Page 124 of Random in Death
“Okay. Still, their passions don’t connect, either. It’s a kind of narrow vision on each side. This is what I want.” Peabody pressed her palms together, pointed them to one side of the room. “And the other, this is what I want.” She pointed them to the opposite side.
“Public school for one, private for the other.” And it mattered, Eve thought. Mattered because it provided no connection. “One rarely dates, the other has a boyfriend of several months, and he wasn’t her first. No mutual clubs, no attending the same camps. But still, this is a communality, so we put it on the board.”
Eve glanced around again. “Let’s finish this up. We can check more shoe stores on the way back downtown.”
On the journey they found two venues who’d sold the Stuben loafers, correct style, correct color within the last six months.
One to an eighty-year-old regular customer who bought them for himself, the other to a tourist from Ottawa.
“We cut the list more than by half now.”
“Yeah,” Eve agreed. “I think we pull some uniforms to handle the rest. The planet’s revolving.”
“Well, yeah, it has to or… Oh, like the clock’s ticking.”
“The clocks would still tick if the planet stopped revolving.”
“I guess they would until… I’m not sure what happens if the Earth stops revolving, but it wouldn’t be good. Maybe Teasdale will hit on something. Maybe the killings were the escalation, and he started with sexual assault. Then we have the shoes. We have Yancy. We may have his prints. Something’s going to break, Dallas.”
It had to.
“We’ve got enough time to swing by the lab before the memorial. Maybe an in-person shove will move things. Contact Uniform Carmichael. He can pick a couple of officers to start on the shoe hunt.”
While Eve drove through traffic that had decided, probably gleefully, to thwart her at every turn, she tagged Feeney.
“I’m still in the field,” she told him. “Any progress?”
“A lot of elimination, and that’s progress. We’ve got a couple who may fit. Don’t get a buzz from them, but they’re a pretty close fit. You got a hell of a lot of schools, Dallas, and a hell of a lot of kids in them.”
“Yeah. Send me the couple you’ve got. We pulled a couple out last night. I can start pushing on that later today.”
“I’ll send them, and any others who look possible.”
“You got Jamie in there?”
“Roarke freed him up for the duration.”
Another set of hands, another pair of eyes, another brain.
“How about you shift him over to universities, medical labs. Looking for the killer maybe taking a college course over the summer, or interning in a lab.”
“I can do that.”
“Appreciate it, Feeney. I’ll get back to you.”
Eve pushed through a yellow light as pedestrians did their best to flood the crosswalk in advance.
“Parent or guardian could be a doctor, a medical researcher, a lab rat. Not a police lab.” Missing the next light, Eve hissed, braked. “You’ve got to be eighteen, and he’s just not there. Plus, the screening, not that he couldn’t get through it, but Dickhead’s surely a dickhead, but he knows what we’re looking for. He’d have flagged anyone who looked off.”
“Dawber got past him,” Peabody pointed out.
“Dawber got past everybody. But point taken.”
She slogged her way to the lab.
Inside, the hive buzzed, as always.
She spotted Berenski at his station along with Garnet DeWinter—fashion dish and bone expert.