Strangers in Death (32 page)

“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.

20

EVE SET UP EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, LINING up the data she’d already accumulated and organized. For now, she set aside the results of Roarke’s
explorations.
The warrants would pull that information in soon enough.

She decided to say nothing about the buffet table, the extra seating, that had found their way into her office. What would be the point? She skimmed over her notes, took a last round with her murder boards.

Baxter surprised her by walking in just before eight.

“Guess the brunette wasn’t so hot after all.”

“She was smoking. I left her warm and cozy in…that’s food. Hot damn!”

Eve watched him bullet over to the buffet, lift the lid of the first warmer. “Yo, that is pig meat.” He plucked out a slice of bacon, bit in.

“Just help yourself,” Eve said dryly.

“Gonna.” Bearing no shame, Baxter grabbed a plate. “While I do you can tell me what you’ve got that has me here eating meat of pig—and hey!—egg of actual chicken at eight hundred on a Saturday.”

“You’ll get it when the team gets here.”

“We’ve got a team now?” He surfed the warmers, began to pile the plate with food while he studied Eve and the buffet offerings. It seemed to her it was a tough toss-up which interested him more.

“We’ve got a team now. Where’s Trueheart?”

“On the way. Peabody?”

“The same. I’ve called in Feeney and Mira and…the civilian,” she said as Roarke walked in.

“Baxter.”

“Primo pig. Thanks.”

“My pleasure.” Roarke poured himself a cup of coffee, lifted his eyebrows at Eve. “Lieutenant?”

“Yeah, yeah, why not? We’ll see if we can work in the briefing between courses.”

“Woohoo, breakfast!” Peabody all but skipped into the room, just ahead of McNab.

“I told you not to feed the puppies,” Eve scolded.

“But they’re so cute.” Roarke handed her the coffee.

“Sorry, am I late?” Trueheart hurried in. “I missed the…Wow.” His young hero face went bright as a birthday candle at the sight of the buffet.

“Grab some pig, kid,” Baxter told him. “Team feed. Hey, Feeney, Dr. Mira.”

“Good morning. Isn’t that lovely!” Mira shot a smile at Eve, beamed at Roarke. “And so considerate.”

“Don’t eat all the damn bacon, McNab.” Feeney muscled him aside to claim his own.

“There’s ham, too,” McNab told him with his mouth full of it.

“When you all finish stuffing food in your faces, maybe you could listen up.”

“I got no problem listening while I’m stuffing.” Feeney glanced around. “You?”

“Well, damn it, everybody just fill it up and sit down with it somewhere.” Cops and food, she thought. Put them in the same room, invite chaos. “This is a goddamn official briefing not an all-you-can-eat.”

“Here you are, then.” Roarke handed her a plate of bacon and eggs. “You won’t be so cross if you have a bit of breakfast.”

“This is your fault.”

“It is, isn’t it?” He grinned without an ounce of remorse. “Go on, then, shovel some in.”

She did, as everyone else was. “Some of you vultures…sorry,” Eve said to Mira, “no offense.”

Mira took a neat bite of creamy eggs. “None taken.”

“Some of you may be aware that Detective Pig-Eater there and his aide, Officer Danish, caught a homicide a couple months back. Baxter, quick overview.”

“Custer, Ned,” he began, and reeled off the basic facts.

When he’d finished, Eve flipped Suzanne Custer’s ID and data on screen. “The widow’s alibi holds,” she said. “The ’link to ’link transmissions she made originated in her apartment, and EDD analysis verifies they were live trans, not recorded. Suzanne Custer didn’t slit her husband’s throat. She not only wasn’t there, but lacked the physicality for the killing blow.”

“Too short, too slight,” Baxter confirmed between shovels.

“The extensive and thorough investigation by the gluttonous primary and his aide unearthed no sidepiece, no relative, no friend who might have killed Custer on the wife’s behalf,” Eve continued. “Said investigation found no financial payment, or other bartering tool that may have been used by the wife to hire the hit. The widow does, however, benefit financially from Custer’s death, and as the vic had a documented history of spousal abuse, adultery, and kept his fist closed over the purse strings, the widow also benefits on emotional, physical, and practical levels from his death.”

“Dallas, we can’t pin her.” Baxter lifted his hands, one of them holding a chunk of grilled ham speared on a fork. “We dead-ended on every angle we played with her connected to the murder.”

“She went white.” Trueheart shifted in his seat as Eve turned her gaze on him. “When Detective Baxter and I went to inform her, she didn’t seem all that surprised to find cops at the door. More tired, resigned. She said how she didn’t have money for bail. And when we told her he was dead, she went white. It didn’t feel faked, I guess I want to say. It rang true.”

“It probably was true. Let’s switch over to the Anders case. Peabody and I caught this one.”

Baxter rose to get more coffee as Eve laid out the salients. “Are you looking for a connect?” he asked. “Because both vics appear to have been killed by an LC, or a sex partner?”

“That’s an interesting connection, isn’t it? And one of the mistakes made. Ava Anders.” Eve ordered Ava’s ID photo and data split screen with Suzanne’s. “Also solidly alibied at the time of her husband’s murder. While she apparently has more friends, certainly more influence and resources than Suzanne, no evidence leads to murder for hire. Her circle of friends don’t play in. She also gains financially, and when you scrape away at the surface of her claims of a happy marriage to the lies and manipulations underneath, she gains on several other levels.”

She turned to study the screen. “These women have a great deal in common, under the surface. And they’re connected. Another mistake. Suzanne Custer’s two kids are part of the Anders sports programs. She’s attended several of Ava’s seminars and mommy retreats. She’s done some volunteering, too.”

“Huh.” It was all Feeney said, but Eve glanced at him, and saw it had clicked.

“You think the Anders woman got the idea to off her husband from what happened to Custer?” Baxter’s brows drew together as he stared hard at the screen. “Little Suzanne caught a lucky break, why can’t I? Maybe she talks an LC into doing her the favor, pays her off through the program or the company, then…”

“Simpler than that,” Feeney commented and enjoyed another scoop of hash browns. “Simpler’s best.”

Baxter frowned, then…“Well, Christ.”

It hit, Eve noted, hard enough for Baxter to forget his coffee and pig meat. “Give me a hand, will you,” she said to Roarke.

Together they turned Eve’s murder board so the second side faced the room. “Ava Anders to Bebe Petrelli and Cassie Gordon. They didn’t pan out for her, but she tested waters there. Ava Anders to Charles Monroe. Professional LC, clean record, sterling rep. Use him to build her claim that her husband liked the kink, and she didn’t. That she loved him regardless. Ava to Brigit Plowder and Sasha Bride-West. Alibis. Girlfriends, tight circle.”

As she outlined, Eve tapped each photo, each connection.

“Ava to Edmond and Linny Luce—friends of vic who would, in turn, testify as to the comfortable and happy marriage. Except they don’t like her—under the surface, they don’t like her a bit. She didn’t count on that. She didn’t count on any real connection being made between her—lady of the manor, lady bountiful—with the less fortunate women in the program she oversees.”

Now she pinned her finger to Ned Custer’s photo. “She sure as hell didn’t count on any connection between the murder of a philandering, blue-collar asshole and the murder of her renowned philanthropist husband. Murders committed months apart, with different MOs, in different parts of the city.”

“It could work,” Peabody said under her breath. “It could really work.”

“It did work,” Eve corrected. “Two men are dead.”

“You think they
traded
murders. Fuck me,” Baxter added.

“I know they did. Ava’s been planning this a long time. At least two years, since I believe she killed her father-in-law. But probably longer than that. Once the father-in-law was out of the picture—” Eve tapped Reginald Anders’s photo on the board. “Lots more at stake. More money, more power, more control. That skin she was wearing, boy, that really had to start to tighten up on her. Every single day, to have to look at this guy she’d married, play the contented wife, listen to him drone on and on about his sports, his business, his programs. Planning the murders, that would help her get through it. That light at the end of the tunnel.”