Loyalty in Death by J. D. Robb Page A

the beeps and buzzes and whines of electronics crowded the air and made her wonder how anyone could manage to squeeze in a stray thought.
    Despite the noise level, the door of Captain Ryan Feeney’s office was open. He sat at his desk, his shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbows, his wiry, rust-colored hair standing up on end, his droopy eyes enormous behind the lenses of microgoggles. While Eve watched from the doorway, he plucked a tiny translucent chip from the guts of the computer upended on his desk.
    “Gotcha, you little bastard.” And with the delicacy of a surgeon, he slid the chip into an evidence bag.
    “What is it?”
    “Hah?” Behind the goggles, his hound dog eyes blinked, then he shoved the goggles up to his forehead and focused on her. “Hey, Dallas. This little darling? It’s basically a counter.” He tapped the bag and smiled a little. “Bank teller with a talent for e-work installed it in her unit at work. Every twenty transfers, a deposit got zipped into an account she’d set up for herself in Stockholm. Pretty slick.”
    “You’re slicker.”
    “Damn right. What are you doing over here?” He continued to work as he spoke, methodically tagging evidence. “Want to hang out with real cops?”
    “Maybe I missed your pretty face.” She eased a hip onto the corner of his desk, grinning when he snorted. “Or maybe I wondered if you had any spare time.”
    “For what?”
    “You remember The Fixer?”
    “Sure. Bad attitude, magic hands. The son of a bitch’s nearly as good as I am. He can take a unit like this XK-6000 here, strip her down, harvest her, and spread her into six other units before she cools down. He’s goddamn good.”
    “Now he’s goddamn dead.”
    “Fixer?” Genuine regret showed in his eyes. “What happened?”
    “He took a last swim.” She filled him in quickly, moving from her meeting with Ratso through her quick tour of the shop.
    “Had to be something big and something bad to scare an old warhorse like Fixer,” Feeney mused. “You say they didn’t take him from inside?”
    “I’d say that would’ve been next to impossible. He had full security scan. Interior and exterior. A hive of locks. One exit — reinforced — and one window, one-way luminex, barred. Oh, and I checked his supplies. He had enough unperishables and bottled water to last a man used to rations a good month.”
    “Sounds like he could’ve held off an invasion.”
    “Yeah. So why run?”
    “Got me. The Jersey primary cleared you to look into it from this end?”
    “Well, he’s got nothing. I haven’t got much more,” she admitted. “The story’s from my weasel, and he tends to spook easy. But Fixer was into something, and they took him out. They didn’t get into his place, so they didn’t get to his equipment. He’s got a fail-safe on his shop unit. I thought you could play with it, see if you can get past it.”
    Feeney scratched his ear, reached absently for a handful of the sugared nuts in a bowl on his desk. “Yeah, I can do that. Gotta figure he’d’ve taken his logs with him if he was going under. But he was smart. Might’ve left a copy behind. So I’ll look.”
    “Appreciate it.” She straightened. “I’m just juggling this in for now. I haven’t run it by the commander.”
    “Let’s see what I find; then we’ll take it to him.”
    “Good.” She snatched some of the nuts before she headed for the door. “So how much did she get? The bank teller?”
    Feeney glanced down at the micro-timer. “Three million and change. If she’d settled for the three and skipped, she might’ve gotten away with it.”
    “They always want more,” Eve said.
    She munched on nuts as she headed to her own office. The detective’s bullpen clattered with voices, curses, and whines from suspects, from victims giving statements, the incessant trill of ‘links, and the quick screams and scratches as two women went at each other with teeth and nails over a dead man they both claimed