[In Death 24] - Innocent in Death

by J. D. Robb

  “Not bad,” Roarke commented.

  “Yeah, a pretty sweet setup for a kid or a teacher. In here, Williams intersects with Mosebly. Allika Straffo is on premises—no intersections reported—then, according to her statement, she went looking for Williams, and—using your terms—ran a parallel line with him and Mosebly, overhearing their argument.”

  From where she stood, Eve could see the exits, entrances into the pool area. Staff. Students.

  “She leaves, Mosebly leaves, more intersections with her and Hallywell, Dawson. Dawson comes in to see Williams, and for the second time in a week finds himself a dead body.”

  “Quite the coincidence.”

  “Yeah, yeah. But he and the nurse, who was also called to both scenes, they’re peripheral. Someone else reached the center of both these circles, undetected.” Eve stared down at the surface of the water. “Both times.”

  “You’re sure it was the same killer?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I am. Pretty sure I know who the killer is, but I don’t have the why. I have to have the why on this one.”

  “Well now, share.”

  She nearly did, then shook her head. “Not yet, okay? I’d like to see what a geek like you comes up with without prejudicing the, ah, theorem. Want to talk it over with Mira, too. But that’s all gut right now. I’m going to look at the solid first, and track the go-cup angle.”

  “Are we going shopping?”

  “Just going to check a few of the places that sell that make and model, in a ten-block radius.”

  “You said radius. Does that make you a geek?”

  “Smart-ass.”

  He took her hand. “That’s more like it.”

  It didn’t blow the investigation open for her. Like the majority of cop work it was routine—repetitious and tedious.

  She spoke to clerks, to managers, to the clueless and the chirpy. The item in question was a popular model, not the cheapest or the priciest. A good value, she was told endlessly. Practical, attractive, and hard-wearing.

  “We had to order in another shipment two weeks before Christmas,” Eve was told by an eager-to-help assistant manager. “Great stocking stuffer or emergency gift, and we had them on sale. Couldn’t keep them on the shelf. We’re still selling them briskly. Valentine’s Day. Free inscription inside a heart, or with heart motif.”

  “Adorable. You’ve got records. I’m interested in one of these models inscribed to ‘Craig.’” She spelled it out.

  “Sure, I’ll look it up. If they went credit or debit, we’d have a record. Cash, we wouldn’t. Most people don’t do cash because once they come in, they end up buying multiple items.”

  “Uh-huh.” Eve glanced around, noticed that Roarke was roaming, browsing, examining. All the things that people who actually liked to shop ended up doing.

  “I’m really sorry.” And the guy actually looked it. “We don’t have a sale of that model—or any other—with an inscription added that says ‘Craig’—any spelling—during the last thirty days.”

  “Go back another thirty.”

  “Oh. Um.” He looked distressed now. “That’ll take me a few minutes, and on the main unit in the back, since I’d have to go back into last year. You’ll have to excuse me.”

  “Done. I’ll wait.” She turned now and saw that Roarke wasn’t just shopping, he was buying. She crossed the store, winding around displays. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m making a purchase.”

  “How? Why?” It must be a kind of sickness, she decided. “You already own six of everything.”

  He only smiled, and took the bag from the clerk. “Thank you. And now,” he said to Eve, “it appears I have more of everything. Any luck?”

  “No. Still checking. It was always going to come down to cash. Killer thinks clearly. Not going to leave a paper trail. It’s easy to breeze into one of these places, buy something, add the fee for inscription, pass some paper money, and walk out. Nobody’s going to remember you.”

  The clerk came back, dripping apology. “I’m so sorry, I couldn’t find what you’re looking for. I can ask around, see if any of the clerks remember.”

  “Yeah, great. Thanks. You can contact me if you find out anything.” She dug out a card, passed it over.

  “That’s one to cross off,” she said when they were outside. “Had to be done, though.”

  “Here.” He took out a pair of gloves from the shopping bag. “To replace the ones you’ve lost since Christmas.”

  “I haven’t lost them.” Why was she always losing them? “They’re just somewhere else.”

  “Of course. These can go on your hands. And these”—he tapped the bag—“will go in your vehicle to replace the ones on your hands once you lose those.”

  “And when I lose those?”

  “Back to square one. Now, should we go out to dinner, or go back to work?”

  “We could eat dinner while we work.”

  “How strangely that sort of thing suits us.” He draped an arm around her shoulders. “I’ll drive.”

  Since she’d picked the place for takeout, she let him pick the meal. She should’ve known it would be fish. Maybe it came from being born on an island, though she knew it was more likely he picked it because it was good for her.

  Still, it was tasty, as was the bed of spicy rice that almost disguised the vegetables mixed in it. Besides, it washed down just fine with a crisp glass of white.

  She told him about the search at the Straffos’ penthouse. This was what she wanted from him now, impressions, comments, insights. Telling him what she knew, what she’d seen, heard, observed. And for now, leaving out the seed of certainty planted dead center of her gut.

  “Sad,” he said.

  “What is?”

  “Who. Straffo’s wife. That’s how she strikes me. Keeping everyone’s records and schedules with her own—needs to know, doesn’t she, where everyone is, what they’re doing. Wouldn’t want to have her own schedule, interests, impulses conflict with theirs. Then there’s her memorial box.”

  “Memorial. I thought memory.”

  “It’s both, isn’t it? To keep his memory fresh for her, and to memorialize him. For herself. Just for her. That’s sad. It must be a terrible thing for a mother. Then you said she hid some of her meds. Doesn’t want her husband to know she’s taking them. Doesn’t want to—what, upset, disappoint, worry him? So she keeps her little secrets.”

  “Yeah, she does,” Eve agreed. “She’s got secrets.”

  “And you think they apply to these murders? How?”

  “Keeping the status quo is vital to her.” Because visuals helped, Eve brought Allika’s photo ID onto the wall screen. “She broke it off with Williams. Betrayed her husband, sure.” Split-screened Allika’s image with Oliver Straffo’s. “But in addition she rocked her own boat. That spooked her. She needs those waters calm again. Still, I don’t think they ever are. Not inside her anyway. It’s pretense. So she needs her chemical boosts.”

  “I don’t see how that connects to your investigation.”

  “Everything connects. She loses a kid.” Now, Eve added a third image, the innocent and doomed little boy.

  “He’s charming, isn’t he?” Roarke commented.

  “Yeah. He’s got a look. So does Allika. Hers is like before and after, and that’s how it strikes me in that house. You can see it in the pictures. In their eyes. They’re wounded, walking wounded, but they get through it. His way, her way. Now she stumbles, has this affair. He knows it, or close enough. I think he knew she ended it, and he doesn’t confront her. Keep up the pretense, the status quo. Already lost a kid, can’t put themselves or their surviving child through a divorce.”

  She added Rayleen’s photo so the screen held four images. “Now there are two murders, slapped back to back and right in their faces. She’s shaking and scared. He’s closed up and angry.”

  “And the girl?”

  Eve looked at the screen. “She’s fascinated.”

  “
Ah. Children can be cold-blooded. Death’s other for them. They’re so far from it. Innocent enough to believe it can’t touch them, so it’s compelling.”

  “Is it innocence?”

  “It’s childhood, I suppose.” He topped off her wine, then his own. “So very different from yours or mine.”

  “Yeah. Different by a long shot. Roarke?”

  “Hmm.”

  She started to speak, then changed her mind. “I wonder if either of us can really be objective about a family unit like that.” She gestured toward the screen. “But I know there are answers in that house. I’m going to find them. Each one of them, each segment of that square that became a triangle. Mother, father, daughter.” She drew a triangle in the air. “Each knows something. Something that connects them and keeps them separate at the same time. I’m going to have to take each segment separately to figure it out.”

  18

  AFTER DINNER, EVE BEGAN TO SEARCH AND CROSS-reference every name in the address books she’d taken during the search of the Straffo penthouse. While it ran, she started a chart of schedules.

  Intersections, she thought again. Parallel lines. But a triangle here, not a circle.

  Idly, she doodled a triangle on a pad, drew a horizontal line through its center. “What would you call this?”

  Roarke glanced over her shoulder. “What you have there is a midpoint proportionality, a segment whose endpoints are the midpoints of two sides of a triangle. A segment that is parallel to the third side—its length half the length of that third side.”

  “Jeez, über-geek. I see a kind of box inside a triangle. A connect from another source.”

  “That as well.”

  “Huh.” While he wandered off to the kitchen, she rose and updated her murder board. Her computer signaled the assigned task was completed before she was finished.

  “Display results.” She started to turn just as Roarke came out of the kitchen with a tray. “We already ate.”

  “We did indeed.” He crossed, set the tray on the table, then took off a small plate. And turning, offered it. “And this is a homemade fudge brownie.”

  Her heart, she was embarrassed to realize, just melted. “Man, you never miss a trick.”

  “You can thank Summerset later.”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “I asked if he’d bake a batch. So you can thank me as well.” Roarke held the plate just out of reach, tapped his lips with the index finger of his free hand.

  She rolled her eyes, but it was only for form. Then leaned in, pecked a kiss on his lips, and snatched the brownie. “Damn me if I’m kissing those bird lips of Summerset.” She bit in, then just groaned. “Oh, God, this is really…Are there more?”

  “Maybe.”

  “I’d better space it out. I think this is the chocolate equivalent of Zeus.” On another bite she turned to read the data. “Son of a bitch! I fucking knew I was right.”

  “About…” He scanned the data. “One Harmon, Quella, female, age fifty-eight of Taos, New Mexico. Two marriages, two divorces, no offspring. Occupation, artist.”

  “What kind of artist?”

  Cocking his head, he continued to read the data. “Specializes in fashion and jewelry, stone and leatherwork. Leatherwork. Ah.”

  “Ah, my ass. Bull’s-fucking-eye. If that’s not the ricin source, I will kiss the hideous lips of Summerset. The castor beans, they still grow wild in arid areas. I bet New Mexico has some arid areas. And I bet a leather artist living out there uses the oil in leather preparation.”

  “Certainly that may be, and how does Quella Harmon connect—or are we still using ‘intersect’—with your victims?”

  “By being the maternal aunt of Allika Straffo. Means,” Eve stated. “Closing right in on means. Computer, search date books on each Straffo individual in evidence for any travel to New Mexico over the past six months. No, amend. A full year. And/or any mention during that time period in same of Harmon, Quella, to New York.”

  Acknowledged. Working…

  “You think Straffo took a sample of ricin from this woman, with or without her knowledge, carried it back to New York, then used it to poison Foster.”

  “I damn well do.”

  “All right, means I’ll give you, Eve, but you’ve lost motive again, haven’t you? Unless the computer reports that there was contact with this Harmon in the last couple of months, it would have been prior to Allika’s affair with Williams, prior to Foster having knowledge of it.”

  “Uh-huh. Parallel lines.”

  Task complete. Straffo, Oliver, Allika, and Rayleen traveled by commercial shuttle from New York to Taos, New Mexico, on November twenty-six. Returned to New York by commercial shuttle on November thirty…

  “That’s before Allika took up with Williams, according to their statements. Isn’t it?”

  “Yeah.” But Eve was smiling grimly.

  “Then unless Straffo is a sensitive with psychic tendencies, why would he transport a poisonous substance on a commercial carrier before his wife strayed?”

  “Maybe it wasn’t a poisonous substance at that time, maybe it was just a bag of beans. But it’s all about planning and possibilities. Opportunities. Curiosity.”

  As she spoke, she walked back, circling the board again. Then she continued to pin photos, lists, notes, data. “Computer, print out displayed data. Hard copy.”

  Acknowledged…

  And now Roarke circled, studied, scanned while she went to retrieve the printout.

  He could see she was building something. It was the way she’d arranged the pieces on the board, how she continued to arrange them. Into some sort of pattern she, obviously, saw in her head. Or felt in her gut.

  Her mind, he knew, was labyrinthine and linear, fluid, flexible, and stubbornly rigid. He could and did admire it without ever fully understanding its workings. Her gut, he believed absolutely, was close to infallible.

  He stepped back and let his own mind clear, refocus, in an attempt to see what she was moving toward.

  When he did, his shock was instant. His denial automatic. “You can’t be serious.”

  “You see it?”

  “I see what you’re stitching together, what pattern you’ve made out of it. But I can’t put my head around why you’d aim in that direction.”

  “What? You don’t think a ten-year-old girl can be a stone-cold killer?”

  She said it casually as she pinned Harmon’s photo and data to the side of the triangle she’d made out of the Straffos. “I murdered at eight,” she reminded him.

  “Not murder, not close to it. You saved your own life, and destroyed a monster. You’re talking about a child deliberately and coldly planning and carrying out the murder of two adults.”

  “Maybe more than that.” Eve reached into her file, took out the ID photo of Trevor Straffo she’d already printed. And pinned it in the center of the triangle.

  “Christ Jesus, Eve.”

  “Maybe he fell down the steps. Maybe he did. Maybe he had help. Maybe it was a tragic accident, which involved his sister.”

  Her gaze was pinned now, to Rayleen Straffo’s violet eyes. “Excited, running, a couple of kids, one trips over the other, over his own feet. Whatever. But you know what?”

  She turned, and those flat cop’s eyes met Roarke’s now. “I don’t think so. I think she pushed him. I think she got him up when her parents were sleeping, lured him out of bed. Don’t make any noise. Santa’s downstairs! Let’s peek.”

  “Well, my God,” Roarke muttered.

  “Then, when he gets to the steps, a good hard shove. No more little brother edging in on your territory. Squeezing into the center of your circle.”

  “How can you think this? She’d have been all but a baby herself when that happened.”

  “Seven. She’d have been seven. She’d had all the spotlight for five of those years, and now she has to share it. Maybe it’s a novelty at first, let’s play with the baby. But it got old, and they’re not paying nearly enough attentio
n to Rayleen. Princess Rayleen. Just have to fix that, won’t we?”

  “What you’re saying, it’s obscene.”

  “Murder always is. The mother knows,” Eve said quietly. “She knows. She’s terrified and she’s sick and she tries different ways to escape the horror of it. But she can’t.”

  “You’re so sure of it.”

  “I saw it in her. I know it. But knowing it and proving it, especially something like this, are way different.”

  He had to struggle to overcome an innate and instinctive denial. “All right, even considering you may be right about the boy, why Foster? Why Williams? Because of her mother’s affair?”

  “I don’t think she’d give a flat shit about her mother’s affair. Sex isn’t on her radar, not really. And it doesn’t really apply to her directly. I don’t know why, that’s the bitch of it. I’ve got Peabody searching through Foster’s student records to start. Maybe he caught her cheating, or stealing.”

  Didn’t fit, she thought, annoyed with herself. Didn’t really jibe. “There were a few illegals in student lockers. Maybe she’s selling or using. If she was threatened by him in some way, or felt he could or would do something to screw up her perfect world, she could kill him to prevent it.”

  She began to pace. “I need Mira’s take. For me, this kid fits the profile down the line. But I need Mira to back that up. I need that, and I need to catch Allika alone tomorrow. Wear her down, break through the protective shield. I need more than what I’ve got because unless I’m completely crazy, this kid’s killed three people in her first decade. And she hasn’t even come close to hitting her stride.”

  “How would she know what ricin is, much less how to use it?”

  “Kid’s smart. Smart enough to listen, observe, and check the web.”

  “And the paralytic used on Williams. How’d she get her hands on it?”

  “She volunteers, some organization called From the Kids. You know what they do?” She tapped the copy of Rayleen’s busy schedule. “They visit pediatric wards, geriatric wards, spend time with the sick and infirm to brighten their day. I bet she could get whatever the hell she wanted. Who’s going to look at some sweet, socially conscious little girl? I need to find her diary.”