“And when they tried that on you, you beat them. A golf thing,” Eve said with a shrug. “I’m not convinced you wouldn’t be a more exciting target. You’re not in service, fine, but you employ a universe of people who are. You’re already a competitor, and one they dislike because you had the nerve to build a fortune instead of inheriting one. It’s a pretty fair bet you’ve been involved with some of the women they’ve been involved with.”
He took a slow sip of water. “I’ll just say my taste has improved. Then point out what you should know very well. There’s no better way to strike at me than by murdering my wife.”
“The one you bought and paid for?”
Well now, that grated her ass, didn’t it? he mused. And for some perverse reason her reaction banked the embers of his own temper.
“Yes, to their minds. They don’t understand you, or me for that matter. And they certainly don’t understand love. Would you agree, Doctor Mira?”
“I would. And they prefer killing women. You can judge the ratio.” Mira gestured to the board. “They’ve killed men, and certainly will continue to if not stopped. But women are the preferred target, as both of them consider women something to be used, something disposable. Something less.”
“Dudley particularly,” Eve commented. “He surrounds himself with them. It’s like a harem. Okay.” She nodded again as her mind took a few leaps forward. “We’ll need to put something in place. The search warrants may be enough to push me to the head of the line, but we can work something that ups that time frame.”
“But if you wait for Reo to come through,” Peabody protested, “we’d have more time to work out the strategy, the backup.”
Feeney shook his head. “She fronts the play, they react. That puts them on defense. They have to rush their move, and while they’re pissed off. They don’t maneuver her into a situation, because she’s maneuvering them. We can get eyes and ears on you.”
“I’ve got this.” Eve held up her wrist, and Feeney’s eyes narrowed.
“Let me see that. Take it off,” he told her when she held her arm out. “I’m not going to pocket it.”
When she obliged him, he took it off to a chair to examine.
“I confront them. I’m pissed off.” Eve tapped a hand to her chest. “All these bodies piling up, and two in one day. I’m the best, right, and they’re running circles around me. I know they’re involved,” she continued as she began to pace. “I’ve got all these arrows pointing, but they’re racking up the points while I’m spinning. Makes me look incompetent.”
She could work this, she realized. Yes, she could work it.
“My commander’s on my ass, my husband’s getting testy with the hours I’m putting in. I’m starting to look like an idiot and I don’t like it. I’m going to light some fires.”
“How much will you give them?” Whitney asked her.
“Just what they’ve given me. The surface connections, but I need to make it personal. Them, me. Budget’s stretched,” she decided. “Yeah. I can’t access the resources through the department, but I’ll use my own money to get those resources outside the department. Don’t you know who I am? Don’t you know I’ve got more money than the two of you put together? That’ll speak to them, won’t it?” she asked Mira. “He bought me, but now I can get my hands on billions as long as I bang him when he wants it.”
“A fool and his money,” Roarke murmured, amused despite himself.
Mira let out a little sigh. “I would say it’s their probable view of your relationship.”
“And I’d say this no longer sounds like a backup plan,” Roarke put in.
“Feeney’s right, I front the play. I can time it. Hit them after I know, or am reasonably sure, we’re going to get the warrants, but before we serve them. It’s just adding incentive for them to move up their timetable. We sting them right,” she insisted, and Roarke understood she was pushing to get him in her corner, “they go after me, they go after a cop, they’re done. Their high-priced lawyers, their family fortunes, their goddamn pedigrees aren’t going to keep them out of a cage for the rest of their lives.”
“Is that what worries you?” he asked. “That even with the case you’ve built, even with the evidence you believe you’ll gather with the warrants, they’ll slip through the system?”
“They worry me.” In one sharp move, she pointed to the board, to the faces of the dead. “The chance I’ll have to put another up there worries me.”
He watched her realize she’d let her emotions spike, let them show in front of her superior. And he watched her draw them down again, draw them in.
“They want me up there,” she said in a tone both cool and flat, “so we’ll make them want me up there sooner.”
“You know, I’ve been working on something like this off and on.” Feeney continued to study the wrist unit as his casual comment defused the charged air. “This one’s nice and compact, got more bells and whistles than I’d worked out.”
He glanced up, his gaze flicking over Roarke before homing in on Eve. “What would be prime is if you run into them—the both of you—someplace. Public place. Restaurant, club, like that. That’s what fries you, see, trying to get a little downtime, and there they are in your face. Maybe you’re already pissy, having a spat with Roarke, and that just shoves you over the line. That way it comes off impulse. Like you just lost it there for a minute.”
“That is prime,” Eve agreed.
“I’ve got moments.” Feeney rose, handed the unit back to Eve, looked at Roarke. “That’s nice work.”
“Thanks.”
“Peabody, see if you can find out where they’re going to be tonight. At least one of them. Friday night . . . they’re not going to sit at home playing mah-jongg.”
“It’ll be easier and quicker for me to find out.” Roarke took out his ’link, walked away.
“Still want eyes and ears on you,” Feeney told her.
“Fine.” She stuck her hands in her pockets as she tracked Roarke out of the room.
“You keep them on, unless you’re locked up in that fortress you live in, or you’re working toward getting your hands on some billions.”
“What . . .” It struck her. “Jesus, Feeney.”
“You started it. I’ll start setting it up.”
“I want two officers on you at all times. That starts now,” Whitney added.
“McNab and I will take tonight.”
“They’ve seen you,” Eve reminded Peabody.
“They won’t make me.”
Mira slipped out, waiting until Roarke put his ’link away.
“I’m going to apologize to you,” she began. “I couldn’t, in good conscience, keep my opinion to myself, even knowing how she’d react, what she’d do. But I’m sorry.”
“I’m obliged to accept what she does. What she is,” he added, reminding himself that she, in turn, accepted him. Hardly realizing he did so, he slid a hand into his pocket, found the button he carried there. That tiny piece of her. “That obligation started when I fell in love with her, and was sealed when I married her. Before you told her, I’d been engaged in a vicious internal debate about telling her myself.”
“I see.”
He held her gaze for a long moment. “I don’t know which side of me would’ve won.”
“I do. You’d have told her, then had your argument over her reaction in private.”
“I expect you’re right.”
“What troubles you more? What she’s planning to do, or the fact that she’s in the position of doing it because her connection to you qualified her?”
“Toss-up. They have utter contempt for me, and enjoy letting it show. Just enough. I suppose they think I’d be insulted, or have my feelings hurt.”
“As you said, they don’t understand you.”
“If they did, they’d have tried to kill her already. They think killing her will inconvenience me, certainly disrupt my personal and professional lives for a bit, cause me some distress.”
He turned the button in his fingers. “They’d enjoy all of that. If they knew losing her would destroy me in levels they can’t imagine, they’d cut her into pieces and bathe in her blood.”
“No.” Eve spoke from the doorway. “No, they wouldn’t because I’m better than they are. They can’t beat me, and they sure as hell can’t beat us. Can you give us a minute?” she asked Mira.
“Yes.” She touched Roarke’s arm before she went back inside the conference room.