His eyes widened. “No bull?”
“No bull. Start in New York.”
“Start?”
“Yeah. Start in the city, then the boroughs, then the state. You don’t get a hit, move on.”
“To what?”
“Another state.” She pulled out her PPC, ordered up the photos she wanted. “What’s your code? No, here, just copy it over yourself.”
He took her handheld. “Dallas, she looks pretty dead.”
“She is. I’m not looking for her, but who she represents to the person who killed her.” She hesitated, then reminded herself she’d connected with Jamie not so much through Feeney as through Alice.
His sister, his murdered sister.
So she ran through the basics.
“Butterfly tat, that’s a solid. Okay, I’m all over it and back again.” Faster than she could have thought it, he transferred the photos to his unit.
And looked, Eve thought, not daunted by the impossibility of the assignment but energized.
“Clear it with Feeney,” she repeated as she took back her PPC.
“No prob. I got this. Yo to Roarke.”
“Yeah.” Even as she turned away to escape the carnival, Jamie was bopping to the beat.
5
Back in the bullpen, at Peabody’s desk, Eve studied the two missing women’s data. Anna Hobe, age twenty-four, single, worked at Mike’s Place, a karaoke bar. Lower West. She lived alone, in an efficiency just under six blocks from her workplace.
Seven days missing, Eve noted, reported by her manager when she didn’t show up for work, her ’link didn’t respond, and the coworker who talked the building super into letting her in found the apartment empty.
Becca Muldoon, age twenty-five, a dancer at Honey Pot, a Lower West Side strip joint, eight days missing. Single, reported by roommate.
“We’ll take Hobe, have Norman take Muldoon. We’ll hit her workplace and residence. Get the files transferred. Give me five.”
She went into her office, added some notes to her book. She printed out Hobe’s photo, held it next to Elder’s. Same coloring, a similarity in features. And from the data, likely a similarity in build.
Muldoon, now, she thought as she studied that printout, she’d put closer to the Bad Mommy. But that came from the facial enhancements Muldoon wore in the ID shot.
With a quick search she found one of Muldoon’s professional shots on her social media. Curvier, definitely bustier.
Would he adjust for that? she wondered.
Either way, they struck her as candidates.
She pinned them up, grabbed her jacket.
“Let’s move, Peabody,” she said as she walked through the bullpen.
“Norman’s already heading out,” Peabody told her. “He contacted the lead on the Muldoon case, and they’re meeting up at the strip club. Eight days,” Peabody added. “If he grabbed her, she’s running out of time.”
“I think the probability’s lower on Muldoon. Yeah, maybe he always wanted backups, alternates, but is he going to grab one right after the other? Higher probability—maybe—because she more closely matches what he created—her face. But her build’s different. She wouldn’t fit in what he dressed Elder in.”
“Buys to fit her.”
“Yeah, easy enough. She’s got a couple of tats already. A snake—a cobra—going down her left hip, and a dragonfly on her right tit. What does he do about that? Leave them, remove them, just cover them up? If he’s seen her in the club, he knows that. But, other side, she’s already got the navel piercing, which would also be in view when she’s working.”
“It caught me she looks more like what he did with Elder than Hobe does. But Hobe looks more like Elder before he worked on her.”
“Exactly. What does he want, Peabody?” Eve asked as they crossed the garage level to Eve’s car. “The good mommy or the bad one?”
Peabody considered it as she climbed in. “He kills the bad mommy, so it could follow he wants the good one. It would weigh on Hobe more than Muldoon.”
“That’s how I see it. If it was only about punishment, he’d have hurt Elder. Messed her up, smacked her around. He took what he wanted, and he took her after observing her, watching her routine, planning it out. If he’s taken another, he did it the same way.”
As she drove out, pushed through traffic, Eve thought it through. “That’s not to say he didn’t have more than one at the same time on his radar. If he’s taken another—and if he hasn’t, he will—he likely had a gauge on her for a while.”