In Death 18 - Divided in Death

PROLOGUE
    Killing was too good for him.
    Death was an end, even a release. He’d go to hell, there was no question in her mind, and there he would suffer eternal torment. She wanted that for him—eventually. But for the time being, she wanted him to suffer where she could watch.
    Lying, cheating son of a bitch! She wanted him to snivel and beg and plead and slither on his belly like the gutter rat he was. She wanted him to bleed from the ears, to scream like a girl. She wanted to twist his adulterous dick into knots while he shrieked for the mercy she’d never give.
    She wanted to pound her fists into his beautiful liar’s face until it was a pulpy, pustulated mass of blood and bone.
    Then and only then, the dickless, faceless bastard could die. A slow, withering, agonizing death.
    Nobody, nobody cheated on Reva Ewing.
    She had to pull over and stop the car in the breakdown lane of the Queensboro Bridge until she calmed down enough to trust herself to continue. Because someone had cheated on Reva Ewing. The man she’d loved, the man she’d married, the man she’d believed in utterly was, even now, making love to another woman.
    Touching another woman, tasting her, using that skilled deceiver’s mouth, those clever cheating hands to drive another woman wild.
    And not just any other woman. A friend. Someone else she’d loved and trusted, believed in, counted on.
    It wasn’t just infuriating. It wasn’t just painful to know her husband and her friend were having an affair, and right under her oblivious nose. It was embarrassing to discover herself a cliché. The deceived wife, the clueless dolt who accepted and believed the adulterer every time he said he had to work late, or had a dinner meeting with a client, or was zipping out of town for a few days to nail down, or hand-deliver, a commission.
    Worse, Reva thought now as traffic whizzed by her car, that she of all people had been so easily duped. She was a goddamn security expert. She’d spent five years in the Secret Service and had guarded a president before going into the private sector. Where were her instincts, her eyes, her ears?
    How could Blair have been coming home to her, night after night, fresh from another woman and she not know?
    Because she’d loved him, Reva admitted. Because she’d been happy, deliriously happy to believe a man like Blair—with his sophistication and amazing looks—had loved and wanted her.
    He was so handsome, so talented, so smart. The elegant bohemian with his dark silky hair and emerald-green eyes. She’d been sunk, she thought now, the minute he’d turned those eyes on her, the instant he’d sent her that killer smile. And six months later, they’d been married and living in the big, secluded house in Queens.
    Two years, she thought, two years she’d given him everything she had, shared every piece of herself with him, and had loved him with every cell of her body. And all the while he’d been playing her for a fool.
    Well, now he’d pay. She dashed the tears from her cheeks, dug deep again for her anger. Now, Blair Bissel was going to find out just what she was made of.
    She pulled back into traffic, and drove at a rapid clip to Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
    ———«»———«»———«»———
    The husband-stealing bitch, as Reva now thought of her former friend, Felicity Kade, lived in a lovely converted brownstone near the north corner of Central Park. Instead of reminding herself of all the time she’d spent inside, at parties, casual evenings, at Felicity’s famed Sunday brunches, Reva concentrated on the security.
    It was good. Felicity collected art and guarded that collection like a dog guarded his meaty bone. The fact was, Reva had met her three years before when she’d helped design and install Felicity’s security system.
    It would take an expert to gain entrance, and even then, there were backups and fail-safes that would foil all but the crème de la crème of burglars.
    But when a woman made her living, her very good living, looking for chinks in security, she could always find one. She’d come armed, with two jammers, a beefed-up personal palm computer, an illegal police master code, and a stunner she intended to slap right against Blair’s cheating balls.
    After that, well, she wasn’t quite sure what she’d do. She’d just play the rest by ear.
    She hefted her bag of tools, shoved the stunner in her back pocket, and marched through the balmy September evening toward