by J. D. Robb
“That’s good,” Reo said.
“Whip guy remembers Dudley,” Baxter continued. “Remembers he took the lessons seriously. He not only took the package, but added to it with another round of lessons. Whip guy says Dudley was damn good with a whip by the end of it.”
“That’s very, very good,” Reo added.
“It’s bull’s-eye,” Eve countered. “What do you need, to actually see them kill somebody? We can link the weapons to the men, the victims to the men. Moriarity’s going to have the crossbow and harpoon gun, Dudley’s still got the sheath he used for the bayonet. Believe it. A case for the whip. They’d want part of the weapon to keep, to gloat over.
“There’s no way to know who they’ve targeted next, but there will be a target.” She pressed that button, pressed it hard. “These are addictive personalities, and they won’t stop. They can’t stop,” Eve insisted. “They like it too much, and they’re at tie score. They won’t stop until one of them misses, and even then, they won’t stop. After an entire life of playing at work, at playing at sport, at just goddamn playing, they’ve found something they’re really good at, something that they can share as intimately as lovers. The people they kill are only important because they’re important—but every one of the victims lack what these men would see as their pedigree, their privilege to be important by birth.
“They’re addicts,” she repeated, “and won’t give up this drug. And they’re freaking soul mates, so they won’t give up this union. They may take it elsewhere—Europe, South America, Asia, mix their pie a little when they’re bored of New York.”
“I think they’ll stay until they’ve finished this particular contest.” Mira spoke quietly. “I agree with the lieutenant’s evaluation. These men need to feed their desires, their whims, their sense of intimacy with each other. They need to indulge themselves, and this is their ultimate competition, and partnership. They work together, even as they compete. Killing two people, one after another, using the same alibi would have been yet another kind of rush. A new thrill, and codependency. They may continue that pattern, or escalate. And once again kill together. I believe that’s how they plan to indulge themselves with you, Eve.”
21
HE’D WONDERED IF SHE’D FOLLOWED THOSE dots, but Roarke could see now she hadn’t gone there. Oh, her ego was healthy enough, but it simply hadn’t clicked how precisely she fit their victim profile.
She was the best at what she did, and well known for it, particularly well with the success of Nadine’s book. She’d made herself what she was.
She wasn’t for hire in a technical sense, but she served.
And the connection, well fuck it all, it was through him, wasn’t it?
She was going there now, and bloody buggering hell she was considering how she could use it, use herself.
“It’s your opinion I’m a target,” Eve said to Mira.
“It’s my opinion that you’re not only a perfect fit, but would be, to them, the ultimate prey. Their timing of the first murder played the odds, and they were good ones, that you would catch the case,” Mira reminded her. “If you hadn’t, you would certainly have been involved in some manner by the second murder, which also connected to Roarke through its location. You fit their target requirements. You’re known to be one of the best in your field, a field of service. You’ve gained notoriety for what you do.”
“I don’t have any past connection with them.” But even as she said it, she glanced at Roarke.
“Of course you do,” he said, equably, “because I do. My business dealings and theirs have crossed in the past. They have reason, if they take such matters personally, to resent me for some of those dealings.”
She hooked her thumbs in her front pockets. “Why not go for you?”
He smiled. “Wouldn’t that be entertaining? I don’t fit,” he added. “I don’t provide a service, nor am I for sale. Protect and serve, Lieutenant, for which you draw a salary. And if you’d think as they do for a moment rather than grinding those gears wondering how you could set yourself up as bait, you’d see you’re an indulgence. Mine. From their perspective, I bought and paid for you. Mind you don’t sputter.”
He felt her fury, the hot burst of it, and continued to lean against the wall and watch her.
She pulled it in—he had to admire the strength of will—and simply nodded.
“I’d like to give this some thought, discuss it further, but detailing the investigation, thus far, and getting the warrants are the priority and purpose here. Do you have enough to take to your boss, Reo?”
“I’ll take it to him, and I’ll push.” Reo sat where she was, scanning the boards and screens. “You’ve got a mountain of circumstantial here that adds up to a solid argument for the search warrants. You’re shy of arrest—and you know it,” she added. “You’ve convinced me, and I’ll convince the PA. Convincing a judge to issue the warrants to search the homes of two men with no priors, with their pedigree, their connections and influence, that’s going to be work, and it’s going to take time.”
She rose. “So I’d better get started. It’s damn good work, all around. I’ll be in touch.”
“Let’s add to the mountain,” Eve said as Reo walked out. “Dig, push, wheedle, finesse. We’re going to pile it on, and we’re going to bring them in. Get back to work. Doctor Mira,” she continued as cops surged to their feet, “if I could have a few minutes. Commander, I’ll keep you fully updated and informed.”
“I believe I’ll stay.”
“Yes, sir. Peabody, coordinate the—”
“If my partner’s thinking about sticking herself on a hook, I’m going to be in on the strategy session.”
“Bait needs an e-team.” Feeney chose a pickle from the food table, crunched in.
“I’m not, at this time, planning any such operation.” She felt, literally, squeezed in. “It would be backup only, if Reo doesn’t get the warrants. I believe she will, so everybody can just stop hovering. Apologies, Commander.”
“Unnecessary.”
“Doctor Mira, if I’m a target, it’s likely they’ve already chosen the location and weapon, if not the time.”
“I agree. It would be my belief that you would be their endgame, at least here in New York, and at least for this phase of the contest. Everything points to their enjoyment of the competition, its results, so it’s unlikely they’ve positioned you for the last round. But—”
“If and when we get the search warrants, that would change the complexion of things.” Eve nodded. “It would piss them off, and it would challenge them. They’d want to go at me sooner.”
“I’d have to agree. They’ve left pieces of themselves at the scenes—the weapons. They’ve connected themselves to the murders, indirectly, to ensure you would have contact with them. While they compete with each other, they’re competing against you, as a team.”
“And they cheat.” Roarke took a bottle of water from the table.
“And when they tried that on you, you beat them. A golf thing,” Eve said with a shrug. “I’m not convinced you wouldn’t be a more exciting target. You’re not in service, fine, but you employ a universe of people who are. You’re already a competitor, and one they dislike because you had the nerve to build a fortune instead of inheriting one. It’s a pretty fair bet you’ve been involved with some of the women they’ve been involved with.”
He took a slow sip of water. “I’ll just say my taste has improved. Then point out what you should know very well. There’s no better way to strike at me than by murdering my wife.”
“The one you bought and paid for?”
Well now, that grated her ass, didn’t it? he mused. And for some perverse reason her reaction banked the embers of his own temper.
“Yes, to their minds. They don’t understand you, or me for that matter. And they certainly don’t understand love. Would you agree, Doctor Mira?”
“I would. And they prefer killing women. You can judge the ratio.” Mira gestured
to the board. “They’ve killed men, and certainly will continue to if not stopped. But women are the preferred target, as both of them consider women something to be used, something disposable. Something less.”
“Dudley particularly,” Eve commented. “He surrounds himself with them. It’s like a harem. Okay.” She nodded again as her mind took a few leaps forward. “We’ll need to put something in place. The search warrants may be enough to push me to the head of the line, but we can work something that ups that time frame.”
“But if you wait for Reo to come through,” Peabody protested, “we’d have more time to work out the strategy, the backup.”
Feeney shook his head. “She fronts the play, they react. That puts them on defense. They have to rush their move, and while they’re pissed off. They don’t maneuver her into a situation, because she’s maneuvering them. We can get eyes and ears on you.”
“I’ve got this.” Eve held up her wrist, and Feeney’s eyes narrowed.
“Let me see that. Take it off,” he told her when she held her arm out. “I’m not going to pocket it.”
When she obliged him, he took it off to a chair to examine.
“I confront them. I’m pissed off.” Eve tapped a hand to her chest. “All these bodies piling up, and two in one day. I’m the best, right, and they’re running circles around me. I know they’re involved,” she continued as she began to pace. “I’ve got all these arrows pointing, but they’re racking up the points while I’m spinning. Makes me look incompetent.”
She could work this, she realized. Yes, she could work it.
“My commander’s on my ass, my husband’s getting testy with the hours I’m putting in. I’m starting to look like an idiot and I don’t like it. I’m going to light some fires.”
“How much will you give them?” Whitney asked her.
“Just what they’ve given me. The surface connections, but I need to make it personal. Them, me. Budget’s stretched,” she decided. “Yeah. I can’t access the resources through the department, but I’ll use my own money to get those resources outside the department. Don’t you know who I am? Don’t you know I’ve got more money than the two of you put together? That’ll speak to them, won’t it?” she asked Mira. “He bought me, but now I can get my hands on billions as long as I bang him when he wants it.”
“A fool and his money,” Roarke murmured, amused despite himself.
Mira let out a little sigh. “I would say it’s their probable view of your relationship.”
“And I’d say this no longer sounds like a backup plan,” Roarke put in.
“Feeney’s right, I front the play. I can time it. Hit them after I know, or am reasonably sure, we’re going to get the warrants, but before we serve them. It’s just adding incentive for them to move up their timetable. We sting them right,” she insisted, and Roarke understood she was pushing to get him in her corner, “they go after me, they go after a cop, they’re done. Their high-priced lawyers, their family fortunes, their goddamn pedigrees aren’t going to keep them out of a cage for the rest of their lives.”
“Is that what worries you?” he asked. “That even with the case you’ve built, even with the evidence you believe you’ll gather with the warrants, they’ll slip through the system?”
“They worry me.” In one sharp move, she pointed to the board, to the faces of the dead. “The chance I’ll have to put another up there worries me.”
He watched her realize she’d let her emotions spike, let them show in front of her superior. And he watched her draw them down again, draw them in.
“They want me up there,” she said in a tone both cool and flat, “so we’ll make them want me up there sooner.”
“You know, I’ve been working on something like this off and on.” Feeney continued to study the wrist unit as his casual comment defused the charged air. “This one’s nice and compact, got more bells and whistles than I’d worked out.”
He glanced up, his gaze flicking over Roarke before homing in on Eve. “What would be prime is if you run into them—the both of you—someplace. Public place. Restaurant, club, like that. That’s what fries you, see, trying to get a little downtime, and there they are in your face. Maybe you’re already pissy, having a spat with Roarke, and that just shoves you over the line. That way it comes off impulse. Like you just lost it there for a minute.”
“That is prime,” Eve agreed.
“I’ve got moments.” Feeney rose, handed the unit back to Eve, looked at Roarke. “That’s nice work.”
“Thanks.”
“Peabody, see if you can find out where they’re going to be tonight. At least one of them. Friday night . . . they’re not going to sit at home playing mah-jongg.”
“It’ll be easier and quicker for me to find out.” Roarke took out his ’link, walked away.
“Still want eyes and ears on you,” Feeney told her.
“Fine.” She stuck her hands in her pockets as she tracked Roarke out of the room.
“You keep them on, unless you’re locked up in that fortress you live in, or you’re working toward getting your hands on some billions.”
“What . . .” It struck her. “Jesus, Feeney.”
“You started it. I’ll start setting it up.”
“I want two officers on you at all times. That starts now,” Whitney added.
“McNab and I will take tonight.”
“They’ve seen you,” Eve reminded Peabody.
“They won’t make me.”
Mira slipped out, waiting until Roarke put his ’link away.
“I’m going to apologize to you,” she began. “I couldn’t, in good conscience, keep my opinion to myself, even knowing how she’d react, what she’d do. But I’m sorry.”
“I’m obliged to accept what she does. What she is,” he added, reminding himself that she, in turn, accepted him. Hardly realizing he did so, he slid a hand into his pocket, found the button he carried there. That tiny piece of her. “That obligation started when I fell in love with her, and was sealed when I married her. Before you told her, I’d been engaged in a vicious internal debate about telling her myself.”
“I see.”
He held her gaze for a long moment. “I don’t know which side of me would’ve won.”
“I do. You’d have told her, then had your argument over her reaction in private.”
“I expect you’re right.”
“What troubles you more? What she’s planning to do, or the fact that she’s in the position of doing it because her connection to you qualified her?”
“Toss-up. They have utter contempt for me, and enjoy letting it show. Just enough. I suppose they think I’d be insulted, or have my feelings hurt.”
“As you said, they don’t understand you.”
“If they did, they’d have tried to kill her already. They think killing her will inconvenience me, certainly disrupt my personal and professional lives for a bit, cause me some distress.”
He turned the button in his fingers. “They’d enjoy all of that. If they knew losing her would destroy me in levels they can’t imagine, they’d cut her into pieces and bathe in her blood.”
“No.” Eve spoke from the doorway. “No, they wouldn’t because I’m better than they are. They can’t beat me, and they sure as hell can’t beat us. Can you give us a minute?” she asked Mira.
“Yes.” She touched Roarke’s arm before she went back inside the conference room.
“Do you really think those two trust-fund fuckwits could take me down?”
Oh aye, he thought, her ego was healthy enough—so was her temper. But by God, so was his. “Think, no. But neither would I have thought those two trust-fund fuckwits could or would murder nine people or more, and have the NYPSD chasing their tails.”
“Chasing our . . .” Fury erupted. He’d have sworn his skin singed in the hot flow of its lava. “Is that what you call this? Is that what you call putting a solid case together in under a week? Making connections that tie th
em up out of sweat and sleepless nights and solid, consistent police work? Chasing our tails?”
“So solid a case you’re about to paint a target on your back rather than trust that solid case and police work.”
“This is police work, goddamn it. This is the job, and you know it. You knew it from the jump, and if you can’t back me when—”
“Stop there,” he warned her. “I haven’t said I wouldn’t back you, but I won’t be pushed into it.”
“I don’t have time to ease into it, to debate and discuss. I didn’t put it together, and I should have. I didn’t see it until Mira pointed it out, and it should’ve been flashing like fucking neon in my brain. I’ll know who their next target is if it’s me, and I won’t have to stand over somebody else I couldn’t save.”
“I understand that, and you, very well.” Christ, he was tired. He couldn’t remember when he’d last been so bloody knackered. “Do you really expect me to have no concerns, no worries, no dark thoughts? Reverse it. I’m putting myself up as bait. What do you do?”
“I trust you enough to know you can and will handle yourself, and use the resources you have available to ensure your own safety.”
“Eve, please don’t stand there and shovel that bullshit at my feet. These are good shoes.”
She hissed out a breath, but at the end of it he saw the chip on her shoulder tumble off. “Okay, I would trust you, but I’d also have some concerns, worries, and dark thoughts. And you’d be sorry I did. You’d hate that I did.”
“All right.”
She squinted at him. “All right? That’s it?”
“I had a bigger and considerably more vicious fight with you before, in my head. It was passionate, fierce, and very, very loud.”
“Who won?”
He had to touch her, just a skim of his fingertip down the little dent in her chin. “We hadn’t quite got there, but since we’ve finished it here, I like to think we both have.”
“I meant what I said in there, which I shouldn’t have said in front of Whitney. I can’t have another face on that board.” He watched her face change, watched her let him see what was inside.