Celebrity in Death (In Death #34)(45)

“How?”

“Matthew agreed to meet her on the roof, but we were both going—with a recorder I had in my bag. We’d get her to talk about the break-in, the blackmail. Then we’d tell her to shove it. We’d have something to bargain with, you see? If she went public with what she had, we’d not only go public with her admission, we’d file charges.”

She nodded briskly, righteously. “Criminal trespass, extortion, sexual harassment. But when we got up there, she was in the water. She was already dead. Matthew—listen to me—he didn’t even hesitate. He went in after her. Despite what she’d done, what she threatened to do, he tried to save her. He tried so hard.”

Tears shimmered now along with the urgency in her voice. “He’d have saved her life if he could have. But we were too late. And now, we didn’t tell you all of this because we didn’t want the suspicion, the media nightmare, the fallout. We didn’t deserve it. We haven’t done anything but fall in love.”

“That’s nice for you, but you’ve also obstructed justice by withholding relevant information.”

“Fine.” She sat back, shrugged in a jerk. “Arrest me. We didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Where’s the recording K.T. had on you?”

“I don’t know.” Marlo all but spat it out. “Maybe it was all a lie, all of it. A bluff. She said she’d show Matthew a preview, so if she had it, she should have had it with her. But …”

“You looked for it.”

“All right, yes. Maybe that was cold and self-serving, but she was dead. We couldn’t do anything about that. And if you found the recording, who would you look at for her murder? And the recording would find its way to the damn media, you can count on it. So I looked in her bag, but it wasn’t there. It wasn’t on her, or in the bag, or anywhere I could find up there. So I guess you can add attempted theft and compromising a crime scene to my list of sins.”

“It’s a bad time to cop an attitude, Marlo,” Eve said mildly. “Where’s your recording?”

“I just told you, she didn’t have any recording.”

“Not hers. Yours.”

“My …” Her face froze. The hand she lifted to shove at her hair dropped to the table. “My recorder. It was on. God, it was on the whole time. I got so focused on hers, I forgot. It’s in my bag. It’s still in my evening bag. Everything was so crazy and complicated and awful. It’s still in my bag, at the loft. I’ll go get it.” She shoved to her feet. “I’ll go get it, and you’ll see what happened. You’ll see we didn’t kill her.”

“I’m going to have two officers escort you back to the loft. They’ll bring the recording in. Just an aside, Marlo. We have an excellent EDD here. If it’s been tampered with, edited, screwed around with, we’ll know.”

“Good.” She squared her jaw, her shoulders. “Because it hasn’t been, so you’ll know that, too. I hated her. She was a sick, bitter bully. A manipulator who would have been happy to ruin my life. But I didn’t want her dead. I wanted her to know, and to live with the fact that I was smarter, stronger, and just better than she was. I wanted her to live with the fact that when the project was complete, I was going to show the recording I’d made to Roundtree, to the producers, and her life would be ruined. She’d have been lucky to get a part playing a housewife on an ad blimp. That’s what I wanted.”

“I believe her,” Peabody said when Eve assigned the officers to escort Marlo back to the loft. “It plays. It makes sense.”

“She’s an actor. Actors make fiction play and make sense. But yeah, I’m leaning in the same direction. So where’s K.T.’s blackmail preview?”

“Maybe it was a bluff.”

“I don’t think so. What interests me is why the killer took it. For another dose of blackmail, or for protection? After we get this damn media conference behind us, we need to head over to the vic’s hotel room. If she had part of the recording with her, the whole shot’s somewhere else.”

“I could take the search now while you do the media deal.”

“Nice try, Peabody.” She checked her wrist unit. “Let’s go get it over with so we can get back to doing what we actually get paid to do. I want this PI if he exists,” she added as they walked to Central’s main media room. “If he exists, he got paid. If he got paid, we can track it through the vic’s financials.”

“Maybe a cash deal. PIs who break-and-enter don’t like leaving a trail.”

“Maybe cash, but it would’ve been recent, and substantial for the trespassing. She had to find one who’d do it. We’ll find him.”

“He’d have checked the recording, to make sure he had something worth taking to the client.”

“Oh yeah. And odds are he made himself a copy for insurance. A PI who’d do this kind of sleazy domestic work probably specializes in same. It’s what she’d be after. With his client dead, he’s got two choices. He destroys the evidence, cleans up anything that he feels connects him to a DB—or he tries to cash in on the recording. I think with what we’ve got, we can finesse a tap on Marlo’s and Matthew’s ’links.”