Obsession in Death (In Death #40)(66)

She’d need to find out if they’d answered it. Maybe the e-mail address had remained valid then – as it was no longer.

[email protected].

She read through the next, the next, seeing the gradual escalation. Still, nothing that would have set off alarms, not individually. And as the e-mail addresses varied, no one – including herself – would have paid much attention.

She’d have paid none, Eve admitted, after the Icove blast hit, fall of ’59, because she’d tossed pretty much everything to public relations.

She glanced up as Roarke came in.

“I think I’ve found her – not who she is or where, but where she started contacting me. The first one – and it’s the first – is up on screen. There were three more in ’59, and there’s been nine this year.

“The searches matched all these on every factor. Same writer, different e-mails, but the same person wrote them.”

“Different e-mails – you’d never have noticed,” he commented.

“I probably didn’t read them, or most of them. Different e-mails,” she repeated, “and until the last three, different signatures. She’s settled on Your True Friend for the last three.”

She needed coffee, and got up to program a pot while Roarke read.

“It’s the same writer. The comp agrees with me, and the probability is ninety-four-point-six.”

“Nixie,” Roarke said. “That seems to have been the launching point.”

“Innocent, defenseless kid, loses her entire family, crawls through her mother’s blood? It got play. And I talked about it some to the media. About her being a survivor, about her courage. I probably mouthed off about getting justice.”

“It’s not mouthing off,” he corrected. “And you’ll annoy me if you try to find some handhold for responsibility here.”

She’d annoy herself, Eve admitted. “I think we should contact Richard and Elizabeth.” Roarke’s friends – hers, too, she supposed – were Nixie’s foster parents. Nixie’s family now. “I don’t think there’s anything to worry about, but I don’t want to be wrong and have done nothing. It wouldn’t hurt for them to be a little more careful.”

“I’ll contact them, because I agree with you. Better safe.”

“I’ve done a search on all the e-mails. No account currently exists. For any of them. We’ll dig there, contact the server, hold their feet to the fire, see if we can get any account information.”

“I can work with McNab for a bit, try to dig out the IP, triangulate. Someone this careful would do some routing, some bouncing, but if we can find a few threads, we might be able to weave a bit of rope.”

“I’ll take anything you can do. She gets more intimate, I guess you could say. Starts calling me Dallas in the third, then shifts to Eve by the sixth.

“No threats, no talk about killing anyone – that would have sent up a flag. It’s more subtle, and in the one where she started calling me Eve, she talked about lawyers – no mention of Bastwick – just talking about lawyers who feather their nest with blood money, who undo, or try to undo, all the work I do, trampling on justice, badgering good cops. Like that. Just a few lines, and again on the imposed limits of the system that hamper my duty.”

“Is there anything about her, any personal details?”

“She’s too careful for much. Somewhere in her head this was always the plan. But she says she knows what it’s like to grow up without family, to have to carve out your own place. To be unappreciated, disrespected. There’s several mentions of being overlooked, not seen, unappreciated. She doesn’t mention the foster system, or use any of the code words foster kids use. But maybe a state school, or some nontraditional upbringing.” Eve blew out a breath. “Or she hated her family and pretends they don’t exist.”

She sat on the desk. “I’m going to admit, right out loud, it’s f*cking creepy. She’ll write something about hoping I enjoyed my vacation, and how relaxed I looked, or how mag I looked at the vid premiere – and wasn’t she proud when I took down a killer and closed a case at the same time.

“I should know when someone’s watching me. I haven’t felt it.”

“A lot of the watching may be on screen, on the Internet,” he pointed out. “And if she’s involved in law enforcement, it might be someone you see as a matter of course.”

“See but don’t see. Just like she whines about in her correspondence.”

He shook his head. “You see everything. It’s part of your talent. And I think, when you catch her, you’ll know her. Maybe not her name, but her face.”

“Maybe that’s creepier,” Eve breathed out. “The last contact was right after the Sanctuary case. She had a lot to say – young girls again, I think that’s a trigger. Could be something happened to her when she was a kid. That’s something to dig into. Maybe…”

She rose, circled her board. “The abuse. Maybe she senses it. She’s studied me, read about me, watched, extrapolated for her own means. And maybe she senses some of it because she experienced some of it. Young girls. Maybe.”

She blew out another breath. “Reaching.”

“Maybe not. We knew each other, you and I, didn’t we? On some level.”