“Gone.” In penance for her own failure, Eve took a glug from the smoothie – which could have been worse – unwrapped the power bar.
“On the map,” she said. “It’s logical to assume they hit him between Perry and Christopher. Tag-teamed him, disabled, got him in the vehicle, restrained. Most probable hole would be this sector. I’ve got uniforms checking out abandoned buildings.”
“I’m not getting anything new or salient in the interviews. Theo Barron and Samuel Deeks came in on their own, so I went ahead and talked to them.”
“Part of the After Midnight group.”
“Right. Theo cried the whole time, kept saying if he hadn’t tried to score with the singer – Hanna – he’d have been with Dorian, and Dorian would still be alive.”
“He’s right about that.” When Peabody’s tired eyes widened, Eve waved her off. “It doesn’t make him guilty or responsible or at fault, it’s just fact. These two wouldn’t have tried for a couple of guys at once. They take singles – that we know of.”
“You still think there’s more.”
“It’s not fact, yet. But it’s logical. Some gaps on the route. Now, maybe they were in a hurry to get from one point to another, or maybe they just didn’t find anybody who did it for them, but the most logical conclusion is they killed somebody in these gaps. It hasn’t been connected, or the body hasn’t been found. But here…” With the power bar she gestured to the New York map. “This is promising. We’ll check it out.”
“I scheduled this break time, but we’ve got more coming in for interviews.”
“Are Baxter and Trueheart still in the bull pen?”
“Yeah, they haven’t caught anything.”
“Fill them in,” Eve ordered. “They’ll take over the interviews while we’re in the field. Give me five to update Mira, send an update to Whitney.”
She tried for an actual conversation with Mira, but was told in no uncertain terms by Mira’s dragon of an admin the doctor was in meetings. So Eve settled for hammering out a quick update, copying both Mira and her commander.
Because it was there, she drank down the rest of the smoothie, then grabbed her coat.
“You set?” she asked Baxter, with a nod to Trueheart as she hit the bull pen.
“We’ve got it.”
She paused a moment, shifted back to Trueheart’s young, earnest face. “Are you set otherwise, Officer?”
“I… yes, sir.”
“She means the detective’s exam, my young apprentice.”
“Yes, sir. I’m prepared for it.”
“Stay that way. Peabody, with me.”
Eve swung on her coat as she headed to the glides and, remembering the vicious cold of the morning, pulled out the scarf Peabody had knitted her.
“The FBI are looking at Tennessee as the first,” she began. “I don’t buy that. It was too organized, too clean. Wouldn’t the first be sloppier, maybe even impulsive? How did they come to figure out killing – torturing and killing – was their deal?”
“Maybe somebody they knew the first time.” As they rode down, Peabody wound her mile-long scarf into some sort of complex and artistic looping knot around her neck. “Somebody they – or one of them anyway – was pissed at, or wanted something from.”
“More possible,” Eve agreed. “How did they team up? How long have they been together? And the first, add in possible defense or accident, another crime gone south. But somewhere in there, they found their romance.”
When they were close enough to keep it short, she switched from glide to elevator. “Are they from New York and coming home – or again one of them – or are they from out west, and looking for some fun in the big city? Not enough to see them yet. We don’t have enough to see them yet. But they’re not picking on the type of victim. It’s not just random, it also reads opportunity. The one prior to ours, a woman in her seventies, most likely taken from the parking lot of a small outdoor mall where she worked – out of range of the security cameras, then dumped two days later into a ravine six miles away. And we’ve got a twenty-year-old male who went missing from a rest-stop area in Pennsylvania, dumped two days later off the highway heading northeast.”
She got out, headed for her car. “Always a single vic, always alone, and what looks like opportunity rather than specific targets. The body dump some distance from kill zone, or most usually. Which means their hole is more likely Lower West than near the Mechanics Alley dump site.”
She got behind the wheel, backed out. “If Kuper hadn’t gotten out on Perry, if he’d had the cab take him all the way to the club, he’d probably be playing his cello and someone else would be dead.”
“They could still be heading north,” Peabody commented. “They’ve never hit anything as big or as urban as New York.”
“Exactly why it strikes as a destination.”