Strangers In Death

19

WHEN HE CAME IN, SHE SAT AT HER DESK, HER jacket tossed on the back of her sleep chair. The jacket, he knew, would bother her while she worked. The weapon she still wore? Its weight wouldn’t register any more than the weight of her own arms.

Steam rose out of the mug on her desk. Coffee, he thought, nearly equaled the weapon as part of her essential makeup.

She hadn’t yet worked herself into exhaustion on this one. He’d seen her work, worry, wrangle with a case until her system simply collapsed from neglect. But this one, he realized, was different. She was juiced.

“It’s a competition.”

She glanced over, brows knit. “What?”

“You’re as involved and determined as you are, always. You’ve made the victim yours, as you always do. But you’re not suffering this time around.”

“Suffering? I don’t suffer.”

“Oh, but you do, darling Eve. Murder infuriates you, insults you, and the victims haunt you. Every one. But for this, for this particular one, it’s challenged you above all else. She challenges you-and your attitude toward her, which strikes me as a personal level of dislike, kicks that up a notch. You’re damned if you aren’t going to beat her.”

“Maybe. Whatever works. Whatever gets the job done. So, the efficient Leopold came through. I’ve got his incoming here, the list of parents Ava tapped for grunt work. The ones he had some record of or remembered, anyway. We’ll split those if you’re up for it.”

“Shoot my share to my unit.”

“Okay. We’ll divide by alpha. We should…I don’t like her,” Eve said suddenly. “Didn’t like her pretty much from the jump. Didn’t like her when I stood watching her on the security screen as she walked into the house the morning of.”

“With her well-groomed hair and coordinating wardrobe,” Roarke remembered.

“Yeah. It was…” Eve snapped her fingers. “But that screws objectivity, so I pushed it back. Thing is, it kept pushing back in again. It took me a while-well, not that much while, but some-to figure out why.”

Since he sensed something there, he sat on the corner of her desk. “All right. Tell me why.”

“Don’t get bent over it.”

He angled his head. “Why would I?”

“She reminds me of Magdelana.”

He said nothing for a moment, just watched her face, then rising, he walked over to the murder board to study Ava’s.

“Not just the high-class blonde thing,” Eve began.

“No,” he said quietly, “not just.” He thought of Magdelana, the woman he’d once cared for. The woman who’d betrayed him, and on the return trip had done everything in her power to hurt Eve and chip away at their marriage.

“Not just,” he repeated. “They’re both users, aren’t they? Manipulators with a wholly selfish core polished over with sophistication and style. Very much the same type. You’re right about that.”

“Okay.”

Hearing the relief in her voice, he looked over at her. “Did you think I’d be annoyed or upset by the comparison?”

“Maybe some, maybe more if I’d finished it out and said that because she reminds me of Magdabitch, I’m going to experience a tingly, even orgasmic satisfaction by bringing her down.”

“I see. Revenge by proxy.”

“She deserves the cage on her own merits or lack thereof. But yeah, maybe some element of revenge by proxy.”

Walking back, he leaned down, kissed the top of Eve’s head. “Whatever works. And now that you’ve pointed it out, I’ll enjoy some of that tingly satisfaction as well. Thanks for that.”

“It’s small, petty, and probably inappropriate of us.”

“Which will make it all the more orgasmic. Send over the file. I’ll just cop some of your coffee, then get started.”

Whatever works, Eve thought again as he strolled into the kitchen. What really worked, was them.

She ordered her unit to copy and send Roarke’s unit the names on file beginning with N surnames. Then she opened the first half of the file, took a quick scan.

Plenty of little slaves and servants to pick from, she thought. A nice wide field of the vulnerable, the needy, the grateful. The bitch just had to keep circling until…

“Wait. Whoa. Wait.”

With coffee in hand, Roarke stepped back in. “That was fast.”

“Wait, wait, wait.” Scooping back her hair, Eve launched to her feet. “Computer, display on screen, data for Custer, Suzanne.”

“Who might that be?” Roarke wondered.

“Wait, wait. Computer, display on second screen, data on Custer, Ned.”

Roarke did wait, studied both photos, the basic identification data. “Husband and wife, and he’s deceased. Recently.”

“He’s Baxter’s.” She dropped back down into the chair. “I didn’t keep the damn file. I need the damn case file on this guy.”

“Move,” Roarke ordered. “Get up. Give me a moment.”

“Don’t hack into Baxter’s police unit. I’ll tag him and-”

“And I’ll have it for you a great deal quicker. It’s hardly hacking, as it’s ridiculously easy. And you’re authorized in any case.” He gave her shoulder a light, but purposeful shove. “Give me the chair a minute.”

“All right, all right.” In any case, it gave her time to pace and think. She stared at the woman on screen-pretty in a toned-down, tired-eyed kind of way. Couple of kids, professional mother’s stipend, philandering, heavy-handed husband.

“Coincidence, my ass.”

“Quiet,” Roarke muttered. “Half a minute more here. Ah, and there we are. What do you need from this?”

“Take down the data on screen, put that up. We’ll scroll through.” She felt it, felt it in her bones. But…“I want your take here without any of my input first.”

He read, as she did, of the quick and nasty death of one Ned Custer by person or persons unknown. Cheap sex flop, slit throat-attack from behind-castration, no trace or DNA, no witnesses. No trail.

“So the wife was well-alibied, I see.”

“Solid. They ran the ’link calls, confirmed the source. She was in her apartment when he got sliced. No boyfriends, no close relatives or friends. Baxter and Trueheart are thorough, and they didn’t pop anything on this.”

“She’s one of Ava’s mothers.”

“Yep.”

“Strangers on a Train.”

“Huh?” Her head swiveled back toward him. “What train? Nobody was on a train.”

“I haven’t run that vid for you, have I?” Coolly, he continued to study the screen, continued to read data. “It’s a good one. Mid-twentieth-century, Hitchcock film. You’ve enjoyed Hitchcock.”

“Yeah, yeah, so?”

“Briefly, two men-strangers-meet on a train, and the conversations turn to how each wishes to be rid of a certain individual in his life. And how it could be done without the police suspecting them if each did in the other’s. Very clever, as there’s no real connection between the two men. It was a book first, come to think of it.”

“Strangers,” Eve repeated.

“In this case, the one who wanted his wife done didn’t take the other-an unstable sort, who wanted his father done-seriously. But, the wife was dispatched, and the unstable sort pressured the sudden widower to complete the bargain. It’s twisty and complex. You’ll have to watch it.”

“The exchange is what clicked for me,” Eve told him. “The possibility of that. You do mine, I do yours. We’re both alibied, and who’d look at either of us for the other’s? Why would Baxter look at Ava Anders in the murder of this guy? She doesn’t know him, and even if you note that Suzanne Custer’s in the Anders program, it doesn’t pop. It doesn’t mean a thing.”

“Until you look at Anders’s murder, won’t let it slide as an accident, and dig deep enough to see this. And wonder.”

“Probability scan’s going to bottom out.” Already annoyed by that, Eve hissed out a breath. “It’ll bottom out until I can plug in more. What about you? Do you buy it?”

“The stronger personality, the more powerful one, hatches the plan, draws the weaker one in. And does the job first, to add pressure and obligation. Even threat. When the weaker follows through, it’s not quite as clean and tidy. Yes, I’d buy it.”

“It’s easier to pry open the weaker one. We pull Suzanne Custer in, we work her.” Pacing, Eve circled the murder board. “Work her right, work her hard enough, she’ll flip on Ava. Need more first. You move.”

He pushed back from the desk. “Do you still want runs on the other names?”

“I’ll put a drone on that. This is the money shot here, this is the one. I’ve got a tingly.”

“Save it for me, will you?”

“Ha. I need everything I can get on her. Baxter’s got a solid murder book. We just have to look at the data from a different angle now. Suzanne didn’t kill her husband. She killed Ava’s.”

“There had to be contact between the two murderers,” Roarke pointed out. “Confirming the first, setting up the second.”

“Where did Custer get the murder weapon, the drug, the enhancer? That’s a place to pick at. Ava had to give her the security code, the layout.” As she spoke, Eve scrawled down names, connections, questions. “They changed the code every ten days, so there had to be a way to pass that on. We pick at Ava at the same time. She’s not going to be alibied so damn tight for the night of Ned Custer’s murder. She fits,” Eve added. “She’s the right height for the angle of the killing strike. The right personality to have planned it without leaving a trace behind, the right personality to use someone else to get what she wanted.”

“Baxter would have had EDD check all Custer’s ’links, her comp for communication and activity before her husband’s murder, and-I assume-for a week or so after it.”

“Yeah, but not for before Anders.” Eve planted a finger on Thomas Anders’s name on her notes. “No point. She wasn’t a suspect, not with her alibi, in her husband’s. You look, you check, but Baxter didn’t feel it. Because it wasn’t there to feel. We’ll pull them now, all of them. Anders’s, too. We’ll go back to before the Custer murder on them.”

She drummed her fingers. “Asshole like Custer, I bet he kept cock enhancers around. The barbs, now…where’s a nice mom of two like Suzanne going to get her hand on them? They came from her. That part wasn’t in Ava’s plan.”

“A terrible thing when your husband’s murdered that way,” Roarke commented. “I’ll bet a kindly doctor would prescribe tranquilizers for the widow. Put them all together instead of doling them out for yourself…”

“Good. That’s good. A medical won’t want to give us that information, not without a warrant, but we start with her financials, see if she paid a doctor, paid a pharmacy between the murders. Close to the second murder, yeah, close, I bet. Got cold feet as it got toward the sticking point.”

She engaged her ’link, put through to Baxter’s home. When she hit voice mail, she ordered a transfer to his mobile.

She heard music first, something low and bluesy that said sexual foreplay to her. Baxter’s face came on with dim lighting in the background.

“This better be damn good.”

“My home office, tomorrow, eight hundred hours.”

“I’m not on the roll till Monday. I’ve got-”

“You are now. Tag your boy, too.”

“Give me a break, Dallas. I’ve got a clear field and a hot brunette on tap.”

“Then you’d better turn her on full tonight, because you’re here at eight. How much do you want to close the Custer case, Baxter?”

The irritated scowl vanished. “You got something there?”

“Hotter than any brunette who’d give you a clear field. Eight hundred. If you’ve got any personal notes not in the murder book, bring them.”

“Give me a goddamn hint, will you?”

“Strangers on a Train. Look it up.” She clicked off, contacted Peabody, then Feeney.

“Sounds like we’ll need the standard cop breakfast buffet,” Roarke decided. “And a Saturday one at that.”

“You don’t have to feed them. I want Mira, too,” she considered. “I’d like her take on the suspect profiles.” She glanced at her wrist unit. “It’s not really all that late.”

“While you’re interrupting the Miras’ evening, send me the file. I’ll poke into the financials.”

She frowned at him. “It’s still open and active. Yeah, you could do that. And I can order the full search on the electronics. When you do the financials, see if anything pops back a ways that points toward Suzanne Custer buying the sex aids.”

After copying and sending the file, Eve stared at her ’link. It wasn’t really that late, she reminded herself. But she had sex aids on the brain, and that nudged her into thinking how the Miras might be spending their night together. “Jesus, way to wig myself out.”

She hedged, and ordered the transmission to go straight to voice mail. “Dr. Mira, I didn’t want to disturb your evening. I’ve got something on the Anders case, a strong possibility of a connection with a previous homicide that’s still open and active. I realize tomorrow’s Saturday-” Or she did now that Roarke had mentioned it. “But I have a team meeting at my home office tomorrow at eight-”

“Eve?”

“Oh, hey.” There was music again. It wasn’t porn vid music, thank God, but it spoke of an intimate evening at home to Eve. “Sorry to bother you when you’re…whatever. I have something I’d like to pull you in on. I’ve set a meeting at my home office in the morning, if your schedule-”

“What time?”

“Eight hundred.”

“I can make that. I’ll be there. Do you want me to study anything in the meantime?”

“I’d actually like you to come into this fresh.”

“Fine.” Mira glanced away, laughed as she sent a warm look off screen. “Dennis sends his best. I’ll see you in the morning.”

“Thanks.”

Eve swiveled away from the ’link, pressed her fingers to her eyes. “They’re going to do it,” she mumbled. “If not now, soon. I wish I didn’t have to know that.”

To clear the image, and the thought, out of her head, she turned back to Baxter’s file, and started digging.

At some point the cat wandered in to leap on her desk. When he got nothing but, “Don’t sit on my stuff,” he leaped back down to stalk into Roarke’s domain.

She started a new file listing the correlations, the connections-actual and possible-the time lines. Using the backside of her murder board, she arranged photos, notes, reports. Stood back, studied it.

She could see it, actually see it. The steps, the stages, the moves, the mistakes. Not enough, she admitted, not for an arrest, not for a conviction. But there would be.

Lock and key, that’s how she saw it. The Anders case the lock, the Custer case the key. Once she fit them together, turned it just right, it would open. Then she’d reach in and grab Ava by the throat.

She turned to Roarke’s office. He sat at his desk, the cat draped over his lap. “Find anything?”

“Custer’s financials don’t allow her much wiggle room. From what I can see, the husband ran the show there previously. Most of the withdrawals, debits are in his name. There are several in one particular sex shop-Just Sex-in the six months before his untimely. As it wouldn’t have surprised me to find certain items you had interest in-”

“Hopefully you mean professional interest.”

He only smiled. “As, and so forth, I entertained myself and did a bit of searching at the vendor’s…”

“You hacked.”

“You say that in such a disapproving tone. I explored. You’ll certainly do so yourself, legally and tediously, but I like having my curiosity satisfied.”

He said nothing more, only picked up the bottle of water on his desk and drank. And his eyes laughed at her over the bottle.

“Crap. Yes, I’ll get the data by fully legal means, but what did you find?”

“Multiple purchases of what’s delightfully marketed as Hard-on. It comes in a phallic-shaped bottle.”

“Check one.”

“Purchases of various sexual aids and toys. Cock rings, probes, textured condoms, vibrators.”

“Check two.”

“Nothing on the ropes, I’m afraid.”

“But they carry them. We checked venues for that type of rope, and they carry them. Did Suzanne pay a visit there?”

“No record of that, no. They do take cash. She did, however, visit a clinic two weeks before Anders’s death. She saw a Dr. Yin there according to the records-”

“Which you hacked into?”

“Which I explored,” he said mildly. “And she incurred a debit at the attached pharmacy, filling a prescription for a box of home pressure syringes, and a liquid form of lotrominaphine-a barbiturate used to aid sleep and nervous conditions.”

“Big, fat, red check. I have to get all this data through channels, get it all lined up. Then I’m going to knock her down with it.”

“Where are you going?”

“It’s never too late to call an APA,” she said as she hurried back to her desk. “I’m going to contact Reo, do the fast talk, and get the paperwork started on warrants for the data you just gave me.”

“And after we dropped it all nicely tied in a bow into her lap,” Roarke said to the cat. “That’s a cop for you.”

He heard her giving her pitch to Cher Reo, then arguing with the soft-voiced, tough-minded APA. He busied himself for the next few minutes studying and analyzing the last weeks of Suzanne Custer’s financials.

“Find another spot,” Roarke told Galahad, and hauled the limp mass of cat up, dropped him lightly on the floor. When he walked into Eve’s office, she sat at her desk, keying in more notes.

“She’s getting them. Whined about it, but she’s getting them.”

“Whined, perhaps, because you contacted her at very close to midnight.”

“Mostly. You can put them together like that.” Eve lifted her hands, fingers open and pointed toward each other, then slid them together. “Like teeth. Like gears. You just have to see the big picture. It’s a nearly perfect, well, machine, to stick with the teeth and gears. Clean and efficient. The problem is the operators. She made her mistake selecting this operator.”

He eased back down on her desk. “Why was this particular operator a mistake?”

“Look at her.” Eve gestured toward the screen. “Look at her background data, look at her face. Ava looks and she sees somebody weak, easily manipulated, easily cowed because she stayed with a cheating, abusing husband. She sees ordinary, a woman nobody’s going to look at twice. A woman who owes her.”

“What do you see?”

“That, all that. But I also see a woman who takes the time and trouble to find something better for her kids, something that makes them happy. One who, according to the statements in Baxter’s knock-on-doors, kept those kids and herself clean and out of trouble. She never crossed the line before this. When you push somebody like that across the line, or seduce them over it, sooner or later they look back and regret it. I’m going to make her regret sooner.”

“You can get started on that in just under eight hours.”

“Why…Oh.”

“There’s nothing more you can do tonight.”

“Not really.” She saved, copied, shut down. “Probably better to let it cook anyway.”

He took her hand, tugged her along when she looked back at the murder board. “You should be interested that Suzanne Custer’s better off financially with a dead husband than she was with a live one.”

“Little life insurance, decent pension.”

“More than that. On a quick analysis of their financials for the past twelve months, he spent approximately forty-six percent of their combined incomes on his personal needs, wants, and pursuits. Leaving the fifty-four to cover housing, food, medical, clothing, transportation, educational supplies for the children, and so on. She has his life insurance payment now, and-as a widowed professional mother, with the pension from his employment-nearly the same income as before. About eight percent less.”

“With forty-six percent less outlay. So she’s actually-why do I have to do math at midnight?”

“Thirty-eight percent to the good-using that table, and one year as an example.”

“Good enough for me. It’s not the megabucks Ava reaps, but it’s solid. It’s…proportionate, if you think about it. And it’s another button to push when we get Custer into Interview. Thanks.”

She mulled it over as she undressed. “Some of the seminars Anders offered are on budgeting, financial planning. What do you bet Ava talked to Suzanne about her money situation and how it could get a lot brighter?”

“A basic strategy would be to list all advantages. And push home all the disadvantages of the status quo. I imagine some of those seminars dealt with being proactive, with empowerment, making tough choices to improve your family situation. Any and all could be twisted by a clever woman to seduce, as you said, a vulnerable one.”

“So many mind games,” Eve mused, “so little hard evidence.”

“It’s cooking until morning,” he reminded her. “And speaking of seductions.” He gripped her hips. “I believe we have to finish making up.”

“Oh yeah. I guess I could work that in now.” Bracing her hands on his shoulders, she pushed off the balls of her feet, rising up with his helpful boost to wrap her legs around his waist. “How mad were we?”

“Furious.”

“It didn’t seem that bad, looking back.”

“It was a pitched battle that nearly shook the foundation of our marriage.”

“My ass.”

“Yes, it is.” He gave it a squeeze before tumbling to the bed with her. He laughed down at her, then kissed her lightly. “It’s a good day when it ends like this.”

She laid a hand on his cheek. “They’re pretty much all good days for me now, even the bad ones.”

All good, she thought, with him. When her mouth lifted to his, they both sank in.

So it was to be slow and easy, quiet and sweet. And so married, Eve thought, with one anticipating the other. A rise, a fall, a turn, a glide. A thrill, yes, it would always and ever be a thrill-the feel of him, the taste of him. But comfort twined with it, a velvet ribbon through the silver blade.

Her pulse quickened, and muscles, tight from a long, long day, relaxed.

He felt her give, that slow, fluid yielding to him. To herself. She warmed his blood, steadied his heart even as its beat went fast and thick. He drank her in, there, just there under the line of her jaw where the skin was so amazingly sweet. Pleasure slid through him as her hands stroked, gripped, whispered over him.

It was she who took him in, opened and asked and took, guiding him into the heat. Surrounding him with it so that each long, slow thrust pulsed and pumped through them both.

Slow, beautifully slow, drawing out and out and out every drop of pleasure. She stared into his eyes, her fingers locked with his now, clamped together as they held each other to that lazy, that torturous pace. She held, even when her breath came short, her head arched back.

He pressed his lips to the curve of her throat. Skimmed up the scrambling pulse, once again along that sweet spot under her jaw. His mouth found hers, and with that final link, let himself go.