Hunching his shoulders, he looked like a man who’d just swallowed something nasty. “I’m working on it.”
“Do that. I can’t get to my pile yet.”
“The woman dressed up like the painting. Street LC, manual strangulation.”
Yeah, she thought, that was one of the reasons.
“Finish the paperwork, and if you’re still clear, I’ll tap you in. Peabody, you can tap Reineke in. Start him looking for artists’ models.”
“Where’s the justice? He gets models, I get paperwork.” Jenkinson shook his head.
“With rank,” Eve said, “comes bullshit.”
“You’re telling me,” Jenkinson said as she strode to her office.
She went for coffee first, and with it sat at her desk to do the notifications. In general, notifying a parent their daughter was dead brought shock, disbelief, and a flood of grief.
With Mitzi Lee Starr, the leading reaction was annoyance.
Sure, Eve thought, due to the stupid planet’s dumbass rotation around the sun, it was earlier in Las Vegas, and who wants to get pulled out of sleep with bad news?
But.
“She probably asked for it.” Mitzi Lee, her gilded hair tipped in scarlet, sat up in a bed with a fluffy pink headboard shaped like a heart. The sheets she tugged up covered a small portion of her impressive, man-made boobs.
“Excuse me?”
“Girl always does what she wants, when she wants.” As the other woman shrugged, Eve got the full, and unwanted, view of said boobs. “Always thinking she’s better than anyone. Probably her bad attitude and big mouth got her killed.”
Yawning, she leaned back against the fluffy pink heart. “What do you want me to do about it?”
“I can arrange for you to see your daughter.”
“What for? Dead, isn’t she?”
“Yes, she is. In order for you to make arrangements for her body—”
“What? Like for a funeral? Forget it. She’s a grown-ass adult. Walked out when she was seventeen, and good riddance. Helped herself to a couple hundred I had stashed, too. I’m not spending my hard-earned money on funerals. Dead’s dead. You got her, you deal with it.”
Eve kept her tone neutral. “There are also personal effects and possessions.”
“What do I want with her junk?”
With that, Mitzi Lee broke the connection.
“Okay then.”
Eve took a moment, drank coffee, then tried the father.
He registered some shock if not grief. Though he wasn’t as abrupt as the woman he’d created a daughter with, the upshot came to the same.
Nobody was coming for Leesa.
She sent Morris a memo.
Leesa Culver’s next of kin will not view or claim her body. Please hold the body for forty-eight hours after you complete your report. During that period we will attempt to locate any other family members. Failing that, file for standard cremation and disposal for unclaimed remains.
She went into the bullpen, scanned, and spotted Officer Shelby in her cube.
