“Design and execution,” Peabody confirmed. “Hey, Bellamina, want to come with me?”
Bella blew Peabody a kiss, but curled into Eve. “Das.”
“Let’s take it into my office.” Because Eve couldn’t quite get her head around standing in the bullpen holding a kid.
“Sure. Hey, Jenkinson.” Mavis beamed at him. “That tie is the total ult.”
“Don’t encourage him,” Eve mumbled and led the way.
“I’m running facial recognition,” she began. “And we’ve got a couple other angles. Since you’re in the business, maybe you know somebody who knows something. If she’s as good as Peabody says, maybe she works for a top outlet or designer. We need to—”
As they stepped into the office, Bella gasped. She pointed at the board. “Ow!”
“Oh shit.”
Leonardo grabbed Bella, turned her face into his shoulder. He went pale and glassy-eyed himself even when he deliberately looked away from the board.
Moving fast, Eve snatched up her coat, tossed it over the board to cover the crime scene photos.
“Sorry. Shit, sorry.”
“Shit,” Bella echoed against her father’s broad shoulder.
“And again, sorry.”
“Hey, Bellissima.” Cool and calm, Mavis took her from Leonardo and gestured toward the sketch of Eve done by a young survivor. “Who is that?”
“Das!” Ow forgotten, Bella threw back her head, gave her big belly laugh. “Das!”
Remembering how Leonardo reacted to the sight of blood and violence, and there’d been plenty of it on the board, Eve pulled out her desk chair.
“Thanks. I don’t know how you do what you do. I don’t know how anybody does.”
“Got any of Mira’s tea in the AC?” Mavis asked.
“Yeah. Give me a second.”
“I’ll get it. Hey, Bella, let’s make Daddy some tea. Just think happy thoughts, moonpie.”
She managed them, Eve thought. Her friend, the former grifter, the woman who changed her hair color more often than some changed their socks, the music-vid star and walking rainbow, handled the big man and the little girl as naturally, as smoothly, as if she’d trained for it all her life.
With Bella on her hip, she set the tea on the desk, leaned down to kiss Leonardo’s cheek. “We’re going to sit on the floor here, and play with our blocks.”
“Das!”
“Dallas has to work, my baby doll, but we get to play.”
She sat on the floor, pulled a bag of colorful blocks out of the enormous pink-and-green handbag.
“Okay then. Here’s the deal.” Eve leaned on the desk, brought Leonardo’s attention to her. “She’s about forty, and she relocated from Delaware about two years ago. She’d live alone, on a budget. She’d be unlikely to socialize or make an impression. With her work, yeah, but not otherwise. Not the sort that draws attention, more slides into the background. She writes. She’s probably a reader. She’s going to seem harmless. She’s going to have her own professional machine at home. She’s likely to do side work.”
“A lot of tailors do side work. Off the books. I did myself when I was just getting started.”
“Did you go to clients’ homes?”
“Once you establish a relationship? That’s usually what you do. If you have a place, they might come to you, but usually, you’re offering them the convenience. A fitting, alterations of something they already have, sometimes an original design.”
“How do they find you?”
“Word of mouth.” He sipped tea and seemed to relax again. “If you’re working in a shop—department store, boutique—you’d slip them a card, let them know you’d be happy to come to them for a job. Big or small. If you’re working for another tailor, you’d have to be really careful about that—some will fire you on the spot. If she doesn’t socialize, it’s harder. It might be she gets side work from having a customer approach her.”
“Okay, got that.”
“I’ve still got contacts from my early days. I can ask around.”
“I’m going to give you the sketch, and ask you to do just that. If you get a hit, remember, she’s not harmless. Just tag me.”
She stopped when her comp signaled. Turning to the screen, she felt the lift, the buzz as she studied the ID shot side-by-side with the sketch.
“Ann Elizabeth Smith. Average name, average face. No more fading,” she stated. “I’ve got the bitch.”
“Bitch!” Bella said cheerfully, and laughed like a loon.
20
The minute she cleared her office, Eve started a run on Ann Elizabeth Smith, barked for Peabody.
Peabody came on the run. “Mavis said you—” She caught the face on-screen. “Yes!”
“Born and raised in Wilmington, Delaware. DOB March 14, 2018. No sibs. Parents divorced in ’27. Father relocated the same year, remarried six months later. Already had a skirt on the side,” she deduced. “Mother, a seamstress, ran her own shop. Fit for You, established 2023.”
“She learned young,” Peabody said. “Her mother taught her to sew. That fits.”
“The mother remarried and relocated in ’36. It looks like Smith took over the management of the shop. Run a side search on that, the financials. It shut down two years ago—coordinating with her move to New York. I’ve got a Brooklyn address, and employment at Dobb’s.”
“Small, exclusive department store,” Peabody told her as she worked her PPC. “High-end clothing and accessories.”
“Carmichael and Santiago are already in Brooklyn.” Eve pulled out her communicator. “We’ll have them sit on her home address. Keep running that, and get us a conference room. Pull in Uniform Carmichael and … Officer Shelby. We’re going to work out the takedown.”
While Peabody went out, PPC in hand. Eve contacted her detectives, gave the order. Then contacted Feeney.
“Told you already. It’s going to take awhile,” he said stiffly.
“I may have her—don’t stop what you’re doing, and I don’t want to pull McNab off it. I need a geek. Can you spare one?”
“You can take Callendar.” His tone stayed as frosty as the day. “She knows how you work.”
“Perfect. I’m taking a conference room, working out the op.”
“I’ll get her moving.” Though still stiff, he added, “Good hunting.”
“One more thing. I’m sending you an address.”
He offered her a mournful stare. “You got any detectives in your own division?”
“Non-work-related. It’s Kincade’s recording studio. Avenue A—the band—is having—doing?—whatever, a session. They expect to start about fifteen hundred today, go through till maybe twenty-two, twenty-three hundred. It gives you a big window. You’re cleared for it.”
“Cleared for it?” Feeney said blankly.
“To, you know, go. To hang. Watch, listen. He didn’t have time to come back to Central, but you can go there. If you want.”
“I’m cleared to watch Avenue A record?” The frosty tone melted into the awed.
“Yeah. I said I’d fix it.”
When he didn’t speak for a full fifteen seconds, Eve worried he’d suffered a small stroke. “Feeney?”
“You didn’t fix it.” His voice came out raw, then went to booming. “You killed it! Holy shit, holy mother of shit! Best day of my life! Don’t tell my wife, my kids, my grandkids I said that. Ever. Holy hot, steaming shit.”
She wasn’t sure she could tell anyone—ever—that the cop she considered to be as steady, cynical, bullshit-free as any she’d ever known currently looked just a little insane.
That there might’ve been a tear in his baggy eye.
“Okay. So we’re good?”
“Good, my ass. Kid, this is how you rock it.”
“Okay then. I’ve got to get on this, you know, murder stuff.”
She clicked off fast because Feeney’s face reminded her of the big, sloppy dog at the vet clinic.
Peabody clomped back. “Conference room two. I’ve got some financial data. It’s a little convoluted.”
“Do I need Roarke?”
“Not that convoluted. It looks like the mother retained ownership, kept Smith on salary. Decent enough, I guess, but not as much as you’d think for a daughter—only child—taking over the running of a family business. One said daughter worked in, on record, since the age of seventeen. It’s, you know, stingy. No percentage, no bonuses.”
“Okay. Okay.” Eve thought it through. “Maybe a hard relationship with the mother. Mira turf, but it may play into Smith’s obsession with the female writer, the female characters, the female vics.”
“No personal female power, or female circle,” Peabody finished with a nod. “A little more on that. The place did good business under the mother, held its own for the first couple years after she passed the management, it shows a small decline, then a big drop. The big drop’s about a year before she shut the doors. The mother, from my interpretation, shut them.”
“Got it,” Eve said as she walked herself through transferring what she had to the comp in the conference room. “Let’s get set up. Walk and talk. We’ve got Callendar on the e-work. On her way. Patch in Santiago and Carmichael when we’re ready to brief. I want a map, and whatever we can get of her residence.”
“She’d probably be at work now, right?”
“We need her direct supervisor. Let’s find out.”
In the conference room, Eve immediately set up the board with Smith’s ID shot front and center.
“Address is a three-story, eighteen-unit apartment building. She’s on the second floor, second unit, west side.”