The In Death Collection Books 21-25 - J. D. Robb [250]
Twice she came upon fender benders, felt obliged to stop and get out, determine if there were injuries before calling it in to Traffic.
When traffic stalled, again, she imagined what it would be like just to roll over the cars in her path. The tank she was in could handle it, she thought.
When she arrived at Central, she calculated that more than twenty percent of the slots on her level were empty.
One of the detectives hailed her when she walked into Homicide.
“Slader, aren’t you on graveyard?”
“Yes, sir. Caught one a couple hours before end of tour. Got the guy in the cooler. Vic’s his brother, who was visiting from out of town for the holidays. Ends up with a broken neck at the bottom of the stairs. Guy in the cooler has some swank place over on Park. Vic’s a loser, no fixed address, no visible means of employment.”
“He get helped down the steps?”
“Oh, yeah.” Slader’s smile was thin and wry. “Guy claims the brother was stoned—and we’ll get the tox on that—but he did have some Juice on him. Suspect said he was in bed, heard the noise of the fall, and found his brother at the bottom of the steps. Thing is, he apparently didn’t think we’d notice the vic’s facial bruises, or hoped we put them off on the fall. But seeing as our guy’s got scraped knuckles, and a split lip, we’re figuring otherwise.”
Eve scratched the back of her neck. People, she thought, could be unbelievably stupid. “You work him toward the self-defense or accidental angle?”
“Yeah, but he’s sticking to his story. He’s an exec for an ad company. Figure he doesn’t want to get his name on-screen. We’re going to go at him again after he sweats a little more. Guy broke down and cried twice, but he’s not moving off the story. Thing is, Lieutenant, we’re into overtime.”
“Keep at him, get it wrapped. I’ll clear the OT. Half the damn squad’s out. I’m not passing it off. He call for a lawyer?”
“Not yet.”
“You run into a wall, tag me. Otherwise, just put it to bed.”
She left her coat in her office after skimming the waiting paperwork and what had accumulated overnight. It bred, she thought as she headed to EDD, like rabbits.
For once, the walls of EDD weren’t bouncing with voices, music, or electronic chatter. There were a handful of detectives in cubes or at desks, and some of the machines humped away, but it was, for this division, eerily quiet.
“Crime could run rampant with the number of cops at home hanging their damn Christmas stockings.”
Feeney looked up. “Things are mostly quiet.”
“That’s what happens before things blow up,” she said darkly. “Things get mostly quiet.”
“You’re cheerful. Here’s something that’s going to put a kink in your hose.”
“You still haven’t pinned down the account.”
“I haven’t pinned down the account, because there is no account. Not with those numbers, in that order.”
“Maybe she mixed up the numbers. If you do a random search, utilizing the numbers in any order, then—”
“You’re going to stand there, tell me how to do e-work?”
She blew out a breath, dropped into his visitor’s chair. “No.”
“Thing is, we got too many numbers. At least one extra. So you run a random, taking out any number, or numbers, what you’ve got, Dallas, is a hell of a lot of accounts.”
“Well, shit” was the best she could think of.
“No way to pin it. I can pin the random accounts, but it’s going to take time if you want all of them. ’Cause what you’re doing this way, is pulling rabbits out of hats.”
She drummed her fingers on her thigh. “I’ll take them when you get them. Start cross-referencing.”
He gave her one of his hangdog looks. “Gonna be a headache of major proportions. Thing is, Dallas, you’re getting the data from a woman who was under duress and stress. No telling if she got the numbers she gave you right in the first place.”
“Why didn’t he make her record them? Write them down. Have some way of being sure she got them right?