Calculated in Death

as well stay where it landed as the car tipped to her side like a banking plane before they boomeranged around a corner.
    “It’s
stupid
to kill him.” Eve slammed back to the street, punched through a hole in traffic. “But they’re stupid. I should’ve factored that in. The goddamn stupidity.”
    “He knows a lot,” Peabody began.
    “Because he’s dirty. Throw money at him to stonewall me. They don’t know Dickenson made those copies. Stonewall me, doctor the books,
then
kill him. Or just ship him off. He’s got no real ties here. Ship him off to someplace we can’t extradite him, give him a new identity, and keep him on the payroll. Why bring yet another goddamn number cruncher in? It’s inefficient to kill him. It’s wasteful.”
    “Maybe that’s what they’re doing. Trying to get him gone, hide him.”
    Eve only shook her head. “They’d have plucked him out in Vegas. No point bringing him here to send him somewhere. And no goddamn point to bring him here to kill him. Why not do it out there where there’s distance between you? Stupid. They’re stupid.”
    Murderously stupid.
    She fishtailed, righted, then swung beside a black-and-white.
    The thunder of traffic roared overhead when she got out of her vehicle. A uniform stood beside the open rear doors of the ambulance, another at the driver’s side. She noted two more talking, or trying to talk to a jittery funky-junkie.
    “DB in the back, Lieutenant. He’s still warm.”
    She peered in, visually identified Chaz Parzarri. “Peabody, they had to have another vehicle here. See what you can find on any traffic cams in this area. They can’t have more than a fifteen-minute window, probably less. What have we got over there?” she asked the uniform, jerking a head toward the junkie.
    “We found him trying to get into the bus. Nothing locked on it, but he’s so strung out he couldn’t work the handle.” The uniform set a hand on his hip under his Sam Browne belt. “Says he was just checking to see if anybody was inside. Just being a good citizen.”
    “Right.”
    “Yeah, we figure he’s messed up, but a junkie like him can smell drugs a mile off. The guys are working him some, but he claims he didn’t see anything.”
    The timing said otherwise, Eve thought as she did a quick scan. She spotted the pile of rubble and trash behind one of the pillars. “Is that his hive over there?”
    “That’s what we figure.”
    “I’m going to talk to him. Stand by here.”
    “Good luck.”
    The man wore a filthy army-green coat and torn orange sweatpants over the gaunt frame with the distended belly typical of severe malnutrition. His red-rimmed, watery eyes—sunlight wasn’t the funky-junkie’s friend—skittered over at Eve as she approached, then squinted out of a grimy pair of sunshades with a crack in the left lens.
    His hands moved, picking at the ragged fringe of the black scarf wrapped around his neck. His feet moved, shuffling inside scarred army boots with no laces and silver tape holding the soles together.
    He could have been anywhere from thirty to eighty with that pale, ravaged, soot-streaked face.
    He’d been someone’s son, might have been someone’s lover once, or father. He’d had a life at some point before he’d offered it up on the altar of funk.
    “Just walking by,” he chanted—moving, moving, moving. “Yep, yep, just walking by. Hey, lady, got anything to spare? Don’t need much.”
    She tapped her badge. “See this?”
    “Yep, yep.” But those ruined eyes watered and blinked.
    “It’s a badge. A lieutenant’s badge. It means I’m not a lady. Give me a name.”
    “Whose name you want?”
    “Yours.”
    “Doc. Tic-tock doc, the mouse and the clock.”
    “Doc. Do you live over there?”
    “Not hurting anybody. Keep myself to myself, right? Check? Double check.”
    “Check. Were you at home when the ambulance got here?”
    “Just walking by.” Those ruined eyes did their skittering dance again. “Just walking.”
    “Where to, where from?”
    “Nothing, nowhere. Nohow.”
    “You were just walking from nothing to nowhere, and happened to see the ambulance parked there, maybe twenty feet from where you live?”
    When he smiled, he offered Eve a full view of the unfortunate results of really bad dental hygiene. “Yep. Yep. Check.”
    “I don’t think so, Doc. I think, you were tucked up at home. Wrapped up warm on a cold day like this, not walking around without more gear. I bet you’ve