Peabody gave her the side-eye—Eve felt it. “Okay. I guess there will be talk about it all pretty soon.”
“That may be to our advantage. He thinks, and I agree, this Royal Suite is too recognizable, too famous, for a fence—even a high-end one.”
“So somebody wants to do what Barrister did—the father anyway—keep them all locked away just for him.”
“Maybe. Or, and what feels more likely, or at least worth pursuing: auction. Exclusive, underground. Then somebody with piles of money locks them away and gloats over them.”
“It’s stupid, you know?” Shaking her head, Peabody looked down at her cowboy boots. “Somebody with that kind of money could buy whatever the hell they wanted.”
“TheDavidthing. The big-assDavidstatue thing. He has a big ass, all tight and toned, and in proportion, but big.”
“Okay, not that. But you want to wear emeralds as big as my fist, you buy them. But someone like the vic’s father—his type—that’s not enough. They want the shine. It’s really a smear, but they see it as a shine, of taking it, hoarding it.”
When they turned into the garage at Central, Peabody shifted. “Is it really, really frosty? TheDavid. I mean seeing it for real, is it frost extreme?”
“I didn’t think it would be. Okay, so a giant statue of a naked boy with a slingshot. So?”
She pulled into her slot, parked, sat a moment. “It doesn’t seem possible. It’s taking your breath, dropping your jaw, and you’re thinking that can’t be real, and why is it so beautiful, this giant naked boy with a slingshot? How did anyone create that level of detail out of a giant slab of marble anyway? So take frost extreme up however many more notches are left, then double that.”
Peabody sighed. “One of these days I’m going to see it for myself. That and all the other really frosty extremes.”
They got out of the car, walked to the elevator.
“All somebody like Henry Barrister can do is gloat,” Peabody added. “They can’t really admire or look in wonder. It’s just stupid.”
“If he wasn’t dead, it’d be a pleasure to lock him up instead of all his loot. But since he is, and we’ve got murder attached to this theft, Roarke’s going to keep his ear to the ground. And we’re going to have EDD looking for chatter on the underground. We’re going to see if we can pull in Detective Willowby. Underground shit’s her specialty.”
“That’s a good call. Do you want me to reach out?”
“No, I’ll do it. Talk to the medicals, start your half of the loot list.”
They walked into a mercifully empty elevator.
“Get what you can get done by one, then take off. Hit the street fair.”
“Oh, but you said you were doing a follow-up at Barrister House.”
“And I can handle it. You can push on the rest of the list tomorrow. But Sundays are worse than Saturdays.”
When the elevator opened and two annoyed-looking uniforms hauled in an even more annoyed-looking man of about twenty-five—trench coat, baggies, well-worn kicks—she resigned herself to the company of a busted street thief.
“I found that stuff. You can’t prove otherwise. I told you, I found it, picked it up. Finders keepers.”
The uniform on the right cast her eyes up. “Right, dipshit, you just happened to find three wallets, two ’links, and a wrist unit while strolling down Broadway.”
“That’s right! You can’t prove otherwise. It’s my fault they’re just lying there?”
The second cop slanted a look back at Eve and Peabody. “Yeah, like all the stuff you got busted for strolling along with last time was just lying there.”
“That’s right.”
“You’re really bad at this,” the first cop decided as they muscled him off again.
“Some people,” Eve considered, “should just get a regular job. It may suck to bus tables or ring up sales at a twenty-four/seven, but it’s got to be better than cooling it in a cell for thirty or sixty days a couple times a year.”
They got off, walked down to Homicide to find Baxter and Trueheart at their desks. The young, earnest Detective Trueheart worked his comp. The slick-dressed Baxter had his fancy Italian shoes on his desk, his chair kicked back, his eyes closed.
“Since you caught the weekend roll, shouldn’t you actually do something to earn the pay?”
