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“This butt-ugly desk has two locking drawers. Neither locked now.”
“Is that so?”
“It looks to me like somebody riffled through them pretty good.”
She crossed to him over red carpet so thick she wondered it didn’t suck the boots off her feet. Both bottom drawers were fitted with keypad locks. Feeney had them both open.
“Paper files?”
“Looks like house and personal stuff in one, work stuff in the other. Finances, insurance, repairs, like that. Lot of people don’t trust digital, keep paper backups. You’re one of them.”
“Yeah.” She fingered through. “Either he’s disorganized and messy, or someone went through these, at least superficially. Looking for what?”
“Can’t say, but the desk comp was riffled with, too. Full scan and search executed at nineteen-twelve.”
“He changed clothes about an hour before that—closet comp—getting ready for his date. Date comes in, with a friend because there’s two of them, and likely three. Stuns him, maybe roughs him up a little. We didn’t see anything like this at Wymann’s, but I’m going back, looking again. What did they want here?”
She circled the office with its hard colors, elaborate space.
“Nothing to find in the Spring Street house, and they can’t get into the Mira penthouse.”
“Tortured him.”
She turned back, nodded. “Yeah, and maybe he gave them something on Betz. Betz has this or that. Maybe, like you said, that roster, those rules, something on this brotherhood of theirs. But what’s the difference if they’re going to kill them anyway? It’s not like they’re looking for evidence. They’ve already tried and convicted.”
She looked behind art of strange, long-bodied dogs and rearing horses.
Finding nothing, anywhere, she looked back at Feeney as he busied himself checking ’link transmissions.
“You cheated on your wife.”
He kept working. “Not if I wanna live past Tuesday.”
“Think like a cheat. You end up marrying one of the women you cheated with. You’re still cheating—it’s what you do. Do you keep anything to do with your sidepieces, and more, anything to do with something that would turn a woman murderous, where the current wife could find it?”
“Me? I’d have a separate account she didn’t know about, maybe a bank box, too. And, if I’m rich like this asshole, I’ve got a place she doesn’t know about. If I had a place when I was cheating with her, it’s gone, sold, done when I’m cheating on her. Anything I did cheating with her, I switch up now.”
“A place. A place,” she murmured. “Like Edward Mira had the hotel. His wife knew he cheated, so he didn’t have to worry about it. Wymann wasn’t married—I’m still waiting for Roarke to tell me if
he used the hotel. We’ll do the same with Betz. But, a place. A place just for sex. You can only have it here when your wife’s out of town, and you really like cheating.
“He’d need a key, a swipe, codes, something. And he wouldn’t keep it in a desk drawer, even a locked one, where his wife might get to it.”
She opened a door, looked into a red and silver powder room, turned and studied the bar in the corner of the office.
“I bet I know where she doesn’t go.”
Eve walked out, jogged downstairs, back into the master.
She found Peabody and McNab beside the huge red (naturally) bed with its avalanche of pillows. They had a look in their eyes, but fortunately for them nobody’s hands were on anybody’s ass.
“I don’t think anybody broke in a second-story window.”
“Nobody broke in anywhere,” McNab told her. “Two other doors on the main, and neither of them have been opened for twenty-six hours. The windows haven’t been opened for weeks. I figured I’d take the ’links and comps in here.”
“Is that what you figured?”
He grinned. “Abso-true. And hang with She-Body while I’m at it.”
