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She nearly told him about her dream, her memory, but pulled back from it. The subject of mothers had to be sensitive for him yet. Instead she used work. It wasn’t an evasion. Work did trouble her.
“My gut knows who he is already, has from the first time I saw him. But I can’t see him, so I don’t know for sure. Not in my head. He changes, and he’ll change again, so I can’t see him. Not his type, or even his mind. Because that changes, too. He’s good at what he does because he changes. Because he assumes the personality of what he imitates. I don’t know if I can stop him.”
“Isn’t that what he’s hoping for? That he’ll frustrate you by assuming a different personality, different method, different victim type, all of it?”
“So far, mission accomplished. I’m trying to separate him from, let’s say, the cloak he wears. To see him as he is so I’ll know if my gut’s right. So I can move from instinct to evidence to arrest.”
“And what do you see?”
“Arrogance, intelligence, rage. Focus. He has excellent focus. Fear, too, I think. I’m wondering if it’s fear that makes him imitate others, instead of striking out in his own way. But what does he fear?”
“Capture?”
“Failure. I think it’s failure. And maybe that fear of failure has its roots in the female authority figure.”
“I think you see him more clearly than you give yourself credit for.”
“I see the victims,” she continued. “The two he’s killed already, and the shadow of the one who’ll be next. I don’t know who she’ll be, or where, or why he’ll choose her. And if I don’t figure it out, he’ll get to her before I get to him.”
Her appetite was gone, as was the euphoria of good sex. “You’re a busy guy, Roarke,” she said. “Got a lot on your plate.”
“I prefer that to an empty one. So do you.”
“Good thing for us. I need to look into my list of suspects. I need to find this female authority figure, because when I do, I find him. I could use a hand.”
He took hers, squeezed it. “I happen to have one available.”
The most practical way to begin, she thought, was alphabetically. And, though it still scraped the pride a bit, to let Roarke man the computer.
He may have gotten spanked by a barbecue grill, but on a desk unit, he was king.
“We’ll start with Breen,” she told him. “I want everything I can get on Thomas A. Breen and his wife, without trampling on privacy laws.”
He sent her a pained look as he sat at her desk. “Now, what fun is that?”
“Keep it clean, ace.”
“Well then, I want coffee. And a cookie.”
“A cookie?”
“Yes.” The cat leaped on the desk to bump his head against Roarke’s hand. “You have a cookie cache in here. I want one.”
She stuck her hands on her hips, tapped her fingers. “How do you know I have a cache?”
He stroked the cat and smiled at her. “Unsupervised, you forget to eat half the time, and when you remember, you go for the sugar.”
She took some exception to the “unsupervised” remark, but had another priority. Eyes slit, she came closer, watched his face as keenly as she would a prime suspect. “You haven’t been sneaking into my office at Central and riffling my candy stash?”
“Certainly not. I can get my own candy.”
“You could be lying,” she said after a moment. “You’re pretty slippery.”
“And so you said in the shower.”
“Har-har. But I don’t see you skulking around Central lifting my chocolate just to drive me buggy.”
“Not when I can easily find more convenient ways to do so. Where’s my coffee?”
