Rafe Pasco obviously had no idea he had picked the lousiest spot in the room, Ruby thought. Maybe he’d had a similar spot in cybercrime, wherever that was headquartered. Spending all his time on a computer, he might not have noticed or cared where he sat.
“So you get the new guy.” Tommy DiCenzo sat down in the chair beside her desk, a bottle of Coke Zero in one big paw. He tilted it toward her, offering her a sip.
She waved it away. “Rafe Pasco. From cybercrime.”
“I heard.” Tommy glanced over his shoulder. “What’d you do, tell him to keep his distance?”
“Didn’t get a chance to,” she said. “He picked it out himself.” From where she was sitting, she could actually see him quite well. She watched as he took a shiny black laptop out of a bag and set it on the desk. “I see he brought his own hardware. Maybe he figures he’ll have more privacy over there. No one’ll be able to see when he’s playing solitaire.”
Tommy followed her gaze. “Guy’s a geek. No offence,” he added quickly. “How is Jake, anyway?”
Ruby laughed. “Fine. And he’d take offence if you didn’t call him a geek. As would he, I imagine.” She jerked her chin in Pasco’s general direction.
“It’s a different world,” Tommy said, affecting a heavy sigh. Then his face grew suddenly serious. “You OK?”
“Damn.” Ruby gave a short laugh. “You know you’re the second person to ask me that today?”
Tommy’s steely-grey eyebrows arched. “Oh? Must be something going around.” His gazed at her thoughtfully. “So, are you OK? Anything bothering you?”
The Dread seemed to reawaken then; it shifted inside of her by way of reasserting itself, reminding her that it was there and it was in charge. “Like what?” she said, hoping the casually offhand tone in her voice didn’t sound as forced as it felt.
“Well, like Rita pulling the pin.”
She let out a long breath. “It’ll take some getting used to. I keep looking around for her. Which is only normal, I guess.”
“You weren’t prepared for her leaving, were you.” It wasn’t really a question.
“No,” she admitted. “But I’m OK with it.”
“I’m sure you are.” Tommy’s smile was knowing. “But it still took you by surprise. You never thought about her retiring.”
“I was busy,” she said and then winced inwardly. Had she ever said anything lamer? “But you know, things, uh, change.” Now she had.
“They do that.” Tommy pushed himself to his feet. “It’s not a steady-state universe.”
“No, I guess not.” Ruby stared after him as he ambled over to introduce himself to Rafe Pasco, wondering why his words seemed to hang in the air and echo in her brain. Maybe it was just having him and Ostertag ask her if she were OK within a few minutes of each other that had put a whole new level of odd over the day.
The call came in about twenty minutes before Ruby had tentatively planned to go to lunch. Which figured, she thought as she and Pasco drove to the east midtown address; it had been a quiet morning. Any time you had a quiet morning, you could just about count on having to skip lunch. Of course, since the Dread had moved in on her, it hadn’t left much room in her stomach. Not a whole lot of room in her mind, either—she missed the turn onto the right street and, thanks to the alternating one-ways, had to drive around in a three-block circle. If Pasco noticed, he didn’t say anything. Maybe she would let him drive back to the station.
She was a bit surprised to see that patrol cars had almost half the street blocked off, even though there were very few curious onlookers and not much in the way of traffic. The address in question was a six-storey tenement that Ruby had visited with Rita a few times in the past.
“Is this an actual residence or a squat?” Pasco asked her as they went up the chipped concrete steps to the front door.
“Both,” Ruby told him. She wasn’t actually sure any more herself.
The uniform standing at the entrance was a young guy named Fraley; Ruby thought he looked about twelve years old, despite the thick moustache he was sporting. He opened the door for them as if that were really what he did for a living.
The smell of urine in the vestibule was practically a physical blow; she heard a sharp intake of breath from Pasco behind her.
“Straight from the perfume counter in hell,” she said wryly. “Ever wonder why it’s always the front of the building, why they don’t take a few extra seconds to run to the back?”
“Marking their territory?” Pasco suggested.
“Good answer.” Ruby glanced over her shoulder at him, impressed.
There was another uniformed officer in the hallway by the stairs, a tall black woman named Desjean whom Ruby recognized as a friend of Rita’s. “Sorry to tell you this,” she told them, “but your crime scene’s on the roof and there’s no elevator.”
Ruby nodded, resigned. “Do we know who it is?”
Desjean’s dark features turned sad. “Girl about twelve or thirteen. No ID.”
Ruby winced, feeling acid bubbling up in her chest. “Great. Sex crime.”
“Don’t know yet,” the uniform replied. “But, well, up on the roof?”
“Local kid?” Ruby asked.
Desjean shook her head. “Definitely not.”
Ruby looked at the stairs and then at Pasco. “You can go first if you think you might go faster.”
Pasco blew out a short breath. “I’m a geek, not a track star.” He frowned. “Ostertag did tell you that, didn’t he?”
“Uh, yeah,” Ruby said, unsure as to whether he was kidding around or not. “Before we go up, one thing.”
“Don’t talk to you on the way?” He nodded. “The feeling’s mutual.”
She felt a brief moment of warmth toward him. Then the Dread overwhelmed it, crushing it out of existence, and she started up the stairs.
A uniformed sergeant named Papoojian met them just outside the door on the roof. “Kid with a telescope spotted the body and called it in,” she told them as they stood catching their breath. “I sent a couple of officers over to get a preliminary statement from him and his very freaked-out parents.”
“Kid with a telescope.” Ruby sighed. “I don’t know if that’s an argument for closed-circuit TV surveillance or against it.”
The sergeant looked up at the sky worriedly. “I wish the lab guys would hurry up and get here with a tent or we’re gonna have regular TV surveillance to deal with. I’m surprised the news helicopters aren’t buzzing us already.”
As if on cue, there was the faint sound of a chopper in the distance. Immediately, one of the other three uniformed cops on the roof produced a blanket and threw it over the body, then turned to look a question at Papoojian. Papoojian nodded an OK at him and turned back to Ruby. “If the lab has a problem with that, tell them to get in my face about it.”