Indulgence in Death (In Death #31)(27)

“Yeah, but you’d be the one with the weapon.” She frowned a moment. “Maybe this is kind of the same deal. Houston—or whoever might’ve been driving—is in his natural habitat, so to speak. You’re sitting in his space, maybe it’s the back of a fancy limo, but you’re hunting. Primal charge, maybe.”

“But hardly sporting,” Roarke pointed out. “He shot an unarmed man from behind. Most animals have what you could term a weapon at least. Tooth and fang—and the advantage, to some extent, of instinct and speed.”

“I don’t think he’s worried about being fair. Maybe a hunter, maybe, and maybe a little bored with shooting four-legged mammals. Trying for bigger game? Something to think about.”

She thought about it in her home office while she set up a second murder board. She programmed coffee, glanced at the door that joined her office with Roarke’s. He had work to catch up on, she knew, and it felt homey in their own strange way to be working in connecting rooms.

She set up her computer to start runs, and while it worked began to add to her case notes.

Hunter. Bigger game. Thrill kill. Unusual weapon, elaborate setup = attention. Attention = trophy? Who has access to Sweet’s data and hunts? Motive for involving Sweet?

She paused, glancing over at an incoming transmission. “Reo comes through,” she murmured, and called the incoming file, now unsealed, on-screen.

Vandalism, shoplifting, illegals possession, truancy, she read. Two stints in juvie, with another illegals pop for dealing and destruction of private property in between. Mandatory counseling, all before Houston hit sixteen.

Tipping back in her chair, she read social workers’ reports, counselors’ reports, judges’ opinions. Basically they’d labeled him a wild child, a troublemaker, a chronic offender with a taste for street drugs.

Until somebody’d bothered to dig a little deeper, somebody’d bothered to take a good look at his medicals.

Broken bones, blackened eyes, bruised kidneys—all attributed to accidents or fighting. Until just before his seventeenth birthday he’d beaten his father unconscious and taken off.

Her stomach shuddered with memory, with sympathy. She knew what it was to be broken and battered, knew what it was to finally fight back.

“They went after you, didn’t they? Yeah, hunted you down, tossed you in a cage for a while. But somebody finally took a good, hard look.”

She read his mother’s statement, read the fear and the shame in it, but felt no sympathy there. A mother was meant to protect the child, wasn’t she? No matter what. This one had hidden all those breaks and bruises out of that shame and fear, until the right cop, the right moment, and they’d pulled it out of her.

Supervised halfway house, more counseling—that, she thought, and maybe the power of finally fighting back had turned a teenage boy around, and helped build him into a man.

And last night, someone had taken that from him.

“His juvenile record,” Roarke said from the doorway.

“Yeah.”

“The system worked for him, maybe not as soon as it should have, but it worked for him.” He came to her, kissed the top of her head. “And so will you. How can I help?”

“You said you had work.”

“I’ve caught up with some, and have a few things running that can go on their own for a bit.”

He thought of her, she understood, when he read the file. And he thought of himself, too—of being kicked and punched, broken and battered by his father.

It connected him—she understood that as well—to a man he’d never met.

“It’s grunt work now, mostly. I’m doing runs on a portion of the staff at Dudley, and the transpo company’s employees. I’m going to cross-reference those with any membership in hunting clubs or that kind of travel, licenses and permits for crossbows. And I want to dig on Sweet’s PA’s financials, just because the little bastard is off somewhere.”

“Why don’t I take the financials? I can do them faster.”

“Show-off.”

“But I do it so well.” He pulled her in for a moment. “Take that down now.” He studied the data on-screen as she did. “It reminds you, and that upsets and distracts you.”

She shook her head. “Not until I do a search for the father. Maybe he wanted payback after all these years. Maybe he got enough money for some sort of hit, or . . . I have to cross it off.”

“All right. I’ll look into the money on the little bastard.”

It made her laugh. “Thanks.”

She did the grunt work, sorted through runs, sieved the data, ran probabilities until a low-grade headache brewed behind her eyes.

“I can’t find one person in the mix with a hunting connection, at least not that shows. No permits, no licenses, no purchases of that nature. I tried crossing with sporting—people do the damnedest things, and there’s competitions for archery and shit. Legal ones. Nothing there, either.”

“Well, I had better luck.”

“I knew it.” Eve slapped a fist on her desk. “I knew that little bastard was wrong. What did you find?”

“An account he’d buried under a few layers. Not a bad job of it, really, and it would likely have remained buried if no one had a reason to dig. You’ll note, as I did,” Roarke continued, “he’s been careful not to give anyone a reason to dig. Clean record, bills paid in a timely fashion, taxes all right and tight. I transferred the account data to your machine. Computer,” he ordered, “display Mitchell Sykes’s financials on screen two.”