Page 147 of Devoted in Death

“Hot damn.”

“Put on your bitch face, Peabody.” Eve opened the door, noted orange didn’t do much for Parsens, either. “Record on. Dallas, Lieutenant Eve, and Peabody, Detective Delia, entering Interview with Parsens, Ella-Loo.” She fed in the case numbers, talking steadily as Ella-Loo bitched.

“You can’t push me around this way! I’m all cut up. I want to go to the hospital. You molested me, you grabbed my tits. I don’t want to talk to you.” And finally. “What did you do with Darryl? I want my Darryl!”

“Have you been read your rights, Ella-Loo?”

“Fuck you and your rights. I want to go to the hospital. I want Darryl.”

“You’ve been medically cleared, and seeing Darryl’s not going to happen. Probably ever.”

Pure shock leached color from her face. “What do you mean ‘ever’? He’s the husband of my heart and I got every right to see him.”

“The only rights you have are these: You have the right to remain silent.”

She continued to read out the Revised Miranda over Ella-Loo’s shouts and demands. “Do you understand your rights and obligations?”

“I understand you’re a titless bitch.”

“I can read them off again, and keep reading them off until you say, for the record, whether or not you understand them. Or we can go, leave you alone here to think about it for a few hours.”

“I understand them just fine. I want my own clothes, and I want Darryl, and I don’t have to say nothing to some dyke cop.”

“We don’t give much of a shit about what you want,” Peabody said, made Eve proud with the grinding, vicious tone she used. “The only clothes you’re going to be wearing from now on are what you’ve got and prison blues. You look like an overbaked pumpkin in orange, but I bet the women at Riker’s are going to eat you right up.”

“I don’t know what Riker’s is, and I’m not going.”

“Just temporarily,” Eve continued. “After a short stay I’m betting on Omega. That’s off-planet. Jayla Campbell and Reed Mulligan—the two you were torturing when we met? They have a lot to say about you and Darryl.”

“They’re liars. We were partying. No law against doing what you want to do in your own home. Consenting adults.”

“They consented to being bound, cut, burned, beaten, raped?”

“They’re sick, that’s what. Darryl and me were just going along, just experimenting. But we’d had enough and were going to make them get out of our place.”

“Your place?” Peabody roared it, grabbed the file, dumped the photos, found Samuel Zed. “His place, you twisted twat. Are you so stupid you think cutting off his fingers meant we couldn’t ID him? Look what you did to him.”

When Peabody shoved up, rushed around the table, pushed the photo in Parsens’s face, Eve just sat back, let her ride.

Go, Peabody, she thought.

“Get away from me!” Ella-Loo shrieked it. “Don’t touch me. You’re not allowed to put hands on me.”

“I’m allowed to do whatever the hell I want to sick, psychopathic sluts.”

“Are not! Darryl! Get her off me! I’ll tell!”

“Tell who?” Eve wondered. “Who’s going to believe you over cops? And things happen to recordings all the time. Glitchy equipment. How about we unlock her restraints, Peabody? You can do what you did to the last one. I’ve got your back.”

Peabody bared her teeth; her eyes glittered. “Let’s go.”

When Eve started to rise, Ella-Loo tried to hunch into a ball. “You can’t, you can’t. He attacked me, that’s what happened. Darryl was just protecting me. That guy there, that guy he was trying to rape me, so Darryl protected me. It was self-defense.”

“And somehow in this self-defense, Samuel Zed lost all his fingers.”

“We... we were afraid. We were afraid we’d get in trouble, so we dropped him in the water.”

She kept herself hunched, shot hate-filled looks at Peabody.