Killer Instinct (Instinct #2)(22)

Elizabeth and I had Tracy to thank for setting this all up. He was also being a mensch for staying home with Annabelle. It was a double favor. But it was Doug who was doing us the huge favor.

“Just let me know what the hourly rate is,” I said as we entered one of the studios at the end of a long hallway.

“Zilch,” he said. “The booking agent felt bad for holding me to my session the day after the bombings, so this one’s a freebie.”

“What about your time, though?” I asked. “I need to pay you something.”

“Nah, don’t worry about it. To be honest, making Tracy jump around for hours in that ridiculous green leotard makes me feel a bit guilty for not paying him more,” he said. He turned to Elizabeth. “Speaking of that leotard, I assume you have the honors?”

“I’m afraid so,” said Elizabeth. “And green is so not my color.”

Doug’s involvement required a delicate dance for us in terms of what we could and couldn’t tell him. We’d already emailed him the hotel surveillance footage of Darvish the night of his death. As far as Doug knew, he was helping the police identify the woman on the professor’s arm. We obviously couldn’t share why we wanted to know who she was or the real reason her face was obscured. If he asked about the glow, I was going to tell him it was the result of the footage being tampered with, but I had the feeling he wasn’t going to ask.

“Okay, walk me through what you’re thinking,” he said, eyeing the shoebox in Elizabeth’s hands. “So to speak.”

“It’s simple,” I said. “While we can’t see the woman’s face, we can see her walk, and everyone has their own unique way of walking. Almost like a fingerprint.”

“Almost, but not exactly,” said Doug.

“Right, but close enough that we might be able to model this woman’s precise gait. Of course, to do that—”

“You’d have to have her precise shoes. Lucky for you, she was wearing Christian Louboutins,” he said.

I nudged Elizabeth. “See? He knows women’s shoes and there’s no way he’s gay.”

Elizabeth rolled her eyes. “Just ignore him, Doug. That’s what I do.” She took the shoes out of their box and handed them over.

“Yeah, I once dated a girl who was addicted to Louboutins,” said Doug, giving them a look. “She couldn’t afford them and I couldn’t afford her. Are you sure these are the right ones, though? The difference of even a few millimeters in the heel height would throw off every calculation.”

“They’re the right ones,” said Elizabeth, “and the heel is exactly a hundred millimeters. It’s the only way they come.”

Scam or no scam, you don’t get to sell shoes for close to a thousand bucks a pop by making a gazillion different styles. The cross straps and open-toe design with a vamp heel narrowed the field down to just one, and there was no escaping the irony.

Louboutin made shoes with names like Fifi, Bibibop, and Doracandy.

This particular shoe, however, was called the Malefissima.

Latin root word mal, meaning bad.

Or evil.





CHAPTER 29


ELIZABETH RETURNED from the bathroom after changing into the skintight green leotard that gave new meaning to the word unflattering, even on her.

“You’re right, Doug,” she said, cringing, and not just from her cuts and bruises. “You’re probably not paying Tracy enough.”

Doug quickly lined her legs with the reflective markers otherwise known as “those tiny ping-pong balls.” Her job now was to walk the world’s shortest catwalk, back and forth in front of an elaborate station of cameras, behind which was an even more elaborate console of screens.

“Work it, girl!” I said.

Doug was multitasking at the keyboard, modeling the movement of the woman with Darvish in addition to the measurements he was getting from Elizabeth. The only fixed element was the shoes, so everything else—stride differential, for instance—had to be accounted for and adjusted using multiple algorithms that also took into account things like skin tone and body mass. And that was only for starters. The real math hadn’t even begun.

So much for my having a statistics PhD from MIT. My head was spinning just thinking about it.

“Doug, any sign of the file?” asked Elizabeth.

All the computing in the world couldn’t help us unless we had something to apply it to. That was the file we were waiting on—additional surveillance footage from the hotel covering the days leading up to Darvish’s death. The detectives assigned to the case had acquired it, as per protocol for their investigation, and had even checked to see if there was any sign of Darvish’s mystery woman. But they were searching for someone with the same glow. We weren’t.

An operative or anyone else doing reconnaissance before taking out a mark wouldn’t bother using Halo. She would assume she didn’t need to.

“How the hell can anyone go back and identify her without having seen her face?” asked the detective Elizabeth had called on our way to Bergdorf’s. She’d had him on speaker. He was peeved that she’d interrupted his dinner, especially because the file was only supposed to be viewed on the department’s encrypted server.

“You’re a detective, figure it out,” snapped Elizabeth. She wasn’t digging the guy’s attitude. “In the meantime, just send the damn file to the following address.”