J. Robb - Born In Death

She kept those sleepy eyes open and on his when he pushed her back against the wet wall. While the jetting water thundered he took her mouth, took her taste and quivered with the thrill when her lips met his with equal passion.

Then, gripping her hips, he plunged into her, swallowing her cries, her gasps, her moans, as he drove them both.

Her fingers slid down him, dug in for purchase as shock and excitement ripped through her. There was nothing but the heat, the wet, the glorious hard body against her, in her. The pleasure shot her up so high she had to fight for breath to even moan his name.

Then it wrung her out, made her weak, made her woozy. She felt him let go, felt him give himself to her as she went limp.

“Ta cion agam ort.”With his body warm and pressed to hers he murmured it.

I love you , Eve thought, in Gaelic. Knowing he used it when it mattered most to him, she smiled.

Feeling relaxed and accommodating, she let him pick the meal and ended up eating some sort of lightly grilled fish with a side of spicy rice mixed with crispy vegetables. She might have preferred a burger and fries drenched in salt, but she couldn’t complain.

And the chilly glass of Italian white made it all go down smooth as silk.

“Before we go any further,” he began, “I want to say more than feeling kicked, I felt I’d been sucker punched by this. And it bruised.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Hardly your fault. The fact is, I was equally furious with myself. I should have seen it coming.”

“Why? How?”

“A prominent accounting firm, with prominent clients.” He moved his shoulders. “There had to be some question that I’d have access to the financial data of some competitors. And the ensuing uproar over it.”

“Hey.” She stabbed out with her fork. “You’re not going to take their side on this one. That’ll just piss me off all over again.”

“I’m not, no. I think it was poorly handled. Still, I should have expected something along those lines, and been better prepared to deal with it.”

“They bitch-slapped both of us. I’m not going to forget it.”

“Nor will I. Why don’t you tell me about the progress of the investigation. If nothing else, it’ll make me feel we’ve given them a good poke in the eye.”

“Sure.”

He listened while she brought him up to date.

“So somebody accessed her files and deleted whatever it was she was looking into. A clean job, according to McNab. They’re going to keep digging.”

“Smarter if they’d taken the units, as they did on the crime scenes.”

“Yeah, in hindsight. I’m guessing the killer couldn’t be sure we’d pin it to an account and start looking there. And until I talk to her supervisor, I don’t know that we will pin it to a specific account. When you take a scan of her office unit, even a hard look, you just see her tidy, organized files and data. The missing pieces only show up if you’re looking for them – those specific times and dates.”

“Foreign accounts,” he mused. “It would be, most likely, a company – or individuals attached to it – that has interests here as well. Most likely directly here in New York. EDD hasn’t yet determined if the access was remote or on site?”

“Not yet. My gut tells me on site. The killer hauled off their home units. If he had solid hacker skills, why not just delete the files from them? Or better, do that by remote before or after the killing? He hauled them away so he could get rid of them, ditch the data and dispose of the units. Not so easy to walk off with office equipment.”

“Good security?”

“Damn good. I don’t think anyone could have wandered in after hours without it showing up on discs. And nothing has. He deleted the files during working hours. Maybe got the passcodes and deleted from another station inside the building, maybe got into her office while her assistant was busy elsewhere. With the delay getting the warrant to confiscate, there was time. The killer or an accessory is inside the firm.”

He sipped a little wine. “Did your first victim gain any new accounts in the last few weeks?”

“Thought of that, and no. Nothing new in the last couple that I can see, so there’s no way to narrow it down from that route. If she flagged anything hinky, that’s gone. Maybe one of the accounts suddenly didn’t jibe, and she took a closer look. Could be the client recently started doing the shadowy stuff. Or she just happened to stumble across something because they’d gotten sloppy. Happens. But she didn’t discuss a problem with an account to any of the higher-ups or with her assistant. Not that any of them is copping to, at any rate.”

“Just the fiancé.” Roarke nodded. “Because she trusted him completely.”

“I get that. But I don’t believe she didn’t at least mention something to one of the partners or her supervisor, her department head. She was meticulous. You’ll see what I mean when you look at her files.”

“I’ll take your word on that for now.”

Eve set down her glass. “I thought we’d squared this, and you’d step onto the team – at least when you had time for it.”

“For now,” he repeated, “I’d rather wait to look at the files. By meticulous, you mean she kept everything in excellent order.”

Eve struggled back her annoyance. “That, yeah, but she was meticulous in the way she kept her office space, her apartment, her closet. She never had a single work eval that wasn’t glowing. She had a good relationship with her department head, and apparently with everyone she worked with. She was tight pals with the grandson of one of the partners.”

“Romantic link?”

“No. It comes off as pals. Good, platonic pals. Grandson has a girlfriend, and the four of them hung. But she doesn’t mention there’s this problem to her pal.”

“Blood’s thicker?”

“Maybe, maybe.” She pushed away from the little table where they’d eaten. “It’s inconsistent with her type, her pathology. She was a team player, and she was a rule keeper. She took this to one of them, Roarke, and the one she took it to was the wrong choice.”

“She must have dealt with some clients directly.”

“In the office, or in theirs – New York-based. Some travel, too, sure. But nothing out of the ordinary I’ve found. No last-minute appointments worked in, according to her assistant. No last-minute travel to meet with a client or their representatives. If you look at her office, on the surface, it’s straight business as usual. Taking the home units without making it look like a bungled burglary was a mistake.”

“I don’t know.” He considered it. “Simpler, as you said, to take the units than to stay there and fiddle with them. Especially since the killer had a second job to do. It could simply be confidence. Go ahead and look at her office files, I’ve taken care of that. Covered the tracks.”

“Nobody ever covers them all the way. Okay, okay, present company excepted,” she added when he lifted an eyebrow. “If he was as good as you, and as – let’s say – meticulous – he’d have found a better way to do Copperfield and Byson.”

“Such as?”

“Arrange a meet, take them out together outside their apartments. You make it look like a mugging or a thrill kill. Rape the woman, or him, or both. Send the investigators mixed signals. I figure I’m looking for someone focused on the task – eliminate the threat, remove the evidence. That’s straight-line thinking, leaving out the flourishes.”

“Perhaps the only way he could take lives was to block out all but the target. Reach the goal, don’t consider the enormity of the action to get there.”

“I don’t think so, or not completely. Yeah, okay, reaching the goal. But if he’d needed to distance himself emotionally from the action, he wouldn’t use strangulation. It’s intimate. And it was face-to-face.”