He was right, but knowing it didn't ease her gut. "If Feeney fines down the list to a workable number, we can contact each name. I'll put together a team to make the calls."
"It'll leak, Lieutenant, and we'll be back to panic."
"We can't just leave them open this way. The next one he kills is on us." On me, she thought, but knew better than to say it. "If we do nothing to alert the victim, it's on us. He knows we've got his pattern. He knows we've got the number of targets. And he knows we can't do anything but juggle names and wait for him to hit again. He loves it. He performed for the security camera at Peterman's. Stood in the damn foyer and posed. If Gonzales had been out making goals last night, she'd be dead. That's four in a week, and it's too damn many."
He heard her out, his face calm and set. "It's a hell of a lot easier where you're standing, Lieutenant. Maybe you don't think so, but it's a hell of a lot easier on that side of the desk. I can't give you what you want. I can't let you stand in front of every victim and take the hit the way you stood in front of Roarke's man a few weeks ago."
"This has nothing to do with that." Battling frustrated fury, she set her teeth. "That incident is closed, Commander. And my current investigation is against the wall. Information is already leaking to the media. Another one dies, it's going to blow up in our faces."
Whitney's eyes flattened. "How much have you given Furst?"
"No more than I had to, and most of that off the record. She'll hold back. But she's not the only reporter with a good nose, and not many of them have her integrity."
"I'll take that matter up with the Chief. That's the best I can do. You get me Feeney's amended list, and I'll ask for individual contacts. I can't authorize the budget for that kind of operation, Dallas. It's out of my control."
He leaned back, studying her. "Come up with something tonight on this surveillance. End this thing."
Eve found Feeney scanning the monitor in her office. "Good, you saved me a trip to EDD."
"Heard you had Jacko Gonzales in." He glanced wistfully over her shoulder. "Guess he's gone, huh?"
"I'll get you his autographed hologram, for God's sake."
"Yeah? Appreciate it."
"I need you to run these names and data." She pulled out a copy of a disc. "My machine's stuttering again and it takes me too damn long. I need victim probability whittled down as far as it'll go." She dragged open a drawer, pawing through and ignoring the vague headache behind her eyes. "Just the top fifty, okay? I can push Whitney into contacting fifty. God help the others. Where the goddamn hell is my candy bar?"
"I didn't take it." Feeney jostled his bag of nuts. "McNab was in here. He's a known candy thief."
"Son of a bitch." Desperate for fuel, she snagged Feeney's bag and downed a handful of nuts. "I had the security disc from Peterman's enhanced and enlarged, but I figure you can do better. I want the frame of him when he's most himself – when he's turned to run. You can see the panic."
She jabbed at the AutoChef hoping for coffee to wash down the nuts. "I've got photos of the match lists, the personnel at Personally Yours. You got the equipment to scan them, see how many might pop as far as facial shapes, eye shape, that kind of thing. Even with enhancements, something's got to come through. Most of his mouth's hidden by the beard."
"We can do most-likely shapes on that if we have a good enough image."
"Yeah. Build isn't going to work, but height should. See how close you can come to height. From the images he didn't appear to be wearing lifts, so I think we can get close. The gloves screw up the shape of his hands."
She gulped coffee, eyes narrowing. "Ears," she said abruptly. "Would he have bothered to change the shape of his ears? How much of them show?"
She leaped to her machine, called up the program, the file, the images. "Shit, nothing, nothing, nothing. Here!" Scanning through she came up with a side view. "That's good, that's pretty damn good. Can you work with it?"
Feeney nibbled, considered. "Yeah, maybe. The hat covers the top of the ear, but maybe. Nice call, Dallas. It would've slipped by me. We'll work feature by feature, see what jumps. It's not going to be quick. Something this complex is going to take days. Maybe a week."
"I need the bastard's face." She closed her eyes, concentrated. "We'll go back, work the jewelry angle again, the disinfectant, the cosmetics. The tattoos were hand drawn. Maybe we can shake out something there."
"Dallas, two-thirds of the salons and clubs in the city have freehand tattoo artists."
"And maybe one of them knows that design." She blew out a breath. "We've got two hours before the meets at Nova. Let's do what we can."
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The one thing that really irritated Peabody was that McNab was on her match list. It didn't matter that it was most likely due to the fact that her profile and his had been altered to fit those of the victims'.
It just griped her.
She didn't like working with him, with his ridiculous clothes, cocky grins, and know-it-all attitude, but figured she was stuck as long as Eve found him an asset.
There was no one on the force Peabody admired as much as Eve Dallas, but she figured even the smartest of smart cops could make one mistake. Eve's, in Peabody's opinion, was McNab.
She could see him across the snazzy little bar. He and the six-foot blonde he'd matched with were directly in her line of vision. A deliberate move on McNab's part, Peabody imagined, just to annoy her while they worked.
If he hadn't been there, she might have been able to enjoy the quietly elegant atmosphere. The bar had pretty silver-topped tables, pale blue privacy booths, and clever art prints of New York street scenes decorating the warm yellow walls.
Classy, she thought, glancing over at the long, shiny bar with sparkling mirrors and tuxedo-decked servers. But you'd expect classy from something that belonged to Roarke.
The padded chair where she sat was designed for comfort; the drinks were glorious. The table was equipped with hundreds of musical and video selections and individual headsets if a customer wanted entertainment while he or she waited for a friend or enjoyed a quiet, solitary drink.
Peabody was sorely tempted to try out the headset, as her first match was a blistering bore. The guy's name was Oscar and he was a teacher who specialized in physics on at-home screens. So far, he'd mostly been interested in sucking down rippers and bad-mouthing his recent ex-wife.
She was, Peabody was told, a non-supporting, self-centered bitch who was frigid in bed. After fifteen minutes, Peabody was fully on the bitch's side.
Still, she played the game, smiling and chatting while she crossed Oscar off her mental lists of suspects. The guy had a serious problem with alcohol, and their man was too clearheaded to spend his time with the awesome hangovers a few rippers produced.
Across the room, McNab erupted with delighted laughter that ran along Peabody's nerve endings like a dull razor. While Oscar guzzled the last of his third ripper, she glanced over, and caught the quick, eyebrow wiggle McNab sent her.
It made her want to do something cool and mature. Like sticking out her tongue.
With great relief, she parted ways with Oscar, making vague plans to hook up again.
"When they sell iced rippers in hell," she muttered and winced as she heard Eve's voice in her earpiece.
"Maintain, Peabody."
"Sir." Peabody hissed the word, covering it by lifting her own virgin blitzer. She sighed, noting by her wrist unit that she had ten minutes before the next meet.