“I think we’ve got it.” She signaled Peabody to give him a card.
“If you think of anything,” Peabody said.
“I’ll talk to the staff. If anybody saw anything, I’ll make sure you hear about it. Nobody had anything against him I know of. He was… no-pun cocky, but likable.”
“Thanks for the time.” Eve started out, stopped. “Did he have any regulars?”
“Maybe. I really tried not to pay much attention to that part of things.”
“Sounds real,” Peabody said when they walked down another flight of steps.
“He’d have had a hard time dressing an LC up and strangling them with a wife and two spooky kids.”
“Twins are kind of spooky.”
“Tell me. Most of the art in there, that apartment? Kid art, familyphotos. I don’t see him as an art buff. And we can easily confirm he was at the theater at TOD.”
When they made it back to the car, Eve gestured for Peabody to take the wheel. “Lab. I’ll notify the mother on the way.”
Chapter Ten
Bobby’s mother cried. She looked and sounded resigned, then cried again.
“Bobby always had to go his own way. After his dad died, there was no stopping him from going his own way. He was a good son, and a good brother to Rachel. He came to see me most every Sunday. He took me out to a fancy dinner in the city for my last birthday, even though I said he shouldn’t spend his money that way. But he’d never let me come see him where he lived. He said it wasn’t fit for me, and it was only temporary. And he never hurt anybody in his life. I don’t know why somebody would hurt him.”
“We’re going to do everything we can to find out.”
“I need to see him. I need to tell his sister, and we need to come see him. I need to take care of things for him now.”
“Yes, ma’am. You’ll be notified as soon as that’s possible. Will you need transportation?”
“No, I know my way around.” She swiped at her eyes. “I can get to myboy. You find who took him away like this, and you tell them he had a mother who loved him. You tell them Bobby was a good son and a good brother.”
When Eve finished, she just sat a moment.
“Nobody who hasn’t had to do a notification knows what it’s like to do one.”
Eve shook her head. “No, I guess they don’t. We need something from Harvo we can work with. You don’t pick up costumes like that on the street corner, damn it.”
“If anybody can pin it down, it’s Harvo.”
“Counting on it.”
But when they got to the lab, Eve aimed for Dick Berenski first. The chief lab tech slid up and down his long counter on his rolling stool, egg-shaped head bent, spidery fingers tapping keys, swiping screens.
He looked up and fixed Eve with beady eyes. “Figured you’d be in here this morning to nag my ass.”
“I’m not interested in your ass. What did he use to dose the victims?”
“I’m looking right now to see if we got the same in the second one, aren’t I? What he used on Culver? He did a cocktail of secobarbital and phenobarbital. The one’s short acting—it’s going to last about fifteen minutes—and the other’s long acting—you can get twelve hours out of it.”
“Why mix them?”
“Can’t tell you. Either one’d do the job. Maybe he wanted the sec—kicks in faster—but he wanted to be sure he had enough time, so went with the cocktail.”
Yes, she thought. That played.
“Okay, what else?”
