In Death 24 - Innocent in Death

again. “Maybe not.”
     
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Chapter 17
    WHEN THE ITEMS FROM THE STRAFFO RESIDENCE were logged, Eve commandeered a conference room. There, she and Peabody spread everything out, grouping according to area, subgrouping by person or persons who owned or used the item.
    She dragged in her murder board, clipping up pictures of various items or groupings.
    She studied, she circled, she paced.
    “Please, sir, I must have food.”
    Distracted, Eve glanced over. “What?”
    “Food, Dallas. I gotta eat something or I’m going to start gnawing on my own tongue. I can order something in or run down to the Eatery.”
    “Go ahead.”
    “Mag-o. What do you want?”
    “To nail this bastard down.”
    “To eat, Dallas. Food.”
    “Doesn’t matter, as long as it comes with caffeine. She had a box full of pictures.”
    “Sorry?”
    “Allika, in her sitting room. A big pretty box, up in her closet, not quite hidden, but not out in the open. It was full of pictures of the dead kid, had a lock of his hair, some of his toys, a piece of his blanket.”
    “Jeez.” Peabody’s tender heart ached a little. “Poor woman. It must be awful.”
    “Not one picture of the kid anywhere in the open, but bunches of them in her box. Hers.”
    Eve moved around the groupings again, stopped by the section taken or copied from Oliver Straffo’s office. “Nothing like that in Straffo’s office or in the bedroom or any of the family areas.”
    Peabody moved over to stand by Eve, tried to see what her lieutenant might be seeing. “I had a second cousin who drowned when he was a kid. His mother got rid of all his things.
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    All of them except this one shirt. She kept it in her sewing basket. I guess you can’t predict how anyone’s going to handle the death of their kid. I’ll bring food and caffeine.”
    She zipped out before Eve could delay her.
    Alone, Eve circled the table, the board. And thought about the dead.
    The boy had been good-looking, fun-looking, she added. Big, goofy grin on his face in most of the pictures that weren’t taken in infancy. Happy, healthy family, she mused, studying the picture she’d copied of one in Allika’s box-the four Straffos grinning at the camera. Kids in the middle, parents flanking them.
    Everyone touching some part of someone else. An attractive unit. Somehow complete.
    She compared it to the one she’d copied from Rayleen’s room. One kid now framed by mom and dad. And yeah, even though Allika grinned into the camera there was a hollowness around her eyes, a hint of strain around her mouth.
    Something missing.
    Did she try to fill that void with social functions, routines, appointments, structure?
    Medications and men?
    Don’t be sad, Mommy!
    Bright kid, that Rayleen. Smart, perceptive, pissy. Eve couldn’t hold the pissy against her. So Rayleen had looked up her data, her service record, her cases. Easy enough to do, Eve mused, but interesting work for a ten-year-old.
    Nixie, she remembered. Nixie had been another bright, perceptive kid. Courageous kid.
    One who’d lost a brother, too-and her entire family, her entire world, in one horrible night.
    Nixie’d been full of questions, as Rayleen seemed to be. Maybe they just popped out smarter and more full of curiosity now.
    At their age, Eve had barely started real school. Had she been curious? she wondered.
    Maybe, maybe, but she hadn’t been one to ask questions. Not then, not for quite a while.
    For the first eight years of her life asking too many questions meant a fist in the face.
    Maybe worse.
    Better to stay quiet, watch, figure it out than to ask and end up bloody.
    Something was going on in that house, Eve thought. Something was just a little tilted in that perfect space. She wasn’t afraid to ask questions anymore. But she needed to figure out the right ones to ask.
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    She ate something that might have once wished to be chicken inside cardboard pretending to be bread. And ran a series of probabilities.
    She was fishing and knew it, following various lines of logic-and one knotted string of pure instinct.
    The computer told her that her instinct was crap, but that didn’t surprise her. Then she ran a hypothetical, omitting certain details, and the computer called her a genius.
    “Yeah, wouldn’t that be a kick in the ass?”
    She sat back. It was, of course, bullshit to run a hypothetical or probability without including known details or evidence. But she’d satisfied her curiosity.
    Intrigued, she copied it