by J. D. Robb
Unless Sima had been standing on a box, that left her out. And however Eve felt personally about Trina, she couldn’t see the hair-and-skin monster beating a guy’s head in because he’d dissed a friend.
Coburn. Possible if she’d worn five-inch heels, which strangely women did. But then why leave so much evidence tying her to the scene? Panic? Possible. But writing a note, getting a knife from the kitchen, jamming that knife into a dead body, didn’t speak of panic.
If a woman had the cold blood for that, she had enough control to grab her bra and her shoes.
Still… Eve played with her notes. Would that same woman be clever enough to leave incriminating evidence behind as a kind of cover? A stretch, Eve thought. Something to weigh in, but she just hadn’t gotten shrewd calculation from Alla Coburn.
Lill Byers, the vic’s supervisor. Absolutely no evidence she’d had anything but a professional relationship with the victim. Physically, she’d fit. Height, strength, and she’d have known the vic’s address. She’d known at least some of what he did on the side.
Possible kickback? Vic pays her a percentage of his side business in order to run it smoothly out of the facility. She wants more, they argue over it, she loses it.
Weak, Eve thought, just weak. And the computer agreed with her at a 53.6 probability.
David “Rock” Britton. About the right height, certainly strong enough. Motive and potential opportunity with the lack of an alibi.
The computer liked him, she noted, with a probability of nearly ninety percent. But the computer hadn’t looked in his eyes. If he’d gone after Ziegler, he’d have used his fists.
The fashion blogger. Tall enough, fit enough. And if her previous experience with date rape held true, more than enough motive. Somebody got away with it once, by Christ, this fucker wasn’t getting away with it.
So motive, no alibi, physically able.
Eve rose, walked around her board, rearranged some photos, some data.
She sat again, studied it again.
Of that group, the blogger went to the top. The flourish of the note, the knife? Yeah, she could see it. Insult to injury.
Martella Schubert. Delicate – but that was personality more than physicality. She seemed delicate, a little on the fragile side. Monied, pampered – and there was always power in money. Taken at face value, her statement indicated she hadn’t known she’d been dosed, felt guilty for betraying her marriage.
And, taken at face value, her statement could indicate she felt guilty enough to confront the vic, argue with him. He wants more money to keep their tryst a secret. She loses it.
It could play, Eve mused. She could see that playing out. But she couldn’t see the delicate Martella adding the flourish.
But who was she with the first time Eve had interviewed her?
The sister. Big sister.
Impulse, rage, violence, panic.
What if she’d called on the sister.
Tash, I’m in trouble. Oh God, he’s dead! I killed him. What should I do?
What would big sister do? Would she run to the rescue, assess the situation? And with the knowledge the vic had slept with her and the sister, lead with a little of her own rage?
The note, the knife, then unity. Each keeping the big secret while dribbling out bits of the rest.
Maybe.
Or Natasha Quigley alone. She claimed the arrangement with Ziegler was over, ended with her hopes of mending her marriage. Maybe Ziegler didn’t want it over – wanted her to keep paying. Or maybe she’d found out about her sister, confronted Ziegler.
Alibi reasonably tight, Eve mused. But all from staff of one kind or another, and staff often said or did what they were told to say and do.
And physically she fit the bill.
As for the husbands, she couldn’t see Schubert. Like Rock, he’d have used his hands, his fists.
Now JJ Copley didn’t strike her as a guy who led with his fists. A blunt object seemed more his style. And the flourish, well, that fit, too. Payback without any chance of confrontation.
She could see him stabbing a dead man. Yeah, she could see it.
But maybe she could see it because she just didn’t like him.
Regardless, he topped the list of this next group, with his wife running a close second.
And still, not enough, Eve thought.
So she got more coffee, sat again, put her feet up on the desk and let the entire business begin again inside her head.
11
Roarke glanced up, distracted, by the jingle bells. Galahad slunk into his office just ahead of Eve.
“I have some data for you,” he told her, “but I’m not altogether finished.”
“Okay.”
She set a fresh glass of wine beside him, knowing he cut off the caffeine intake a hell of a lot earlier than she did.
“Thanks. And this is for?”
“Interrupting. Go ahead and finish. I’m just taking my brain into a new space.”
The cat gathered himself, leaped onto Roarke’s lap with a ringing of bells, kneaded and circled while Eve wandered to the wide window.
His home office space was sleeker and snappier than hers, she thought – by design. He’d created hers to mirror her old apartment, and to lure her in with the familiar.
Clever.
Wasn’t it interesting how that single room was indeed just about as large as her former living space altogether? She hadn’t given that much thought before, had just found herself – initially – baffled and touched that he would go to the trouble, that he would understand her so well so quickly.
She looked out the window, over the grounds, the holiday fantasy of them shining against the dark. He’d thought of that, too, built that, too. For both of them now.
She glanced over her shoulder at the painting she’d given him on their first anniversary, one of the two of them under the blooming arbor on that summer day. Their wedding day.
He’d placed it there, where he could see it from his workstation. She’d come to know him, too, hadn’t she? Enough to know he’d cherish that image of them in that moment of promise.
He could see that when he worked, when he wheeled and dealed from this spot. When he bought and sold, ordered and cajoled, and did all the things she didn’t fully comprehend.
He sat now, hair tied back in work mode, the sleeves of his sweater shoved up to the elbows, the cat curled in his lap, and his eyes – so brilliantly blue – focused on one of the three screens he utilized to do the slipping and sliding he’d talked about.
“You have something inside the brain you brought in here,” Roarke said as he continued to work. “You might as well let it out. I’m just tying things up here.”
“I have three people hovering at the top of my suspect list. The computer doesn’t completely agree, probability-wise, but they’re my three.”
“Copley being one.”
“Definitely. And his wife – Natasha Quigley. I’ve got a couple of theories that could put her in the mix.”
“She developed actual feelings for Ziegler, no longer wanted to share. Killed him rather than watch him bed other women for fun and profit?”
“Huh. That wasn’t one of them, but I’ll toss it in, roll it around.”
“Who’s your third?”
“Kira Robbins, the fashion writer.”
Roarke’s brows lifted as he looked away from the screens. “Really?”
“No alibi. Physically she fits the reconstruction. Add in former rape victim. I can’t positively confirm that, but it rang true. You… you get an ear for it when you’ve been through it.”
He picked up his wine, sipped, said nothing.
“There’s a part of me, I can admit, that hopes it’s not her because of that. But I have to consider it. If she was raped as she said, as a teenager, it left a mark. No amount of healing erases the mark, and what I didn’t pull in when I talked to her? If it had been done to her before, wouldn’t she have wondered, suspected it had been done
again? For the second time in her life she experiences date rape, but could she, did she, just pass this one off as bad judgment, as personal weakness? The more I ask myself that, the more I call it bullshit.”
“You believe she knew what had happened, what he’d done.”
“I believe she had to wonder, and I know I have to talk to her again, and push that. And I’m sorry for it. If it turns out she’s the killer, I’m going to be sorrier.”
He sat back. “There was a time I’d have questioned you on this. There’s a part of me that still does, even though I know the answer. Even though I understand it, and almost fully accept it.”
“Can’t change what was,” she said with a shrug. “So you deal with what is.”
“It leaves a mark.” Eyes on hers, he repeated her words. “No amount of healing fully erases it. She was a victim, and if she killed him she had reason. A reason you and I both understand far too well. He was an ugly sort, a vicious user of people, a rapist. But you’ll stand for him even over a woman he used so meanly. You have to. You have to.”
He repeated it because that single reality lived in both of them now.
“More than the job, it’s a duty, and your sense of right. Your line.”
“My line and yours run only so far together before they fork off. Sometimes that’s a balance. Sometimes it’s a problem.”
Considering, she ran a finger around the lip of one of the wobbly bowls Feeney’s wife had given them.
He’d put that here, too, she thought – like the painting – in his space. Because he understood, he valued, connections, symbols of family – far better than she.
“So. If it turns out to be her, I’ll push for Mira to evaluate her, the circumstances, her state of mind, the PTSD angle. Mira’s evals have weight.”
“They do. As do yours.”
“But that’s jumping forward, and jumping far. Where it is now, I’ll lean on her, push buttons, even knowing how it feels to have them pushed.”
“You’ll stand for her, too, if she’s killed. Because it’s always more than the job, more than duty.”
“It’s not about me.”
“Bollocks.” He said it mildly, even smiled a little when she frowned, though her words stirred up memories of what he knew she’d survived. “Investigating objectively doesn’t remove you. Your experiences, your understanding of victimology from the viewpoint of the victim is as much a part of what you do, who you are, as your training and your instincts. You are, forever, all points of the triad, Lieutenant: victim, killer, cop. And you know each section intimately.”
“Because I’ve not only been a victim, I’m not only a cop, but I’ve killed.”
“Yes. To save your own life, to save the lives of others, you’ve taken lives. It weighs on you every bit as much as what happened to you when you were a defenseless and innocent child. And it makes you who you are.”
“Maybe it’s bollocks because I don’t want it to be her.” Because that weighed on her, too, she stuck her hands in her pockets, wandered his space. “Because, objectivity aside for the right here and now, I want it to be Copley because it would go down easier.”
“I may be able to help you there.”
“Yeah?” She stopped, turned back to him. “I’ll take it.”
Roarke lifted the cat, giving him an apologetic stroke as he set him on the floor. Then he swiveled his chair toward Eve, smiled, and patted his knee.
“Get serious. I’m not playing office whoopee.”
“The price, and a fair one, for the data.” He patted his knee again.
She rolled her eyes, but walked over, sat on his lap. “Satisfied?”
“I hope to be, eventually. But for now.”
He danced his fingers over keys, put data on the wall screen.
“As you can see the Quigley money – and here Natasha Quigley’s share of it, which is quite comfortable.”
“Ha. A paltry quarter billion?” She angled her face toward his, grinned. “Chump change from where I’m – literally – sitting.”
“Be that as it may.”
“Yeah, be it or may it, this part I knew. The sister’s got about the same. Investments, trusts, and whatnot, all down the same road until each hit twenty-five. Some divergence there, choices – different investments, expenses, big sister purchased the New York brownstone and a second home in Aruba, a flat in Paris – all in her own name. Little sis and her husband, who also has an even paltrier hundred and seventy-five-ish mil of his own. They bought the New York townhouse together. She also has a Paris flat – same building as big sis, bought on her own a couple years prior to her marriage. And as a couple they own a place on St. Lucia. Copley, on the other hand, has a pathetic six million in his own name.”
“All but begging on the street.”
“Comparatively.” Shifting, she hooked an arm around Roarke’s neck, studied the numbers. “He gets credit for earning it, a mil at a time, but it’s going to sting, isn’t it, to have his whole shot be what his wife would think of as pocket change?”
“Does it?”
This time she rested her head against his. “Not as long as you keep the coffee coming. But for him? He strikes me as a showboater, just the way he came across today.”
“He has a taste for the finer things, I can’t quibble with that. Wardrobe, vehicles – though the wife appears to be reasonably generous there. His expense account at the firm is consistently at the max. He travels very well, professionally and personally.”
“This is all on the up-and-up?”
“This part, yes. He does, however, have two other accounts, both set up offshore – since the marriage – and both under very thin fronts. He went to some trouble to hide them, and they’d likely stay tucked away from any surface search his spouse or her money people might engage. Unless it got serious.”
“Or it got serious in a murder investigation with an exceptional civilian consultant poking into it.”
“Or that.”
He switched screens manually. “Twelve million here, eight there.”
“Where’d he get it?”
“Those were some of the ends I was tying up. I’ll want to dig a bit deeper, but again on the surface, from skimming. Personal and business expenses, carefully and craftily – and the personal would be from his wife.”
“He’s stealing from his wife.”
“A bit at a time, and those bits, I’ve found, go back to the early days of their marriage. Not particularly greedy in it, but consistent. Some of it’s earned right enough, just separated out into these other areas – out of the family coffers you might say. Solo investments, some tax wrangling – all close to the line but not really over it.”
“What’s that one? The monthly direct pay deal. Six thousand, the first of every month.”
“Ah, you’ve a sharp eye. That would be the management fee, which includes thrice-weekly cleaning, all maintenance and so forth on a condo. Upper East Side. Bought with one of his shells about six months back. As there’s no coordinating income from the property, I wouldn’t call it an investment.”
“A place of his own – opposite end of the city from the family house.” Eve shifted again, angling her head as she followed the numbers. “Smells like a love nest to me.”
“It has that cachet. You’ll also see some outlay – hotels, restaurants, boutiques. Go back about four months, there’s considerable to design vendors, furniture.”
“Feathering the nest. What does that mean? Do birds use feathers to make their nest? Why would they? How would they? I don’t get it.”
“I couldn’t say, but I agree with the idiom. He bought it, furnished it, and as some of the outlets he paid out of these accounts are ladies’ boutiques, I’d say he also outfitted the bird he’s nesting with.”
“He’s got a side piece.”
When she started to rise, Roarke simply wrapped his arms around her. “I’m not done. Keep looking.”
She’d have looked better if she could get up, mo
ve, but she settled back. After all, he’d done the work.
“Cash withdrawals, three weeks running – back six weeks – for five thousand each. Paying somebody off? Has to be the vic. Wait, wait – it doubles at that three-week mark. Weekly again, but for ten thousand each. That’s not walking-around money.”
“Perhaps he walks in very rarified areas.”
“I’m calling bullshit there. That’s payoff, and it jibes with the accounting McNab pulled off Ziegler’s comp.”