He was hard and smooth, and she used her hands, her mouth to pleasure and to torment. Used her body to tease and arouse until her own needs nearly swallowed her.
He rolled, pinned her, his eyes fiercely blue.
“Now you’ll take it,” he said, and proceeded to destroy her.
She cried out once as those hands that had so coolly stroked the cat now used her, ruthlessly. He drenched her, saturated her with sensations that robbed her breath, shuddered through her body in choppy, drowning waves.
When she trembled, he hiked up her hips and plunged into her.
Filled and surrounded, caught and found. Craved. Power merged with power now as they drove each other.
Once again their eyes met, and he saw that deep and gilded brown. And now let himself fall into them.
A damn good welcome home, Eve decided as she dressed. She glanced over at Roarke. “I’ve got some work to get to.”
“Limo driver, crossbow. I figured as much. This would be the driver from Gold Star.”
She frowned a little, knowing he often checked the crime reports. “How much does the media have? I didn’t have time to monitor.”
“That’s about it. You’ve been stingy with the details.”
“They probably have the rest by now. Driver and co-owner, husband, father of two. Not a lot there to make too many ripples media-wise, until they get the crossbow angle. That’ll ripple some.”
“I expect it will.” She left off weapon and jacket, he noted, and slipped her feet back into her skids. Her comfortable work mode.
The murder might not ripple overmuch in the media, he thought, but for Eve it would be a drowning pool until she closed the case.
He had a bit more work to catch up on, but nothing, he decided, that couldn’t wait.
“Why don’t we have a meal in here and you can fill me in before you get to it?”
“That’ll work. I don’t want much. I took pity on Peabody and sprang for dogs and fries this afternoon.”
“Some cold pasta?”
“As long as it doesn’t come with a light white sauce. Vic’s last meal.”
“We’ll go for a light white wine instead.”
They ate in the sitting area of the bedroom while she relayed the basics.
“Are you convinced the killer didn’t know who’d be at the wheel?”
“It plays,” she said. “We’ll still look at the vic, the company, the employees, but it feels like the partner, the wife are telling it straight. The vic took the ride on a coin toss. When you listen to the transmissions during the ride, it’s easy, business as usual with casual personal stuff mixed in. I don’t, at this point, see Houston as a specific target. The company, maybe, but not him.”
“Add in the security expert. It’s interesting.” As he tore a hunk of olive bread, handed her a share, Roarke considered it. “Dudley and Son is an old company, with a long reach and very deep pockets. I’d expect a man in Sweet’s position to have been well vetted.”
“He was pissed. It felt real. Then again.” She shrugged and stabbed some curly pasta. “If he’d set it up, he’d be ready to make it feel real.”
“The question would be why.”
“Why Houston, why Sweet, why that company, why that method. Sweet’s PA’s off a little. Something off there,” she considered. “I want a closer look at that little bastard. Thinks a lot of himself. Whoever did this thinks a lot of himself. The method matters, the whole, elaborate setup. If you don’t know who you’re going to kill, then it’s about the killing, not the victim. When you go to this much fuss, it’s about how a lot more than who.”
“You’ve looked into who bought that particular make of bolt?”
“Yeah. I interviewed one of them on my way home. Iris Quill.”
“I know of her.” Roarke lifted his wineglass. “She’s got quite a reputation. A very serious hunter, and one of the founders of Hunters Against Hunger.”
“HAH.”
“An unfortunate acronym from the animal’s viewpoint, I imagine. Still, they do good work.”
“She struck me as solid. Gave me all her records on that weapon, even let me do a count of the bolts she has. And they add up. She also gave me a list of people she knows who use the same type. You don’t hunt.”
“No. It doesn’t appeal to me.”
“Mostly I don’t get why people want to tramp around the jungle or the woods, or wherever in the stone bitch of nature just to kill some stupid animal who’s just hanging around where it lives. You want meat, you can buy a dog on the street.”
“That’s not meat.”
“Not technically.”
“Not in any reasonable sense. I expect it’s the primal charge with hunting, the pitting yourself against the stone bitch of nature and so on.”
“Yeah, but you’d be the one with the weapon.” She frowned a moment. “Maybe this is kind of the same deal. Houston—or whoever might’ve been driving—is in his natural habitat, so to speak. You’re sitting in his space, maybe it’s the back of a fancy limo, but you’re hunting. Primal charge, maybe.”
“But hardly sporting,” Roarke pointed out. “He shot an unarmed man from behind. Most animals have what you could term a weapon at least. Tooth and fang—and the advantage, to some extent, of instinct and speed.”
“I don’t think he’s worried about being fair. Maybe a hunter, maybe, and maybe a little bored with shooting four-legged mammals. Trying for bigger game? Something to think about.”
She thought about it in her home office while she set up a second murder board. She programmed coffee, glanced at the door that joined her office with Roarke’s. He had work to catch up on, she knew, and it felt homey in their own strange way to be working in connecting rooms.
She set up her computer to start runs, and while it worked began to add to her case notes.
Hunter. Bigger game. Thrill kill. Unusual weapon, elaborate setup = attention. Attention = trophy? Who has access to Sweet’s data and hunts? Motive for involving Sweet?
She paused, glancing over at an incoming transmission. “Reo comes through,” she murmured, and called the incoming file, now unsealed, on-screen.
Vandalism, shoplifting, illegals possession, truancy, she read. Two stints in juvie, with another illegals pop for dealing and destruction of private property in between. Mandatory counseling, all before Houston hit sixteen.
Tipping back in her chair, she read social workers’ reports, counselors’ reports, judges’ opinions. Basically they’d labeled him a wild child, a troublemaker, a chronic offender with a taste for street drugs.
Until somebody’d bothered to dig a little deeper, somebody’d bothered to take a good look at his medicals.
Broken bones, blackened eyes, bruised kidneys—all attributed to accidents or fighting. Until just before his seventeenth birthday he’d beaten his father unconscious and taken off.
Her stomach shuddered with memory, with sympathy. She knew what it was to be broken and battered, knew what it was to finally fight back.
“They went after you, didn’t they? Yeah, hunted you down, tossed you in a cage for a while. But somebody finally took a good, hard look.”
She read his mother’s statement, read the fear and the shame in it, but felt no sympathy there. A mother was meant to protect the child, wasn’t she? No matter what. This one had hidden all those breaks and bruises out of that shame and fear, until the right cop, the right moment, and they’d pulled it out of her.
Supervised halfway house, more counseling—that, she thought, and maybe the power of finally fighting back had turned a teenage boy around, and helped build him into a man.
And last night, someone had taken that from him.
“His juvenile record,” Roarke said from the doorway.
“Yeah.”
“The system worked for him, maybe not as soon as it should have, but it worked for him.” He came to her, kissed the top of her head. “And so will you. How can I help?”
“You said you had work.”
“I’ve caught up with some, and have a few things running that can go on their own for a bit.”
He thought of her, she understood, when he read the file. And he thought of himself, too—of being kicked and punched, broken and battered by his father.