speed.”
“Yes, sir.”
Her voice squeaked a bit, and she stumbled over the initial data, but Eve was pleased Peabody found her rhythm. It would be a while yet before she had the stones to lead a team, but she had a good, agile mind and, once she got past the nerves, a straightforward and cohesive method of relaying data.
“Thank you, Detective.” Eve waited while Feeney finished up making notes. “Baxter, anything from the club on Jacobs?”
“No leads. She was a regular. Came in solo or with a date, with a group. Night in question it was solo, and that’s how she left. Hit the dance floor, had some drinks, chatted up a couple guys. Bartender knows she left alone because she talked to him over the last drink. Told him she was in a dry spell. Nobody she met lately did it for her. We got some names, and we’ll check them out today, but it looks like a bust.”
“Well, tie it up. Pursuant to the information gathered re Cobb, I flashed her picture around the restaurant Ciprioni’s, where it’s believed she had a date with the man we know as Bobby Smith.”
“You went to Ciprioni’s?” Peabody exclaimed.
“I needed to eat, I needed to follow up the lead. Two birds.”
“Other people like Italian food,” Peabody whined.
Eve ignored her. “I found the waitress who had their table in July. She remembers Cobb, and I’ve set her up with a police artist to try to jog her memory a little more on her description of Cobb’s date. We can check the museums, galleries, theaters we believe they visited. Somebody might remember them.”
“We’ll take it,” Baxter told her. “We’ve knocked down a few already.”
“Good. Now that the media’s announced the possible connection between these murders, our quarry is aware, almost certainly aware, we’ve made the link and are investigating concurrently. I don’t see this as a deterrent to the investigation.”
She waited a beat. “In your packs you’ll find data relating to Alex Crew, one of the diamond thieves, and the only one of the four who demonstrated violent behavior. My source related that Crew had an ex-wife and a son. Both of these individuals vanished between the divorce and the heist. I want to find them.”
“Crew might have killed them,” Peabody suggested.
“Yes, I’ve considered that. He didn’t have any problem killing one of his partners, or attempting murder on another partner’s daughter. He’d done some time previously and was suspected of other crimes. He was into the life. Killing an ex wouldn’t have been beyond his pathology. Neither would harming or killing a child. His child.”
Fathers did, she thought. Fathers could be monsters as easily as anyone else.
“Dead or alive, I want to find them. We have their birth names, and their locations prior to their disappearance. Peabody and I will talk to Gannon this morning.” She cocked a brow at Peabody.
“Eleven hundred at the Rembrandt.”
“It’s possible she has more information on them gathered through her family or her research for her book. I also want her reasoning for leaving them out of that book when others are named. Feeney, you’re on the search?”
“On it.”
“Ah . . . Roarke has offered to assist, if necessary, as civilian consultant. As he gathered the current data for me, he has an interest in following through.”
“Never a problem for me to use the boy. I’ll tag him.”
“McNab, I want anything you can get me off Cobb’s d and c, her ’links. Gannon’s and Jacobs’s communications equipment are already in-house. Check with the officer assigned to clearing those units.”
“You got it.”
“I’ve urged Gannon to consider private security, and she appears to be amenable. We’ll keep a man on her as long as the budget allows. This perpetrator is very specific in his goal. Very specific in his targets. Both victims connected to Gannon. If he feels she’s in his way, or has information he wants, he won’t hesitate to try for her. At this point, we have nothing that leads to him but a fifty-year-old crime. Let’s get more.”
On the way back to the division, Eve watched idly as two plainclothes muscled along a restrained woman who weighed in at about three hundred pounds and was flinging out an impressive array of obscenities. Since both cops had facial cuts and bruises, Eve assumed the prisoner had flung more than curses before they’d cuffed her.
God, she loved the job.
“Peabody, my office.”
She led the way in, closed the door, which had Peabody sending it a puzzled look. Then she programmed