Strangers in Death (In Death #26)(34)

“I haven’t heard it played from the source, and that can make a difference. But I will say that marriage partners often make arrangements and bargains that seem odd, or even wrong, to someone looking—or listening—in.”

“Yeah, I keep coming back to that, too. People do the whacked all the time.”

Time to let it stew, Eve decided as she hopped on a glide to start the trip back to Homicide. Time to take another look at the facts and evidence, and let the personalities and speculations simmer. With that in mind, she switched glides to detour to the Electronic Detectives Division. A face-to-face with its captain, and her old partner, might give her another angle on the security breach. She skirted by a couple of cops leaning back on the glide and jawing about basketball, wound her way around a grim-faced woman with her arms folded and piss in her eye before she ran into a logjam of bodies.

She smelled bad cologne, worse coffee, and fresh-baked goods as she snaked and elbowed her way through. Because the elevators were always worse, she stuck with the glides. As she neared EDD, the tone changed. The cops got younger, the clothes more trendy, the visible body piercings more plentiful. The smells edged toward candy and fizzy drinks. Every mother’s son or daughter was hooked up—pocket ’links, ear ’links, headsets so the chatter jittered out, the noise of it rising through the corridor and reaching critical mass inside the squad room.

She’d never known an e-detective to be still for more than five minutes. They bopped, danced, tapped, jiggled. Eve figured it would take her less than that five minutes to go stark raving mad if she rode a desk in EDD. But it suited Feeney. He might have been old enough to have fathered most of his detectives, and his idea of fashion ran to making sure his socks matched, but the color and buzz of EDD fit him like one of his wrinkled suits.

Naturally.

She turned toward his office and his open door. An explosion of sound had her pausing, then approaching with more caution. Feeney sat at his desk. His ginger hair with its generous dashes of gray sat on his head like an electrified cat. Beneath it, his comfortably droopy face was clammy and pale, if you overlooked the bright red nose that sat in the middle like a stoplight.

The explosion of sound came again in the form of three blasting sneezes, followed by a rattling wheeze, and a barking curse.

“Man, you look bad.”

His puffy eyes lifted. The shadows under them seemed to droop right down to his clammy cheeks. “Got a freaking son of a bitching cold.”

“Yeah, I heard that. Maybe you should be in bed.”

“I’m in bed, the wife’s on me like white on tofu, how she told me I shoulda worn the muffler, and how she didn’t give me those nice earmuffs for Christmas. Damn things make me look like I got a couple of red rats coming out of my ears. She’ll want to be pouring Christ knows what into me.”

He hacked, sneezed, cursed. And Eve eased back another few inches.

“Plus, she’s been taking some godforsaken class on alternative medicine, and has it in her head colonics are the cure for every damn thing. You think I want a colonic?”

“I really don’t.”

He blew his nose heroically. “You want a rundown on the Sanders electronics.”

“Anders.” She could almost see the microscopic germs dancing and mating gleefully in the air around him. “Feeney, you gotta go home.”

“I’m going to ride it out. Got inhalers, and decongestants. Don’t work for shit, but I got them. I get a brain tumor, they can fix it, no problem. I get a lousy germ, and they got nothing.”

“Blows, but—”

“Come on in, I’ll bring up the file.”

She studied him, her trainer, her mentor, her longtime partner. He was, in every way that counted, a father. And she thought of the gleeful germs banging each other all over the office. “Ah, actually, I’ve got to get back down. I forgot something.”

“This’ll only take a minute.”

“Feeney, I’m not coming in there, I’m not taking one step closer without a hazmat suit. You’re dog sick, you’re contagious, I can actually see your germs flying around in the air having a party. You need to go home.”

He lowered his head to the desk. “Stun me, will you, kid? I’m too weak to pull my own weapon and do it myself.”

“Shit.” She glanced back, saw McNab’s cube was empty. Figured. “You.” She jabbed a finger at the closest live body, even if it was clad in a banana yellow skin-suit with knee-high purple airboots. “Your captain needs transportation home. Now. Arrange it. Who’s next in rank?”

“Ummmm.”

“Jesus. Get the transpo. I want a vehicle ready to go, and an officer at the elevator door of the garage, this sector, ground level, by the time I get there. If it’s not—who are you?”

“Um, Detective Letterman.”

“If it’s not, Detective Letterman, I’m coming back up here and peeling you like the banana you resemble. Clear?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then do it!” Eve took several deep breaths, like a diver preparing to go under, then holding it, went into the red zone. She grabbed Feeney’s coat, his hat, his scarf. “Come on, get these on.”

“Wanna die at my desk,” he whimpered, “not in bed like an old man.”

“Jesus, stop being a baby. You’re not going to die. Get your coat on. Don’t breathe on me. Wear the hat. What the hell’s wrong with you coming in today?”