Golden in Death(94)

“You’ll take her down as well.”

“It’s going to be a pleasure.” Picking up her water glass, she toasted. “A really serious pleasure. I may not be able to put her in a cage, but when all this comes out, she won’t be able to get a job cleaning toilets in a school much less running one.”

“It sounds like the punishment you’re aiming for fits the crime.”

There she shook her head. “I wish it could be more, because she and Whitt, they’re the same. Power over the weak and vulnerable is what fuels them. She may not be involved, directly, in the murders, but she helped create them.”

“What will I do to help you take them down?”

“I’m doing a follow-up with Cosner—with his legal team headed, most likely, by his father—in the morning. We made sure Daddy got wind of the cops looking at his boy.”

“Forewarned?”

“Not exactly. I think in this case, Peabody and I called it right. The father knows the son is a fuckup. They’ve been through the cycle, covered for him, given him busywork to try to keep him straight. This? Murder? It’s going to be a bridge too far. What does that mean?”

Frowning, she stopped herself. “How can a bridge be too far? Too far from what? It has to go from here to there. Why did I even say that when it makes no sense?”

“I have no comment,” Roarke said, wisely.

“Anyway, I’m going to break young Cosner, and offer a deal. He flips on his pal, he doesn’t spend the rest of his life in a concrete cage off-planet. Meanwhile…”

“Will I have fun?”

She grinned back at him. “It’s going to be your favorite thing. I want to drill down deep, into Cosner’s finances, but more into Whitt’s.”

“That is my favorite thing—nearly. You’re so good to me.”

“I figured maybe Cosner figured out how to cook the agent, but now, after talking to him, I don’t see him stumbling into that on his own. They had to have somebody—maybe Peabody’s mad scientist. They had to pay somebody. At least until they had the formula. That means payments, equipment, ingredients, safety precautions. It wouldn’t be cheap.”

Rising, she walked back to the board, circled. “They’re rich, but Whitt’s smart, and he’s a money guy. You wouldn’t want the payments to show, to be tracked back to you. Not that he believes we’d ever actually try to hang this on him. He sees himself as above—just like Grange. But he’d be careful. He’d instruct Cosner to be careful.”

“I’ll enjoy this.”

“Figured. You should start looking during the time Hayward got engaged and forward. I think that’s the trigger. Whitt, he doesn’t love, he’s not capable, but in his mind she belonged to him. She—or her parents—cut him off.”

“And the reason for that stems back, for him, to Rufty, to Duran.”

“That’s right. It might be he decided back then, well fuck her, I never really wanted her anyway. Or figured if he ever wanted her again, he could just pick up where they left off. But the engagement, and the splash, the prominence of the fiancé’s family? Slap in the face.”

“I see, yes. She doesn’t just do well without him.” Roarke studied Hayward’s ID shot. “She doesn’t give him a thought. She’s successful in her own right, but then, to add insult, she’s suddenly a media darling, engaged to the successful in his own right, son of a political powerhouse.”

“Big-ass wedding to follow, you can bet,” Eve added, “and more media attention.”

“Which all should have been his,” Roarke added, nodding. “The golden egg makes perfect sense. Gold Academy,” Roarke continued. “He had everything he wanted his way there, and envisioned it would only continue. But Rufty and those like him killed the goose.”

She frowned. “There’s that goose again.”

“The one that laid the golden egg, darling. Kill the goose, end the supply of golden eggs.”

“Yeah, right, right.” She circled around it, hit the point. “Okay, yeah, that’s his little smart-ass symbolism.”

“It only makes the delivery system uglier.”

“I guarantee he’s had some good laughs over his goddamn clev erness. But he’d need somebody, Roarke, somebody to cook up the agent, to figure out how to—distill it or whatever it’s called. That had to cost.”

“I’ll look into it. And what will you do?”

“I’m going to see if I can dig up more teachers, more students who’ll talk to me. Especially the one who walked in on a fellow teacher bumping uglies with Grange on school property. The one who banged her died in a car accident.”

“Suspicious?” Roarke asked.

“No. Five years ago last winter. Michigan, icy roads, multicar wreck with two fatalities.” She shook her head. “So I have to hope others I talk to remember. Then I’m going to start digging into Whitt, the college years. There may be some threads to pull there.”

“Then we should both be well entertained for the evening.”

“Nice how that works, huh?” Since he’d gotten dinner, she walked over to clear the table. “You know what else? I actually liked planting that tree.”