“Closer to thirty,” Eve interrupted. “Close, I think, to the ages of his victims.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know, just feels right. It could be a kind of trigger, couldn’t it? The age. The age he is himself, the age he sees her—the one he’s really killing. He’s grown up, he’s on equal ground now. He can punish her.” Eve jerked a shoulder. “I sound like Mira.”
“Some. And like Mira, it sounds plausible. So, we assume he’s around thirty. We know he’s strong, has big feet. According to our civilian consultant, he also has big hands and is well over six feet in height. But we can verify through evidence, the strength and the feet.”
While negotiating traffic, Eve glanced at her partner. “Doesn’t sound like you’re convinced by our civilian consultant.”
“I believe her, but her visions aren’t hard fact. We work with the facts, and consider the rest.”
“Now that’s the kind of cynicism I like to hear.”
“She isn’t making this stuff up, and she didn’t fake her reaction to the murder weapon. Dog-sick in the bathroom. Another couple of minutes I’d have called an MT. But visions can be tricky.”
“Can they?”
“You know, when it comes to sarcasm, you have perfect pitch. What I’m saying is, visions often twist around reality.”
Interested, Eve glanced over. “For instance?”
“For instance, Celina may see the killer as unusually big—tall, large hands, and so on—because he’s powerful. Not only physically, which we can determine by the MO, but in some other way. Professionally, say, or financially. Or she sees him this way because he kills, and that’s frightening to her. The boogie man’s a big guy.”
“Okay.” Eve nodded as she began the hunt for parking. “Keep going.”
“We know his shoe size, and that it’s considerably larger than average. From this we can extrapolate that he is probably taller than average for a man. We know he’s strong enough—powerful enough, you could say—to carry a woman, the dead weight of that woman, nearly fifty yards, and down a short but fairly steep cliff. It’s cop work that’s giving us the most likely picture of his physical type, not visions.”
“Does the cop work confirm her visions, or do her visions confirm the cop work?”
“It’s both, isn’t it?” Peabody held her breath when Eve utilized the vertical and lateral modes to squeeze into an empty slice of space at a curb. Then let it out when it actually worked. “Civilian consultants are tools, but we have to know how to use them.”
Eve eyed the traffic, waiting for a break in it where she could get out of the car without being slammed into
the pavement. “She doesn’t see his face.”
“Could be he wears a mask. Or it could be she’s too afraid to look, that she blocks it.”
Eve stepped onto the sidewalk. “Can she do that?”
“If she’s strong enough, and scared enough. And she’s plenty scared. She’s not a cop, Dallas,” Peabody continued as they walked. “She’s seeing murder, and it’s not her choice the way it is ours. We don’t want to see it, we don’t pick up the badge. We sure as hell don’t work in Homicide. I chose this because I wanted to live and work in New York, always did. I wanted to be a cop, and the kind of cop who found the big answers to the big questions. Who worked for people who’d been victimized, and against the ones who’d made them victims. You?”
“Close enough.”
“Okay, but Celina didn’t choose. She didn’t decide, hey, I want to be a psychic, that’d be frosty. But she took what was laid on her and made her life work with it.”
“Gotta respect that.” Eve gave a brief glance at the sidewalk sleeper with his grimy license hung around his neck who was happily posing for tourists.
“Now, this comes along,” Peabody added. “And I think one of her biggest fears is that this new deal isn’t a one-shot. That she’s afraid murder is going to be something she sees, even after this one’s over. It’s weighty.”
“That must’ve been some puke session.”
Peabody snorted out a laugh. “Gold metal status. But what I’m saying is she’s trying, and it’s costing her. She may help us, but in the end, it’s our job, not hers.”
“Agreed.” Eve stopped outside the craft shop. “Using sensitives is problematic under the best of circumstances—the best being the sensitive is cop-trained and elects to be part of the investigative team. We’ve got neither of those things in this case. But she’s linked into this, locked in. So none of us has a choice. We’ll use her, ask the questions, follow up on her visions. And you hold her head when she barfs.”
She reached for the door, stopped. “Why New York, Peabody?”
“Big, bad city. Hey, you want to be a crime fighter, you want to fight big, bad crime.”