Page 15 of Devoted in Death

“Totally can do. His mom seemed really sure nobody who knew him could do this.”

“His mother loved him, and figured everybody else did, too. At least one person didn’t, whether they knew him or not. So we check it out.”

A thin snow started to spit out of grumpy gray skies. Which meant, Eve knew, that at least fifty percent of the drivers currently on the road would lose a minimum of one-third of their intelligence quotient, any skill they’d previously held at operating a vehicle thereby turning what had been the standard annoying traffic into mayhem.

She bulled her way south, determined to beat the onset of insanity.

•••

The minute she stepped into the morgue, she yanked the cap off her head, stuffed it in her pocket.

The white tunnel echoed with their footsteps—the post-holiday, frozen-tundra lull, Eve thought. It wouldn’t last.

She caught Peabody eyeing the vending machine that offered hot drinks.

“You know everything in that thing is crap.”

“Yeah, but it’s snowing a little, and when it starts to snow I start thinking hot chocolate. Even though the strange brown liquid that machine pees out doesn’t bear much of a resemblance. Why can’t law-enforcement facilities get decent vending?”

“Because then we’d all be snuggled up with hot chocolate instead of doing the job.”

She pushed open the door to Morris’s domain.

She recognized opera—not which one, but identified the soaring tragedy in the voices, the mournful blend of instruments as some opera or other.

Morris stood over Dorian Kuper. A clear cape protected the chief ME’s plum-colored suit, and the fascinating high-planed face was unframed as he’d tied back his black hair in one of his complicated braids, twined it with silver cord.

Blood smeared his sealed hands. Kuper’s chest lay open from the Y incision.

“Giselle,” Morris said, glancing up as if seeing the music. “I was going to see it next week.”

“You’re into opera?”

“Some.” He stepped away to wash the blood and sealant from his hands. “I knew him.”

“The vic?” Eve’s thoughts shifted from Morris’s eclectic taste in music, zeroed in on connection. “Kuper? You knew Dorian Kuper?”

“Yes. He was a brilliant musician. Truly brilliant—not just his ability, which was striking, but his affinity. I’m sorry to have him in my house this way.”

“You were friends?”

“Very casually. He sometimes came into After Midnight—a blues club we both enjoyed. We jammed a number of times. Had a drink, talked music.”

Saxophone, Eve thought. Morris played a hell of a saxophone. “I’m sorry.”

“As am I. I took Amaryllis to a party at his apartment, just a few weeks before she was killed. It’s strange, isn’t it, how things link together?”

She saw the grief come over him, fresh after so many months, for the woman he’d loved.

He turned, reached into his friggie for a tube of Pepsi, the orange fizzy he knew Peabody preferred and a ginger ale for himself. He passed out the tubes, cracked his own.

“A drink to old friends,” he said.

“What can you tell me about him?”

“Personally? He had a large and eclectic group of friends if the party—and the various people who’d come with him to the clubs—is an accurate gauge. He and his mother adored each other—it showed. I’ve seen him with men and with women—in a romantic sense. That showed, too. He could play anything. You could hand him an instrument and he’d bring joy or tears from it.”

Morris drank, looked back at the body—the work to be done.