Free In Death 07.5 - Midnight in Death by J.D. Robb Page B

through high and low, back to back, sweeping with their weapons. Music was playing, a primitive backbeat of drums behind screaming guitars. In the tidy living area, the mood screen had been set on deep reds and swimming blues melting into each other.
    She signaled Dalrymple to the left, had taken two steps to the right herself when a naked man came out of the kitchen area carrying a bottle of wine and a single red rose.
    He screamed and dropped the bottle. Wine glugged out onto the rug. Holding the rose to his balls, he crouched. “Don’t shoot! Jesus, don’t shoot. Take anything you want. Anything. It’s not even mine.”
    “NYPSD,” Eve snapped at him. “On the floor, face-down, hands behind your head. Now!”
    “Yes, ma’am, yes, ma’am.” He all but dove to the rug. “I didn’t do anything.” He flinched when Eve dragged his hands down and cuffed them. “I was just going to meet Sunny. She said it would be okay.”
    “Who the hell are you?”
    “Jimmy. Jimmy Ripsky. I go to college with Sunny. We’re on winter break. She said her parents were out of town for a few days and we could use the place.”
    Eve holstered her weapon in disgust. The boy was shaking like a leaf. “Get him a blanket or something, Dalrymple. This isn’t our man.” She dragged him to his feet and had enough pity in her to uncuff him before gesturing to a chair. “Let’s here the whole story, Jimmy.”
    “That’s it. Um”—cringing with embarrassment, he folded his arms over his crotch—“Sunny and I are, like, an item.”
    “And who’s Sunny?”
    “Sunny Polinsky. Sheila, I guess. Everybody calls her Sunny. This is her parents’ place. Man, her father’s going to kill me if he finds out.”
    “She called you?”
    “Yeah. Well, no.” He looked up with desperate gratitude when Dalrymple came in with a chenille throw. “I got an E-mail from her this morning and a package. She said her parents were going south for the week and how I should come over tonight. About midnight, let myself in with the key she’d sent me. And I should, um, you know, get comfortable.” He tucked the throw more securely around his legs. “She said she’d be here by twelve-thirty and I should, well, ah, be waiting in bed.” He moistened his lips. “It was pretty, sort of, explicit for Sunny.”
    “Do you still have the E-mail? The package the key came in?”
    “I dumped the package in the recycler, but I’ve got the E-mail. I printed it out. It’s…it’s a keeper, you know?”
    “Right. Detective, call in your partner and my aide.”
    “Um, ma’am?” Jimmy began when Dalrymple turned away with his communicator.
    “Dallas. Lieutenant.”
    “Yes, ma’am, Lieutenant. What’s going on? Is Sunny okay?”
    “She’s fine. She’s with her parents.”
    “But—she said she’d be here.”
    “I think someone else sent you that keeper E-mail. Somebody who wanted me to have a little something extra to do tonight.” But she sat, pulled out her palm-link. “I’m going to check out your story, Jimmy. If it all fits, Detective Dalrymple’s going to arrange for a uniform to take you home. You can give him the printout of the E-mail—and your computer.”
    “My computer? But—”
    “It’s police business,” she said shortly. “You’ll get it back.”
    “Well, that was fun,” Peabody said when Eve resecured the door.
    “A barrel of laughs.”
    “Poor kid. He was mortified. Here he was thinking he was going to have the sex of his dreams with his girl, and he gets busted.”
    “The fact that a rosebud managed to preserve most of his modesty tells me that the sex of his dreams outruns the reality.” At Peabody’s snort, Eve turned to the elevator. “Sunny backed up his story about them being an item. Not that I doubted it. The kid was too scared to lie. So…Dave’s been keeping up with the social activities of his marks. He knows the family, the friends, and he knows how to use them.”
    She stepped out of the elevator,