Creation in Death (In Death #25)(28)

Roarke lifted his eyebrows as he ate. “Four times lucky?”

“Yeah, exactly. I don’t think it was luck. He’s not lucky, he’s precise and prepared.”

“Did you consider he might use an official vehicle? A black-and-white, a city official, a cab?”

“Yeah, we pushed that angle, and got nowhere. And we’ll push it again. I’ve got Newkirk sifting through the records, looking for any private purchase of that kind of ride. They go up for auction a couple times a year. Checking the stolen vehicles records. I’ve got McNab searching the city and transportation employee records to see what we see there. We’ll cross all that with the other case files. Even if he changed his name and appearance, prints are required on all ID for that kind of thing. Nothing’s popped yet.”

“What about medical equipment and supplies? He drugs them, restrains them, and certainly must have some equipment to deal with the blood.”

“Went there, going there again. Countless clinics, hospitals, health care centers, doctors, MTs. Doctors and MTs and aides and so on who lost their licenses. Toss in funeral parlors and bereavement centers, even body sculpting salons. You’ve got hours and hours of leg and drone work.”

“Yes. Yes, you would. You’re covering every possible area.”

“Maybe. We worked it for weeks, even after the murders stopped. Then Feeney and I worked it weeks more, every time we could squeeze it in. No sleep and shower sex and steak in those days.”

She pushed up to pace a little. Maybe by looking back she’d see something she hadn’t seen before. “We’d work around the clock sometimes, pushing and prodding at this on our own time. Sitting over a beer at three in the morning in some cop bar, talking it through all over again. And I know damn well, he’d go home, pick through it. I did.”

She glanced back at Roarke, sitting at her desk with the remnants of the meal they had shared, with data on death on her comp screen, on the wall screen. “Mrs. Feeney, she’s one of the ones who gets it. She understands the cop, the job, the life. Probably why she has all those weird hobbies.”

“To keep her from sitting, worrying, wondering when it’s three in the morning and he hasn’t come home.”

“Yeah. Sucks for you guys.”

He smiled a little. “We manage.”

“He loves her a lot. You know how he’ll talk in that long-suffering way about ‘the wife.’ He’d be lost without her. I know how that is. I know how he’s working this right now while she’s probably knitting a small compact car. How he’s seeing all those faces, the ones from then, the ones from now.”

Can’t you hear us screaming?

“And he knows it’s on him.”

“How can you say that?” Roarke demanded. “He did everything that could be done.”

“No, because there’s always something else. You missed it, or you didn’t look at it from just the right angle, or ask just the right question at exactly the right time. And maybe someone else would have. Doesn’t make them better or mean they worked harder at it. It just means they…” She lifted a hand, swiveled it like a door. “Means they turned something, opened something, and you didn’t. He was in command, so it’s on him.”

“And now it’s on you?”

“Now it’s on me. And that hurts him because, well, he brought me up. As far as being a cop goes, he brought me up. I didn’t want to bring him into this,” she said and sat again. “And I couldn’t leave him out.”

“He’s tough and he’s hardheaded,” Roarke reminded her. “Just like the cop he brought up. He’ll handle it, Eve.”

“Yeah.” She sighed, looked back at the wall screen. “How does he pick them? We know, this time, part of his requirement is that they work for you in some capacity. He’s so f**king smart he had to figure we’d click to that. So he wants us to know that much. He gives us the information he wants us to have. The type he prefers, how long he worked on them. He doesn’t mind if we know what products he used to clean them up. But this time, he’s given us a little more. Here’s a new piece, what do you make of that?”

She looked back at Roarke. “Does he know you? Personally, professionally? Has he done business with you? Did you buy him out, and maybe he didn’t want to be bought out? Did you underbid him on some contract? Did you fire him, or overlook him for promotion? Nothing’s random with him, so his choice here is deliberate.”

He’d inched all those same questions through his mind, turning them over from every angle. “If he works for me, I can find out. The travel,” Roarke said. “Whether it was business-related or personal time, I can search files for employees who were sent to the locations of the other murders in that time period, or who took personal leave.”

“How many employees would you figure you have?”

His lips curved again. “I honestly couldn’t say.”

“Exactly. But using Mira’s profile—and we’ll have an updated one tomorrow—we can cut that back considerably.”

Following the usual arrangement when he dealt with the meal, Eve rose to clear the dishes. “I’ll run a probability, but I think there’s a low percentage he works for you. He doesn’t strike me as a disgruntled employee.”