The in Death Collection Books 11-15 - J. D. Robb [342]
She looked back at Feeney, who with his magic fingers and droopy eyes was giving the unit its first check. “He’s a creature of habit, too,” she said. “And the habits are a trail. Can you find him on this?”
“He used it, we can find out when and how. Gonna take time to filter through all the data and find his. But what he put in, we can get out.”
With a nod, she pushed away from the table and walked back to where the image tech worked with the droids. The one thing about droids, she thought, was no matter how annoying they might be, their eyes were a reliable camera.
Already she could see the face and features coming to life on the tech’s comp-canvas.
Soft face, bland features. A hairline starting to recede from a wide dome of brow and left to shag messily over the ears. The kind of face that passed through a crowd unnoticed, that blended to the point where it was a faint smear on the memory.
Except for the eyes. They were sharp and cold.
Whatever he did to his face, Eve knew when she looked into those eyes, she would know him.
There was no cyber-joint within view of Grace Lutz’s building. No coffee shop or little diner. There was a small, walk-in deli with one long narrow aisle, but Eve’s morning run of luck ran out there.
She’d sent for Peabody, and her aide walked in just as she was buying a candy bar.
“That’s a very childish lunch,” Peabody said, craving it. “Is that veggie hash fresh?”
“What have you got for me?”
“A big, gaping pit where my stomach used to be,” Peabody told her, and ordered a take-out serving of the hash. “I’m trying this new diet where you eat only the white of a hardboiled egg for breakfast. Then—”
“Peabody.” Cruelly, Eve unwrapped the candy, took a slow, deliberate bite. “Have you somehow mistaken me for someone who has an interest in dietary matters?”
“That’s really mean. You’re got a mean temperament because you’re spending your caloric intake on processed sugar and . . . is that caramel?”
“Bet your ass.” Eve licked a glossy string of it off her index finger while Peabody enviously followed the move. “Outside. I need to walk.”
“Oh well, if we’re going to exercise give me one of what she’s got,” Peabody demanded, and dug for more money.
On the street, she scooped up forksful of hash slowly to make it last and matched her stride to Eve’s.
“If you can manage to swallow, Peabody, I’d like your report.”
“It’s pretty good. I think they used dill. We listed sixteen possibles,” she said quickly. “Roarke, well, I don’t have to tell you, but he’s one mag tech. So fast and smooth. And when he does manual searches . . . Have you ever noticed his hands?” She ate more hash at Eve’s steely stare. “Yeah, guess you have. Anyway, we’ve had sixteen names that jibed with the purchases, and we factored them down to ten, deleting two guys who got married in the last two weeks. May and June, still big months for weddings. Another who got run over by a maxibus a couple days ago. Did you read about that? This guy, he’s walking along doing his stock checks on his PPC, and steps right off the curb in front of the bus. Blap.”
“Peabody.”
“Okay, well. We narrowed it down to ten most-likelies, going with the outlets McNab came up with in-city for the enhancements. The wigs are taking longer because he’s got to target the manufacturer, and he says there’s about two hundred who use that high-grade human material—then hit the brand, then the product name. The style used in the first murder is a pretty popular hair alternative, and goes by several names, depending on the brand and material used.”
She flipped her empty take-out carton into a recycler, and began to peel the wrapper off her candy bar with the slow precision and intense concentration of a woman stripping her lover.
“He wants to have pizza tonight.”
“What? Roarke wants pizza?”
“No, McNab. McNab wants to have pizza with me tonight.