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“Quiet,” Roarke muttered. “Half a minute more here. Ah, and there we are. What do you need from this?”
“Take down the data on screen, put that up. We’ll scroll through.” She felt it, felt it in her bones. But…“I want your take here without any of my input first.”
He read, as she did, of the quick and nasty death of one Ned Custer by person or persons unknown. Cheap sex flop, slit throat—attack from behind—castration, no trace or DNA, no witnesses. No trail.
“So the wife was well-alibied, I see.”
“Solid. They ran the ’link calls, confirmed the source. She was in her apartment when he got sliced. No boyfriends, no close relatives or friends. Baxter and Trueheart are thorough, and they didn’t pop anything on this.”
“She’s one of Ava’s mothers.”
“Yep.”
“Strangers on a Train.”
“Huh?” Her head swiveled back toward him. “What train? Nobody was on a train.”
“I haven’t run that vid for you, have I?” Coolly, he continued to study the screen, continued to read data. “It’s a good one. Mid-twentieth-century, Hitchcock film. You’ve enjoyed Hitchcock.”
“Yeah, yeah, so?”
“Briefly, two men—strangers—meet on a train, and the conversations turn to how each wishes to be rid of a certain individual in his life. And how it could be done without the police suspecting them if each did in the other’s. Very clever, as there’s no real connection between the two men. It was a book first, come to think of it.”
“Strangers,” Eve repeated.
“In this case, the one who wanted his wife done didn’t take the other—an unstable sort, who wanted his father done—seriously. But, the wife was dispatched, and the unstable sort pressured the sudden widower to complete the bargain. It’s twisty and complex. You’ll have to watch it.”
“The exchange is what clicked for me,” Eve told him. “The possibility of that. You do mine, I do yours. We’re both alibied, and who’d look at either of us for the other’s? Why would Baxter look at Ava Anders in the murder of this guy? She doesn’t know him, and even if you note that Suzanne Custer’s in the Anders program, it doesn’t pop. It doesn’t mean a thing.”
“Until you look at Anders’s murder, won’t let it slide as an accident, and dig deep enough to see this. And wonder.”
“Probability scan’s going to bottom out.” Already annoyed by that, Eve hissed out a breath. “It’ll bottom out until I can plug in more. What about you? Do you buy it?”
“The stronger personality, the more powerful one, hatches the plan, draws the weaker one in. And does the job first, to add pressure and obligation. Even threat. When the weaker follows through, it’s not quite as clean and tidy. Yes, I’d buy it.”
“It’s easier to pry open the weaker one. We pull Suzanne Custer in, we work her.” Pacing, Eve circled the murder board. “Work her right, work her hard enough, she’ll flip on Ava. Need more first. You move.”
He pushed back from the desk. “Do you still want runs on the other names?”
“I’ll put a drone on that. This is the money shot here, this is the one. I’ve got a tingly.”
“Save it for me, will you?”
“Ha. I need everything I can get on her. Baxter’s got a solid murder book. We just have to look at the data from a different angle now. Suzanne didn’t kill her husband. She killed Ava’s.”
“There had to be contact between the two murderers,” Roarke pointed out. “Confirming the first, setting up the second.”
“Where did Custer get the murder weapon, the drug, the enhancer? That’s a place to pick at. Ava had to give her the security code, the layout.” As she spoke, Eve scrawled down names, connections, questions. “They changed the code every ten days, so there had to be a way to pass that on. We pick at Ava at the same time. She’s not going to be alibied so damn tight for the night of Ned Custer’s murder. She fits,” Eve added. “She’s the right height for the angle of the killing strike. The right personality to have planned it without leaving a trace behind, the right personality to use someone else to get what she wanted.”
“Baxter would have had EDD check all Custer’s ’links, her comp for communication and activity before her husband’s murder, and—I assume—for a week or so after it.”
“Yeah, but not for before Anders.” Eve planted a finger on Thomas Anders’s name on her notes. “No point. She wasn’t a suspect, not with her alibi, in her husband’s. You look, you check, but Baxter didn’t feel it. Because it wasn’t there to feel. We’ll pull them now, all of them. Anders’s, too. We’ll go back to before the Custer murder on them.”
/> She drummed her fingers. “Asshole like Custer, I bet he kept cock enhancers around. The barbs, now…where’s a nice mom of two like Suzanne going to get her hand on them? They came from her. That part wasn’t in Ava’s plan.”
“A terrible thing when your husband’s murdered that way,” Roarke commented. “I’ll bet a kindly doctor would prescribe tranquilizers for the widow. Put them all together instead of doling them out for yourself…”
“Good. That’s good. A medical won’t want to give us that information, not without a warrant, but we start with her financials, see if she paid a doctor, paid a pharmacy between the murders. Close to the second murder, yeah, close, I bet. Got cold feet as it got toward the sticking point.”
