In Death 27 - Salvation in Death

looks like a knife.”
    “It really does.” Eve tossed it, hilt first, to Peabody. “This is just turning into a mess, isn’t it?”
    “Puta!” Penny whipped her head around, spat in Eve’s face.
    “Okay, now I’m no longer entertained.” Eve cuffed Penny’s hands behind her back. “Call for a wagon, Peabody, to take our prisoner downtown. Book her on assaulting an officer, armed, and resisting.”
    “Bullshit charges. I’ll be out in twenty minutes.”
    Eve took the napkin Peabody passed her, wiped the spit off her face. Then leaned close to Penny’s ear, and whispered, “Wanna bet?”
     
    We won’t be able to hold her very long,” Peabody commented after they’d turned Penny over to a pair of uniforms.
    “Sure we will.” Eve took out her ’link, called Homicide. “Jenkinson,” she said when one of her detectives came on-screen. “I’m having a female prisoner transported down. Soto, Penelope. Charged with assaulting an officer and resisting. I’m going to be a couple hours. Jam it up.”
    “Got that.”
    Eve clicked off, checked her wrist unit. “No time to talk to López or Freeman. Let’s head down and take care of making Lino official.”
    “You really just pissed her off.”
    “Yeah.” Smiling a little, Eve got behind the wheel. “That was the good part.”
    “Maybe pissed her off too much to talk to you, especially if she lawyers up.”
    “Oh, she’ll lawyer. I’m counting on it. And that’s why she’ll talk to me about Lino. The lawyer will so advise.”
    Baffled, Peabody scratched her head, and at last, long last, bit into her now stone-cold burrito. “Hmcum?”
    “How come? Because admitting she knew Lino was posing as a priest, had contact, was friendly with him, should bump her down the list of murder suspects.”
    Peabody swallowed. “Are we liking her for it?”
    “Not particularly. Not yet. As we’ve just witnessed, she’s hotheaded. It’s hard to see her sneaking into church—where she’d stick out like, well, a whore in church, and poisoning the wine. That’s cunning, and it’s symbolic. She’d just cut his throat and leave him in the alley.” Eve thought about it for a minute. “I almost like that about her.”
     
    Teresa Franco and her husband were already waiting at the morgue when Eve arrived. Tony Franco kept his arm around his wife’s shoulders, his right hand rubbing, rubbing gently up and down her biceps they stood listening to Eve.
    “I’m sorry I kept you waiting. I checked on the way in, and they’re ready whenever you are.”
    Shadows haunted Teresa’s eyes. “Will you tell me what to do, please?”
    “We’re going to look at a monitor, a small screen. If you’re able to identify the body, you just tell me.”
    “He never sent pictures. And if he called, always blocked video. In my head—my heart—he’s still a boy.” She looked up at her husband. “But a mother should know her son. She should know him, no matter what.”
    “It’s not your fault, Terri. You did everything you could. You still are.”
    “If you’d just come with us.” Peabody touched her arm, led the way.
    In the small room with its single chair, little table, boxy wall screen, Eve moved to a com unit. “This is Dallas,” she said into it. “We’re in Viewing Room One.” She paused. “Are you ready, Mrs. Franco?”
    “Yes.” The hand gripped with her husband’s went white at the knuckles. “Yes, I’m ready.”
    “We’re go,” Eve said, and turned to the screen.
    A white sheet covered the body from armpits to toes. Someone, Morris she imagined, had removed the tag for the viewing. Death didn’t look like sleep—not to Eve—but she imagined it might to some. To some who’d never seen death.
    Teresa sucked in a breath, leaned into her husband. “He . . . he doesn’t look like Lino. His face is sharper, his nose longer. I have a picture. See, I have a picture.” She drew one out of her bag, pushed it toward Eve.
    The boy was early in his teens, handsome, smirky, with dark, sleepy eyes.
    “We’ve established he had facial reconstruction,” Eve began. But the shape of the eyes, she noted, was the same. The color nearly so. The dark hair, the line of the throat, the set of the head on the shoulders. The same. “There’s a resemblance.”
    “Yes. I know, but . . .” Teresa pressed her lips together. “I don’t want it to be Lino. Can I—is it possible for me to see? To go in, where he is, and see?”
    She’d hoped the screen