Seduction in Death (In Death #13)(45)

"Milo. Milo Horndecker."

Doomed, she thought, from birth to geekdom. "Milo, you keep telling me you didn't do anything, I'm going to start thinking you did." She pulled out the three stills of the three faces the killer had used. "Do you know any of these men?" She laid them on the counter first for Tad and Bitsy. And got simultaneous head shakes out of them.

"But they're really pretty, too," Bitsy added.

The negative responses from the customers had Eve re-evaluating. "Okay. You have anyone in here the past few weeks. Somebody who just started coming in recently, hasn't been in since the murder? He'd want to sit near the front window. He'd come around in the mornings, but not after ten. Or in the evenings, but not before six."

She had to shuffle through the files in her head to come up with Bryna's regular work schedule. "If he came in otherwise, it would be on Tuesdays. He'd order fancy coffee. Slim latte grande with chestnut flavoring."

"He came in two Tuesdays in a row." Bitsy bounced on the toes of her pink slippers. "He sat in the front and he always had two lattes while he worked. And then he left."

"Which table?"

"He always used station one. Always." She pursed her bubblegum lips. "It has a nice view of the street."

And Bryna Bankhead's building, Eve thought.

She pulled out her communicator and tagged Feeney. "I'm at a cyber-club across from Bankhead's building. I'm looking at a unit he used. I need an impound warrant and an image tech."

Sitting at station one, Eve drank the genuine soy product with caffeine additives. Beggars couldn't be choosers.

She had only to angle her head to see the twelfth floor of the apartment building across the street. Bryna's apartment windows. The little terraces.

"He likes to be thorough," she said to Feeney. "He's a data addict and needs his input fix. She told him in her e-mails what she usually did on her days off. How she liked to open the windows first thing to see what sort of day it was."

I love to take that first breath of New York in the morning, she'd written. I know what people say about city air, but I think it's so full, so exciting and romantic. All the scents and flavors and colors. I have them all, and on my day off, I bask in them.

"He probably watched her step out on the terrace. Maybe she'd have a cup of coffee out there, standing by the rail. Being a creature of order, she'd tidy up the apartment, get dressed, probably go out shopping awhile. Meet a friend. He would have tailed her, just to make sure what she told him in e-mail clicked with her habits. Want to make sure she lived alone, that there was no boyfriend or whatever to cramp his style. More, he wanted to see how she behaved, how she looked when she was unaware of him. She had to be good enough to f**k after all."

She looked back at Feeney, who with his magic fingers and droopy eyes was giving the unit its first check. "He's a creature of habit, too," she said. "And the habits are a trail. Can you find him on this?"

"He used it, we can find out when and how. Gonna take time to filter through all the data and find his. But what he put in, we can get out."

With a nod, she pushed away from the table and walked back to where the image tech worked with the droids. The one thing about droids, she thought, was no matter how annoying they might be, their eyes were a reliable camera.

Already she could see the face and features coming to life on the tech's comp-canvas.

Soft face, bland features. A hairline starting to recede from a wide dome of brow and left to shag messily over the ears. The kind of face that passed through a crowd unnoticed, that blended to the point where it was a faint smear on the memory.

Except for the eyes. They were sharp and cold.

Whatever he did to his face, Eve knew when she looked into those eyes, she would know him.

There was no cyber-joint within view of Grace Lutz's building. No coffee shop or little diner. There was a small, walk-in deli with one long narrow aisle, but Eve's morning run of luck ran out there.

She'd sent for Peabody, and her aide walked in just as she was buying a candy bar.

"That's a very childish lunch," Peabody said, craving it. "Is that veggie hash fresh?"

"What have you got for me?"

"A big, gaping pit where my stomach used to be," Peabody told her, and ordered a take-out serving of the hash. "I'm trying this new diet where you eat only the white of a hard-boiled egg for breakfast. Then -- "

"Peabody." Cruelly, Eve unwrapped the candy, took a slow, deliberate bite. "Have you somehow mistaken me for someone who has an interest in dietary matters?"

"That's really mean. You're got a mean temperament because you're spending your caloric intake on processed sugar and... is that caramel?"

"Bet your ass." Eve licked a glossy string of it off her index finger while Peabody enviously followed the move. "Outside. I need to walk."

"Oh well, if we're going to exercise give me one of what she's got," Peabody demanded, and dug for more money.

On the street, she scooped up forksful of hash slowly to make it last and matched her stride to Eve's.

"If you can manage to swallow, Peabody, I'd like your report."

"It's pretty good. I think they used dill. We listed sixteen possibles," she said quickly. "Roarke, well, I don't have to tell you, but he's one mag tech. So fast and smooth. And when he does manual searches... Have you ever noticed his hands?" She ate more hash at Eve's steely stare. "Yeah, guess you have. Anyway, we've had sixteen names that jibed with the purchases, and we factored them down to ten, deleting two guys who got married in the last two weeks. May and June, still big months for weddings. Another who got run over by a maxibus a couple days ago. Did you read about that? This guy, he's walking along doing his stock checks on his PPC, and steps right off the curb in front of the bus. Blap."