Celebrity in Death

everyone who’d been on scene at the murder.
    Three cops, she thought in annoyance, a shrink, and a former criminal now expert consultant, civilian, right there at the time and the place, and they couldn’t appreciably narrow the list of suspects.
    It was as embarrassing as it was infuriating.
    She walked into the color and sound of EDD. And movement, she thought when she spotted McNab doing a kind of prancing pace around the room. He weaved or sidestepped when one of his fellow e-geeks strutted or boogied in his path.
    Like a strange, disjointed dance, Eve thought, where even the chair-sitters bopped, swiveled, or tapped to some constant internal beat.
    She stepped in front of McNab, poked him to get his attention.
    “Hey.” He flicked off his earpiece. “Got those financials for you.”
    “Two withdrawals of fifty large, each within the last ten days.”
    “Well, hell. You spoil the fun.”
    “We tracked her PI. Anything else interesting?”
    “As a matter of fact. Come, have a seat in the parlor.”
    He led the way to his cube, recently decorated, Eve noted, with a poster of a monkey in a tutu riding an airboard with a PPC in one hand, a sandwich in the other while its earpiece flashed green. A smaller monkey rode in a pack on her back.
    It was titled MULTITASKING MAMA.
    “So, I figured I hit the gold with the 50K withdrawals, but I ran through the rest anyway. She’s got auto-payments on her place in New LA, standard autos for standard home expenses, the usual blah stuff. Fees to her agent, her manager. She doesn’t spend a lot considering what she pulls in. Mostly it goes to face and body treatments, wardrobe.”
    He swiped through what Eve supposed he considered the usual blah stuff.
    “Then I find this nice chunk charged up to I Spy, so I dig down, and it’s the shop here, in Times Square. Follow that up. She bought two spy cams a couple weeks ago. Microminis, with audio, motion, and sound activation, remotes, timers—the works. I got the clerk who sold them to her, and he remembered her. Except he described her as a redhead—a ‘pushy, hard-ass redhead,’ to use his words.”
    “Fits. She was a redhead when she hired the PI, and when she rented a safe box at a downtown bank. That must’ve been her go-to disguise. Two cams. Interesting. And interesting timing. That’s good work, McNab.”
    “All kudos accepted. One more deal. She also put a hefty deposit down on a high-end, high-class villa—for a two-week stay startingDecember twenty-third. Olympus Resorts, and she booked a private shuttle—two passengers. She had to give the names. Hers, and Matthew Zank.”
    “And again interesting. Send the data to my home unit. I’ll take a look when I get there. Is Feeney in his office?”
    “Last I saw him.”
    She headed over. The captain of the ship of noise and eye-blasting colors sat hunched at his desk in rumpled shirtsleeves. Silver threaded through his minor explosion of ginger hair. His face sagged like an old, comfortable hammock and looked as lived-in as the rumpled shirt.
    As he worked his screen, he reached for one of the candied nuts in the lopsided bowl on his desk.
    She gave his open door a one-knuckle rap. “Got a minute?”
    “I’m working on a goddamn budget. You can have an hour.”
    “I finished mine.”
    “Shut the fuck up.”
    She smiled, shut the door. And Feeney’s droopy eyes sharpened like arrows.
    “You got doughnuts? I don’t smell doughnuts.”
    “Because I don’t have any doughnuts.”
    “Then why’d you shut the door?”
    “I need you to analyze something.”
    “I did your anal. The purse recording. It’s clean. Straight through, no edits, no splices.”
    “Good. But this is another one. And it’s sensitive.” She helped herself to a couple nuts, studied the crooked orange, green, and blue bowl. “Mrs. Feeney make this?”
    “Nah. She can do better than that now. Mostly. My granddaughter made it for me. Now the kid wants a frigging pottery wheel and a kiln for Christmas. Who can think about Christmas this early?”
    Apparently Harris had.
    “Do you ever take off,” Eve wondered, “go away, like a vacation, for Christmas?”
    “Why the hell would we do that? It’s Christmas.”
    “Yeah. Okay, so my vic hired a PI to plant a cam in her former bedmate’s and his current bedmate’s loft. I’ve got two recordings, one she kept in a lockbox in a safe in her hotel suite, one she kept in a safe box at a bank.”
    “What did she catch them