Page 7 of Framed in Death (In Death #61)

They finished the search, found another twenty inside the vase with the dead rose.

“Let’s talk to the neighbor across the hall.”

Eve judged the woman who answered as early thirties, a mixed-race female in black sweatpants, a gray T-shirt over a thin body. She had blond hair that needed a root job pulled back in a tail. Her eyes, a hazel that pulled toward the green, were red and swollen from weeping.

“Ma’am, Lieutenant Dallas, Detective Peabody, NYPSD.”

The woman looked at the badge, looked at Eve as another tear spilled. “Whatever he’s done, I kicked him out. He doesn’t live here anymore.”

“We’d like to speak to you about your neighbor, Leesa Culver.”

“Oh.” Now she glanced across the hall and anger dissolved any more tears.

“It wouldn’t surprise me if he slipped her a fifty—of my money, too—for a BJ when I was out working for a living.

I work nights, cleaning office buildings, and what happens?

I come home, again, and he’s lying in bed.

Says he quit his job. Again. Which is bullshit.

I bet you twice that fifty he got fired again. I’m finished.”

So we heard, Eve thought.

“Could we come in and speak to you for a few minutes?”

“Hell, I guess I could use the distraction.”

The apartment seemed to be the same footprint as Culver’s, but a world apart. The neighbor obviously used her cleaning skills at home.

She, too, had a two-cushioned sofa, but in a cream color that was spotless. She’d paired it with a chair that had tiny cream-and-blue checks, a small blue rug. The wall screen was double the size of Culver’s and was joined with a few framed prints.

The small white table in the eating area had four blue stools. The kitchen shined.

She’d hit Peabody’s cute and cozy, Eve thought.

“You might as well sit. Do you want coffee? I was late getting home this morning because I stopped to get coffee—since he forgot to pick any up yesterday—and I got pastries because he likes them.

“I’m an idiot.” She pressed her fingers to her swollen eyes. “Two years, two years wasted on that lying, lazy son of a bitch, and I buy him pastries. Do you want some?”

“Thanks, but we’re fine. We don’t want to take up too much of your time, Ms.…”

“Boxer, Stasha Boxer.” She walked over to take the chair, gestured to the sofa. “So what did Leesa do?”

“Ms. Culver was murdered last night.”

“What! Oh God.” Stasha pressed her hands to her face. “Murdered. Now I’m going to hell for thinking bad thoughts about a dead person. I didn’t like her very much, but… She was hardly more than a kid.”

“Could you tell us the last time you saw her, spoke to her?”

“A couple of nights ago, I guess. I think. I’m not really sure. Once in a while we leave for work about the same time. Mostly not, but sometimes. I think we did a few nights ago. How did it happen?”

“We’re investigating that. Can you tell us anything about her personal relationships? Romantic relationships, friendships, family?”

“I don’t think she had any. I sleep during the day, try to get a solid six, maybe seven hours in. That’s the workweek. Weekends I clean around here, do laundry, get the shopping and whatever errands done.”

She paused, closed her eyes. “Listen to that. Not once in there did I say he did any of it. Because he didn’t, and I kept letting that go.”

She drew a breath. “Done. I’d see her now and then on my days off. We’ve got a laundry in the basement, and she came in once or twice while I was doing mine. She didn’t know what the hell she was doing there, just dumping everything in together.”

Stasha shrugged. “She was young, you know, so I said how she should separate things, and showed her. Anyway, I don’t remember ever hearing—and you can hear everything in this place, which is why I wear earplugs to sleep—or seeing anybody go to her door, or hear or see her come home with anybody.”

Stasha lifted a hand. “I remember now. Showing her how to do something as basic as laundry, I asked why a pretty girl like her didn’t have a boyfriend.

And she said she didn’t have time for that.

She was working her way up, saving her money.

She was going to be a top-level LC inside three years, and rich guys would take her places, buy her things.

She wanted to travel to Europe—oh, and pay somebody to do the stupid laundry.

“Did she have family?” Stasha wondered. “She never mentioned family. I guess we didn’t talk more than a handful of times over hi, how’s it going.”

Stasha shook her head. “God, she was so young, and pretty, too. But I don’t know if she had anybody who cared about her. I really didn’t know her.”

“Did she have any interest in art?”

“Art who? Oh, oh, you mean like paintings and that kind of thing? I don’t know, but I don’t think so.

The best I can tell you is she was ambitious, and I think she liked her work.

Around here? She absolutely kept to herself as far as I know.

I’m friendly enough, with a lot of other people in the building.

I don’t remember anyone ever bringing her up in conversation. ”

Stasha lifted her hands, let them fall. “I can wish I’d made more of an effort, I guess, to get to know her. But we just didn’t have much—anything, really—in common.”

“We appreciate your time.”

“I’m so sorry for what happened to her,” Stasha said as Eve and Peabody rose. “I hope you find whoever killed her.”

As they left, Peabody glanced back at Culver’s apartment. “Do you want to knock on more doors?”

“I think we hit our best source. We’ll put a couple of uniforms on that, but it fits the space she lived in. She lived for herself.”

“Ms. Boxer took the time to show her how to sort laundry. If she’d wanted a friend,” Peabody said, “she could have had one across the hall.”

“Friends take time and effort. I lived like that for a while. I was focused on getting out, getting here. One goal—well, two. New York and the badge. Hers? Making top level and living high. So I get her, to a point.”

“Why New York? For you, I mean. Why here especially?”

“Because you can be anybody here. You can disappear if you want. Nobody knows you, and nobody cares where you came from. It’s the whole fucking world in one place.”

“That? That last bit? For me, too. The excitement, the so much of it. I wanted the badge, also, but I wanted it here. I wanted some of that so much. It scared me a little, at first, and even that was exciting.”

As they got in the car, Peabody belted up. “Did it scare you at first?”

“No, it was the answer.” Eve thought of herself sitting at the counter window, eating her first slice of New York pizza.

Freedom, at last.

“It was all the answers. I thought I could shake off everything that happened before, shut it away. That the city would just burn it off. I was wrong about that, because you never shake it all off.”

She considered a moment. “Maybe you shouldn’t.”

She pulled into traffic. “But it was still all the answers. We’ll hit the morgue.”

“You made friends in New York.”

“Mavis didn’t give me a choice.”

“She’s pretty irresistible. You had Feeney, too.

And connections with other cops, and in your apartment building, that used to be my apartment building until this weekend.

I made friends, and I had connections on the job when I made it, in my first apartment building, and in the second.

If you don’t have those connections, you end up like Culver—in a sloppy chaotic mess, because fuck everything but me.

Or in a lifeless sterile space for the same reason. ”

“We’ll need to talk to some of her coworkers, LCs that worked that same block.

But how it reads right now? She went with someone.

And if she went off with someone to a place he could kill her, dress her in that outfit, which meant a private place, not whatever flop she used, he offered enough money to make it worth the time.

And she’d have wanted half up front. She’d been working for over a year and a half, she wouldn’t have left her block without a solid deposit in hand. ”

“Do you think she had friends on the street?”

“No. She had competitors.”

“That’s sad. But sounds true.”

“We’ll check it out anyway. One of them might have seen whoever hired her. We could get a description. If he used a vehicle, we could get a description of that. Meanwhile, maybe Morris can tell us something more.”

She drummed her fingers on the wheel when she stopped for a light. “Find out what cops work that sector. Most street levels work close to home. We’ll run this by them. Probably beat droids. As annoying as droids can be, we’ll get straight facts.”

“Straight facts are great, but they leave out impressions and instincts.”

“Yeah, one of the annoying things about droids.”

When they walked down the white tunnel of the morgue, Peabody glanced up from her PPC. “Droids. Officers Campbell and Winters. Both female replicas.”

“We’ll call them into Central after we’re finished here.”

Eve pushed through the double doors of Morris’s theater.

She’d have called the music he had playing peppy. Something with a bouncy beat and a couple of girl voices playing with harmony.

Leesa Culver lay on the slab, and Morris stood beside it.

He wore a kind of rusty red suit today, one with a faint metallic sheen. His shirt had tiny stripes of the same color against white. He’d added a tie of deep sapphire blue with cords of that blue winding through a complicated braid he’d looped in a circle at the back of his head.

As he reached into the Y-cut to lift out Leesa’s heart and weigh it, Peabody looked carefully away.

“Lower music volume by half,” Morris ordered. “I thought she’d enjoy something young and energetic. She had a very short life.”

“Somebody ended it after dressing her up like a girl in a painting.”

“So I’m told. The slight injuries from the wiring, the glue, all postmortem.

Your call of manual strangulation is correct.

You’re looking for someone with wide-palmed, long-fingered hands.

Strong ones. Her larynx was crushed. I’ll give you measurements on the hands—and they’ll be close—in my report. ”

“A chance for prints?”

“No, He was careful enough to seal them before he killed her. No other injuries on the body. Internally, she’d consumed a very nice Pouilly-Fuissé, about eight ounces, approximately three hours prior to her death, and another six within minutes of death.

In that six ounces? Enough barbiturates—powder form, I believe—to knock out someone double her weight. ”

“He drugged her, then he killed her.” Considering, Eve walked around the slab.

“Didn’t want her to fight back. He gave her something to put her out so he could strangle her, and with his hands.

Personal, intimate. He doesn’t just bash her over the head, stab her in the heart.

Can’t do that and have her intact for the final pose. ”

She looked down at the body.

“So that’s important, that final pose. And he’s a coward who needed her unconscious before he killed her. He doesn’t need the rush of the struggle.”

“Um.” Eyes still averted, Peabody added, “A struggle could mess up the costume, or maybe end up putting a bruise on her face.”

“That’s right. But he could’ve given her a heavier dose, or injected her with a lethal dose. She’d die nice and neat that way. But he wanted the intimacy, his hands around her throat. It takes effort to squeeze the life out of somebody using your own hands.”

Morris walked over to wash up. “She’d have felt nothing, which is a blessing for her if there can be one. Her body would have fought for air, but she wouldn’t have been aware of it, wouldn’t have felt the panic and pain over the three or four minutes it took him to kill her.”

He pulled a tube of Pepsi, and Peabody’s choice of Diet, out of his friggie.

“Thanks. Illegals or alcohol abuse?”

“No. Her last meal, about six hours before death, a soy dog and fries, a Coke. While a healthy weight, she was borderline on malnutrition. She needed more iron, fiber, and green vegetables in her diet.

“She used a six-month injection for birth control, was naturally a brunette who’d recently refreshed the blond and added the streaks. Harvo has a sample and, being the Queen of Hair and Fiber, will tell you what she used there—home or salon grade. Harvo also has the clothes.”

Eve nodded. “He had to get them from somewhere. They’re not exactly today. What about the wire, the glue?”

“I can tell you the wire’s one and a half millimeters, and strong. Metal with a protective jacket. The lab will take it from there. And the glue, also very strong. I needed acetone to remove it.”

Morris laid a hand on Leesa’s head. “Her eyelids already had a slight rash by the time she got to me, as had the other areas where he’d used glue to secure the wire, to keep her head in that exact position.”

Morris looked down, then eased the body’s head over to show Eve the spotty redness. “It’s a different kind of cruelty, but cruelty nonetheless.”

“She was nothing more than a droid to him by that point—maybe all along. Less, really. Like some doll he could dress up, use, destroy. Sex?”

“She’d had intercourse, yes, but hours before her death. At least four, closer, I think, to five hours before. And she followed the regulations, douched thoroughly.”

“Why would he give her time for that? He’d’ve used a sperm killer. It probably wasn’t him. If it wasn’t, he didn’t care about sex. Or we’re wrong, and it’s a woman.”

Pacing, she cracked the tube. “No, not a woman. She’s not registered for females, and she wanted to work up to top level. That means following regulations.”

She took a drink from the tube, nodded. “Okay. We know what we know now. Thanks, Morris. You added to it.”

“Family?”

“I’m going to make the notification when I get to Central. She didn’t have a sign of either parent in her apartment, and neither live in or around New York. But I’ll let you know if they, or anyone, wants to come see her or make arrangements for her.”

“They brought her into this world. I hope they care enough to see her out of it.”

“I’ll let you know.”

“Morris?” Peabody paused at the door. “Can I ask why you decided to be an ME?”

He sent her a surprised look, then an easy smile.

“It’s simple, really. There are those who tend to the living and those who tend to the dead. Those, like me, work to find answers to give those like you. Those who stand for the ones who had their lives taken.”

He laid a hand on Lessa’s head again. “The dead also need tending.”

“Thanks.”

“Let me add congratulations on your new home.”

“Double thanks. We’re going to throw a hell of a party soon.”

“I look forward to it.”

As the doors closed, they heard him say, “Music at previous volume.”