Page 14 of Festive in Death

“Nearly there, Dallas. Not such a tricky one. Just tedious. He spent a lot of time on the layers, but no pizzazz. Just takes some time.” He glanced over at her, grinned. “Watch it be empty after all this! Wouldn’t that be a bitch?”

“Don’t make me kick your ass, McNab.”

“Last sequence coming up, locking in, and... bam! Overridden. It’s all yours, Lieutenant.”

“Okay, let’s see what was so fricking important.”

It wasn’t empty.

Wrapped packs of bills formed neat stacks and rows. Low denomination, Eve noted, banded in thousand-dollar packs.

“Holy shit!” Lill clamped a hand on Eve’s shoulder as she leaned in, goggled. “Holy shit, where did Trey get all that money? Cash money. Who has that kind of real money anywhere?”

“Good question. Peabody, let’s get an accurate count with Ms. Byers as witness, then seal and log. He put the second lock on when?”

“Ah. God. Maybe a month ago,” Lill managed. “Maybe more like six weeks. Yeah, more like six weeks ago.”

Just what kind of side business had Ziegler launched in the past few weeks? Eve wondered. Whatever it had been, it had proven lucrative and deadly.

“A hundred and sixty-five thousand, Dallas. A hundred and sixty-five thousand-dollar stacks, and one broken stack with five thousand. Crisp new twenty-dollar bills,” Peabody added. “Rubber-banded. Not bank-banded.”

“Seal it up. McNab, go through the staff comps here, then take his home unit, his ’link. Do the works. We appreciate your time and cooperation,” she told Lill.

“Will you kind of keep me up on things? I can’t believe Trey had all that money in there. I can’t believe he’s dead. None of this is really getting through, you know?”

“Will let you know what we can when we can.”

“Okay. Oh, listen, let me get you a bag. A complimentary Buff Bodies gym bag. You can’t carry all that money out of here in those clear bags.”

“Good thought.”

Once it was loaded up in the bold red bag with the glittery double B logo, Eve glanced at her wrist unit. “We’re going to take a good, hard look at his financials. We need to get this into evidence, then double back here, talk to Coburn, check in with Morris, and start working down Ziegler’s client list.”

“I know but, Dallas? I’m carrying a hundred and sixty-five thousand dollars in a gym bag.” Peabody slung it over her shoulder like Santa Claus as they walked back out into the cold. “I mean, jeez! Ho, ho, freaking ho!”

“I’ve never held this much money at one time in my life. I thought it would be heavier,” Peabody said as they walked into Cop Central.

“What kind of asshole keeps that much cash in a staff locker at a gym? Cheap bastard’s right. Wanted the cash,” Eve speculated. “No record of it that way, you can wash cash easy enough.”

“I’ll start on the financials, but no way that was saved up or legit. It was all new money. New money smells really good.”

“No sniffing the evidence.” Eve hopped off the glide.

She wanted to swing into Homicide, check a few things, start her murder book and board while Peabody dug into the vic’s financials. Then they’d circle back around for interviews.

Plus her office at Central offered the one thing she hadn’t had access to since she’d been rudely called out of a warm bed in the middle of the night.

Real coffee.

She turned into the bullpen and the noise of comps, voices, ’links. Someone had dug out a tatty and tawdry length of silver garland, strung it over the side windows. An even tattier sign announcing “HAPPY HOLIDAYS” hung crookedly from it.

Perhaps the same determined elf had dragged in the pitiful, spindly fake tree, propped it in a corner. ID shots of detectives and uniforms decorated the branches with Eve’s stuck on the stubby top.

“Seriously?”

The slick-suited Detective Baxter stepped over to study it with her. “Santiago pulled it out of the recycler.”

“Waste not, want not,” Santiago said from his desk. “Carmichael did the decorations.”

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