Witness in Death (In Death #10)(32)

"Yeah. Well." He smiled hopefully. "Here she is. I was just hooking her to the mainframe. You want I should finish?"

"Yeah, I want you should finish."

"Okay. Have it done in a wink, then get right out of your way." He all but dived under the desk.

"What the hell kind of name is Tomjohn?"

"It's my name, Lieutenant. You got your complete owner's manual and user's guide in that box over there."

She looked over, snorted at the foot-high box. "I know how it works. I have this model at home."

"It's a good machine. Once you're linked to the main, all we gotta do is transfer your code and data from your old equipment. Take about thirty minutes, tops."

"I got time." She skimmed her eyes over her old unit, dented, battered, despised. Some of the dents had been put into it by her own frustrated fist. "What happens to my old equipment?"

"I can haul it out for you, take it down to recycle."

"Fine -- no. No, I want it. I want to take it home." She'd perform a ritual extermination, she decided. She hoped it suffered.

"Okay by me." Since he figured his tongue and his ears were safe again, he began to whistle with his work. "That thing's been obsolete for five years. Don't know how you managed to get anything done with it."

Her only response to that was a low, throaty growl.

When Peabody came in an hour later, Eve was sitting at her crowded desk, grinning. "Look, Peabody. It's Christmas."

"Whoa." Peabody came in, circled around. "Whoa squared. It's beautiful."

"Yeah. It's mine. Tomjohn Lewis, my new best friend, hooked it up for me. It listens to me, Peabody. It does what I tell it to do."

"That's great, sir. I know you'll be very happy together."

"Okay, fun's over." She picked up her coffee, jerking her thumb toward the AutoChef so Peabody knew she was welcome to a cup of her own. "I did a run-through on Draco's apartment last night."

"I didn't know you planned to do that. I would have adjusted my personal time."

"It wasn't necessary." Eve had a nasty image of the scene in Areena's apartment if Peabody had come along.

"Draco kept a stash of illegals in his penthouse. A variety pack that included nearly an ounce of pure Wild Rabbit."

"Creep."

"You bet. Also a number of inventive sex toys, some of which were out of the scope of even my wide range of experience. He had a collection of video discs, and a large percentage of them are personal sexual encounters."

"So we have a dead sexual deviant."

"The toys and the discs are personal choice, but the Rabbit shuffles him over into SD territory. It could go to motive, or motives, since they're piling up like Free-Agers at a protest rally. No offense."

"None taken."

"We've got, as potentials, ambition, personal gain, money, sex, illegals, woman or women scorned, and all-around general dislike. He enjoyed preying on women, generally pushing members of both sexes around. He had a regular illegals habit. He was also an irritating son of a bitch, and had everyone who knew him wanting to string him up by his intestines. It doesn't cut the list by much. But."

She shifted in her chair. "I started running probabilities last night. Made some headway. My handy new XE-5000 will copy that data to you so you can continue to run scans. I have a consult with Mira shortly. That may help shave the working list down. Set up a conference with our pals in EDD for eleven."

"And the interviews this afternoon?"

"Go as scheduled. I'll be back in an hour, two at most." She pushed away from her desk. "If I get held up, contact the lab and nag Dickhead into verifying the illegals I sent down this morning."

"A pleasure. Bribe or threat?"

"How long have you worked with me now, Peabody?"

"Almost a year, sir."

Eve nodded as she strode out. "Long enough. Use your own judgment."

Mira's area was more civilized -- Eve imagined that was the word -- compared with the warrens and hives of the majority of Cop Central. A bubble of calm, she supposed, especially if you didn't know what went on behind the doors of Testing.

Eve knew, and she hoped eons passed before she was forced to step through them again.

But Mira's individual space was a world away from the depersonalizing and demoralizing cage of Testing. She favored shades of blues in her cozy scoop chairs, in the soothing ocean waves she often set on her mood screen.

Today she was dressed in one of her soft and snazzy pastel suits. A hopeful green, the color of spring leaf buds. Her hair waved back from a face of composed beauty Eve constantly admired. There were teardrop pearls at her ears that matched the single dangle on a gold-linked chain at her throat.

She was, to Eve's mind, the perfect example of gracious femininity.

"I appreciate you fitting me in this morning."

"I feel a vested interest," Mira began as she programmed her AutoChef for tea. "Being a witness. In all my years attached to the NYPSD, I've never witnessed a murder." She turned with two cups of floral-scented tea in her hand and caught the dark flicker in Eve's eyes. "Richard Draco was not a murder, Eve. It was an execution. An entirely different matter."