“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 otherpeople 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 thathappened 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 tohome. 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.”
