Calculated in Death (In Death #36)(49)

“I like her very much, personally and professionally. I actually met Marta a few times. She struck me as a lovely and loving woman.”

“She’s coming off that way. She’s dead because she drew the short straw.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Everything points to it. Two auditors get banged up, put out of commission. She inherits some of their files. Hours later, she’s dead in what the killers hope we’ll see as a violent mugging. Hours after that, the offices where she works are compromised, her computer messed with, and the files—and the master copies—go missing.

“Short straw.”

“Yes, I see. I agree, insofar as her murder was impersonal and poorly masked. You call it semi-pro in your report. I think that’s very accurate.”

“I’ve got these honchos, okay? Companies I’m taking a hard look at. I’ve got Roarke doing his thing—who knows business and numbers and money better—so he may give me more to take a hard look at, or eliminate some I’m looking at now. But the honchos all have, let’s say, attributes that could have them order the murder of an accountant. She’s just a tool, and the wrong tool at that, which makes her a potential liability.”

“It was rushed. Both the time frame and the profile of the killing were rushed. Still honchos as you say can afford full professionals.”

“Can afford,” Eve agreed, “but maybe don’t see the need to pay. You’ve got security of some kind on the payroll already. Put them on it, give them a little bonus on the side. She’s just a droid, basically, no big deal.”

“Their needs outweigh hers.” Mira nodded as she sipped tea. “They can’t concern themselves with the lives of those who work for them, work under them.” Mira sipped again and considered. “I’d like to read your interview reports from this morning.”

“I’ll get them to you.”

“I would say you’re dealing with brutish, cold-blooded, and physically trained individuals for the actual killing. Those who do what they’re told, but don’t think for themselves. Taking the victim away from her workplace, leaving her body blocks from where she would have been shows a lack of logic.”

“She was supposed to walk to the subway, but they didn’t know that. They, or the one who hired them, may have assumed she’d walk home. Added to it, the location was convenient.”

“An empty building, and one it appears they could easily access.”

“Not worried about the connection, maybe because it’s rushed, it’s convenient. It’s just a mugging, it’s just an accountant.”

“Whoever hired them, if they were indeed hired, also doesn’t consider the long view. It’s immediate, quick gratification rather than careful planning and finesse. The concern is the files, the data, which may be incriminating in some way, not the victim. She is disposable. It’s not cruelty. It’s callousness.”

“It’s business.”

“Yes. It’s business. And how do you run and maintain a successful business when you aren’t inclined to look at the long view, at the details, when you brute your way through a problem?”

Eve sat back. “You inherit it.”

Mira smiled. “Cynical, and in this case high probability. The killers themselves, as I said, brutes. No sexual aspect, no rage, no personal agenda. Though the actual killing is a kind of showing off.”

“Showing off?”

“I’m strong. See how strong—I can snap a neck with my bare hands. Quickly and cleanly according to Morris’s report. They have a stunner, which is lethal used on full with contact, but go with brute force. Yes, showing off, and completing the kill with his own hands rather than a weapon or tool. He’s the weapon.”

“Okay.” Eve tried it out in her head. “Yeah. Okay. And maybe he needed to show off since he stunned an unarmed woman in the back, and that’s cowardly. He . . . had to offset that maybe.”

“I believe so. And the source? Impatient, impulsive, accustomed to having what he wants and quickly, with a distinct lack of compassion or attention to those who do the work so that he can live as he lives.”

“That pretty much eliminates four of my suspects.”

Mira smiled. “Which four?”

“Four women, five counting their office manager. Your Space. They didn’t inherit anything, they came from the middle-class pool, and they pay attention to details. It’s part of what they do. They’re organized and they’re efficient. If they’d targeted the vic, I think it would’ve been done right. It would’ve been very tidy, very clean.”

“Is that a compliment?”

“It is, actually. And they understand time-budgeting. The vic didn’t have time to get that far in the files. Killing her was inefficient. Okay, I can’t take them off the list, but I can keep my focus elsewhere. It saves me time. Thanks.”

“I’ll let you know what I think after I look at your interview reports.”

“Good enough.” Eve rose, surprised to find her cup nearly empty. She didn’t remember drinking the damn stuff. “So . . . I thought I should tell you I had this dream last night.”

Concern clouded Mira’s eyes. “Dream?”

“Yeah. Not a nightmare. You could call it a kind of review of the day, sort of going over the murder, at the scene. Sometimes I get a different aspect of the vic that way, or the killer, or some line, some angle. Anyway, she was there. Stella.”