretty she was, how excited when she called her pal about going out to meet this f**khead. Thinking she was meeting someone romantic and, damn it, nice. Someone nice and the whole time he's planning to..."

"Fuck her to death? I don't know that he planned that going in, but that's how it worked out. Could be we get him on Murder One, using the illegals as the murder weapon. More likely, it's going to Second Degree. And don't blow your cortex, Peabody, we wrap him on that, add in the sexual assault and his attempt to dispose of the evidence, he's not going to see daylight again."

"It's not enough." She shifted in her seat, appalling them both because there were tears in her eyes. "Sometimes it doesn't seem to be enough."

Eve stared through the windshield to give them both time for Peabody to pull herself together. A pack of kids, sprung from school, were cruising over the crosswalk on airboards, wreaking havoc on the bipeds they wove through.

There was something painfully innocent, painfully alive about the flash and color of them, a half a block away from a house of dead.

"It's enough," Eve said, "because it's what we can do. Our job is to stand for Bryna Bankhead and bring in the man who killed her. After that..." She remembered her session in court, the defense attorney's slippery twist on the law. "After that, we trust the system to give her justice, and we put it away. You don't put it away, they pile up. The dead pile up," she added when Peabody stared at her, "until you can't see past them, and you can't do the job."

"Do you put it away? Can you?"

It was a question Eve tried not to ask herself -- and asked herself too often. "A lot of murder cops, they've only got so many years in them. So many dead. Then it starts eating at them until they're used up. I can't do anything else but this, so it's not going to use me up." She let out a long breath. "But in a perfect world, we'd have the rusty spoon option."

"When I started working with you, I thought Homicide was the most important thing I could do. It's been about a year now. I still think that."

"Okay." She jammed her way into traffic like a battering ram. "I need to make a stop down at the Canal Street Clinic. Let's see if the boys in EDD have made any progress."