The In Death Collection 06-10 (103 page)

He sat back, shot her the exasperated look brothers reserve for nagging sisters. “I carry my money in my front pocket. I don’t talk to the people who cart around those cases full of wrist units and PPCs, and I don’t
move in to play that card game like the one they had going on Fifth Avenue, even though it looks like fun.”

“It’s a con. You can’t win.”

“Still looked like fun.” But he wouldn’t brood on it, not when she had that line dug between her eyebrows. “I don’t strike up conversations on the subway.”

“Not with a chemi-head looking to score.” She rolled her eyes. “Jesus, Zeke, the guy was practically foaming at the mouth. Anyhow.” She waved that away. “I don’t expect you to lock yourself into the apartment on your free time. I just want you to be careful. It’s a great city, but it eats people every day. I don’t want one of them to be you.”

“I’ll be careful.”

“And you’ll stick to the major tourist areas, carry your palm-link?”

“Yes, Mom.” He grinned at her again, and looked so young Peabody’s heart stuttered. “So, you up for the Fly Over Manhattan tour?”

“Sure.” She managed to smile instead of wince. “You bet. Soon as we’re done here.” She took her time with the soup. “When are you supposed to get started on this job?”

“Tomorrow. We set it all up before I left. They approved the plans, the estimates. They paid for my transpo and expenses.”

“You said they saw your work when they were out in Arizona on vacation?”

“She did.” And just thinking of it had his pulse running a little faster. “She bought one of the carvings I’d done for Camelback Cooperative Artworks. Then she and Silvie—I don’t think you ever met Silvie, she’s a glass artist. She was running the co-op that day and she mentioned how I’d designed and built the cabinets and counters and the displays. And then Mrs. Branson mentioned how she and her husband were looking for a carpenter, and—”

“What?” Peabody’s head snapped up.

“They were looking for a carpenter, and—”

“No, what was that name?” She grabbed his hand, clamped down. “Did you say Branson?”

“That’s right. The Bransons hired me. Mr. and Mrs. B. Donald Branson. He owns Branson T and T. Good tools.”

“Oh.” Peabody set down her spoon. “Oh, shit, Zeke.”

Fixer’s was a grungy smear in an area not known for its tidiness. Just off Ninth, a bare block from the entrance to the tunnel, Fixer’s was a dilapidated storefront mined with security bars, patched with intercoms and peek lenses, and as welcoming as a cockroach.

The one-way windows offered the passerby a dingy field of black. The door was reinforced steel, studded with a complicated series of locks that made the police seal look like a joke.

People who loitered in the area knew how to mind their own business—which was usually second-story work. One glance at Eve had most of them finding something else to do and somewhere else to do it.

Eve used her master on the police seal, relieved that the sweeper team hadn’t engaged Fixer’s locks. At least she wouldn’t have to spend time decoding them. It made her think of Roarke and wonder how long it would have taken him to slide right through them.

Since a part of her would have enjoyed watching him do just that, she scowled as she stepped inside and shut the door behind her.

It smelled—not quite foul but close, she decided. Sweat, grease, bad coffee, old piss. “Lights, full,” she ordered, then narrowed her eyes at the sudden brightness.

The interior of the shop was no more cheerful than the exterior. Not a single chair invited a customer to sit and relax. The floor, the sickly green of baby vomit, carried the grime and scars of decades of wear. The way
her boots stuck and made sucking noises as she walked told her that mopping up hadn’t been a major occupation of the deceased.

Gray metal shelves rose up one wall and were jammed full in a system that defied all logic.

Miniscreens, security cams, porta-links, desk logs, communication and entertainment systems crowded together in varying stages of repair or harvesting.

Jumbled on the other side of the room were more units she took to be complete as the hand-lettered sign above warned that pickup must be made within thirty days or the customer defaulted the merchandise.

She counted five No Credit Given postings in a room no larger than fifteen feet wide.

Fixer’s sense of humor—for lack of a better term—was evidenced by the dangling human skull over the cashier’s counter. The sign under the sagging jaw read The Last Shoplifter.

“Yeah, that’s a laugh riot,” Eve murmured and huffed out a breath.

Damn if the place didn’t give her the creeps, she realized. The only window was behind her and barred. The only outside door mired with locks. She glanced up, studied the security monitor. It had been left running and gave her a full view of the street. On another, securing the interior, she could study herself on the crystal-clear screen.

Nobody got in, she decided, unless Fixer wanted them in.

She made a note to ask Sally at NJPSD for copies of the security discs, exterior and interior.

She crossed to the counter, noted that the computer stationed there was an ugly hybrid of scavenged parts. And in all probability, she mused, ran with more speed, efficiency, and reliability than the one in her office at Cop Central.

“Engage, computer.”

When nothing happened, she frowned and attempted
to boot it manually. The screen shimmered.

Warning: This unit protected by fail safe. Code proper password or voice print within thirty seconds of this message or disengage
.

Eve disengaged. She’d see if Feeney, top dog in the Electronic Detective Division, had the time and inclination to play with it.

There was nothing else on the counter but some greasy fingerprints, the dull sheen left by the sweepers, and a scatter of parts she couldn’t identify.

She uncoded the door leading to the back area and stepped into Fixer’s workshop.

The guy could’ve used a few elves, she thought. The place was an unholy mess with the bones and sinews of dozens of electronic devices scattered around. Tools were hung on pegs or tossed wherever they landed. Minilasers, delicate tweezers, and screwdrivers with bits hardly wider than a single hair.

If he’d been attacked here, how the hell would you tell?
she wondered, nudging the shell of a monitor with her boot. But she didn’t think he had been. She’d only dealt with Fixer a handful of times and hadn’t seen him in a couple of years, but she remembered he kept his place and his person in constant disarray.

“And they wouldn’t have gotten into this dungeon unless he’d wanted them to,” she murmured. The man had been seriously paranoid, she mused, checking out yet more monitors overhead. Every inch of his space and several feet outside the shop were all under surveillance twenty-four/seven.

No, they didn’t take him from inside, she decided. If he was panicked, as Ratso had said, he’d have been all the more careful. Still, he hadn’t felt safe enough to simply barricade himself inside and wait it out. So he’d called a friend.

She moved into the tiny room beyond, scanned the mess of Fixer’s living space. A cot with yellowed sheets, a table with a jury-rigged communications center, a pile
of unwashed clothes, and a narrow bathroom with hardly enough room for the skinny shower stall and toilet.

The kitchenette was a turnaround space packed with a fully loaded AutoChef and a minifridge stocked to bursting. Canned and dry goods were stacked in a wall as high as her waist.

“Jesus, he could have waited out an alien attack in here. Why go out to go under?”

Shaking her head, she tucked her thumbs in her pockets and turned a slow circle.

No windows, no outside doors, she noted. He’d lived in a fucking box. She studied the monitor across from the bed, watched the traffic move along Ninth. No, she corrected. Those were his windows.

She closed her eyes and tried to picture him there, using the image of him she remembered. Skinny, grizzled, old. Mean.

He’s scared, so he moves fast,
she thought.
Takes only what he needs. He’s former military. He knows how to decamp fast. Some clothes, some money. Not enough money on him for a man going under,
she realized.
Not nearly
.

Greed, she thought. That was another facet of the man. He’d been greedy, hoarding his money, overcharging his clients who paid because of his magic hands.

He’d have taken cash, credits, bank and brokerage passkeys.

And where was his bag? He’d have packed a bag. Could be in the river, too, she decided, hooking her thumbs in her front pockets. Or whoever killed him took it.

“He’d’ve had money,” she thought aloud. “He sure as hell wasn’t spending it on home decorating or personal hygiene and enhancements.”

She’d check into his finances.

He packs a bag. Going under,
she thought again.
What does he put into it?

He’d have taken a palm-link, a PPC. He’d have wanted his logs, his connections. And weapons.

She moved back out, poked under the counter. She found an empty rack with a quick-release bar. Hunkering down, she narrowed her eyes as she studied it. Had the old bastard really had an illegal blaster? Was this some kind of weapon holder? She’d check the sweepers’ report, see if they’d confiscated a weapon.

She hissed out a breath, picked up the rack to examine it. She didn’t have a clue what an army-issue blaster circa the Urban Wars looked like.

Then she sighed, pushed the rack into her evidence bag. She knew where to find one.

Because she wanted to speak to Feeney in person, Eve swung back to Cop Central. She took the glide up to EDD, hopping off long enough to hit up a vending machine for a nutra-bar.

The Electronic Detective Division was a hive of activity. Cops were working on computers, tearing them apart, rebuilding them. Others sat in privacy booths playing and copying discs from confiscated ’links and logs. Nevertheless, the beeps and buzzes and whines of electronics crowded the air and made her wonder how anyone could manage to squeeze in a stray thought.

Despite the noise level, the door of Captain Ryan Feeney’s office was open. He sat at his desk, his shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbows, his wiry, rust-colored hair standing up on end, his droopy eyes enormous behind the lenses of microgoggles. While Eve watched from the doorway, he plucked a tiny translucent chip from the guts of the computer upended on his desk.

“Gotcha, you little bastard.” And with the delicacy of a surgeon, he slid the chip into an evidence bag.

“What is it?”

“Hah?” Behind the goggles, his hound dog eyes blinked, then he shoved the goggles up to his forehead and focused on her. “Hey, Dallas. This little darling? It’s basically a counter.” He tapped the bag and smiled a little. “Bank teller with a talent for e-work installed it in her unit at work. Every twenty transfers, a deposit got zipped into an account she’d set up for herself in Stockholm. Pretty slick.”

“You’re slicker.”

“Damn right. What are you doing over here?” He continued to work as he spoke, methodically tagging evidence. “Want to hang out with real cops?”

“Maybe I missed your pretty face.” She eased a hip onto the corner of his desk, grinning when he snorted. “Or maybe I wondered if you had any spare time.”

“For what?”

“You remember The Fixer?”

“Sure. Bad attitude, magic hands. The son of a bitch’s nearly as good as I am. He can take a unit like this XK-6000 here, strip her down, harvest her, and spread her into six other units before she cools down. He’s goddamn good.”

“Now he’s goddamn dead.”

“Fixer?” Genuine regret showed in his eyes. “What happened?”

“He took a last swim.” She filled him in quickly, moving from her meeting with Ratso through her quick tour of the shop.

“Had to be something big and something bad to scare an old warhorse like Fixer,” Feeney mused. “You say they didn’t take him from inside?”

“I’d say that would’ve been next to impossible. He had full security scan. Interior and exterior. A hive of locks. One exit—reinforced—and one window, one-way luminex, barred. Oh, and I checked his supplies. He had enough unperishables and bottled water to last a man used to rations a good month.”

“Sounds like he could’ve held off an invasion.”

“Yeah. So why run?”

“Got me. The Jersey primary cleared you to look into it from this end?”

“Well, he’s got nothing. I haven’t got much more,” she admitted. “The story’s from my weasel, and he tends to spook easy. But Fixer was into something, and they took him out. They didn’t get into his place, so they didn’t get to his equipment. He’s got a fail-safe on his shop unit. I thought you could play with it, see if you can get past it.”

Feeney scratched his ear, reached absently for a handful of the sugared nuts in a bowl on his desk. “Yeah, I can do that. Gotta figure he’d’ve taken his logs with him if he was going under. But he was smart. Might’ve left a copy behind. So I’ll look.”

“Appreciate it.” She straightened. “I’m just juggling this in for now. I haven’t run it by the commander.”

“Let’s see what I find; then we’ll take it to him.”

“Good.” She snatched some of the nuts before she headed for the door. “So how much did she get? The bank teller?”

Feeney glanced down at the microtimer. “Three million and change. If she’d settled for the three and skipped, she might’ve gotten away with it.”

“They always want more,” Eve said.

She munched on nuts as she headed to her own office. The detective’s bullpen clattered with voices, curses, and whines from suspects, from victims giving statements, the incessant trill of ’links, and the quick screams and scratches as two women went at each other with teeth and nails over a dead man they both claimed to love.

Eve found the atmosphere oddly soothing after her trip to EDD.

As a professional courtesy, she stepped in and hauled one of the shrieking women up in a headlock while the detective in charge struggled with the other.

“Thanks, Dallas.” Baxter grinned at her.

She only sneered. “You were enjoying that, weren’t you?”

“Hey, nothing like a catfight.” He cuffed his charge to a chair before she could slice at him. “If you’d have waited another minute, clothes might’ve gotten ripped off.”

“You’re so sick, Baxter.” Eve bent close to the woman’s ear. “You hear that?” she murmured, tightening her grip just a little as the woman continued to squirm like a fish. “You go after her again, the guys in the squad are going to get off on it. Is that what you want?”

“No.” She bit the word off, then sniffled. “I just want my Barry back!” she wailed.

The sentiment set the other woman off, so that the room was filled with the wild sobbing of women. Seeing Baxter wince, Eve smiled thinly and pushed the woman to him. “There you go, pal.”

“Thanks a lot, Dallas.”

Satisfied with her part in the little drama, Eve went into her office, shut the door. In the relative peace, she sat down and contacted Suzanna Day, the late J. Clarence Branson’s attorney.

After being passed from reception to assistant, Eve watched Suzanna’s face swim on-screen. She was a sharp-looking woman of perhaps forty. Black hair was cut short and sleek around an attractive face. Her complexion was dark and deep as onyx, her eyes like jet. Her unsmiling mouth was painted a rich crimson that matched the tiny bead pierced through the trailing tip of her left eyebrow.

“Lieutenant Dallas. B. D. told me you’d be in touch.”

“I appreciate you taking the time to speak to me, Ms. Day. You’re aware I’m primary in the matter of J. Clarence Branson’s death?”

“Yes.” Her mouth thinned. “I’m also aware, through a contact at the PA’s office, that Lisbeth Cooke is being charged with man two.”

“You’re not happy with that decision.”

“J. C. was a friend, a good one. No, I’m not happy that the woman who killed him will do hardly more than turnaround time in a high-class cage.”

PAs make the deals, Eve thought sourly. Cops take the heat. “It’s not my job to make that determination, but it is to gather all possible evidence. Mr. Branson’s will could shed a different light on matters.”

“The will is to be read tonight, in the home of B. Donald Branson.”

“You already have the information as to the beneficiaries.”

“I do.” Suzanna paused, seemed to struggle with herself. “And I can’t reveal any of the terms before the official reading, as per my client’s instructions when the document was drawn up. My hands are tied here, Lieutenant.”

“Your client didn’t expect to be murdered.”

“Regardless. Believe me, Lieutenant, I’m already skimming corners by insisting the reading be held tonight.”

Eve considered a moment. “What time tonight?”

“Eight o’clock.”

“Any legal reason why I can’t be there?”

Suzanna lifted her ornamented eyebrow. “No, not if Mr. and Mrs. Branson clear it. I’ll speak to them about it, get back to you.”

“Good. I’m going out in the field, but I’ll get the message. Just one more thing. Did you know Lisbeth Cooke?”

“Very well. I often socialized with her and J. C.”

“Opinion?”

“She’s ambitious, determined, possessive. And hot-tempered.”

Eve nodded. “You didn’t like her.”

“On the contrary, I liked her very much. I admire a woman who knows what she wants, gets it, and hangs on to it. She made him happy,” she added and pressed
her lips together as tears swam into her eyes. “I’ll get back to you,” she said and broke transmission.

“Everybody loved J. C.,” Eve murmured, then, shaking her head, began to gather her things. Her communicator beeped before she got to the door. She tugged it out. “Dallas.”

“Lieutenant.”

“Peabody. I figured you’d have your brother out on the town.”

“Try vice versa.” On-screen, Peabody rolled her eyes. “I’ve already been to the top of the Empire State Building, taken the glide around the Silver Palace twice, gawked at skaters in Rockefeller Center—” Not under the tortures of hell would she admit she’d strapped on skates herself. “And I walked my feet off in two museums. He’s dying to do the Fly Over Manhattan tour. It leaves in fifteen.”

“Tons of fun,” Eve commented as she made her way to the elevator that would take her down to her car.

“Zeke’s never been to the city before. I’ve had to stop him from talking to every LC and beggar on the street. Jesus, Dallas, he wanted to play three-card monte.”

Eve grinned. “Good thing his sister’s a cop.”

“You’re telling me.” Then she sighed. “Look, this probably doesn’t mean anything, but it’s weird, and I thought I should let you know.”

Eve stepped out of the elevator into the garage. “What?”

“You know how Zeke said he came out because he had a commission? Building custom cabinets and stuff? Well, it turns out his commission is from B. Donald Branson.”

“Branson?” Eve pulled up short. “Branson hired your brother?”

“Yeah.” Peabody studied Eve out of unhappy eyes. “What are the odds?”

“Low,” Eve murmured. “Pretty low. How’d Branson hear about Zeke?”

“Mrs. Branson, actually. She was out in Arizona at some spa and was shopping, saw his work in one of the artists’ co-ops. Zeke does a lot of custom work, builtins, furniture. He’s really good. She asked about the craftsman, and they put her in touch with Zeke. One thing led to another, and here he is.”

“It sounds normal, logical.” She slipped into her car. “Has he been in touch with them since he got in?”

“He’s calling now. Their name just came up, and I told him. He thought he should call Mrs. Branson and see if she wanted to put off the work.”

“Okay. Don’t worry about it, Peabody. But let me know how they handle it. And if he hasn’t already spilled it about having a cop for a sister, tell him to keep that little bit of data to himself.”

“Sure. But it’s not like the Bransons are suspects. We’ve got the killer.”

“Right. Let’s just be cautious. Go play tour guide. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Coincidence, Eve mused as she drove out of the garage. She really hated coincidence. But no matter how she played the information through her mind, she couldn’t come up with anything off about the family of her murder victim hiring Peabody’s brother to do carpentry work.

J. Clarence had been alive when Zeke had been hired. Neither of the Bransons were involved in his death. There was no way to stretch it into anything shaky.

Sometimes coincidence was just coincidence. But she pushed the information into a corner of her mind and let it stew there.

There was music playing softly when Eve walked in the house. Summerset entertaining himself, she decided as she stripped off her jacket, while he went about doing whatever the hell it was he did all day.

She tossed the jacket over the newel post as she started upstairs. He would know she was home, she
thought. The man knew every damn thing. He also hated to have his routine, whatever it was, disturbed. It was unlikely he would bother her.

She turned, walked down the corridor to the tall double doors of Roarke’s weapon room. Frowning a little, she hitched her bag on her shoulder more securely. She was aware that only Roarke, Summerset, and she could gain access to this room.

Roarke’s collection was legal—at least it was legal now. She had no idea if every piece had been obtained by legal means. She doubted that sincerely.

Eve laid her hand flat on the palm plate, waited while the cool green light shimmered on to take her print, then stated her name, and finally used the key code.

The security computer verified her identification, and the locks snicked open.

She stepped inside, closed the door behind her, and let out a long breath.

Weapons of violence through the ages were displayed, somehow elegantly, in the great room. Encased in glass, showcased in beautiful cabinets, gleaming on the walls were guns, knives, lasers, swords, pikes, maces. All testaments, she thought, to man’s continued ambition to destroy man.

And yet, she knew the weapon strapped to her side was as much a part of her as her arm.

She remembered the first time Roarke had showed her this room, when her instinct and her intellect had been waging a battle. One telling her he could be the killer she sought, the other insisting it wasn’t possible.

The first time he’d kissed her had been here, in this private museum of war. And another element had been added to her personal battle: her emotions. She’d never quite gotten her emotions back on track when it came to Roarke.