“Confirmation of on-scene conclusions. The vic lived a clean and healthy life, up until an ice pick severed her brain stem.”
“Ice pick. They just look mean.”
“I’d say Rylan agrees with you.”
She swung into Homicide, stared for the three seconds she calculated she had before Jenkinson’s virulent blue tie with its hard-candy pink—were those elephants parading over it?—seared her corneas.
Reineke, Jenkinson’s partner, had one foot propped on his desk as he worked his ’link. A tough-soled cop shoe clad the foot, and the positioning allowed a peek of the multicolored puppies—she thought they were puppies—frolicking against the screaming green background of his sock.
They were solid cops, she thought, solid, sensible cops she’d go through any door with. And yet they insisted on assaulting the senses of all in their viewing area with their insane choices of accessories.
She had to stop asking herself why.
Instead, she turned and headed straight to her office, and the coffee in her AutoChef.
“Maybe I could get one.” Unwinding the boa constrictor of her scarf—pink, blue, and white today—Peabody followed Eve in. “Because I scored you a consult with Mira. Nine-thirty.”
Eve programmed a coffee regular in addition to her own preferred black.
“We can follow that with interviews with the director and producer of the play Rylan was up for,” Peabody added. “They have the other callback—Jessilyn Brooke—scheduled for eleven.”
“That’ll work.” Eve passed Peabody the coffee. “Contact Kawaski. I want a look at the apartment, and the victim’s room. We’ll slide that between Mira and the theater. And put in a visit to the vet. I want to talk to the one who took the bogus emergency.”
“On it. You’ve probably got a report from McNab in your inbox. He went by the vet’s after he left the scene last night, as requested, since they’re open twenty-four. He took a look at the ’link transmission on that. He determined on site the tag came from a drop ’link, but since they cooperated, he brought the desk ’link in to triangulate location at the time of the tag.”
“Good. I’ll get up to EDD if I can, check his progress on that.”
Peabody went out; Eve settled in.
Once she’d set up her board, updated her book, she did deeper runs on the victim’s coworkers, the roommate, and added one for the competitor—Jessilyn Brooke.
Nothing and no one popped.
She sat back, put her boots on the desk, studied the board.
Point one: Whoever committed this murder was a planner. Detail-oriented, someone who knew how to schedule.
Point two: The killer was someone willing to take risks to achieve the goal.
Question: What was the goal beyond Rylan’s death? What was the purpose or gain?
Point three: no sexual component. Ice pick penetrates, but the weapon, as she saw it, had been chosen for speed and silence, not to simulate sex.
Question: How to resolve the personal nature of the planning, the target specificity, the intimate knowledge of the victim’s habits with the impersonal nature of the murder?
She got up, walked to her narrow window.
I see you, she thought. I watch you. Study you. I know what you like, where you go, who you sleep with, what you want.
Was it just that? she wondered. Just the thrill of taking a life. Of plucking someone—at random—studying them like some bug under a scope. Then crushing them.
That’s how it played for her. Rylan might not have known her killer. Maybe she’d have recognized the face. Someone she’d seen in the restaurant, at the vid palace, at the theater. But the connection, on her part, remained just that loose.
On the killer’s? One-sided intimacy and knowledge. The thrill of that. The goal? Maybe nothing more than taking it from selection to study to planning to conclusion.
If so, Rylan wouldn’t be the last, the only. In fact, she may not have been the first.
She turned back to her desk, intending to bring up unsolved homicides from the past year that contained at least one of the elements of her case.