In Death 26 - Strangers in Death

tomorrow at eight—”
    “Eve?”
    “Oh, hey.” There was music again. It wasn’t porn vid music, thank God, but it spoke of an intimate evening at home to Eve. “Sorry to bother you when you’re…whatever. I have something I’d like to pull you in on. I’ve set a meeting at my home office in the morning, if your schedule—”
    “What time?”
    “Eight hundred.”
    “I can make that. I’ll be there. Do you want me to study anything in the meantime?”
    “I’d actually like you to come into this fresh.”
    “Fine.” Mira glanced away, laughed as she sent a warm look off screen. “Dennis sends his best. I’ll see you in the morning.”
    “Thanks.”
    Eve swiveled away from the ’link, pressed her fingers to her eyes. “They’re going to do it,” she mumbled. “If not now, soon. I wish I didn’t have to know that.”
    To clear the image, and the thought, out of her head, she turned back to Baxter’s file, and started digging.
    At some point the cat wandered in to leap on her desk. When he got nothing but, “Don’t sit on my stuff,” he leaped back down to stalk into Roarke’s domain.
    She started a new file listing the correlations, the connections—actual and possible—the time lines. Using the backside of her murder board, she arranged photos, notes, reports. Stood back, studied it.
    She could see it, actually see it. The steps, the stages, the moves, the mistakes. Not enough, she admitted, not for an arrest, not for a conviction. But there would be.
    Lock and key, that’s how she saw it. The Anders case the lock, the Custer case the key. Once she fit them together, turned it just right, it would open. Then she’d reach in and grab Ava by the throat.
    She turned to Roarke’s office. He sat at his desk, the cat draped over his lap. “Find anything?”
    “Custer’s financials don’t allow her much wiggle room. From what I can see, the husband ran the show there previously. Most of the withdrawals, debits are in his name. There are several in one particular sex shop—Just Sex—in the six months before his untimely. As it wouldn’t have surprised me to find certain items you had interest in—”
    “Hopefully you mean professional interest.”
    He only smiled. “As, and so forth, I entertained myself and did a bit of searching at the vendor’s…”
    “You hacked.”
    “You say that in such a disapproving tone. I explored. You’ll certainly do so yourself, legally and tediously, but I like having my curiosity satisfied.”
    He said nothing more, only picked up the bottle of water on his desk and drank. And his eyes laughed at her over the bottle.
    “Crap. Yes, I’ll get the data by fully legal means, but what did you find?”
    “Multiple purchases of what’s delightfully marketed as Hard-on. It comes in a phallic-shaped bottle.”
    “Check one.”
    “Purchases of various sexual aids and toys. Cock rings, probes, textured condoms, vibrators.”
    “Check two.”
    “Nothing on the ropes, I’m afraid.”
    “But they carry them. We checked venues for that type of rope, and they carry them. Did Suzanne pay a visit there?”
    “No record of that, no. They do take cash. She did, however, visit a clinic two weeks before Anders’s death. She saw a Dr. Yin there according to the records—”
    “Which you hacked into?”
    “Which I explored,” he said mildly. “And she incurred a debit at the attached pharmacy, filling a prescription for a box of home pressure syringes, and a liquid form of lotrominaphine—a barbiturate used to aid sleep and nervous conditions.”
    “Big, fat, red check. I have to get all this data through channels, get it all lined up. Then I’m going to knock her down with it.”
    “Where are you going?”
    “It’s never too late to call an APA,” she said as she hurried back to her desk. “I’m going to contact Reo, do the fast talk, and get the paperwork started on warrants for the data you just gave me.”
    “And after we dropped it all nicely tied in a bow into her lap,” Roarke said to the cat. “That’s a cop for you.”
    He heard her giving her pitch to Cher Reo, then arguing with the soft-voiced, tough-minded APA. He busied himself for the next few minutes studying and analyzing the last weeks of Suzanne Custer’s financials.
    “Find another spot,” Roarke told Galahad, and hauled the limp mass of cat up, dropped him lightly on the floor. When he walked into Eve’s office, she sat at her desk, keying in more