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Ransom in Death - Chapter 1
Posted by
Cyrex
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12 August 2012
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Peggy McKenzie felt like a new woman. She knew this trip to New York City was a good idea. It had been four years since she left that horrible hospital and she hated every day of her life. The time before seemed like a story someone else had lived. Today Peggy felt like she was waking up.
George reluctantly dropped her off at the Elizabeth Arden Red Door Salon that morning. “Don’t change too much,” he’d warned. “I like my wife just the way she is.”
Just the way she was....dumpy, frumpy, unfashionable and in sensible shoes.
Peggy stopped to admire her new look in a store window. Gone was the mousy brown hair that had grown long and stringy since her return from the hospital. In its place was a short stylish bob that played off high cheekbones and true blue eyes. She’d gone with pale blonde that seemed to suit her ivory skin better than the brown ever had.
The girl at the salon had a true hand with make-up, Peggy thought admiringly. She was a little concerned if she could recreate the make-up and hair on her own. Eyes normally dull and faded blue now sparkled with color, a thick fringe of lashes made her eyes the focus of her face.
Heavens knew she was no longer young, but she was surprisingly attractive. Maybe when he saw the possibilities, George would spring for that face refresh she had been hinting about.
The new suit showed her figure off to its best. Who know she had a waist? George had been shopping for her since “the incident”. He always favored the loose, dull, gray dresses that had become her staple. With new foundation garments and this gorgeous apricot suit, Peggy swore never to wear those dresses again. She was going to burn everything in her closet.
The big surprise had to be the shoes. High, needle thin heels originally terrified her. How would she ever walk on them? But from the first step, she felt strong, balanced, as if she was coming into her own again.
It was odd, Peggy thought, she always felt like she didn’t know the person in the mirror. But today, as she surveyed herself in the full length 360 mirror at the salon, she nearly recognized the woman there. Something was still missing, she couldn’t quite identify it, but she felt like she was nearly back to herself.
She turned from the window and started to the curb. She had spent so much time admiring herself, she nearly missed the pedestrian walk.
“Barbara, Barbara, is that you?” A woman’s voice called. Peggy turned and searched the oncoming crowd of pedestrians. She focused on a small dark-haired young woman. Images poured into her brain, like a dam had broken loose. She stumbled back.
A lie...it had all been a lie. When she got her hands on George McKenzie....the heel of her beautiful new, expensive shoes slipped over the edge of the curb, sending her sprawling into the street.
The driver of the cab was focused on the light and did not see the woman fall in front of his right front tire. He cursed at the bump as he punched the accelerator when the light went green. Had he hit the curb? He heard the screams and glanced in the rearview mirror to see a crowd gathering around a body on the street.
With a sick feeling it wasn’t the curb he had hit in his haste, he pulled to the curb and waited for the cops.
Troy Trueheart stood over the body. Blood and gray matter matted the blonde hair. Beside him his trainer Detective David Baxter looked dapper in his suit despite the heat of the day. It looked like a traffic accident, tragic maybe, but not homicide.
“Work the scene,” Baxter said.
“What?” Trueheart asked, startled.
“Work the scene. Wits are saying she responded to a call and backed off the curb. Maybe an accident, maybe she saw someone who frightened her. We work the scene,” Baxter rocked back on his heels. Everything pointed to a traffic accident. He loved heels on a woman, but Christ, those needle thin heels should be considered an accident waiting to happen.
“Check time of death and get an ident,” Baxter told Trueheart. “I’m going to check if we have any pictures of the accident,” he glanced up at the camera over the traffic light and a couple of cameras over the store windows.
“Yes, sir,” Trueheart put sealant on his hands and started to work. They knew the accident had occurred 20 minutes earlier, but he dutifully checked and confirmed the body told the same story as the witnesses. Next he ran the identity scan. Margaret Lynn McKenzie, 54 of Eastport, Maine. Married, no children.
Since she was from out of town, Trueheart ran a search on hotels in the city and found a registration for George and Peggy McKenzie in a Traveler’s Inn not far from the Cruise Ship terminal. By the time he finished the search, Baxter was back.
“Disks are being sent to EDD,” Baxter said. “They’ll be doing a recognition search on the clothes since the face is a loss.”
“I’ve got an ID picture of her, but it doesn’t look current,” Trueheart handed Baxter his link. Peggy McKenzie looked out at them, tired, eyes faded, hair pulled back in a long brown tail and looking stringy and greasy.
Baxter looked between the picture of a woman who had given up and the smartly dressed, well-manicured woman with the short hair that had probably been styled before the accident. “Maybe came into the city for a make-over.”
“It looks like she’s registered at The Traveler’s Inn with a George McKenzie, husband,” Trueheart told Baxter.
“Let’s get this over with, then,” Baxter said. He nodded to the crew waiting to take her to the morgue. In a few minutes, traffic would be back to normal. He looked towards the cab still off to the side of the road. The cabbie sat sideways on the passenger seat, his head between his hands.
It was likely to be what it appeared, a stupid case of high heels and impatience that left a woman with a new makeover dead in the street and a man with the haunting knowledge he had been the instrument of that death.
Sometimes life just sucked, and now he and Trueheart were going to have to notify a husband that his wife would not be coming back.
George McKenzie gave Baxter the itch. He was shocked and pale at the news of his wife’s death, but there was no question if they were sure, no denial. He didn’t ask to see the body. He just numbly took the news in the small rundown, over-priced single room.
Somehow it seemed like he had lost a job, not a wife, Baxter thought. He handed McKenzie his card and told him they would be in touch when his wife’s body was available for release. McKenzie just nodded. When Baxter and Trueheart left, McKenzie sat for several minutes, his hands dangling between his knees.
After a few minutes, he pulled out his link and made a call. After a quick conversation, he threw the few things he had unpacked into his suitcase and walked out of the room. Outside of the hotel he tossed his link on the sidewalk and ground it into pieces with his shoe. A few blocks away, he took a brief detour into an alley and tossed the pieces of his link into 3 separate recyclers.
He opened his case and took out a hooded jacket. It was so damned hot, but he needed to cover his features.
A homeless man watched from his spot at the other end of the alley. George McKenzie eyed the rolling cart the man used for his worldly possessions. Grimly he approached the man and negotiated a deal, the contents of his suitcase and 40 credits for the cart.
He tossed a few pieces of trash into the cart even the homeless didn’t want. With the hood of the jacket pulled up around his face, he pushed the cart out the other end of the alley from where he entered. George McKenzie ceased to exist.
“No new cases today,” Roarke reminded Eve. “Administrative work only.”
“Sheesh,” Eve replied, “I know. I promise.
“I mean it Eve, this is the U.S. Senate. You’re slated to appear at 1:30,” Roarke reminded her. “The shuttle will be leaving at 11:30. Craig wants to talk with us before we go to Capitol Hill.”
Craig Underhouse was one of Roarke’s legal team. He had been working on the whole organ regrowth Congressional investigation since it was launched six months ago. It was nearly two years ago that Doctor Michael Waverly had launched his unsanctioned tests on human subjects of his formula to regrow damaged organs. He had managed to get her thrown off the job, but with the help of Feeney, Roarke and Louise Dimatto, he had been stopped.
A year ago his research had gone up for auction and Roarke bought it. When he didn’t develop it or market it, the faction within Congress that had secretly supported Waverly’s agenda launched an investigation. It was bullshit, Eve thought. A waste of taxpayer money and her time, but Senator Bryan Waylan had campaigned on the promise of freeing people from artificial organs. He had the power to bring the investigation to the Senate floor.
Whitney, Tibble and several doctors from the Nordick Clinic where Waverly had run most of his tests, were slated for morning testimony.
Eve wore one of the power suits that had slowly been appearing in her closet. She had fought long and hard about the need to go into Central this morning. Both she and Roarke knew she could do the work from her home office, but it was the principal of the thing. No bat-shit crazy Senator was going to interfere with Eve being a cop.
“Look, Roarke, I know you have Peabody, Feeney and half the bullpen agreeing to get me to the airport in time. I’ll be on the shuttle in time for takeoff.”
“And no blood on this nice suit, or on you,” Roarke rubbed his hands up and down Eve’s arms, then leaned in and kissed her. “I didn’t mean to bring you into this.”
“You didn’t, they did.” This time she kissed him. “Now let me get out of here so I have time to do something in the,” she looked down at her nondescript wrist unit and calculated, “three hours and 15 minutes...”
“Two hours and 45 minutes,” Roarke corrected with a smile, “allowing time for traffic.”
“... I have to get five hours of work done,” Eve continued barely pausing. She pulled away from Roarke and headed out of the bedroom and down the stairs to the car Summerset had waiting for her.
“Dr. Morris,” Shelby intercepted the Chief Medical Examiner as he came in the door. “Do you have a moment before you start your first autopsy?”
Shelby was young, inexperienced. He had been keeping her on the simple autopsies. Morris almost sighed wondering what she had found this time. Every body seemed to have an unexpected issue he needed to look at when Shelby did the cut.
She was thorough, Morris reminded himself. It was important to foster that while gently guiding her towards judging what was important and what was not.
With that firmly in mind, Morris nodded, “What have you got?”
“Traffic accident, the officer in charge, a Troy Trueheart asked for an in-depth,” Morris barely stopped the shudder. Trueheart was another trainee, eager to dot all the i’s, cross all the t’s.
“The medical records from the ident, don’t match the body,” Shelby said.
Morris began scanning the two reports. A frown formed. One or two missed items were not unusual, but these were definitely records from two different women.
“I remembered from class that sometimes when someone is in Witness Protection, a false ident is set in the system ahead of the real one, so I let the search run overnight. This was waiting for me when I came in this morning,” Shelby hit a couple of buttons and a well-dressed, smiling woman came up on the monitor.
“Barbara Prince, wife of Supreme Court Justice Eric Prince. The ident is flagged by Secret Service. It should have come up as a priority. Instead, someone suppressed it. And Prince’s medicals match the woman on the slab, at least up to four years ago. That’s when Prince’s records stop.”
He may never think another bad thing about a trainee again, Morris thought. “Get Trueheart and Baxter down here. Better alert Lieutenant Dallas. Good job, Shelby.”
“Wait til I tell you about the tox report,” Shelby barely kept from rubbing her hands together.
When the call from the morgue came in, Dallas figured she had 45 minutes left before the absolute last minute she had to leave. It wasn’t her case, she thought, but Trueheart’s. Baxter was serious about Trueheart taking the Detective’s exam, she thought. If Morris thought it was worth flagging her, she better hit the morgue and see what was up.
Peabody looked up as Dallas left her office. No way was the Lieutenant leaving so far ahead of schedule. She stood and intercepted Dallas.
“On your way?” Peabody asked casually.
She didn’t fool Dallas. Roarke had engaged virtually everyone at Cop Central in the task to get her on the shuttle on time. Whitney had backed the effort.
“Via the morgue. Seems that Trueheart and Baxter caught something interesting.”
Peabody fell in step, “I better come with you, in case you have to leave before you get all the details.”
“Christ, Peabody, do you think I can’t find my way to the airport?” Dallas grumbled.
“I have every confidence you can find your way to the airport, sir. It is the timing that is in question.”
Dallas wanted to object, but history was on Peabody’s side. She nodded acceptance.
Trueheart and Baxter were already talking with Morris when Dallas and Peabody arrived.
“What’s this about?” Dallas asked, aware of the clock counting down in her head.
“Dallas,” Baxter greeted her, “the boy here has found something interesting. Tell her Trueheart.”
“Ah, sir, the victim, Margaret McKenzie, she didn’t look like her ident shot. When we spoke to her husband, well ah, Detective Baxter noticed he didn’t respond like most victim’s spouses. Didn’t really seem interested. And there was his hands.”
“His hands?” Dallas prompted.
“According to his information, he was a fisherman, but his hands were...well soft. It didn’t feel right.”
This time Dallas let silence be the prompt for Trueheart to continue. Peabody remained silent as well, but sent Trueheart a sympathetic glance and go ahead nod.
“Yes, sir. I asked for an indepth autopsy. Detective Baxter recovered the traffic and security cams. We got a good shot of the vic before the accident and ran a facial recognition. This morning when we came in, the scan had matched with Barbara Prince, the wife of a Supreme Court Justice.”
Morris stepped in at this point, “Shelby handled the autopsy.” He gestured her forward.
“The medical records indicated McKenzie had never been pregnant, but the body suggested at least two pregnancies, likely to full term. I also found evidence of breast implants, eye surgery of a very high grade, two broken bones that had healed nicely, and several other items not in her medical history. It’s all in my report.”
“I’m sure it is,” Dallas said, “Go on.”
“I thought it might be some sort of witness protection thing, you know? So I ran another ident search on her, but set it to run after the initial match. This morning it came up with Barbara Prince. Medicals match.”
“So you both came up with the same name?”
“She’s the wife of a Supreme Court Justice, Dallas,” Baxter said. “One who hasn’t been seen in public for four years. Since you’re going to East Washington today, we thought you might follow-up with the Justice.”
The ten minute warning alert on the wrist unit sounded. Roarke had programmed it in for her as a reminder to wrap things up.
“Get me all the information you can on Barbara Prince, where she’s been for the past four years. Also I need statements from Margaret McKenzie’s husband and neighbors. I want to know if this is a mix up or intentional. If I’m going to take on a Supreme Court Justice, I need everything you can get.”
Dallas started to leave. She knew Roarke had entered a voice message at the five minute mark. She’d never live it down if it played in front of Baxter.
“Ah, Lieutenant,” Trueheart said hesitantly, “the husband, that is George McKenzie, he’s gone.”
“Find him,” Dallas threw another order over her shoulder as she hurried out, “Peabody, see to it. Catch a ride back to Central with Baxter and Trueheart. I’ve got a shuttle to catch.”
"I didn't get a chance to tell her about the tox screen," Shelby pouted.
"Tell me," Peabody said.
Dallas made it inside the vehicle before Roarke’s voice came from the wrist unit “Darling, Eve, if you are not on the way, you’re late.”
“Late, my ass,” Dallas punched it, sending her vehicle careening down the blessedly empty street.
She walked on the shuttle at 11:28 with 2 minutes to spare.
George reluctantly dropped her off at the Elizabeth Arden Red Door Salon that morning. “Don’t change too much,” he’d warned. “I like my wife just the way she is.”
Just the way she was....dumpy, frumpy, unfashionable and in sensible shoes.
Peggy stopped to admire her new look in a store window. Gone was the mousy brown hair that had grown long and stringy since her return from the hospital. In its place was a short stylish bob that played off high cheekbones and true blue eyes. She’d gone with pale blonde that seemed to suit her ivory skin better than the brown ever had.
The girl at the salon had a true hand with make-up, Peggy thought admiringly. She was a little concerned if she could recreate the make-up and hair on her own. Eyes normally dull and faded blue now sparkled with color, a thick fringe of lashes made her eyes the focus of her face.
Heavens knew she was no longer young, but she was surprisingly attractive. Maybe when he saw the possibilities, George would spring for that face refresh she had been hinting about.
The new suit showed her figure off to its best. Who know she had a waist? George had been shopping for her since “the incident”. He always favored the loose, dull, gray dresses that had become her staple. With new foundation garments and this gorgeous apricot suit, Peggy swore never to wear those dresses again. She was going to burn everything in her closet.
The big surprise had to be the shoes. High, needle thin heels originally terrified her. How would she ever walk on them? But from the first step, she felt strong, balanced, as if she was coming into her own again.
It was odd, Peggy thought, she always felt like she didn’t know the person in the mirror. But today, as she surveyed herself in the full length 360 mirror at the salon, she nearly recognized the woman there. Something was still missing, she couldn’t quite identify it, but she felt like she was nearly back to herself.
She turned from the window and started to the curb. She had spent so much time admiring herself, she nearly missed the pedestrian walk.
“Barbara, Barbara, is that you?” A woman’s voice called. Peggy turned and searched the oncoming crowd of pedestrians. She focused on a small dark-haired young woman. Images poured into her brain, like a dam had broken loose. She stumbled back.
A lie...it had all been a lie. When she got her hands on George McKenzie....the heel of her beautiful new, expensive shoes slipped over the edge of the curb, sending her sprawling into the street.
The driver of the cab was focused on the light and did not see the woman fall in front of his right front tire. He cursed at the bump as he punched the accelerator when the light went green. Had he hit the curb? He heard the screams and glanced in the rearview mirror to see a crowd gathering around a body on the street.
With a sick feeling it wasn’t the curb he had hit in his haste, he pulled to the curb and waited for the cops.
#
Troy Trueheart stood over the body. Blood and gray matter matted the blonde hair. Beside him his trainer Detective David Baxter looked dapper in his suit despite the heat of the day. It looked like a traffic accident, tragic maybe, but not homicide.
“Work the scene,” Baxter said.
“What?” Trueheart asked, startled.
“Work the scene. Wits are saying she responded to a call and backed off the curb. Maybe an accident, maybe she saw someone who frightened her. We work the scene,” Baxter rocked back on his heels. Everything pointed to a traffic accident. He loved heels on a woman, but Christ, those needle thin heels should be considered an accident waiting to happen.
“Check time of death and get an ident,” Baxter told Trueheart. “I’m going to check if we have any pictures of the accident,” he glanced up at the camera over the traffic light and a couple of cameras over the store windows.
“Yes, sir,” Trueheart put sealant on his hands and started to work. They knew the accident had occurred 20 minutes earlier, but he dutifully checked and confirmed the body told the same story as the witnesses. Next he ran the identity scan. Margaret Lynn McKenzie, 54 of Eastport, Maine. Married, no children.
Since she was from out of town, Trueheart ran a search on hotels in the city and found a registration for George and Peggy McKenzie in a Traveler’s Inn not far from the Cruise Ship terminal. By the time he finished the search, Baxter was back.
“Disks are being sent to EDD,” Baxter said. “They’ll be doing a recognition search on the clothes since the face is a loss.”
“I’ve got an ID picture of her, but it doesn’t look current,” Trueheart handed Baxter his link. Peggy McKenzie looked out at them, tired, eyes faded, hair pulled back in a long brown tail and looking stringy and greasy.
Baxter looked between the picture of a woman who had given up and the smartly dressed, well-manicured woman with the short hair that had probably been styled before the accident. “Maybe came into the city for a make-over.”
“It looks like she’s registered at The Traveler’s Inn with a George McKenzie, husband,” Trueheart told Baxter.
“Let’s get this over with, then,” Baxter said. He nodded to the crew waiting to take her to the morgue. In a few minutes, traffic would be back to normal. He looked towards the cab still off to the side of the road. The cabbie sat sideways on the passenger seat, his head between his hands.
It was likely to be what it appeared, a stupid case of high heels and impatience that left a woman with a new makeover dead in the street and a man with the haunting knowledge he had been the instrument of that death.
Sometimes life just sucked, and now he and Trueheart were going to have to notify a husband that his wife would not be coming back.
#
George McKenzie gave Baxter the itch. He was shocked and pale at the news of his wife’s death, but there was no question if they were sure, no denial. He didn’t ask to see the body. He just numbly took the news in the small rundown, over-priced single room.
Somehow it seemed like he had lost a job, not a wife, Baxter thought. He handed McKenzie his card and told him they would be in touch when his wife’s body was available for release. McKenzie just nodded. When Baxter and Trueheart left, McKenzie sat for several minutes, his hands dangling between his knees.
After a few minutes, he pulled out his link and made a call. After a quick conversation, he threw the few things he had unpacked into his suitcase and walked out of the room. Outside of the hotel he tossed his link on the sidewalk and ground it into pieces with his shoe. A few blocks away, he took a brief detour into an alley and tossed the pieces of his link into 3 separate recyclers.
He opened his case and took out a hooded jacket. It was so damned hot, but he needed to cover his features.
A homeless man watched from his spot at the other end of the alley. George McKenzie eyed the rolling cart the man used for his worldly possessions. Grimly he approached the man and negotiated a deal, the contents of his suitcase and 40 credits for the cart.
He tossed a few pieces of trash into the cart even the homeless didn’t want. With the hood of the jacket pulled up around his face, he pushed the cart out the other end of the alley from where he entered. George McKenzie ceased to exist.
#
“No new cases today,” Roarke reminded Eve. “Administrative work only.”
“Sheesh,” Eve replied, “I know. I promise.
“I mean it Eve, this is the U.S. Senate. You’re slated to appear at 1:30,” Roarke reminded her. “The shuttle will be leaving at 11:30. Craig wants to talk with us before we go to Capitol Hill.”
Craig Underhouse was one of Roarke’s legal team. He had been working on the whole organ regrowth Congressional investigation since it was launched six months ago. It was nearly two years ago that Doctor Michael Waverly had launched his unsanctioned tests on human subjects of his formula to regrow damaged organs. He had managed to get her thrown off the job, but with the help of Feeney, Roarke and Louise Dimatto, he had been stopped.
A year ago his research had gone up for auction and Roarke bought it. When he didn’t develop it or market it, the faction within Congress that had secretly supported Waverly’s agenda launched an investigation. It was bullshit, Eve thought. A waste of taxpayer money and her time, but Senator Bryan Waylan had campaigned on the promise of freeing people from artificial organs. He had the power to bring the investigation to the Senate floor.
Whitney, Tibble and several doctors from the Nordick Clinic where Waverly had run most of his tests, were slated for morning testimony.
Eve wore one of the power suits that had slowly been appearing in her closet. She had fought long and hard about the need to go into Central this morning. Both she and Roarke knew she could do the work from her home office, but it was the principal of the thing. No bat-shit crazy Senator was going to interfere with Eve being a cop.
“Look, Roarke, I know you have Peabody, Feeney and half the bullpen agreeing to get me to the airport in time. I’ll be on the shuttle in time for takeoff.”
“And no blood on this nice suit, or on you,” Roarke rubbed his hands up and down Eve’s arms, then leaned in and kissed her. “I didn’t mean to bring you into this.”
“You didn’t, they did.” This time she kissed him. “Now let me get out of here so I have time to do something in the,” she looked down at her nondescript wrist unit and calculated, “three hours and 15 minutes...”
“Two hours and 45 minutes,” Roarke corrected with a smile, “allowing time for traffic.”
“... I have to get five hours of work done,” Eve continued barely pausing. She pulled away from Roarke and headed out of the bedroom and down the stairs to the car Summerset had waiting for her.
#
“Dr. Morris,” Shelby intercepted the Chief Medical Examiner as he came in the door. “Do you have a moment before you start your first autopsy?”
Shelby was young, inexperienced. He had been keeping her on the simple autopsies. Morris almost sighed wondering what she had found this time. Every body seemed to have an unexpected issue he needed to look at when Shelby did the cut.
She was thorough, Morris reminded himself. It was important to foster that while gently guiding her towards judging what was important and what was not.
With that firmly in mind, Morris nodded, “What have you got?”
“Traffic accident, the officer in charge, a Troy Trueheart asked for an in-depth,” Morris barely stopped the shudder. Trueheart was another trainee, eager to dot all the i’s, cross all the t’s.
“The medical records from the ident, don’t match the body,” Shelby said.
Morris began scanning the two reports. A frown formed. One or two missed items were not unusual, but these were definitely records from two different women.
“I remembered from class that sometimes when someone is in Witness Protection, a false ident is set in the system ahead of the real one, so I let the search run overnight. This was waiting for me when I came in this morning,” Shelby hit a couple of buttons and a well-dressed, smiling woman came up on the monitor.
“Barbara Prince, wife of Supreme Court Justice Eric Prince. The ident is flagged by Secret Service. It should have come up as a priority. Instead, someone suppressed it. And Prince’s medicals match the woman on the slab, at least up to four years ago. That’s when Prince’s records stop.”
He may never think another bad thing about a trainee again, Morris thought. “Get Trueheart and Baxter down here. Better alert Lieutenant Dallas. Good job, Shelby.”
“Wait til I tell you about the tox report,” Shelby barely kept from rubbing her hands together.
#
When the call from the morgue came in, Dallas figured she had 45 minutes left before the absolute last minute she had to leave. It wasn’t her case, she thought, but Trueheart’s. Baxter was serious about Trueheart taking the Detective’s exam, she thought. If Morris thought it was worth flagging her, she better hit the morgue and see what was up.
Peabody looked up as Dallas left her office. No way was the Lieutenant leaving so far ahead of schedule. She stood and intercepted Dallas.
“On your way?” Peabody asked casually.
She didn’t fool Dallas. Roarke had engaged virtually everyone at Cop Central in the task to get her on the shuttle on time. Whitney had backed the effort.
“Via the morgue. Seems that Trueheart and Baxter caught something interesting.”
Peabody fell in step, “I better come with you, in case you have to leave before you get all the details.”
“Christ, Peabody, do you think I can’t find my way to the airport?” Dallas grumbled.
“I have every confidence you can find your way to the airport, sir. It is the timing that is in question.”
Dallas wanted to object, but history was on Peabody’s side. She nodded acceptance.
#
Trueheart and Baxter were already talking with Morris when Dallas and Peabody arrived.
“What’s this about?” Dallas asked, aware of the clock counting down in her head.
“Dallas,” Baxter greeted her, “the boy here has found something interesting. Tell her Trueheart.”
“Ah, sir, the victim, Margaret McKenzie, she didn’t look like her ident shot. When we spoke to her husband, well ah, Detective Baxter noticed he didn’t respond like most victim’s spouses. Didn’t really seem interested. And there was his hands.”
“His hands?” Dallas prompted.
“According to his information, he was a fisherman, but his hands were...well soft. It didn’t feel right.”
This time Dallas let silence be the prompt for Trueheart to continue. Peabody remained silent as well, but sent Trueheart a sympathetic glance and go ahead nod.
“Yes, sir. I asked for an indepth autopsy. Detective Baxter recovered the traffic and security cams. We got a good shot of the vic before the accident and ran a facial recognition. This morning when we came in, the scan had matched with Barbara Prince, the wife of a Supreme Court Justice.”
Morris stepped in at this point, “Shelby handled the autopsy.” He gestured her forward.
“The medical records indicated McKenzie had never been pregnant, but the body suggested at least two pregnancies, likely to full term. I also found evidence of breast implants, eye surgery of a very high grade, two broken bones that had healed nicely, and several other items not in her medical history. It’s all in my report.”
“I’m sure it is,” Dallas said, “Go on.”
“I thought it might be some sort of witness protection thing, you know? So I ran another ident search on her, but set it to run after the initial match. This morning it came up with Barbara Prince. Medicals match.”
“So you both came up with the same name?”
“She’s the wife of a Supreme Court Justice, Dallas,” Baxter said. “One who hasn’t been seen in public for four years. Since you’re going to East Washington today, we thought you might follow-up with the Justice.”
The ten minute warning alert on the wrist unit sounded. Roarke had programmed it in for her as a reminder to wrap things up.
“Get me all the information you can on Barbara Prince, where she’s been for the past four years. Also I need statements from Margaret McKenzie’s husband and neighbors. I want to know if this is a mix up or intentional. If I’m going to take on a Supreme Court Justice, I need everything you can get.”
Dallas started to leave. She knew Roarke had entered a voice message at the five minute mark. She’d never live it down if it played in front of Baxter.
“Ah, Lieutenant,” Trueheart said hesitantly, “the husband, that is George McKenzie, he’s gone.”
“Find him,” Dallas threw another order over her shoulder as she hurried out, “Peabody, see to it. Catch a ride back to Central with Baxter and Trueheart. I’ve got a shuttle to catch.”
"I didn't get a chance to tell her about the tox screen," Shelby pouted.
"Tell me," Peabody said.
Dallas made it inside the vehicle before Roarke’s voice came from the wrist unit “Darling, Eve, if you are not on the way, you’re late.”
“Late, my ass,” Dallas punched it, sending her vehicle careening down the blessedly empty street.
She walked on the shuttle at 11:28 with 2 minutes to spare.
I know, you are going to make it all come together. Riiight?? 
