Page 94 of Thankless in Death

She examined the body as she spoke. “Hauled you upstairs. There’s a reason for that. You’re a big woman, and why cart you all the way up here? Office equipment. This is your office—desk, chair, small couch. Computer Science teacher. You probably had good equipment.”

She examined the blood, the skin tears on the wrists and arms, the ankles. “You tried. Looks like you tried pretty damn hard. Kept you alive all that time, so he had a use for you.”

“Dallas? It looks like he used her bedroom. I checked the recycler in the bath, and I can see some of the packaging, the stuff he bought. Hair product, skin product. Some hair, too. He cut his hair.”

“Okay.”

“Uniforms are here.”

“Give them a copy of the morph for the canvass. I want them to show his ID shot and the morph.”

Peabody nodded. “Do you think he pushed her over like that? Maybe she fell over, struggling.”

“Hard to say, but she sure as hell didn’t just sit and take it. She ripped skin off trying to get out of the tape.”

“The neighbors I talked to like her. You could tell.” Peabody drew in a breath. “There’s no droid up here. I still have to go over the main floor, but I didn’t see one down there either.”

“He kept it. Handy to have a droid. Clean up after him, run errands. He’d like that. Let’s find out what she had, get a BOLO out there, too.”

“On it. He could come back, Dallas. It’s a nice place, a big house. It’d make a good base.”

“Neighbors. They’d have started asking questions in another day or two. About her, the dog. Or she’d have an appointment. He got what he wanted here.”

Face grim, Peabody looked down at the body. “Because she flunked him in Computer Science. In high school.”

“Because she pissed him off. It’s all he needs now. And money. Get the uniforms started.”

Eve pulled out her ’link.

Feeney said, “Yo.”

“I got another DB. Computer Science teacher, retired.”

“What? He get a D?”

“She flunked him, so he paid her back by smothering her with a plastic bag after keeping her tied and taped to a chair for about eighteen hours. And bashing up her little dog.”

“Fucker.”

“Yeah, he is. She’s supposed to have a lot of nice equipment, but he cleaned her out.”

Feeney’s already droopy face drooped further. “Can’t help you if I don’t have the toys.”

“I’m going to do a search to find out what she had, but, meanwhile, she’s supposed to have some nice scratch. He’d want it.”

“You want me to look for the money? No problem.”

“He knows we’ll find her sooner or later, knows we know who he is. She’d know some tricks, right? Bouncing money around, tucking it away.”

“If she was any good at her job, she’d know the ins, the outs.”

“She was good at her job. If he got her to pull out the money, transfer it, he’d make her cover the tracks.” She looked down at the torn skin, the raw bruising. “But she wasn’t a pushover. Maybe there are tricks in the tricks. So, it takes an e-man.”

“I happen to be one. Give me the data you’ve got.”

“Farnsworth,” Eve began, “Edie Barrett.”

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