Echoes in Death (In Death #44)(35)

“He’s jealous of the looks and wealth as he’s had neither,” Roarke suggested, “or he’s of the same social strata and sticks to his own kind, so to speak.”

Again, she wagged her fork at him. “Don’t blame me for saying you think like a cop when you do.”

“I think like a criminal—reformed. It’s basically the same.”

She couldn’t argue with that. “He likes to steal.”

“Well now, I can relate.”

Since she knew he could, she took it a step further. “Can you relate to taking valuables and not cashing in?”

Roarke thought it over while he drank some wine. “I can, to a point. If you don’t need the money, or if profit itself isn’t the goal, it’s quite satisfying to have trinkets around that you’ve lifted from elsewhere.”

“A kind of payback. I’ve got it now, sucker, you don’t?”

“It could be. Still, people routinely collect souvenirs, after all, to remind them of a trip, an event, something they enjoyed. It may be just that simple.”

“Nothing personal,” she muttered.

“It’s often not, even most usually not personal—from the perspective of the thief.”

Something, he knew, the cop he loved would never appreciate.

“But as he’s cleaned out a number of safes,” Roarke continued as Eve brooded, “he’d have to make himself a kind of Aladdin’s Cave for his spoils, wouldn’t he? That’s excessive.”

Now she frowned. “Which guy’s Aladdin?”

“Depending on the version, he’s a young thief who stumbles across a cave filled with treasures—amassed by bigger, badder thieves—and acquires a genie in a lamp.”

“Hmm. So hoarding, basically. That’s an angle. Maybe this guy’s hoarding all the loot, either because he’s just a sick bastard or because he’s a well-off sick bastard. And there was cash in every hit, so that would add to the well-off. Add e-skills, a risk-taker. And I’m betting he knew the layout of the Strazza house. He may have been inside previously. Maybe as a guest, maybe as some sort of worker.”

“Or he might have accessed the floor plans.”

“Those e-skills.” She nodded. “He walked right in, right up the stairs. He waited up there for close to three hours. Patience, that he’s got. But he’s a coward. Comes in from behind, gets his prey restrained before he starts on them. Pounds on them even when they cooperate, so he likes to hurt people. But the rape, that’s the main event. Raping the woman, making the spouse watch. Forcing her to say she likes it so the spouse can hear it. And terrorizing with the costume, adding that flourish.”

Roarke waited a beat—she was in the groove. “Why does he untie them when he’s done?”

“It only adds to how helpless they were, rubs their noses in the helplessness. Free them so they know he was always in control. Free them and they call for help—have to tell what happened. Reporting a rape, it’s another level of humiliation. You have to go back over it, relive it to tell it. He likes that part, too.

“It’s all part of it,” she added. “Invade their home, where they feel the safest—their bedroom, their most intimate and private space.”

Without thinking, she stabbed some cauliflower, ate it.

“Hurt them, take away their freedom, humiliate them, and make the male vic feel helpless, enraged, impotent while you violate the female. Stealing adds a layer. I can take whatever I want. Beat them unconscious before you release them so they wake in pain, in that shock and humiliation, and somehow worse, free again. It’s a big mind-fuck, start to finish.”

“And when you have him in the box, Lieutenant, you’ll show him what it is to be mind-fucked.”

“Damn straight I will.” She looked back at the board, at the victims. “Damn straight.”

*

She refined her notes, wrote reports, studied case files. At the end of it, the best she could do was lay out her plans for the next day. She’d interview the previous victims, tug hard on those connections, start exploring possible theater angles.

She had to hope a night’s sleep would help coalesce her thoughts enough to pull a solid theory out of them.

This time she got in the fancy new bed, and decided it was more than fine.

“Married couples so far, not cohabs. Does that matter?” She closed her eyes as Roarke’s arm draped over her. “No kids in the house. I think that matters. No pets, no kids—or absent human staff.”

“Let it go for the night.”

“Except the Strazzas had a houseful. So…”

She didn’t let it go so much as drop away.

*

When she woke just after dawn, it took her brain a minute to catch up with her eyes. New room, she reminded herself.

Roarke sat on the big sofa, fully dressed in one of his impeccable dark suits—apparently unconcerned about cat hair on the material, as the cat had deserted her, and was now stretched out on his back beside Roarke.

Roarke absently scratched Galahad’s exposed belly while he sipped coffee and watched the incomprehensible stock reports on screen.

They made a hell of a good-morning picture, she thought, the insanely gorgeous man in his emperor-of-the-business-world suit and the big cat riding on bliss at the touch of those skilled hands.