Page 158 of Golden Eagle

But that would disappoint Sasha.

So Nikita said, “Yeah.” He waved them toward the door, and said to the first few people in line, “They’re on the VIP list.”

That quieted everyone; if anyone looked like he belonged on a VIP list, it was Val.

Val dipped his head in a kind of discreet bow. “Why, thank you, dear.”

Fuck you, Nikita thought, and watched them go in.

It was going to be a long night.

~*~

“I’ve been looking through old case files,” Garcia said as he hustled back up to their desks, arms loaded with file folders, and Trina bit back a groan.

Lanny and his temporary new partner – chalk-pale and shaky with the unmistakable signs of a rookie who’d just come across a scene his stomach couldn’t handle yet – had returned hours ago, and Lanny had met her gaze and given a single nod. Yes, it had been the ferals again – or,feral, singular, since she’d taken one out. Technically, she wasn’t supposed to be working on this case; was instead supposed to stick to overdue paperwork, contemplate her own behavior, and pray IAB deemed it a good shoot. But no one else in the precinct was equipped to handle this particular case, especially not a green newbie like Garcia, no matter how eager and helpful he was being.

At this point, all that eager, helpful energy was a hindrance. Lanny kept trying to send him on errands, but he was damn efficient, and always popped right back into view. He’d dragged a spare chair – old, squeaky, halfway to broken – over to their pushed-together desks, and clung on the side like a barnacle that refused to be scraped off.

“Here – let me just – put that there–” He rearranged the mug that held Trina’s pens and paperclips, moved Lanny’s coffee, shoved over the little tray that served as a physical inbox, and laid his files out. Lanny looked faintly murderous, and Trina shook her head at him. “There. Now. I did a keyword search for past cases. For–” He hesitated, voice going shivery, and then said in a nauseated rush – “dismemberment, disembowelment, that sort of thing. And apparently there’s a street gang called the Hyenas who–”

“Nah,” Lanny said. “Gonna stop you right there, kid. This wasn’t them.”

“But…” Stricken, Garcia looked between the open file and Lanny’s unimpressed face. “They like to use meat cleavers and–”

“You were on the scene,” Lanny said. “Did that look like the work of a meat cleaver to you?”

He gulped. “I don’t…um…I’ve never…”

If he puked on Trina’s desk, she was going to make him drag the whole thing outside and hose if off.

Lanny rolled his eyes, but when he spoke, it was with his educating voice, and wasn’t mocking. “Okay, look. Sometimes there’s a commonality between one case and another that’s important. But you can’t take somebody killed by a knife and apply some kind of universal Knife Logic to it all. A hitman might use a knife, but so could a battered wife who’s reached her breaking point and grabs the first thing at hand. So you have to look at the case from every angle. We didn’t have much of a body; it was torn to shreds, and that’s not something we normally see. But this wasn’t a street gang.”

Garcia blinked at him. Nodded slowly. “Okay.”

“Let’s break it down,” Lanny said.

Trina sat back in her chair, feeling a smile threaten. He would deny it, but of the two of them, he was the better teacher. He wasn’t fancy, didn’t like to use buzzwords or follow manuals, but he had a way of explaining things that cut through all the bullshit and put things in their plainest terms. That made themaccessible.

“When a gang kills, it’s to do one of two things, or sometimes accomplish both things at once: send a message, or eliminate a rival. Sometimes it’s an initiation, but it’s not ever random: the person they kill died for a reason, no matter how fucked up that reason is. Most gang-related murders we see are GSWs, or efficient, clean stab wounds. If a gang cuts somebody up into pieces, it’s to hide the body – not to stick in an alley in broad daylight with witnesses. And they sure as shit don’t cut the body upright there on the scene. Dismemberment is something you do in a secure location, and you dump the body somewhere else. Right?”

“Right.” Garcia nodded, took a breath, and calmed a bit. A little color came back into his face.

“No gang worth its salt would do what we saw this morning. So then we think, ‘okay, maybe a crime of passion.’ We talked to the widow: he worked in a sporting goods store, and he went hiking on weekends upstate with his buddies. He doesn’t care about team sports or horse racing – so no gambling. Doesn’t owe anybody a bunch of money as far as she knows.”

“He could have kept her in the dark.”

“He could have. But think: you try to shake somebody down for what he owes you, do you pop him real quick” – he made a gun with finger and thumb – “stab him” – a fast jab with the same hand – “or do you take the time to give him the lawnmower treatment?”

God, Trina thought, as Garcia’s brows went up.What an image, you jerk. She held back a chuckle, though.

“And think about the time it would take a person to do that to another person,” Lanny continued. “That wasn’t a five-minute crime, dude. That was involved. It was slow work. For ahuman,” he repeated it, stressing the word.

Garcia let that sink in a moment. Sat up straighter. “You think an animal did it.”

“Give the kid a cookie.”

“But what kind of animal? I mean – did something get loose from the zoo? A big cat or something?” He was already digging out his phone, no doubt to Google it.

---