“That’s a lot of time between when Billingsly entered and TOD. It didn’t take that long to kill him. Contact the sweepers, and the ME,” Eve ordered, then, avoiding blood and debris, did another long study of the room, walked over to the break room area.
“Peabody! Get us a warrant for these lockers. Six, digital locks.” Looking up, she studied the open ceiling vent. “There’s his access. It’s big enough for a man to get through.”
“Low tech,” Roarke commented. “But classic.”
“I need the ventilation layout. But for now . . . boost me up.”
Obliging, Roarke hooked his fingers together. With her foot in the hammock of his hands, Eve bounced up, gripped the edge of the open vent. “Yeah, the grille’s in here. Maybe he initially planned to go back out this way.” She took a penlight out of her pocket, shined it in the skinny ventilation tunnel. “Tight squeeze. I see some scuff marks. So he logs out, comes back in somewhere else. Through the health center area, maybe the visitor’s lodging, pretty much anywhere. Scoots and crawls along. Pops out, then—”
“Are you going to solve the case while I’m holding you off the floor?” Roarke wondered.
“Hmm? Sorry.” She jumped down. “Pops out,” she continued. “Maybe gets into his gear here. Lockers, bathroom. Sweepers could find traces of the makeup. Would he be stupid enough to leave something in a locker?”
“Shall I open them?”
“When we get a warrant.”
“Stickler,” he said and made her smile.
“I could claim they’re part of the crime scene, which they are, so the PA could probably hold that line. But a defense attorney would make noises, so a warrant keeps it clean.”
She set her hands on her hips, turned a slow circle. “Was he meeting Billingsly here? In it together, there’s a disagreement, death ensues. I don’t like it. This guy works alone. Billingsly got nosy, then got dead. The killer wasn’t expecting company. He came in for the serum, and he got it. Billingsly’s a bonus round.”
“Why didn’t he go out the way he came in?”
“Too hyped up from the kill to care,” she concluded. “By then, leaving where he’d be caught on disc—if he thought of it—just added some fun. Look at me!”
Peabody came to the doorway. “I tagged Cher Reo,” she said, speaking of the APA. “She was about to call me a very bad name, but I showed her the body.”
“Good thinking,” Eve told her.
“She’s all over the warrant.”
“Okay. When the morgue gets here, I want the skin sent to the lab asap. I want that DNA the same way. I need something for a bribe. Something really good,” she told Roarke. “For Dickhead.”
Chief Lab Tech Dick Berenski wouldn’t drag himself to work in the middle of the night for less than a first-class bribe.
“Two tickets, skybox, first game of the World Series, with locker-room passes.”
“Excellent, but we’re still in play-offs.”
“Wherever it is—transpo included.”
“Nice. I’ll start with one, let him squeeze me for the second ticket—which he will. I’ll tag him on the way to Security. I want to see those discs. Peabody, wait for the morgue and the sweepers. I want that skin hand-carried to the lab. And I want to know as soon as the warrant comes through.”
In Security, Eve studied the screen, the movement, the face. She ordered magnification, ordered freeze, replay.
“Gotta be a new strain of Zeus, or something like it. Along with some serious prosthetics. Nothing’s quite right about him. It’s almost as if his whole body’s disjointed.”
She magnified again to study the hands. Gloved, she noted, with long, sharp nails slicing through the tips. Then went back to the face.
“He couldn’t have taken those bites out of the vic wearing that gear. So he didn’t put it on until after the kill. Or he can manipulate it, because the bites had puncture marks like those pointed incisors he’s got. What is his deal?”
“Totally freak show,” was McNab’s opinion.
Eve glanced at the e-man, and Peabody’s cohab. He wore his long blond hair in a tail secured with silver rings that matched the half dozen hanging from his earlobe. His skinny frame vibrated with color from the many pocketed baggies in Day-Glo orange that picked up the zigs in his shirt.
The zags were nuclear blue.
“You’re wearing that getup and talking freak show.”
He grinned. “Easy to find these pants in the dark.”
“It’d be easy to spot them on Mars in the night sky with the naked eye.”
“They blind the bad guys,” he claimed, still grinning. “Anyway, Dallas, it looks real. This guy, I mean. He looks real.”
“Nothing about this guy looks real,” she corrected. “I want you to take this in to EDD for a full anal.”
She looked down at her com when it signaled. “Warrant’s in. Let’s open those lockers.”
“You’re not going to like this,” Roarke said as they walked back. “But I agree with McNab.”
“Yeah, I figure those pants could blind somebody if they stared at them too long.”
“Something I try to avoid. I also have to agree with him that your killer doesn’t look as if he’s wearing a disguise.”
“Because it’s a combination. Disguise and some kind of powerful drug.”
“How does he blink?”
That put a hitch in her stride. “What?”
“If his eyes aren’t real, if he’s using devices for the size, the shape, how does he blink? He looked directly at the security camera at several points, and his eyelids closed and opened. He smiled, if you can call it that. His jaw shifted, his mouth turned up. And we both saw him contort his body in impossible ways, and move at considerable speed.”
He did have a damn good eye, she thought.
“If he’s a scientist—and he damn well is—he’s figured out how to devise something, and he’s taking something that boosts his adrenaline. Monsters exist,” she added. “But they’re flesh and blood. They’re human, just like the rest of us. It’s what’s inside them that’s twisted. This guy isn’t some Frankenstein monster.”
“Actually, I was thinking of another classic. Mr. Hyde.”
“You’ve got to lay off those old vids,” she commented, and led the way to the lab.
“If you can believe a scientist can create devices and substances to disguise himself this way, why isn’t it possible for that scientist to create something that causes him to be this way?”
“Because,” she said as they approached the door, “appearing and being are different things.” She paused outside the door. “Maybe—maybe—there’s been something going on in this lab that’s whacked. Something botched. And we’re going to salvage Rosenthall’s records and find out. But for now, we’ve got a killer on a spree, and none of my suspects pop out as a fucked-up science experiment.”
“Maybe the more human face is the real disguise.”
With that thought planted in her head, she walked into the lab.
Police business moved forward, with sweepers and the dead crew already at work. With Roarke she headed straight back to the lockers.
She thought of the destruction of the lab and the open, unbroken door of the serum lockup.
“No point in busting them open since you’re here.”
“None at all,” Roarke agreed.
It didn’t take him long. As he moved down the line of lockers uncoding the locks, she called Peabody in for the search.
And hit pay dirt in Pachai Gupta’s.
Eve took out the silver pipe.
“Weighted it for extra punch. And he didn’t even clean it thoroughly,” Eve noted. “There’s still some blood, some matter. It shows some nicks and dents where it hit bone.”
“He loved her—Darnell.” Peabody shook her head. “It was all over him, Dallas. Love and grief, all over him.”
“He wouldn’t be the first to destroy what he loved. But this is so damn stupid, so careless. Steal the serum by unlocking the cabinet rather than busting it up. Then just leave one of the murder weapons in your work locker?”
“A frame-up? It makes more sense to me,” Peabody said. “I know I did the interview, and I hate thinking I missed anything, but a frame-up makes more sense.”