Obsession in Death(23)

“Spouse is in Hawaii and covered. I can’t find anything that indicates she was making another play. Fitzhugh had some punch and power, so there was motive for her there. She was, essentially, top dog once he kicked, so why bother?”

“For the fun?” Roarke suggested.

“Seems she went another way for her fun. She booked a hotel room and an LC for Christmas. She had three LCs she used on a kind of rotation, and what we get is she’d settled into a kind of routine there when it came to sex.”

“Safe, unemotional, and she remains in control.”

“Yeah, my take. She had a short ’link conversation with her family on Christmas Day, didn’t travel, didn’t party that we can find. She worked – that was her focus. I see her pretty clear. I used to look in the mirror at her.”

“Not true. Not at all true,” Roarke countered. “You had Mavis – and she’s been family as well as friend for a very long time. Feeney’s the same. He wasn’t just your trainer, or your partner. He was, and is, a father to you.”

“I didn’t go out looking for them.”

“You didn’t shut them out, either, did you?”

“Nobody shuts Mavis out if she doesn’t want to be shut.” She brooded down at her spaghetti. “I tried shutting you out.”

“And look how that worked out. Do you want to say there’s some surface similarity between you and her? I’ll agree. Strong-willed, successful women, on either side of a line of law, but both serving it in their way. Attractive, intelligent, ambitious women, solitary in their ways. Or you were, and would like to be more than you might find yourself these days.”

“I don’t think I could live without you anymore. That’s how that worked out for me. Maybe somebody wanted her.” She wound pasta again, ate without thinking. “And she didn’t want him, or her, back. But…” She shook her head, reached for her wine.

“No passion in the kill.”

“None. When you want someone, and they keep you shut out, there’s despair or anger or payback. I can’t make the motive about her. I can’t find the angle for that. All the angles say it’s about me. And I can’t figure it.”

“Another cop, one who admires you, and resents the defense attorney who works as diligently to ensure the freedom of the criminals you take off the street.”

“Yeah, that’s one of the angles. It’s not one of mine, Roarke. It’s not one of my cops. I don’t just say that because they’re mine, but because I know them, inside and out.”

“I’m going to agree with you because I’ve come to know them as well. There’s no one in your division who’d take a life this way, or use you as an excuse to do so.”

“None of them are psychotic, and that’s how this feels.”

“But you don’t only work with your own. Uniforms who respond first to a scene, who help secure a scene or canvass. A cop from another division whose investigation crossed with yours. One who consulted you, or vice versa.”

“I couldn’t count them,” she admitted.

“And that doesn’t begin to address all those who work on processing and forensics and so on.”

“I stood in the lab today, and I thought: All these people in their white coats, they’d know how to do a clean kill, to keep evidence off a crime scene. And I don’t know them – a handful of them, but that’s it. There’s the sweepers, there’s the morgue doctors, techs, support. Or it’s just some crazy person who got juiced up from the book and vid.”

“Bastwick’s not in either.”

“No, she’s not.”

“Then why her? Specifically her?”

“Okay.” She sat back with her wine. “I spent some time scanning some interviews she did around the Barrow trial. She tried to make a case in the court of public opinion that I had a vendetta going, that I had a score to settle – a personal one. She tried to get in I’d physically assaulted Barrow, covered it up, and she wasn’t wrong. But it didn’t play out. If they’d copped to the reason I did indeed punch the f*cker, they’d have had to cop to why. As long as they were stringing the line he’d inadvertently developed a system of mind control using subliminals, they had a shot of getting him off with a light tap. If they had to say I’d punched him because he’d used that system on us, and on you, that meant the law would punch him right along with me.”

“I hurt you. I forced you —”

“He did those things,” Eve interrupted. “He used you, me, Mavis. He did it all for fun and profit. And now he’s doing a good long stretch in a cage. He didn’t kill, but he provided a weapon.”

“Bastwick didn’t get him off,” Roarke pointed out. “Could he have found a way to get back at both of you from that cage?”

“I checked on him. He’s restricted. Isn’t allowed electronics. He doesn’t have access to money, so he can’t pay anybody to do it. I could see him trying to find a way to come after me – the sniveling little coward – but I can’t see him going after Bastwick.

“But I’m going to look at him again,” Eve added. “I’m going to look at her firm – eliminate that connection, and the idea of anyone there hiring a pro.”