“Maybe.” Eve had ye
t to make up her mind about DeWinter.
Eve pushed through the door. “I want you to start on Trina’s list, start talking to these women. Any one of them admits to drinking Ziegler’s tea, give her the details, and get a full statement. Press the money angle, too. Let’s find out who gave him cash and why. Get a feel for them, Peabody.”
“Because one of them might’ve killed him.”
“Get started. I’ve got to get to Central, meet with Mira. I’ll tag you as soon as I’m done, catch up with you.”
“I’ve got this, Dallas. I’ll be the sympathetic cop—because I do sympathize. I can usually get more that way than going in tough.”
“Is that the fly, sugar, vinegar deal?”
“Yeah, I guess it is.”
“I still don’t get it,” Eve said and strode to her car.
Mira’s admin offered silence and a frosty stare when Eve walked into Mira’s outer office. Eve wondered if she should’ve grabbed another one of those handy gift bags, but the woman with the icy eyes tapped her interoffice ’link.
“Lieutenant Dallas is here. Of course.” She tapped it again. “You can go in.”
“Thanks.” Eve opened the door, walked in. “Your admin’s pissed I went around her.”
Mira glanced up from the work on her desk, smiled a little. “She’s protective. But I do have some free time this morning, and I do enjoy consulting on your cases.” She rose. “Tea?”
“Definitely not, but that’s something I want to discuss with you.”
“Tea?” Mira said again as she turned to her AutoChef.
“Yeah. Turns out Ziegler mixed a low-grade date-rape drug with loose tea, brewed it up when he got the urge.”
Eve flipped out her notebook. “A Rohypnol-bremelanotide combo mixed with chamomile, lavender, and valerian. Dickhead called it Erotica with a twist.”
“I see.” Mira programmed one cup of the flower-smelling tea she liked. “I’m not surprised to learn that.”
“Because?”
“Sit,” Mira invited, bringing her tea over to one of her pretty blue scoop chairs.
They suited her—elegant and functional. As the soft coral of her dress, the slightly bolder color of her ankle-breaking heels, the understated but excellent jewelry suited the department’s top shrink and profiler.
“He was a narcissist,” Mira began. “Extremely self-focused. His choice of career, and apparent skill at it, provided a service to others, but put him in control of them, physically and emotionally. Even spiritually for some who consider their physical regimen a kind of religion. It also put him in the spotlight.”
“Yeah, I get that. Add the photos—of himself—in the apartment, the mirrors, the clothes, the really extensive collection of hair and body products. He could’ve opened his own store there. I also get some people can self-focus, can indulge themselves without being narcissists. Or rapists.”
“Rapists.” Mira sipped her tea. “Tell me about that.”
“One of the women who slept with him—married, a client—described the experience.”
She laid out Martella Schubert’s statement, her suspicions, and the discovery of the tea.
“He laced tea to gain this woman’s—and you believe other women’s—acquiescence for sex. Tea he served them as if a kind of romantic gesture.”
“Exactly. He even used it on his former live-in girlfriend when she wasn’t in the mood.”
“He wouldn’t have seen it as rape.”
“That doesn’t change the fact.”