Calculated in Death

door.
    “Alone again.”
    “Not anymore. Thanks for taking Marlo out.”
    “Easy enough as I wanted to speak with Feeney and McNab in any case. She’s blissfully happy, and very grateful you agreed to stand up for her at the wedding.”
    “I couldn’t find the wiggle room out.”
    “Didn’t have the heart to wiggle hard.” He tapped her chin, then set a go-cup from Vending on her desk.
    “What’s that?”
    “Soup, as I wager you’ve had nothing since breakfast.”
    “I’ve been a little busy.”
    “As I’ve heard.” He stepped over to her board. “Not cold and controlled any longer, but mean and bloody. Is the dog off the leash?”
    “Maybe. Mira thinks so, in a lot of ways. She thinks killing opened up his taste for violence, and for killing. I’m with her on that. She sees him as a coward. Right there with her. Escalating, enjoying his work. Yeah. She also thinks that combination makes him more dangerous. She could have a point.”
    “A frightened animal’s bite is as deadly as an emboldened one, but less predictable.”
    “Okay, that’s her summary, or close enough. She figures I’m the fly in his lotion.”
    “Ointment.”
    “Same thing. He screwed up with me, so he needs to fix that so he feels good about himself. Plus the endlessly rolling vid of the flying baby damaged his internal rep.”
    “He’d hope to lure you into a trap or ambush.” Roarke wasn’t the department’s top shrink, but he knew his wife. “And now you’re planning one for him with yourself as bait.”
    “I wouldn’t call myself bait in this case. More . . . an incentive. If we ID him before, we’ll go scoop him up. If not, I’ve got an idea, and following Mira’s profile, I can’t see him resisting it.”
    He took a disc from his pocket. “I think you’ll find everything on here to arrest and charge Sterling Alexander with multiple cases of fraud, embezzlement, and misappropriation of funds, with a side of tax evasion.”
    “You nailed it down?”
    “Easily enough, once the dominoes started to fall. It’s also easy enough to connect him to several other companies, some merely shells, and to individuals in those companies who would also be guilty of fraud.”
    “Does anything in there tie him to three murders, and attempted murder of a police officer?”
    “It’s easy, again, to draw the lines from his company, the other companies, to the recently dead accountant and the equally if more messily dead money manager. Were they alive, they’d have a lot of questions to answer.”
    “So we could say Alexander had them killed so they couldn’t answer any questions. But without the trigger, we can’t prove it. We get him on fraud, and push him for conspiracy to murder, he can claim he didn’t have anything to do with it, had no idea.”
    She held out her hand for the disc. “I’ll take it to the commander, and the prosecutor. And ask them to give me a couple days to cage him in on the murders. It’s good work, Roarke. Thanks.”
    “How do you know? You haven’t looked at it.”
    “Because it’s your work.”
    He flipped a finger down her hair. “You’re trying to soften me up so I won’t make an issue of your . . . incentive to a murderer.”
    “That doesn’t make it less true.”
    He sat in her miserably uncomfortable visitor’s chair. “I suppose you’d best eat your soup and tell me what you have in mind.”
    Eve took off the lid, sniffed. “What kind of soup is it?”
    “It was billed as minestrone, but it’s your Vending.”
    “It won’t be magic.” But she sampled it. “It’s not horrible. So, Nadine should be here before too long to do a quick interview with me about—woo-hoo—fun and excitement, glamour and glitter at the premiere tomorrow night. A premiere of the vid that’s based on the case I cracked like a rotten walnut. Though modesty will prevent me from playing my own fiddle—”
    “Tooting your own horn.”
    “What’s the difference? They both make noise.”
    “I stand, if not corrected, forced to agree.” In a futile attempt to find comfort in the chair, Roarke stretched out his legs. “You want to manipulate a confrontation with a violent killer at a public event?”
    “I’m going to manipulate a killer into the open at an event he won’t be able to resist because not only am I attending, I’m getting media play from it. It’s splashy, and it comes right on the heels of his own media humiliation in the form of flying baby.”
    “And