The In Death Collection 06-10 (64 page)

She watched the two officers’ shoulders snap straight. The lieutenant had that effect on other cops,
Peabody mused as she retrieved the field kit from the vehicle. She brought you to attention.

It wasn’t just the way she looked, Peabody decided, with that long, rangy body, the simple and
often disordered cap of brown hair that showed hints of blonde, hints of red, hints, Peabody thought, of everything. There were the
eyes, all cop, and the color of good Irish whiskey, the little dent in the firm chin below a full mouth that could go hard as stone.

Peabody found it a strong and arresting face, partially, she decided, because Eve had no vanity
whatsoever.

Although the way she looked might gain a uniform’s attention, it was what she so clearly was that
had them snapping straight.

She was the best damn cop Peabody had ever known. Pure cop, the kind you’d go through a door
with without hesitation. The kind you knew would stand for the dead and for the living.

And the kind, Peabody mused as she walked close enough to hear the end of Eve’s blistering
lecture, who kicked whatever ass needed kicking.

“Now to review,” Eve said coolly. “You call in a homicide, you drag my butt out of
bed, you damn well have the scene secured and have your report ready for me when I get here. You don’t stand here like a
couple of morons sucking your thumbs. You’re cops, for God’s sake. Act like cops.”

“Yes, sir, Lieutenant.” This came in a wavery voice from the youngest of the team. He was
hardly more than
a boy, and the only reason Eve had pulled her verbal punch. His partner, however,
wasn’t a rookie, and she earned one of Eve’s frigid stares.

“Yes, sir,” she said between her teeth. And the lively resentment in the tone had Eve angling
her head.

“Do you have a problem, Officer . . . Bowers?”

“No, sir.”

Her face was the color of aged cherry wood, with her eyes a striking contrast of pale, pale blue. She kept
her dark hair short under her regulation cap. There was a button missing on her standard-issue coat and her shoes were dull and
scuffed. Eve could have poked her about it but decided being stuck in a miserable job was some excuse not to buff up for the
day.

“Good.” Eve merely nodded, but the warning in her eyes was clear. She shifted her gaze to
the partner and felt a little stir of sympathy. He was pale as a sheet, shaky, and so fresh from the academy she could all but smell it on
him.

“Officer Trueheart, my aide will show you the proper way to secure a scene. See that you pay
attention.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Peabody.” At the single word, her field kit was in her hand. “Show me what
we’ve got here, Bowers.”

“Indigent. Male Caucasian. Goes by the name of Snooks. This is his crib.”

She gestured to a rather cleverly rigged shelter comprised of a packing crate cheerfully painted with stars
and flowers and topped by the dented lid of an old recycling bin. There was a moth-eaten blanket across the entrance and a
hand-drawn sign that simply said Snooks strung over it.

“He inside?”

“Yeah, part of the beat is to give a quick eye check on the cribs looking for stiffs to scoop. Snooks
is pretty stiff,” she said at what Eve realized after a moment was an attempt at humor.

“I bet. My, what a pleasant aroma,” she muttered as
she moved closer
and the wind could no longer blow the stench aside.

“That’s what tipped me. It always stinks. All these people smell like sweat and garbage and
worse, but a stiff has another layer.”

Eve knew the layer all too well. Sweet, sickly. And here, sneaking under the miasma of urine and sour flesh
was the smell of death, and she noted with a faint frown, the bright metallic hint of blood.

“Somebody stick him?” She nearly sighed as she opened her kit to take out the can of
Seal-It. “What the hell for? These sleepers don’t have anything worth stealing.”

For the first time, Bowers allowed a thin smile to curve her lips. But her eyes were cold and hard, with
bitterness riding in them. “Somebody stole something from him, all right.” Pleased with herself, she stepped back. She
hoped to God the tight-assed lieutenant got a nice hard shock at what she’d see behind the tattered curtain.

“You call the ME?” Eve asked as she clear-coated her hands and boots.

“First on scene’s discretion,” Bowers said primly, with the malice still bright in her
eyes. “I opted to leave that decision to Homicide.”

“For God’s sake, is he dead or not?” Disgusted, Eve moved forward, bending a bit
to sweep back the curtain.

It was always a shock, not the hard one Bowers had hoped for. Eve had seen too much too often for that.
But what one human could do to another was never routine for her. And the pity that stirred underneath and through the cop was
something the woman beside her would never feel and never understand.

“Poor bastard,” she said quietly and crouched to do a visual exam.

Bowers had been right about one thing. Snooks was very, very dead. He was hardly more than a sack of
bones and wild, straggly hair. Both his eyes and his mouth gaped, and she could see he hadn’t kept more than half
of his teeth. His type rarely took advantage of the health and dental programs.

His eyes had already filmed over and were a dull mud brown. She judged him to be somewhere around the
century mark, and even without murder, he’d never have attained the average twenty more years decent nutrition and medical
science could have given him.

She noted, too, that his boots, while cracked and scarred, had plenty of wear left in them, as did the blanket
that had been tossed to the side of the box. He had some trinkets as well. A wide-eyed doll’s head, a penlight in the shape of a
frog, a broken cup he’d filled with carefully made paper flowers. And the walls were covered with more paper shapes. Trees,
dogs, angels, and his favored stars and flowers.

She could see no signs of struggle, no fresh bruising or superfluous cuts. Whoever had killed the old man
had done so efficiently.

No, she thought, studying the fist-sized hole in his chest. Surgically. Whoever had taken Snook’s
heart had very likely used a laser scalpel.

“You got your homicide, Bowers.”

Eve eased back, let the curtain fall. She felt her blood rise and her fist clench when she saw the self-satisfied
smirk on the uniform’s face.

“Okay, Bowers, we don’t like each other. Just one of those things. But you’d be
smart to remember I can make it a hell of a lot harder on you than you can on me.” She took a step closer, bumping the toe of
her boots to the toe of Bowers’s shoes. Just to be sure her point was taken. “So be smart, Bowers, and wipe that
fucking sneer off your face and keep out of my way.”

The sneer dropped away, but Bowers’s eyes shot out little bullet points of animosity.
“It’s against departmental code for a superior officer to use offensive language to a uniform.”

“No kidding? Well, you be sure to put that in your report, Bowers. And you have that report done,
in
triplicate, and on my desk by oh ten hundred. Stand back,” she added, very quietly now.

It took ten humming seconds with their eyes warring before Bowers dropped her gaze and shifted
aside.

Dismissing her, Eve turned her back and pulled out her communicator. “Dallas, Lieutenant Eve.
I’ve got a homicide.”

Now why,
Eve wondered, as she hunkered inside the crate to examine the body,
would someone steal a so obviously
used-up heart?
She remembered that for a period after the Urban Wars, stolen organs had been a prize commodity on the black
market. Very often, dealers hadn’t been patient enough to wait until a donor was actually dead to make the transfer, but that
had been decades ago, before man-made organs had been fully perfected.

Organ donating and brokering were still popular. And she thought there was something about organ building
as well, though she paid little attention to medical news and reports.

She distrusted doctors.

Some of the very rich didn’t care for the idea of a manufactured implant, she assumed. A human
heart or kidney from a young accident victim could command top prices, but it had to be in prime condition. Nothing about Snooks
was prime.

She wrinkled her nose against the stench, but leaned closer. When a woman detested hospitals and health
centers as much as she did, the faintly sick smell of antiseptic sent the nostrils quivering.

She caught it here, just a trace, then frowning, sat back on her heels.

Her prelim exam told her the victim had died at 0:2:10, given the outside temperature through the night.
She’d need the blood work and tox reports to know if there’d been drugs in his system, but she could already see that
he’d been a brew guzzler.

The typical brown refillable bottle used to transport home brew was tucked in the corner, nearly empty. She
found a small, almost pitiful stash of illegals. One thin, hand-rolled joint of Zoner, a couple of pink capsules that
were probably Jags, and a small, filthy bag of white powder she assumed after a sniff was Grin laced with a whiff of Zeus.

There were telltale spiderwebs of broken blood vessels over his dented face, obvious signs of malnutrition,
and the scabs of what was likely some unattractive skin disease. The man had been a guzzler, smoked, ate garbage, and had been
nearly ready to die in his sleep.

Why kill him?

“Sir?” Eve didn’t glance back as Peabody drew back the curtain.
“ME’s on scene.”

“Why take his heart?” Eve muttered. “Why surgically remove it? If it was a straight
murder, wouldn’t they have roughed him up, kicked him around? If they were into mutilation, why didn’t they mutilate?
This is textbook work.”

Peabody scanned the body, grimaced. “I haven’t seen any heart ops, but I’ll take
your word on that.”

“Look at the wound,” Eve said impatiently. “He should have bled out,
shouldn’t he? A fist-sized hole in the chest, for Christ’s sake. But they—whatever it is—clamped, closed
off, the bleeders, just like they would in surgery. This one didn’t want the mess, didn’t see the point in it. No,
he’s proud of his work,” she added, crab walking back through the opening, then standing to take a deep gulp of the
much fresher air outside.

“He’s skilled. Had to have had some training. And I don’t think one person could
have managed this alone. You send the scoopers out to canvass for witnesses?”

“Yeah.” Peabody scanned the deserted street, the broken windows, the huddle of boxes and
crates deep in the alleyway across the street. “Good luck to them.”

“Lieutenant.”

“Morris.” Eve lifted a brow as she noted she’d hooked the top medical examiner for
an on-scene. “I didn’t expect to get the cream on a sidewalk sleeper.”

Pleased, he smiled, and his lively eyes danced. He wore
his hair slicked back and
braided with a siren red ski cap snugged over it. His long, matching coat flapped madly in the breeze. Morris, Eve knew, was quite the
snazzy dresser.

“I was available, and your sleeper sounded quite interesting. No heart?”

“Well, I didn’t find one.”

He chuckled and approached the crate. “Let’s have a look-see.”

She shivered, envying him his long, obviously warm coat. She had one—Roarke had given her a
beauty for Christmas—but she resisted wearing it on the job. No way in hell was she going to get blood and assorted body
fluids all over that fabulous bronze-colored cashmere.

And she thought as she crouched down yet again, she was pretty sure her new gloves were cozily tucked in
the pockets of that terrific coat. Which was why her hands were currently freezing.

She stuffed them in the pockets of her leather jacket, hunched her shoulders against the bite of the wind, and
watched Morris do his job.

“Beautiful work,” Morris breathed. “Absolutely beautiful.”

“He had training, right?”

“Oh yes.” Affixing microgoggles over his eyes, Morris peered into the open chest.
“Yes indeed, he did. This is hardly his first surgery. Top of the line tools as well. No homemade scalpel, no clumsy rib
spreaders. Our killer is one mag surgeon. Damn if I don’t envy his hands.”

“Some cults like to use body parts in their ceremonies,” Eve said half to herself. “But
they generally hack and mutilate when they kill. And they like rituals, ambiance. We’ve got none of that here.”

“Doesn’t look like a religious thing. It looks like a medical one.”

“Yeah.” That corroborated her thoughts. “One person pull this off?”

“Doubt it.” Morris pulled out his bottom lip, let it snap back. “To perform a
procedure this slick under these
difficult conditions he’d need a very skilled assistant.”

“Any idea why they’d take his heart if it wasn’t to worship the demon of the
week?”

“Not a clue,” Morris said cheerfully and gestured for her to back up. When they were
outside again, he blew out a breath. “I’m surprised the old man didn’t die of asphyxiation in all that stink. But
from a visual exam, my guess would be that heart would have very few miles left on it. Got your prints and DNA sample for
IDing?”

“Already sealed and ready for the lab.”

“Then we’ll bag him, take him in.”

Eve nodded. “You curious enough to bump him up to the top of your stack of
bodies?”

“As a matter of fact, I am.” He smiled, gestured to his team. “You should wear a hat,
Dallas. It’s fucking freezing out here.”

She sneered, but she’d have given a month’s pay for a hot cup of coffee. Leaving Morris to
his work, she turned to meet Bowers and Trueheart.

Bowers clenched her teeth. She was cold, hungry, and she bitterly resented the chummy consult
she’d witnessed between Eve and the chief medical examiner.

Probably fucking him,
Bowers thought. She knew Eve Dallas, knew her type. Damn right she did. A woman like her only
moved up the ranks because she spread her legs while she made the climb. The only reason Bowers hadn’t moved up herself
was because she refused to do it on her back.