Page 101 of Fury In Death

She headed to EDD knowing she’d find her old partner, her mentor, her friend, grim at best.

She passed more than Jenkinson’s eye-searing tie in the crazed circus of EDD. Colors jarred, patterns screamed as e-geeks bounced or chair-bopped or called out to each other in a language she’d never translate.

She hurried by to the glass-walled lab.

Feeney stood in his comforting shit-brown pants, his already wrinkled anemic beige shirt. He’d shed his jacket and tie, she noted.

Flanking him, McNab’s red-streaked blond tail of hair swayed like his hips in star-strewed orange baggies while Callendar’s butt bumped in a similar rhythm in her red-and-yellow-striped ones.

She opened the door to a blast of music where someone shouted she should “walk this way!”

“How can you think?” she yelled over it.

Feeney glanced around, shot her a look. Yes, grim. “Keeps the juices up. Music off. We’re not there yet. Don’t bug us about it.”

She adjusted her strategy. “I wanted to give you a quick update. Mitchell Rosenthal.”

“Damn good player, decent coach.”

“And friend of Steven Redman’s. One who gave him ten K six years ago.”

Since that got Feeney’s attention, she read in the room quickly.

“We didn’t know the explosion was deliberate, but Redman sure as hell did. Goddamn it. Susan Washington—”

“Arson.”

“Yeah, she’s as pissed as I am. She’s going over everything again on her end.”

“Roarke says with the tech they’d have had that we didn’t back then, and the resources, they could’ve pulled it off as an accident.”

“Doesn’t make it better.” But he hissed out a breath, rolled his shoulders. “We’re hitting bumps. Get somewhere, then back to scratch.”

“He kept changing the code,” McNab supplied. “No rhythm or pattern to it.”

“You think you got it,” Callendar added, circling her head, “then you don’t.”

Eve heard the quiet pop-pop as Callendar stretched her neck, and sympathized. But she had to push.

“At the risk of getting my ass kicked, any sort of timeline on breaking it?”

When Feeney rolled his shoulders, Eve heard the crackle and the pop-pop.

“You’ll know when we know,” he told her. “It’s so stupid, so sloppy, it’s fucking genius. But we’ll get it.”

“Okay. I’m in the field.”

“Times like this, I wish I were,” Feeney muttered. “Music on!”

And the music blasted her out of the lab.

She’d have gone straight to Homicide, but stopped when Whitney approached from the other direction. She hoped to save her commander the trouble, and the e-geeks the aggravation.

“Sir, if you’re planning to go in there, ask for a progress report, I wouldn’t. I’ve just done so. They’re hitting snags, but are confident they’ll break through the code.”

“Any idea when?”

“Not at this time. Peabody is currently writing a report on an interview we just conducted. Could we walk and talk, Commander? I want to drop in on Chu’s memorial.”