Purity in Death (In Death #15)(85)

"I've decided to be flattered rather than insulted that you assumed I'd know of such matters. Depends, of course, on the overhead. You'd have to buy or cook the illegals before you could sell them, outfit and maintain the prostitutes, generate the vids. Then there's the outlay for bribes, security, employees. If you were good at it, had a steady clientele, you'd pull in two or three million in profit."

"Still doesn't add up. He kept it small, exclusive. You don't get busted as hard or as often if you keep it low profile. So say you add the three million to what he reported last year. That keeps him under five million. You could live real comfortable on that."

"Some could. Are we done now?"

"No. You've got five million to play with. Look at his clothing expenditures last year."

Stifling impatience, Roarke scanned the data she shot on-screen. "So he wasn't a snappy dresser."

"But he was. Closet full of designer labels. Had to have a hundred pairs of shoes. Since I live with someone with the same baffling addiction, I can recognize the pricey stuff. There was an easy million in the closet. Probably more."

"He prefers paying cash then," Roarke said, but he was becoming interested despite himself.

"Okay, subtract a million from the five. He has art and baubles insured for over three."

"One rarely buys all their baubles in a single year."

"Yeah, but there're appraisals for over three-quarters of a million last year. No debit entries. Cash again. Subtract another seventy-five. Vid equipment, insured for one point five mil. Two new cams on the list last year to the tune of half a mil. Two garaged vehicles in the city. Annual for that's what, two, three thousand a month, each. One's a XR-7000Z, new last September. What do they run?"

"Ah . . . two hundred K, if he got it loaded."

"Three-bedroom condo on Park. Annual's about the same as the car, right?"

He was doing the math in his head. "Close enough."

"Then you add a five-bedroom beach house in the Hamptons, the slip fee for his watercraft. What's that?"

"Run him near a million."

"Okay. You add in he goes out dining and debauchering almost nightly. Basic living expenses over that. What do you get?"

"Either I'm well off on the estimate of his business profit, or he had another source of income."

"Another source." She hitched a hip onto her desk. "Follow me here. You got an underground business that caters to fairly exclusive clientele. Some of whom might blush if their little hobby came out in the light. You've got expensive taste, and your business does pretty good, but hell, you want better. What do you do?"

"Blackmail."

"And we have a winner."

"All right, so he ran a shakedown on the side. A profitable one by all accounts. What does that have to do with the matter at hand?"

"The matter at hand is homicide. It's a Purity hit, and it's connected, but you still run it by the numbers. He might have kept his blackmail data in a safebox. If he did, he'd keep it close to home. Easy access. We can check the banks and depositories. But, maybe he kept them even closer to home. I'm going to go check out his place again."

"Want company?"

"Two could toss it faster than one."

***

He thought she was wasting her time and his. But he supposed the cop in her needed to snip off any loose ends.

And he'd had no intention of letting her go back alone to a place that had taunted her nightmares.

He waited until she bypassed the police seal, uncoded the locks.

The air still carried death. It was the first thing that struck him when he stepped in beside her. The raw, pitiably human stench of it lingered under the odor of chemicals used by the crime scene team and sweepers.

Red stains, splatters, streams were a virulent horror over the white. Walls, carpet, furniture. He could see where the girl had fallen. Could see where she had crawled. Where she had died.

"Christ, how do you face it? How do you look at this and not break?"

"Because it's there whether you look or not. And if you break, you're done."

He touched her arm. He hadn't realized he'd spoken aloud. "Did you need to see this again? To face this again to prove you could?"

"Maybe. But if that was all, I'd've come on my own. Second bedroom and the office are over there. We went through the place thoroughly on the first sweep. But we weren't looking for a hidey-hole. Now we do."

She put Roarke in the second bedroom and started on the office herself. They'd taken the data andcommunication center away, had gone over the work area, through the closet where Greene had kept his extra supplies.

She did it all again, point by point. There was a safe. One of the crime scene techs had run his scanner over it, tagged the combination. She'd found nothing unexpected in it. Some cash, disc documents, a little paperwork.

Not enough cash, she thought now. Not nearly enough. If three clients had come by in the last few days-at least two of them when Greene's symptoms would have been increasing-where was the payoff?

Would he have sent Wade out with cash to tuck it into a safebox? She didn't think so. You might bang a teenager, sell her off to clients, but you didn't put cash in her hand and wave bye-bye.