J. Robb - Innocent In Death

Eve glanced over. “Why?”

“Because from everything we know about him, he comes over as a really straight shooter. I can’t see him having a casual, normal party conversation with Allika if he’d seen her doing the deed with Williams. And she’d have sensed his knowledge. High sexual levels increase instinct, I think. She’d have been excited, and guilty, and she’d have known if he knew. I think she just made a mistake.”

“Is that what adultery is?” Eve asked.

Peabody squirmed a little. “Okay, it’s a betrayal, and it’s an insult. She betrayed and insulted her husband with Williams. Now she has to live with it. And Roarke isn’t about to betray or insult you in that way.”

“This isn’t about me.”

“No, but there’s some overlap in your mind. There shouldn’t be.”

Should or shouldn’t, it was there, and she didn’t like it. But she did her job. The lab found no trace of ricin in the mix or liquid Eve had taken from the Foster apartment. That confirmed the poison was introduced on scene.

She went back to her time line, adding details from the morning interviews. In and out, she thought. People in and out, lingering, wandering, passing each other.

She needed a link to the poison.

She wandered around her board, sat back at her desk. Closed her eyes. Leaned up again and reread her own notes and reports. Got up, paced.

But her mind just wouldn’t stick. Thinking to give it a boost, she opened the back of her computer, reached in to where she’d taped a candy bar to the inside of the case.

And it was gone.

“This is fucked up.” She could see a trace of the tape where it had stuck when the candy had been yanked out. The insidious candy thief had struck again.

Not for the first time she considered putting eyes and ears in her office. A little surveillance, a little chocolate, and she’d bust the thieving bastard.

But that wasn’t the way she wanted to win. This, she thought, was a battle of wills and intellect, not technology.

Her disgust with having her chocolate fix nipped out from under her nose kept her occupied for the next few minutes. Then she gave up, contacted Dr. Mira’s office, and browbeat Mira’s admin into an appointment.

She shot down copies of the files, shot another set to her commander, with a memo to Whitney that she was consulting the profiler.

She closed her eyes again, thought about coffee. And fell asleep.

She was in the room in Dallas. Icy cold, with the dirty red light from the sex club across the street blinking. The knife was in her hands, and her hands were drenched in blood. He lay there, the man who’d given her life. The man who’d raped her, beat her, tormented her.

Done now, she thought, a grown woman holding the knife instead of a child. Done now, what had to be done. A grown woman whose arm screamed with pain from the child’s broken bone.

She could smell the blood, smell the death.

Cradling her broken arm, she stepped back from the scene, turned to escape.

The bedroom door was open, and inside two figures moved fluidly, somehow beautifully on the bed. The light flashed over them, off them, over. His hair was dark and gleaming, his eyes brilliant. She knew the curve of his face, his shoulders, the line of his back, the ripple of muscle in it.

The woman he was inside moaned out her pleasure, and her gilded hair shone in the ugly light.

The pain was worse than the broken bone, worse than the rape. It vibrated through her every cell, every muscle, every pore.

Behind her, Eve’s dead father chuckled. “You didn’t really expect him to stay with you? Look at him, look at her. You don’t even come close. Everybody cheats, little girl.”

And she was a little girl again, trembling with sickness, with pain, with helplessness.

“Go ahead, pay them back. You know how.”

When she looked down, the knife was in her hand, its blade wet and red.

IF LOOKS COULD KILL, THE STARE MIRA’S OVERPROTECTIVE admin aimed would have dropped Eve on the spot. She managed to survive it, and went in to find Mira at her desk.

As always, Mira looked calm and collected. Her sable hair had grown longer, and was sassily waved today in a style Eve hadn’t seen on her before. It always gave Eve a jolt when people changed that sort of thing. Put them out of context, she decided.

It was a younger, sportier style and rippled back from Mira’s lovely face. She wore one of her pretty suits in a color Eve supposed was gray but looked to her like shimmering fog, and somehow made Mira’s eyes, a soft blue, look deeper.

She wore it with silver; spirals at her ears, a braided chain with a pendant that had a clear stone centered in an etched setting around her neck.

Eve wondered if Roarke would have considered it screen-friendly, and decided that what it was was somehow perfect.

“Eve.” Mira smiled. “I’m sorry, I haven’t had a chance to read the file.”

“Squeezed into your schedule.”

“There’s always a little wiggle room. You’ll give me the gist,” she continued as she rose to go to her office AutoChef. “Tough case?”

“Mostly they are.”

“You look especially tired.”

“Getting nowhere. The vic was a teacher. History. Private school,” she began and filled in the blanks while Mira programmed the flower tea she liked.

Mira gestured to a chair as Eve spoke, then took one herself as she handed Eve one of the tea cups.

“Poisoning is remote,” Mira commented as she sipped. “Keeps the hands clean. No physical contact necessary. Passionless, most usually. Often a female mode. Not exclusively, of course, but often a choice.”

“I can’t pin down a motive. Highest on the list is murder to silence him. He was, allegedly, aware that one of his fellow teachers liked to rack up affairs with faculty members, mothers of students.”

“Which, potentially, would be grounds for disciplinary action, even dismissal. Ricin poisoning,” Mira mused. “A little old-fashioned, even exotic. And not as efficient as other options, but easier to come by if you’ve any knowledge of the science.”

“Worked pretty damn well.”

“Yes, it certainly can. So the murder was planned, timed, executed. Not impulse, not in the heat of the moment. Calculated.”

Balancing the saucer on her knee in a way Eve found both baffling and admirable, Mira continued. “It’s possible, of course, that the poison was already in the killer’s milieu, and that easy access made it the method chosen. From what you’ve told me, the victim was unaware he was in any danger, was under any threat, had incurred anyone’s anger.”

“He was going about his routine,” Eve confirmed. “No one close to him reports any hitch in his stride.”

“I would say that the killer harbored this resentment, this anger, or this motive while continuing to go about his business. Planned the details, accessed the method. The killing was simply something that needed to be done. He didn’t need to watch the victim die, or touch him, speak to him. He wasn’t concerned that, in all likelihood, it would be a child or children who discovered the body.”

Mira considered it another minute. “If it was a parent, I would have to say it’s one who puts his own needs and desires above that of his child. A teacher? One who sees the children as a job, as units rather than children. This was means to an end. Efficiently done, with a bare minimum of involvement.”

“He’s not looking for attention or for glory. He’s not crazy.”

“I would say not. But someone who can follow a timetable, and works in an orderly fashion.”

“I’m going to look at the faculty again, the support staff. Timetables are the bedrock of school systems, the way I remember it. And someone inside the system would have a better, and clearer, knowledge of the vic’s schedule.”