Strangers in Death (In Death #26)(33)

“Nope, he was still holding a full load. No fluids on the sheets or on the body itself. No hair, but for a few strays from the vic, skin.”

“Yet it was staged to appear otherwise, and the staging’s important. It took time, and planning and preparation. The killer thought about how this could and would be done for some time. There’s no impulse here, no passion. A sense of the dramatic, even the theatric, but that underlying sense of order. It feels female. That may be sexist, but it doesn’t feel like a same sex crime.”

“If it was, he’d’ve staged the body differently. Given the logistics of man-on-man sex, I think a male killer would have positioned the body differently.”

Mira nodded. “That’s a good point.”

“And even though I told Peabody not to jump to female off the get, it strikes me that if we were dealing with a man—again, if sex was part of it—there’d have been more anger. If Anders was g*y, he was deep in the closet. Added to it, in my interviews with the wife, she admits they’d had discussions about his sexual preferences, and she always speaks of women.”

“A female killer, then, one who is able to resist impulse, at least long enough to plan, and to execute that plan. One who enjoys the elaborate, the symbolic. Who had or believed she had an intimate relationship with the victim, who certainly at some point had a sexual one with him. Someone who finds sex both powerful and compelling, and demeaning.”

“There are LCs like that,” Eve speculated. “Who get wrapped up in it—like an addict—then burn out.”

“Yes, which is why they’re screened so thoroughly before licensing and thereafter to keep the license.”

“Are you leaning toward pro?”

“It certainly could be—there are factors that indicate that sort of intimacy again, and distance. A professional companion must subjugate his or her own needs in order to tailor the relationship to the client’s demands. The nature and the length of the relationship is completely in the client’s hands.”

“That’s what they’re paid for,” Eve commented.

“Yes, and the most successful are able to consider it as a profession.” They enjoy their work, or consider it a public service. Here, the victim was bound, was naked. He was the supplicant, the submissive. The scarfing, another symbol of who is in control, who is dominant.

“And speaking of S-and-M, bondage, and other fringe areas of sex, Mira sipped her flowery tea. “This was a sex crime, certainly, but not one of sexual rage, or revenge. The genitals aren’t destroyed or mutilated, but spotlighted.”

“There’s the word for it.”

Mira smiled a little. “Your crime scene notes indicate he insisted the bedroom door remain closed, had black drapes, and so on. This was a private man, one who had strong feelings about bedroom privacy. So by spotlighting his most private area, his most private business, the killer demeans him. Humiliates him even after death. And yet—”

“She—since we’re going with she—tranqs him halfway to a coma first. She didn’t want him to feel the pain or the fear. Didn’t want him to suffer the pain.” And that was a particular element that stuck in Eve’s craw. “It doesn’t fit.”

“It’s a contradiction, I agree. But people can be contradictory. It may have been an accident, may have been she miscalculated the dose. And before you say it, I will: No, I don’t think it was a miscalculation. Too much prep work to make such a big mistake.”

Eve sat a moment, then picked up the tea and drank before she remembered it wasn’t coffee. “Ah.” She set it down again. “I like the wife for it.”

Intrigued, Mira cocked her head. “I thought it was confirmed the wife wasn’t in New York during the time of the murder.”

“She wasn’t.”

“You suspect she hired the killer?”

“I’ve got nothing to support that. Nothing. Plus, I work back to why does a hire tranq him so heavily. What does a hire care if the target suffers? I’m going to have Roarke go over her financials, dig for other accounts, but it doesn’t feel like a hit. At least not a pro.”

“Why do you like the wife?”

“She’s smart. She’s a planner. She’s got an answer for everything. Her responses, reactions, her demeanor, all perfect, all just right. Like she f**king studied on it. And maybe it’s pushing me toward her, but I can’t get my head around this arrangement she said she and the vic had.”

Pushing up to pace, Eve ran it by Mira, condensing it down to the basics.

“You don’t believe her,” Mira concluded. “More, you don’t believe a couple inside a marriage could, or would, come to an agreement like this arrangement on sexual relationships.”

“Objectively, I know people could, and would, because objectively I know people are completely screwed up. But it doesn’t fit for me, it doesn’t…It’s like this one false note playing over and over in a song, and it throws me out every time. I don’t know if I don’t like the damn song, or if the song’s bullshit.”

“Objectivity is key to what you do, but so is instinct. If the note strikes you false, again and again, then you’d need to decide which note you’d play instead.”

“Huh. How does it strike you?”