If heat was supposed to rise, why the hell was it so much colder up here? She moved through the doorless opening to the left to do a thorough search.
Floors are too clean, she thought. And there was no debris here as there was in the other smaller unit, no faded graffiti decorating the walls. Eve cocked her head at the large hole in the wall on the far right. It looked as though it had been measured and cut, neatly, as a doorway.
She crossed the room to shine her light into the dark.
The skeleton lay as if in repose. In the center of the skull’s forehead was a small, almost tidy hole.
Cupped in the yellowed fingers was the glittery mate to the diamond clip. And near the other was the chrome gleam of a semi-automatic.
„Well son of a bitch,“ Eve murmured, and pulled out her communicator to hail Peabody.
Two
„It’s her. It’s got to be her.“
„Her being the current vic’s ancestor’s dead wife.“ Eve drove through spitting ice from the crime scene to the victim’s home.
„Or lover. I’m not sure they were actually married now that I think about it. Gonna check on that,“ Peabody added, making a note in her memo book. „But here’s what must’ve gone down: Hopkins, the first one, kills Bobbie, then bricks the body up in the wall of the apartment he used over the club.“
„And the cops at the time didn’t notice there was a spanking new brick wall in the apartment?“
„Maybe they didn’t look very hard. Hopkins had a lot of money, and a river of illegal substances. A lot of connections, and probably a lot of information certain high connections wouldn’t want made public.“
„He bought off the investigation.“ Whether it happened eighty-five years ago or yesterday, the smell of bad cops offended Eve’s senses. But… „Not impossible,“ she had to admit. „If it is the missing wife/girlfriend, it could be she wasn’t reported missing until he had everything fairly tidied up. Then you got your payoff, or classic blackmail regarding the investigators, and he walks clean.“