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“Here you are, then.” Roarke handed her a plate of bacon and eggs. “You won’t be so cross if you have a bit of breakfast.”
“This is your fault.”
“It is, isn’t it?” He grinned without an ounce of remorse. “Go on, then, shovel some in.”
She did, as everyone else was. “Some of you vultures…sorry,” Eve said to Mira, “no offense.”
Mira took a neat bite of creamy eggs. “None taken.”
“Some of you may be aware that Detective Pig-Eater there and his aide, Officer Danish, caught a homicide a couple months back. Baxter, quick overview.”
“Custer, Ned,” he began, and reeled off the basic facts.
When he’d finished, Eve flipped Suzanne Custer’s ID and data on screen. “The widow’s alibi holds,” she said. “The ’link to ’link transmissions she made originated in her apartment, and EDD analysis verifies they were live trans, not recorded. Suzanne Custer didn’t slit her husband’s throat. She not only wasn’t there, but lacked the physicality for the killing blow.”
“Too short, too slight,” Baxter confirmed between shovels.
“The extensive and thorough investigation by the gluttonous primary and his aide unearthed no sidepiece, no relative, no friend who might have killed Custer on the wife’s behalf,” Eve continued. “Said investigation found no financial payment, or other bartering tool that may have been used by the wife to hire the hit. The widow does, however, benefit financially from Custer’s death, and as the vic had a documented history of spousal abuse, adultery, and kept his fist closed over the purse strings, the widow also benefits on emotional, physical, and practical levels from his death.”
“Dallas, we can’t pin her.” Baxter lifted his hands, one of them holding a chunk of grilled ham speared on a fork. “We dead-ended on every angle we played with her connected to the murder.”
“She went white.” Trueheart shifted in his seat as Eve turned her gaze on him. “When Detective Baxter and I went to inform her, she didn’t seem all that surprised to f
ind cops at the door. More tired, resigned. She said how she didn’t have money for bail. And when we told her he was dead, she went white. It didn’t feel faked, I guess I want to say. It rang true.”
“It probably was true. Let’s switch over to the Anders case. Peabody and I caught this one.”
Baxter rose to get more coffee as Eve laid out the salients. “Are you looking for a connect?” he asked. “Because both vics appear to have been killed by an LC, or a sex partner?”
“That’s an interesting connection, isn’t it? And one of the mistakes made. Ava Anders.” Eve ordered Ava’s ID photo and data split screen with Suzanne’s. “Also solidly alibied at the time of her husband’s murder. While she apparently has more friends, certainly more influence and resources than Suzanne, no evidence leads to murder for hire. Her circle of friends don’t play in. She also gains financially, and when you scrape away at the surface of her claims of a happy marriage to the lies and manipulations underneath, she gains on several other levels.”
She turned to study the screen. “These women have a great deal in common, under the surface. And they’re connected. Another mistake. Suzanne Custer’s two kids are part of the Anders sports programs. She’s attended several of Ava’s seminars and mommy retreats. She’s done some volunteering, too.”
“Huh.” It was all Feeney said, but Eve glanced at him, and saw it had clicked.
“You think the Anders woman got the idea to off her husband from what happened to Custer?” Baxter’s brows drew together as he stared hard at the screen. “Little Suzanne caught a lucky break, why can’t I? Maybe she talks an LC into doing her the favor, pays her off through the program or the company, then…”
“Simpler than that,” Feeney commented and enjoyed another scoop of hash browns. “Simpler’s best.”
Baxter frowned, then…“Well, Christ.”
It hit, Eve noted, hard enough for Baxter to forget his coffee and pig meat. “Give me a hand, will you,” she said to Roarke.
Together they turned Eve’s murder board so the second side faced the room. “Ava Anders to Bebe Petrelli and Cassie Gordon. They didn’t pan out for her, but she tested waters there. Ava Anders to Charles Monroe. Professional LC, clean record, sterling rep. Use him to build her claim that her husband liked the kink, and she didn’t. That she loved him regardless. Ava to Brigit Plowder and Sasha Bride-West. Alibis. Girlfriends, tight circle.”
As she outlined, Eve tapped each photo, each connection.
“Ava to Edmond and Linny Luce—friends of vic who would, in turn, testify as to the comfortable and happy marriage. Except they don’t like her—under the surface, they don’t like her a bit. She didn’t count on that. She didn’t count on any real connection being made between her—lady of the manor, lady bountiful—with the less fortunate women in the program she oversees.”
Now she pinned her finger to Ned Custer’s photo. “She sure as hell didn’t count on any connection between the murder of a philandering, blue-collar asshole and the murder of her renowned philanthropist husband. Murders committed months apart, with different MOs, in different parts of the city.”
“It could work,” Peabody said under her breath. “It could really work.”
“It did work,” Eve corrected. “Two men are dead.”
“You think they traded murders. Fuck me,” Baxter added.
“I know they did. Ava’s been planning this a long time. At least two years, since I believe she killed her father-in-law. But probably longer than that. Once the father-in-law was out of the picture—” Eve tapped Reginald Anders’s photo on the board. “Lots more at stake. More money, more power, more control. That skin she was wearing, boy, that really had to start to tighten up on her. Every single day, to have to look at this guy she’d married, play the contented wife, listen to him drone on and on about his sports, his business, his programs. Planning the murders, that would help her get through it. That light at the end of the tunnel.”
