Down the Rabbit Hole

“Set us up a conference room and give Dickhead a goose on the tox.”


“You want me to goose Dickhead?”

Eve thought of the chief lab tech. “It’ll throw him off coming from you instead of me. Maybe we’ll get happy results there, too.”

She needed to set up the board and book in her office, write everything up.

And if she didn’t have the tox results within an hour, she’d personally go to the lab and sit on Dick Berenski’s egg-shaped head until he produced.

She turned in to Homicide, noted all her detectives and cops were present. “Is there no crime today?”

Baxter, feet on his desk, a ’link at his ear, grinned at her. “Tying one up now, LT. The asshole Trueheart and I took down bright and early this morning’s down in booking.”

She glanced at Trueheart, who’d soon be ceremoniously awarded his gold detective’s shield. Obviously Baxter had dumped the paperwork on his partner.

She glanced across the bull pen to where Santiago sat morosely under a big black cowboy hat with a shiny silver band. “How much longer do you have to wear that?”

“A bet’s a bet.” Behind him, Carmichael smiled smugly. “And he lost.”

“I went double or nothing with her—it’s a sickness.”

She decided not to comment on Jenkinson’s tie, because it looked like an explosion of radioactive waste. Instead she escaped to her office, set up her board. Armed with coffee, she sat at her desk and wrote everything up, in detail, adding a query to Mira.

Then, with more coffee, she put her boots on the desk, her eyes on the board and let her brain play with theories. And, still thinking, she pulled up an incoming from Morris.

“Dallas.”

She held up a finger to hold Peabody off, finished reading. “Morris found traces of peyote, cannabis, phencyclidine, and mint inside the female vic’s nasal passages, sinuses.”

“She inhaled it?”

“Inhaled this—he believes in vapor form. Ingested more in liquid form. What about the lab?”

“Berenski says he’ll have the final when he has it—then I played the innocent underling card, said how you were all over my ass, complimented that weird facial hair he’s been growing lately. He said to give it another twenty.”

“Good job. If she wasn’t taking this crap voluntarily, somebody was doing a hell of a number on her. Morris confirms, even without the elements we haven’t nailed down, she’d have been in a euphoric and altered state.”

“Maybe she didn’t know what she was inhaling and ingesting, or maybe whoever mixed all this up told her it was what she needed to communicate with her parents.”

“Either way, whoever gave it to her is responsible for two deaths.”

“Her lawyer’s here—the family lawyer, I mean. I had her taken to the conference room.”

“Let’s go dig out who stood to gain.”

Gia Gregg sat ramrod-straight at the conference table, talking on an ear ’link. She gave Eve a nod and continued her conversation. She wore a black suit, sharp as a scalpel, and her hair in a dark crown of tight curls with shimmering red highlights. It suited her coffee-regular skin and her cool green eyes.

She completed her conversation, then removed the ear ’link and slipped it into a pocket of her jacket.

“I’m sorry. It’s a difficult and busy morning.”

“We appreciate you coming in.”

“Sean Fitzwilliams has arrived in New York. I spoke with him before I came in, and he instructed me to give you my full cooperation. The family is, understandably, devastated. And they want answers, Lieutenant, Detective, because no one who knew Darlene believes she did what the media is gleefully claiming.”

She took out a notebook, set it on the table. “I intend to take careful notes of our conversation, as I and my clients also want answers. Have you any leads?”