Page 109 of Random in Death

She got in the car. “Anyway, it’s more, and I didn’t have to stand over a dead girl for three nights running.”

A bud that would never bloom. Kiki Rosenburg would have a chance to bloom.

“Big mistake on his part. I need to see where he tried to kill her, and the distance from there to the emergency exit.

“Didn’t have as much time as he counted on,” she calculated. “Jab her, sneer, walk away. Shove open the emergency doors and out. Don’t care about the alarm. That’s just more confusion—he thinks. People might see him sliding out, but they’ll just see some kid in a trench. He’d have already scoped out the cams on the doors, in the lobby. We won’t see his face, but we’ll get more.

“Every time, just a little more. And this time the more comes without a girl on a slab.”

“He didn’t know to jam the alarm. Easy enough to do,” Roarke told her. “Emergency exit doors are as basic as they come. Just put together a jammer, or buy one off the street. Your escape’s silent then. Silent’s always better.”

“It is, isn’t it? Nobody notices a thing then. You’re right.”

She programmed coffee because she might have missed that little detail.

“He either didn’t know to, or know how to. Most teens have a pretty solid or at least basic knowledge of e’s. He doesn’t. Not enough for this.”

She let that roll as he pulled up behind a cruiser at the theater. “That’s more of the more.”

Chapter Fifteen

Inside the brightly lit lobby that smelled of the substance pretending to be butter they squirted on popcorn (it wasn’t all that bad), uniformed officers escorted small groups of civilians from theaters to the exit.

She recognized one, stopped him. “Where are my detectives, Officer Hurley?”

“You got Baxter and Trueheart in theater three. Flick in there ended ’round right before the attack in theater one, so it was already emptied out. Peabody’s in one. The e-geek’s up in the security hub.”

She shot Roarke a look, and he peeled off to find McNab.

“Do you know who was first on scene?”

“That’d be Hernadez and Blicker. They’re in with Peabody. Kid still breathing?”

“She is, and she’s going to stay that way.”

“Lucky break, all around.”

She headed to the main theater.

The lights flooded there, too, and the noise level spiked with nervous laughter, quick shouts all underlined with buzzing conversation.

“Quiet down!” Eve ordered before she moved to Peabody and a group of three.

“Okay, you’re free to go. We appreciate your patience and cooperation.”

“Yeah, right.” One of the three—all male, all about Jamie’s age to Eve’s eye—sneered as he pushed up. “Like we had a choice.”

“The girl in the hospital sure didn’t have one,” Eve commented.

“She spoiled things for everybody. Screaming like she got chopped with an axe.”

“Come on, Jerry.” One of his friends nudged him. And didn’t budge him.

“Then the cops lock us up in here like criminals. Shit, they hauled the screamer out, didn’t they? But instead of watching the vid we paid for, the one we’ve been waiting a damn year for, we’re stuck in here with nothing.”

“That’s a sad story. I can feel my heart bleeding.”

“You know what we paid for these tickets, for the reserved seating?”