In Death 10 - Witness in Death

smoothly, so clearly. Eliminate the threat, give the police their killer. All in one stroke.
    In moments, only moments now, it would all be done.
    "All tied off!" Linus called. "She'll hold."
    "I'm sure. Oh no, Linus, don't walk back down."
    Confused, he shifted on the ladder, looked down at the smiling face below. "Don't walk down?"
    "No. Jump. Jump off the ladder, Linus. Won't that be fun? Just like jumping into the pretty blue water in Tahiti."
    "Like in Tahiti? That's where I'm going once I'm flush."
    "Yes, like Tahiti." The laughter was delighted, encouraging. A careful ear might have heard the strain beneath it, but Linus only laughed in return. "Come on, Linus. Dive right in! The water's fine."
    He grinned, held his nose. And jumped.
    This time death wasn't quiet. The panicked, kicking feet knocked the ladder down with a thunderous clatter. It hit the bottle of brew in an explosion of glass. Choked gasps forced their way through the tightened noose, became rattles. For seconds, only seconds, but the air seemed to scream with them.
    And then there was only the faint creak of the rope swinging. Like the creak of a mast in high seas, it was curiously romantic.

CHAPTER EIGHT
    "Weighing in Mira's profile of the killer, the scales drop on the side of a performer. An actor," Eve continued. "Or someone who wants or wanted to be one."
    "Well, you got your headliners." Feeney stretched out his legs. "Your second string, your extras. Add them all up, you still got more than thirty potentials. You add the wanna-bes to that, and Christ knows."
    "We divvy them up and cut them down. The same way Baxter should cut down audience members."
    Feeney spread his lips in a grin. "We heard his whining all the way over in EDD."
    "Then my job there is done. We factor in connections to the victim," Eve went on, "placement during the last act. We haul the most probables into Interview and start sweating them."
    McNab shifted in his chair, lifted a finger. "It's still possible that the killer was someone in the audience. Somebody who knew Draco, had theater experience. Even working Baxter and whoever he drags into it with him twenty-four/seven on probabilities and backgrounds, it'll take weeks to eliminate."
    "We don't have weeks," Eve shot back. "This is high profile. Pressure's going to build on The Tower," she said, referring to the office of the commissioner. "That means it's going to squeeze us, and squeeze us soon. We run the audience as Baxter passes on potentials, and keep running them until we whittle it down. Meantime, we focus on the stage."
    She moved to the board where the stills of the murder scene, the body, the graphs and charts from the probability scans and background checks run to date were already tacked.
    "This wasn't a spree killing. It wasn't an impulse. It was planned, staged. It was performed. And it was recorded. I've got copies of the discs for everyone. We're going to watch the play, each of us, study it until we know the lines, the moves, so well we could go on the road with it ourselves.
    "It's about twisting the law," she murmured. "About playing with it. And in the end, it's about a kind of justice. The murderer might see Draco's death that way. A kind of justice."
    Feeney rattled the sugared nuts in the bag in his pocket. "Nobody loved him."
    "Then we figure out who hated him most."
    The boy's name was Ralph, and he looked both terrified and excited. He wore a battered Yankees jacket over his dull brown janitorial uniform. He either had a very bad haircut or, Roarke supposed, was sporting some new fashion. Whichever, he was forced to blow, sweep, or shake the ragged streams of dark hair out of his eyes on a continual basis.
    "I didn't think you'd come yourself, sir." Part of Ralph's panicked excitement came from the idea of speaking face-to-face with the legendary Roarke. Everybody knew the man was totally ice. "Orders are to report anything out of the ordinary to control, so when I saw how the stage door wasn't locked and coded, I figured how I should report it right off."
    "That's right. Did you go inside?"
    "Well, I..." Ralph didn't see any point in admitting his over-active imagination hadn't let him get two feet beyond the door. "I started to, you know. Then I saw how there were lights on that aren't supposed to be on. I thought it was smarter to stay out here and... be guarding the door, like."
    "Good thinking." Roarke crouched down, studied the locks, glanced up idly at the security camera. Its