asshole was right about one thing. It was too hot to bother.
Inside, she noted the girl manning the checkout counter. Short, thin, olive complexion, an odd updo of hair with purple fringes over the ink black.
“I could get us something,” Peabody offered. “Something to do with food.”
“Go ahead.” Eve walked to the counter, waited while the customer in front of her paid for a pack of milk powder and a minuscule box of sugar substitute.
“Help you?” the woman said, without much interest.
“I’m looking for Tina Cobb. You’re her sister?”
The dark eyes widened. “What do you want with Tina?”
“I want to talk to her.” Eve slipped out her badge.
“I don’t know where she is, okay? She wants to take off for a couple days, it’s nobody’s sweat, is it?”
“Shouldn’t be.” Eve had run Tina Cobb in the car and knew the sister’s name was Essie. “Essie, why don’t you take a break?”
“I can’t, okay. I can’t. I’m working alone today.”
“And nobody’s in here right now. Did she tell you where she was going?”
“No. Shit.” Essie sat down on a high stool. “Oh shit. She’s never been in trouble in her life. She spends all the time cleaning up after rich people. Maybe she just wanted some time off.” There was fear lurking behind the eyes now. “She maybe went on a trip.”
“Was she planning a trip?”
“She’s always planning. When she had enough saved she was going to do this, and that, and six million other things. Only she never saved enough for any of it. I don’t know where she is. I don’t know what to do.”
“How long’s she been gone?”
“Since Saturday. Saturday night she goes out, doesn’t come back since. Sometimes she doesn’t come home at night. Sometimes I don’t. You get a guy, you want to stay out, you stay, right?”
“Sure. So she’s been gone since Saturday?”
“Yeah. She’s got Sundays off, so what the hell, you know? But she’s never been gone like this without letting me know. I called her work today and asked for her, and they said she didn’t show. I probably got her in trouble. I shouldn’ta called her work.”
“You haven’t reported her missing?”
“Shit, you don’t report somebody missing ’cause they don’t come home a couple nights. You don’t go to the cops for every damn thing. Around here, you don’t go to them for nothing.”
“She take any of her things?”
“I dunno. Her maid suit’s still there, but her red shirt and her black jeans aren’t. Her new airsandals neither.”
“I want to go inside the apartment, look around.”
“She’s gonna be pissed at me.” Essie scooped up the soft tacos and Pepsis Peabody laid on the counter, did the transaction. “What the hell. She shouldn’ta gone off without saying. I wouldn’t do it to her. I gotta close up. I can’t take more than fifteen, or I’ll get in real trouble.”
“That’s fine.”
It was two tiny rooms with a bump on the living area that served as the kitchen. The sink was about the width and depth of a man’s cupped palm. In lieu of the pricier privacy screens, there were manual shades at the windows that did absolutely nothing to cut the street or sky noise.
Eve thought it was like living in a transpo station.
There was a two-seater couch Eve imagined converted to a bed, an ancient and clunky entertainment screen and a single lamp in the shape of a cartoon mouse she suspected one of them had saved from childhood.
Despite its size and sparseness, the apartment was pin neat. And, oddly enough to her mind, smelled as female as the girl-powered travel agency had.
“Bedroom’s through there.” Essie pointed at the doorway. “Tina won the toss when we moved in, so she has the bedroom and I sleep out here. But it’s still pretty tight, you know? So that’s why if one of us has a guy, we usually go to his place.”
“She have a guy?” Eve asked as Peabody walked toward the bedroom.
“She’s been seeing somebody a couple of weeks. His name’s Bobby.”
“Bobby got a last name?”
“Probably.” Essie shrugged. “I don’t know it. She’s with him, probably. Tina’s got this real romantic heart. She falls for a guy, she falls hard.”
Eve scanned the bedroom. One narrow bed, neatly made, one child-sized dresser, likely brought from home. There was a pretty little decorative box on it and a cheap vase with fake roses. Eve lifted the top of the box, heard the tinkling tune it played and saw a few pieces of inexpensive jewelry inside.
“We share the closet,” Essie said as Peabody poked inside the tiny closet.
“Where’d she meet this Bobby?” Peabody asked her, and moved from the closet into the bathroom.
“I don’t know. We live in this box together, but we try to stay out of each other’s faces, you know? She just says she met this guy, and he’s really cute and sweet and smart. Said he knew all about books and art and shit. She goes for that. She went out to meet him like at an art gallery or something one night.”
“You never met him?” Eve asked.
“No. She was always meeting him somewhere. We don’t bring guys here much. Jeez, look at this place.” She looked around it with the forlorn and resigned expression of a woman who knew it was the best she was going to do. “She was going out to meet him Saturday night, after work and shit. To a play or something. When she didn’t come home, I figured she’d stayed at his place. No big. But she doesn’t miss work, and she hasn’t ever stayed out of touch this long, so I’m starting to worry, you know?”
“Why don’t we file a report?” Peabody stepped back out of the bath. “A missing person’s report.”
“Oh man, you think?” Essie scratched at her bicolored hair. “She comes waltzing in here and finds out I did that, she’ll be on my case for a month. We don’t have to tell my parents, do we? They’ll get all twisted inside out and come running over here hysterical and whatever.”
“Have you checked with them? Maybe she went home for a couple days.”
“Nah. I mean yeah, I checked. I buzzed my mom and did the hey, how’re things, la la la. She said to have Tina call ’cause she likes to hear from her girls. So I know she hasn’t seen her. My mom would flip sideways if she thought Tina’s shacked up with some guy.”
“We’ll take care of it. Why don’t you give the information to Detective Peabody?” Eve looked at the tidily made bed.
“She’s not off with some guy for extended nooky,” Eve said when they were back in the car. “Girls like that don’t take off without a change of clothes, without taking earrings and their toothbrush. She doesn’t miss a day of work in eight months, but she just happens to miss the Gannon job?”
“You think she was in on it?”
Eve thought of the tiny, tidy apartment. The little music box of trinkets. “Not on purpose. I doubt the same can be said for Bobby.”
“It’s going to be tough to track down some guy named Bobby. No full name, no description.”
“He left footprints somewhere. Do a check on Jane Does, any that came in since Saturday night. We’re heading down to the morgue anyway. Let’s just hope we don’t find her there.”
“Want your taco?”
Eve unwrapped it on her lap, then decided eating it while she drove was just asking to go through the rest of the day with taco juice on her shirt. She switched to auto, clicked back a couple inches and chowed down.
When the in-dash ’link signaled, she shook her head. “Screen it,” she said with a mouthful of mystery meat by-product and sinus-clearing sauce.
“Nadine Furst,” Peabody announced.
“Too bad I’m on lunch break.” She slurped up Pepsi and ignored the call. “So, a maid from the projects somehow hooks up with some guy named Bobby, who takes her to art galleries and the theater, but he never comes to her place and meets her sister. She’s out of touch, missing work, among the missing for three days, but her new boyfriend doesn’t call, leave a message, scoot by to see what’s up. Nothing.”
“He wouldn’t if she was with him.”
“Point for that. But this girl, who makes her bed like a Youth Scout, doesn’t call in to work sick, doesn’t tell her sister she’s cozied down in a love nest, doesn’t want extra clothes or all the equipment females take on sex safaris. She risks her paycheck, ignores her family, stays in the same outfit? I don’t think so.”
“You think she’s dead.”
“I think she had the access code to Gannon’s place, and somebody wanted that code. I think if she was alive and well or able, she’d have seen or heard the media reports bombarding the screen about bestselling author Samantha Gannon’s recent problem and she’d have gotten to her sister if no one else.”
“Three Jane Does last seventy-two,” Peabody reported. “Two elderly indigents, no official ID on record. Third’s a crispy critter, status pending.”
“Where’d they find her?”
“Abandoned lot,” Peabody read off her PPC. “Alphabet City. About three hundred Sunday morning. Somebody doused her with gasoline-Jesus, they had some credit to tap on-lit her up. By the time somebody called it in, she was toasted. That’s all I’ve got.”
“Who’s primary?”
“Hold on. Aha! It’s our good pal Baxter, ably assisted by the adorable Officer Trueheart.”
“Simplifies. Tag him. See if they can meet us at the morgue.”
Eve had to pace her cooling heels in the white-tiled corridor outside the exam room where Duluc completed an autopsy. Morris never made her jump through hoops, she thought. She wouldn’t be jumping through them now if Duluc hadn’t taken the precaution of locking the exam room doors.
When the buzzer sounded, indicating she was cleared, Eve slammed the doors open, strode through. The stench under the smear of disinfectant made her eyes water, but she fought back the gag reflex and glowered at Duluc.
Unlike Morris, who had both wit and style, Duluc was a stern-minded, by-the-book woman. She wore the clear protective suit over a spotless white lab coat and pale green scrubs. Her hair was completely hidden under a skull cap. Goggles hung around her neck.
She was barely five feet in height, with a chunky build and a face of wide planes. Her skin was the color of roasted chestnuts, and her one good feature-in Eve’s opinion-was her hands. They looked as though they could play a mean piano, and were, in fact, greatly skilled at carving cadavers.
Eve jerked her chin at the draped form on an exam table. “That one mine?”
“If you mean is that the remains of the victim of your current investigation, yes, it is.”
