Celebrity in Death

in the south of France, Buster Pearlman, one of Steinburger’s partners, ingested a terminal cocktail of barbiturates and single malt scotch. The ruling of self-termination was additionally fueled by speculation of embezzlement on his part, and what Steinburger regretfully testified was the threat of internal audit.”
    “Yes,” Roarke murmured, “I’ll be looking more at finances.”
    “We go seven years. A long stretch, so I’ll be going over the interimagain. Allys Beaker, twenty-two. An intern at the studio, found dead in her apartment. She’d slipped in the shower, the report claims, and fractured her skull. Her ex-boyfriend was detained and questioned, but there was no evidence to charge him with anything. He did, in his statement, claim he believed Allys was seeing someone else, an older man, a married man. This supposition was reinforced by a female friend of the deceased, who stated Beaker believed the man she was involved with intended to leave his wife and marry her. Steinburger was two years married to his last ex-wife.
    “Which brings us to current events. So, with this data, what do you see here on the board?”
    “A pattern. You believe he’s been killing for—Christ—forty years? Without slipping, without suspicion?”
    “I stopped thinking it halfway through the forty. I know it. It’s a way to solve a problem, it’s a choice. It’s going to take more to find out what the problem might have been in each case. Some are obvious,” she continued, gesturing at the board as she paced in front of it. “An affair resulting in a pregnancy, and the other party wouldn’t let go. Money difficulties pawned off on a partner, one who might have either been in on the skimming or learned of it. A nosy photographer who saw or photographed something damaging. A stupid young girl who pushed for marriage, likely threatened to tell his wife.”
    “Sex and money, as you said all along.”
    “Most are violent, somewhat impulsive. A shove, a blow. A cover-up. He might even see them as accidents. Or self-defense in a twisted way.”
    Roarke laid a hand on her shoulder when she stopped beside him. “Nine people.”
    “Very likely more, but it’s a hell of a start. He’s a serial killer who doesn’t fit the standard profile. He doesn’t escalate, or stick to type, stick to method. His connections or involvements with each pop out whenyou lay it out, but otherwise, it’s just a four-decade span of accidents, suicide, misadventure. Just bad luck. Who’s going to connect an almost ninety-year-old hiker slipping off a canyon path with a drunk twenty-year-old college kid falling down the stairs six years earlier?”
    “You.”
    She shook her head. “I don’t know if I would have. I looked at this—at Harris—as a first kill. I looked at the list of suspects and thought argument, impulse. Period. Panic, cover-up. Mira thought the same, though she did talk about there being two different styles—the impulse, the calculation. I saw it, but I didn’t. Not clearly. Then you said maybe he’d done it before. I never considered that. Never considered this.”
    “What do you see now, when you look at the pattern?”
    “Ambition, greed, self-indulgence, an obsessive need to preserve status and reputation. Sociopathic tendencies and a need to control, absolutely. He killed Asner rather than pay him off, risking that second kill. But there’s calculation there. He’s alibied, and while Asner was connected to Harris, he was also connected to any number of unsavory types given his line of work. He paid Valerie off for the alibi. He can’t afford a third kill, not now. But eventually she’ll have an accident. He’ll make sure she’s paid and rewarded until he can get rid of her.”
    “He killed Harris because she’d seen the pattern.”
    Eve nodded. “Or some of it—even one element—and she hired Asner to dig into it. He may have seen more of the pattern. We’ll probably never know the full extent of what he and Harris knew.”
    She sat on the edge of her desk, picked up her empty coffee cup, scowled at it. “I can’t prove any of it.”
    “Yet.”
    “It’s nice having somebody believe I can work small miracles.”
    “Every day. It’s likely he’s made other payoffs. I can look for that, near the dates of each of these deaths. I can look into the embezzlementfor accounts opened during that period. And starting with the college roommate, into his academic records.”
    “I’ve got a