Children didn’t play at three in the morning. No, they did not! Even if they had to sleep in the car because the mean landlord kicked them out, they didn’t play so late.
He parked as close as he could, and worked quickly. He wore black coveralls and booties over his shoes. A cap that covered his hair. He’d sealed his hands, but wore gloves, too. Nothing showed. Nothing at all.
He rolled the gurney right up to the bench where good mommies would watch their children play in the sunshine.
He laid her on it like she was sleeping, and put the sign he’d made with construction paper and black crayon over her folded hands.
It said what she was.
Bad Mommy!
He went back to the van and drove away. Drove back and into the garage, into the house.
He had the house because she’d left him. He had the house because she’d given him the deed and the keys and the codes and everything.
But he didn’t want everything. He only wanted one thing.
His mommy.
In the quiet house he changed into his pajamas. He washed his hands and face and brushed his teeth like a good boy.
In the glow of the night-light, he climbed into bed.
He fell asleep with a smile on his face and dreamed the dreams of the young and innocent.
2
In the shallow light just beyond dawn, Lieutenant Eve Dallas badged through the police barriers to study the body on the bench.
A tall woman, and lean with it, Eve took in the details. The position and condition of the body, the distance of the bench from the street, from buildings.
A faint breeze stirred air that, while morning cool, teased of summer. It fluttered around Eve’s cap of choppy brown hair and stirred some cheerful scent from a concrete barrel of flowers by the bench.
For once her partner had beaten her to the scene, but then Detective Peabody lived only blocks away. Peabody, in her pink coat and cowboy boots, heaved out a sigh.
“Really close to home.”
“Yeah.” Eve judged the victim as mid-twenties, Caucasian female. She lay peacefully and fully dressed with her hands folded over a childish sign that deemed her a Bad Mommy.
“Run it down for me,” Eve said.
“First on scene responded to a flag-down at approximately zero-six-forty-five. A female licensed companion got out of a cab on the corner, walked down toward her apartment.” Peabody pointed west. “When she passed the bench, she saw the victim. She assumed sidewalk sleeper, and states that since she had a really good night, she was going to leave a few bucks on the bench. And when she started to, realized, not sleeping. Started to tag nine-one-one, then saw the cruiser make the turn, so she flagged the cops down. We’ve got all her info, so Officer Steppe escorted her home.”
“Did you ID the vic?”
“Lauren Elder, age twenty-six. She lived on West Seventeenth. Cohab, Roy Mardsten, filed a missing persons on her ten days ago. She tended bar at Arnold’s—upper-class bar on West Fourteenth Street—I’ve been there. She didn’t come home from work the night of May twenty-eighth. Detective Norman, out of the four-three, caught it.”
“TOD, COD?”
“Hadn’t gotten that far. McNab—here he comes.”
Eve glanced over to see Peabody’s main dish, Electronic Detectives Division’s hotshot, jog toward them.
The strengthening sun couldn’t hold a candle to the orange-glow tee under a floppy knee-length jacket the color of irradiated plums matched with baggies of mad colors that might have been spray-painted by insane toddlers.
His sunny ponytail swung; his forest of ear hoops sparkled.
“No cams on this area,” he told them. “Low security, quiet neighborhood. Sorry.”
“Since you’re here, you can knock on doors with the first on scene. See if anyone saw her dumped here.”
With her record on, Eve crouched, opened her field kit. “Victim’s identified as Elder, Lauren, female, age twenty-six, missing since May twenty-eight. And held against her will by the look of the marks on her right wrist and left ankle. Her clothes appear undisturbed. If there was sexual assault, the killer dressed her again.”
Frowning, Eve sniffed, leaned closer, sniffed again. “She’s wearing perfume.”
“Full makeup, too,” Peabody commented. “Perfect makeup, and her hair’s unmussed.”
“Yeah, nail polish looks fresh. A woman held against her will isn’t usually so worried about appearance. He fixed her up, that’s how it went. Bad Mommy. She doesn’t look like a mom, does she? More like the let’s-party type. Maybe mommy’s a sexual deal here.”