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“Right. I forgot about that.” She held on a moment, content. “I’d love to read the Quigley-Copley prenup.”
“Would you like me to arrange that?”
“Tempting, but no. There’s no urgency on it, and I think I stirred up some dust. Maybe Peabody did the same.”
She leaned back. “I’m going to check in with her, write all this up. Then let’s pick a vid where lots of shit blows up, and eat ourselves sick with popcorn.”
“A fine plan, with one addition.”
“What?”
“Let’s drink considerable wine with the popcorn, and have crazed sex after the vid—as a double feature.”
“A better plan. Let’s get it done.”
It took some time, getting everything in place to the point she felt justified in taking another few hours off.
She talked to Peabody at length, briefly to McNab. Wrote her update, read Peabody’s. Updated her board, her book.
The Quigley-Copley household was a mess, she mused. Then again in her experience a great many households ran on rocky, pitted, often ugly ground.
“Sometimes we do,” she told the cat, who seemed more interested in taking the next of his long series of naps in her office sleep chair. “The rocky part. We’ve got the smooth running right now, but there are always going to be bumps ahead.”
Stepping back, she hooked her thumbs in her belt loops, studying the ID shots, the way they looked together. “Both attractive—got a polished-up look about them that says money even just in the IDs. They even look like a couple, like two people who should fit. But they just don’t.
“They just don’t,” she repeated, leaned back on her desk.
“People could say that about us,” she said when Roarke moved from his office to hers. “Probably a lot of them do.”
“What would that be?”
“That we don’t fit.”
“I beg to differ.” He walked to her, leaned on the desk beside her. “We fit as cleanly as a bespoke suit.”
“I’m saying what people outside it all might say. It’s perception, pal. Look at them—Quigley, Copley. They look like a set—that’s visual perception, and probable social perception. But when you crack the lid, it’s a bad fit. She’s never going to trust him, not down to the deep, and he’s always going to look for the easy way to get more. Sex, money, prestige. When threatened, or maybe just bored, they lash out. Both of them used sex for that.”
“And possibly a blunt object.”
“Yeah, very possibly. Peabody said Martella was very cooperative, got a little overwrought here and there. The secretary, Catiana, kept her calm, as did Peabody’s innate there-there approach. She agreed to the tap, with a little nudge on how it might help clear things up, might protect her sister. It meant she had to use the angle I’m looking at her spouse, but she’s looking at Copley, and feels she’s got the stronger case.”
“Essentially playing the couples against each other to see what breaks.”
“More or less. It’s in there. My gut tells me it’s in there. I had another round with Robbins, the blogger, and there’s nothing there. It’s not just because I get the rape angle, it’s because I think I get her. And there’s nothing there on this.”
“Then you’re definitely shortening your list.”
“It looks that way. Peabody’s going to take another pass at the girlfriend, but I don’t see that, either. If we don’t tie it up tomorrow . . .”
“Christmas Eve.”
“Yeah, that. If we don’t, it could take days more, if we’re lucky, with Peabody heading off to her family, and everything shutting down. Hell, half the city closes up between Christmas and New Year’s, and if my prime suspect flies off to the tropics, I can’t stop him. Not with what we have.”
“You’d like him to have his Christmas goose and pudding in a cage.”
“I think the best he’d get in a cage would be fake turkey, maybe a slice of pie, but yeah.”
“Does the idea that with you nipping at his heels he’s unlikely to have happy holidays help?”
