In Death 25 - Creation in Death

protest. “You ordered your team to take some downtime for good reason.”
    “I could use a shower,” she said after a moment. “An hour. Compromise.” She held up a hand, held him off. “You’ve got to admit it beats fighting about it for half that downtime.”
    “Agreed.” He copied the data, handed her the disc.
    Since she didn’t consider the drive home part of the break, she let Roarke take the wheel and shuffled through her notes, the timelines, the names, the statements.
    He’d taken the third target sooner than projected, Eve mused. Two reasons she could think of for that. Either the earlier snatch suited his personal schedule or the target’s. Or Gia Rossi wasn’t holding up well.
    She could already be dead—a possibility Eve saw no reason to share with Roarke.
    Hours, she thought. If the contact had been made hours sooner, they would have found Ariel Greenfeld before he had her. The right question, the right time. Not only would the woman have been safe, but they’d have had solid data on the suspect.
    Off at four, she noted. Planned to make dinner for her neighbor. So, she’d planned to be home from this outside appointment in two or three hours, most likely.
    “How long would you budget for a meeting?” Eve asked. “For going over a proposal for wedding cakes and desserts, that sort of thing?”
    “From her end?” Roarke considered. “She put together a lot of images, a number of variations of style and type, flavors. A great deal of trouble. I’d guess she’d prepared for a couple of hours. If she assumed—correctly—that many people take every detail of a wedding very seriously, she would have been prepared to give the potential client all the time he needed or wanted.”
    “Okay, let’s say two, so that makes it eighteen hundred not including travel time. She tells the guy across the hall she’s going to pick up a few things on the way home to make—actually cook—a meal. That’s got to take some time. The shopping part, the cooking part. Probably, what, an hour?”
    “Your guess.” Roarke shrugged. “Summerset would know better.”
    “Yeah, well, until we consult His Boniness, I’m figuring an hour. Which puts it at nineteen hundred, again without travel. Late night Saturday, long day Sunday, early to work on Monday. I don’t figure she was prepping a late meal.”
    “And what does that tell you?”
    “It tells me that, most likely, as far as she knew, she wasn’t going that far for this meeting. Not across the river into Jersey, probably not across the bridge into Brooklyn or Queens. Too much bridge-and-tunnel traffic. Probability is higher he’s in Manhattan. Narrows the search.”
    Eve shifted. “She’s tossing a meal together for a friend, not planning a fancy deal for a lover. Just a pal, one she’s hoping she can share this good news with if she copped the job. Picking up a few things on the way home. That says she planned to get herself home. Public transportation or on foot. So she can stop by the market. Decent chance he’s downtown, at least not above midtown.”
    She sat back. “Focus there to start. Fan out, sure, but we start there, focus there.”
    She worked the problem the rest of the way home, adding in factors, playing with angles. Urban Wars, body ID method, Lower West or East Side clinics.
    He almost certainly had some sort of transportation, but it would also serve if he could stalk any or all of his victims on foot.
    People tended to shop and frequent restaurants in their comfort-zone. The soap and shampoo—downtown store was very likely the source unless he web-shopped or brought it into New York with him. Starlight was in Chelsea, the bakery downtown, the first dumping spot in this round on the Lower East. Gia Rossi worked midtown.
    Maybe he wasn’t traveling far from home this time around.
    Maybe.
    She plugged her knowns and unknowns into her PPC, intending to transfer the information to her desk unit and run probabilities.
    “I want whatever Summerset’s worked up on disc and on my unit,” she began as they drove through the gates. “We can get his take on the timing as far as shopping/cooking, but I want to check out what markets and stores Greenfeld most usually frequented. And other specialty places below Fiftieth. The way her neighbor talked, she’d have gotten a charge out of wandering some new food place. We’ll interview the others she went out with Saturday night. Maybe she let something slip about her Sunday