In Death 26 - Strangers in Death

knew it.”
    She put in a call to EDD expecting to get the acting captain, and was surprised to hit Feeney.
    “So. You’re alive.”
    “Back in the saddle.” He grinned at her. “Feel like a couple billion, tax-free. Whatever they gave me knocked the bastard out of me. Or the wife’s chicken soup did.”
    “Glad to hear it. I’ve got this thing. Electronic pill dispenser.”
    “Why in hell would anybody need that?”
    “Your guess is as good as mine. It was Thomas Anders’s, and I’m working on the idea that his wife slipped a couple sleepers in here. All right if I bring it up?”
    “Sure. I can send somebody down for it.”
    “No, I’ll bring it. I want to run it by you anyway. Give me five.”
    She clicked off, resealed the box, initialed it, then tucked it under her arm as she headed out and up. In EDD, she veered straight away from the color and sound, and into Feeney’s office.
    With healthy color back in his basset hound face, Feeney sat at his desk. “I got work up the wazoo,” he told her, “and already had to kick a couple asses this morning. It’s good to be home.”
    “I spent a couple hours this morning intimidating a widowed mother of two. I love this job.”
    He laughed, then lifted his wiry eyebrows at the box she put on his desk. “Jesus, a gold pill spitter, with engraved initials?”
    “For the man you want to kill who has everything.”
    “You said a couple of sleepers. They wouldn’t do that much.”
    “He had traces of over-the-counter in him, but nobody can confirm he took same routinely. Ingesting one would put him out good enough to let somebody get into the bedroom, shoot him up with barbs and cock hardener. Or groggy enough so he could be bound up before he came around enough to know what was going on, because I think the barbs weren’t on the order sheet. They threw the scene off from the jump. Our girl Ava isn’t going to make a wrong turn like that.”
    “Wanted him awake for it.”
    “Yeah. Killer was meant to come up, truss him up, noose him—throat starts to constrict, what do you do?”
    “Open your mouth and try to suck air in.”
    “And when he does, killer shoves the dick trick into him. The asphyxiation would get him going, then you ring the cock. Let him gasp and flop while you set the scene. If you do it right—and it wasn’t done right—it’s going to look like the vic was playing around on the side, dipping into the kink. Kink got out of hand. I bet part of the instructions were to loosen the scarfing after he was cooked, at least loosen it so it would appear some attempt was made to revive. Then you have your kinky cheater, a tragic, embarrassing, but fairly routine accident, and the panicked partner fleeing the scene.”
    “Voi-fucking-là.”
    “We’d look for her, sure, but we’d get nowhere. Because Anders didn’t cheat, wasn’t into the kink. But the scene and the evidence would read that way.”
    That, Eve realized—taking his decent reputation as well as his life—gripped her guts. “But see, the killer shot him up with the dick hardener. It wasn’t taken orally. Shot him up with that, I’m betting, after she shot him up with the tranq.”
    “You want me to see if the wife diddled with the box?”
    “Yeah. If you can open it up, see if anything was taken out or added before his death. Couple of days before, probably. The wife left New York on March fifteen.”
    “Let me play with it.” Feeney initialed the bag, unsealed it to draw the box out. “Bitch is heavy. It’s got voice or manual settings. She did it manually, it’s going to be tougher to pin. Even if she did it by voice, a lawyer’s going to argue she was his wife. She filled it or added to it at his request, even the sleeper. He’s not here to say different.”
    “One step at a time.”
    She left him to it, started back down. She needed to see if Peabody had contacted Petrelli’s tenant, then they needed to start working on the other possibles she’d culled from the files. Run some probabilities.
    She had a feeling the computer would look favorably on Petrelli, given the data, but…
    She paused when she spotted Benedict Forrest outside her bullpen. It was getting so she couldn’t scratch her ass without coming back and finding some civilian waiting for her.
    He sprang to his feet. “Lieutenant Dallas, I need to talk to you.”
    Since she wouldn’t mind having another round with him, she gestured. “Let’s take it in my office.” She led the