Visions in Death (In Death #19)(55)

"Get it started."

She walked out with him, and parted ways to go back to her office.

It was easy to brief Feeney. He understood her shorthand, her direction.

"Won't be quick," he warned her. "But we'll get on it as soon as you get us the data."

"I'm going to pressure the customer lists from the craft shop. Actually, two of them. One's out of the perimeter, but not by much. I'll do the same at the gyms for membership lists. I'll feed you what I get as I get it, and shoot the data we gathered last night to your office unit."

"Works for me."

"I've been running eye banks. Donors and receivers. I think it's a time waster, but it has to be factored in. I'm going to give you what I've got on that, so you can add it to the mix."

"Give me all you got. You're looking pretty peaky there, Dallas."

"Peaky? Jeez."

She cut transmission. She zipped files, lists, even her work notes to Feeney. Despite the peaky remark, she thought, he had a cop's brain. Maybe outside of the e-work, he'd see something she'd missed.

She grabbed the jacket she'd forgotten to put back on after her shower. Striding into the bullpen, she gave Peabody a come-ahead.

"Let's roll out."

Chapter Twelve

"What does peaky mean?"

Peabody wrinkled her brow. "I dunno. Ah, a little look-see—you know, peekaboo?"

"No." Eve idled at a light. "As applies to someone's appearance. They look peaky."

"Beats me, but it doesn't sound good. Want me to try to look it up?"

"No. I asked Feeney to do the matches, looking for names that come up residentially, and in consumer and/or employee lists from the area we've outlined, the shops and fitness facilities within. We need to get the lists."

"Feeney will find matches quicker than either of us. But it's still going to take time, considering the size of the area and the number of people we're dealing with. Then there's the number of matches to wade through. People tend to do at least some of their shopping and business in their own neighborhoods."

"Then we profile them. Unmarried males to start."

"I can follow the detecting dots. He likely lives alone, is between thirty and fifty."

"Closer to thirty," Eve interrupted. "Close, I think, to the ages of his victims."

"Why?"

"I don't know, just feels right. It could be a kind of trigger, couldn't it? The age. The age he is himself, the age he sees her—the one he's really killing. He's grown up, he's on equal ground now. He can punish her." Eve jerked a shoulder. "I sound like Mira."

"Some. And like Mira, it sounds plausible. So, we assume he's around thirty. We know he's strong, has big feet. According to our civilian consultant, he also has big hands and is well over six feet in height. But we can verify through evidence, the strength and the feet."

While negotiating traffic, Eve glanced at her partner. "Doesn't sound like you're convinced by our civilian consultant."

"I believe her, but her visions aren't hard fact. We work with the facts, and consider the rest."

"Now that's the kind of cynicism I like to hear."

"She isn't making this stuff up, and she didn't fake her reaction to the murder weapon. Dog-sick in the bathroom. Another couple of minutes I'd have called an MT. But visions can be tricky."

"Can they?"

"You know, when it comes to sarcasm, you have perfect pitch. What I'm saying is, visions often twist around reality."

Interested, Eve glanced over. "For instance?"

"For instance, Celina may see the killer as unusually big—tall, large hands, and so on—because he's powerful. Not only physically, which we can determine by the MO, but in some other way. Professionally, say, or financially. Or she sees him this way because he kills, and that's frightening to her. The boogie man's a big guy."

"Okay." Eve nodded as she began the hunt for parking. "Keep going."

"We know his shoe size, and that it's considerably larger than average. From this we can extrapolate that he is probably taller than average for a man. We know he's strong enough—powerful enough, you could say—to carry a woman, the dead weight of that woman, nearly fifty yards, and down a short but fairly steep cliff. It's cop work that's giving us the most likely picture of his physical type, not visions."

"Does the cop work confirm her visions, or do her visions confirm the cop work?"

"It's both, isn't it?" Peabody held her breath when Eve utilized the vertical and lateral modes to squeeze into an empty slice of space at a curb. Then let it out when it actually worked. "Civilian consultants are tools, but we have to know how to use them."

Eve eyed the traffic, waiting for a break in it where she could get out of the car without being slammed into the pavement. "She doesn't see his face."

"Could be he wears a mask. Or it could be she's too afraid to look, that she blocks it."

Eve stepped onto the sidewalk. "Can she do that?"

"If she's strong enough, and scared enough. And she's plenty scared. She's not a cop, Dallas," Peabody continued as they walked. "She's seeing murder, and it's not her choice the way it is ours. We don't want to see it, we don't pick up the badge. We sure as hell don't work in Homicide. I chose this because I wanted to live and work in New York, always did. I wanted to be a cop, and the kind of cop who found the big answers to the big questions. Who worked for people who'd been victimized, and against the ones who'd made them victims. You?"