Mary Robb - Down the Rabbit Hole

A woman came out—short, lavender hair that matched her eyes, a deep purple dress that flowed to her knees. Her data listed her at fifty, Eve recalled, but the perfect, unlined skin carved ten away.

“What can I do to help you?”

“What can you tell me about Darlene Fitzwilliams?”

“Ah, a tragedy. I heard a media report. You’re looking for answers. Seeking death is rarely an answer.”

“Was she a client?”

“I don’t remember her.”

“She had your business card, a pamphlet, and a bottle of your Natural Rest.”

“I see. Casseopia? Would you check, please?”

Casseopia settled on the stool again, swiveled to her counter comp. “Darlene Fitzwilliams, fifty-minute introductory consult, August three of last year. No follow-up on record.”

“Would you pull my notes on that?” Hester gave Eve a quiet smile. “A single consult. It’s difficult to remember the details.”

“I figured you’d . . . intuit that sort of thing.”

The smile never wavered. “My gift is one that intuits, as you say, the inner person. Such as . . .” She turned to Peabody. “You shouldn’t worry so much about your weight. Good nutrition, regular exercise, of course, but you have a very healthy, robust body. Your perception of your body is harsher than the reality.”

“Really?”

“Natural metabolic boosters such as chen pi, sheng jiang, rou gui can be helpful. But you’re young, healthy, and active. It’s the sweet tooth,” she added with a knowing smile, “that challenges you.”

“Your notes.” Casseopia offered Hester a handheld.

“Thank you. Oh yes, so sad,” she murmured as she read. “The loss of her parents, so sudden and tragic. She wasn’t sleeping or eating well—all that stress and grief. I did recommend a sleep aid, and a nutrition plan, and suggested additional sessions to work on emotional healing and acceptance. But . . .”

Hester lowered the handheld. “I remember her now. She wanted to contact her parents.”

“Her dead parents.”

“I understand the skepticism. Contact with those who have moved on in the cycle is not my gift.”

“Your pamphlet says otherwise.”

Hester shook her head. “I can assist, and there are certain herbs and practices that can open and enhance the gift if one has its root. I didn’t sense that root in her, and couldn’t ethically encourage her. She took the aid, and the plan, but didn’t contact me again.”

“She came in a couple more times,” Casseopia said. “I checked for you. She bought more Natural Rest in October and again in December. Purchased some candles and some bath salts.”

“I wish I could have given her more, but I didn’t have the answers she looked for. I’m afraid I don’t have the ones you seek either.”

“Anything in here that causes hallucinations?”

“I don’t traffic in hallucinogens, even natural ones. I believe reality is to be embraced.”

“The Natural Rest stuff, could it cause them in combination with other herbs?”

“I would have given her a list of herbs, foods, medications to avoid while taking the product. I wouldn’t have recommended it if she had been a proponent of altered-reality substances. She was clean, Lieutenant, as both of you are.”

“If you can tell that by looking, we could use you in Illegals testing.”

“That’s not my path. I hope you find the answers you need on yours.”

“She seemed pretty straight,” Peabody commented when they walked out.

“For a psychic nutritionalist. No buzz anyway, but we’ll see what the lab says about the sleep aid. Meanwhile, we’ve got a couple more right in this area, then one in the East Village. And I want to talk to the lawyer. See if you can get her to come in, save us a trip uptown.”

* * *

They interviewed three psychics—waking up one who claimed to commune with spirits only between the hours of midnight and five a.m.

“Nothing there.” Eve got back in the car, aimed it toward Cop Central.

“The second one we talked to? Mikhal Lombrowski? He was the real deal. The others, maybe they had something, but mostly they were looking to score. He was genuine.”

“Why him?”

“My dad’s a sensitive, and he kind of reminded me of my father. He wanted to help her—that’s what came through for me—but he couldn’t give her what she wanted, so like she did with Hester, she cherry-picked, and moved on.”

“I tend to agree. It’s also telling that she went to all of these before she started making those weekly withdrawals. We need to find the one she settled on.”

As she pulled into Central’s garage, Peabody glanced at her signaling ’link. “Huh. The lawyer’s on her way in. We don’t get that kind of result often.”

“Set us up a conference room and give Dickhead a goose on the tox.”

“You want me to goose Dickhead?”

Eve thought of the chief lab tech. “It’ll throw him off coming from you instead of me. Maybe we’ll get happy results there, too.”

She needed to set up the board and book in her office, write everything up.

And if she didn’t have the tox results within an hour, she’d personally go to the lab and sit on Dick Berenski’s egg-shaped head until he produced.

She turned in to Homicide, noted all her detectives and cops were present. “Is there no crime today?”

Baxter, feet on his desk, a ’link at his ear, grinned at her. “Tying one up now, LT. The asshole Trueheart and I took down bright and early this morning’s down in booking.”

She glanced at Trueheart, who’d soon be ceremoniously awarded his gold detective’s shield. Obviously Baxter had dumped the paperwork on his partner.

She glanced across the bull pen to where Santiago sat morosely under a big black cowboy hat with a shiny silver band. “How much longer do you have to wear that?”

“A bet’s a bet.” Behind him, Carmichael smiled smugly. “And he lost.”

“I went double or nothing with her—it’s a sickness.”

She decided not to comment on Jenkinson’s tie, because it looked like an explosion of radioactive waste. Instead she escaped to her office, set up her board. Armed with coffee, she sat at her desk and wrote everything up, in detail, adding a query to Mira.

Then, with more coffee, she put her boots on the desk, her eyes on the board and let her brain play with theories. And, still thinking, she pulled up an incoming from Morris.

“Dallas.”

She held up a finger to hold Peabody off, finished reading. “Morris found traces of peyote, cannabis, phencyclidine, and mint inside the female vic’s nasal passages, sinuses.”

“She inhaled it?”

“Inhaled this—he believes in vapor form. Ingested more in liquid form. What about the lab?”

“Berenski says he’ll have the final when he has it—then I played the innocent underling card, said how you were all over my ass, complimented that weird facial hair he’s been growing lately. He said to give it another twenty.”

“Good job. If she wasn’t taking this crap voluntarily, somebody was doing a hell of a number on her. Morris confirms, even without the elements we haven’t nailed down, she’d have been in a euphoric and altered state.”

“Maybe she didn’t know what she was inhaling and ingesting, or maybe whoever mixed all this up told her it was what she needed to communicate with her parents.”

“Either way, whoever gave it to her is responsible for two deaths.”

“Her lawyer’s here—the family lawyer, I mean. I had her taken to the conference room.”

“Let’s go dig out who stood to gain.”

Gia Gregg sat ramrod-straight at the conference table, talking on an ear ’link. She gave Eve a nod and continued her conversation. She wore a black suit, sharp as a scalpel, and her hair in a dark crown of tight curls with shimmering red highlights. It suited her coffee-regular skin and her cool green eyes.