Creation In Death

He looked up then, eyes frigid. “Until he’s finished with Gia Rossi. Until he’s done cutting and carving on her.”

“That’s right.” No way to soften it, Eve thought. No point in trying. “And until we find Rossi’s body, she’s alive. Until we find her body, she’s got a chance. Now, with this, she has a better one. We canvass, we check parking lots, we check public transpo. We talk to her coworkers, her other friends. We have his age, his body type. We didn’t have any of that twenty-four hours ago.”

She stepped to him, touched his arm. “Make a copy of that program, will you? We’ll work this from home. Maybe something will shake loose on the search Summerset’s been ru

“All right. But neither of us is working on this until we’ve stepped back for a couple hours. I mean it, Eve,” he said before she could protest. “You ordered your team to take some downtime for good reason.”

“I could use a shower,” she said after a moment. “An hour. Compromise.” She held up a hand, held him off. “You’ve got to admit it beats fighting about it for half that downtime.”

“Agreed.” He copied the data, handed her the disc.

Since she didn’t consider the drive home part of the break, she let Roarke take the wheel and shuffled through her notes, the timelines, the names, the statements.

He’d taken the third target sooner than projected, Eve mused. Two reasons she could think of for that. Either the earlier snatch suited his personal schedule or the target’s. Or Gia Rossi wasn’t holding up well.

She could already be dead-a possibility Eve saw no reason to share with Roarke.

Hours, she thought. If the contact had been made hours sooner, they would have found Ariel Greenfeld before he had her. The right question, the right time. Not only would the woman have been safe, but they’d have had solid data on the suspect.

Off at four, she noted. Pla

“How long would you budget for a meeting?” Eve asked. “For going over a proposal for wedding cakes and desserts, that sort of thing?”

“From her end?” Roarke considered. “She put together a lot of images, a number of variations of style and type, flavors. A great deal of trouble. I’d guess she’d prepared for a couple of hours. If she assumed-correctly-that many people take every detail of a wedding very seriously, she would have been prepared to give the potential client all the time he needed or wanted.”

“Okay, let’s say two, so that makes it eighteen hundred not including travel time. She tells the guy across the hall she’s going to pick up a few things on the way home to make-actually cook-a meal. That’s got to take some time. The shopping part, the cooking part. Probably, what, an hour?”

“Your guess.” Roarke shrugged. “Summerset would know better.”

“Yeah, well, until we consult His Boniness, I’m figuring an hour. Which puts it at nineteen hundred, again without travel. Late night Saturday, long day Sunday, early to work on Monday. I don’t figure she was prepping a late meal.”

“And what does that tell you?”

“It tells me that, most likely, as far as she knew, she wasn’t going that far for this meeting. Not across the river into Jersey, probably not across the bridge into Brooklyn or Queens. Too much bridge-and-tu

Eve shifted. “She’s tossing a meal together for a friend, not pla

She sat back. “Focus there to start. Fan out, sure, but we start there, focus there.”

She worked the problem the rest of the way home, adding in factors, playing with angles. Urban Wars, body ID method, Lower West or East Side clinics.

He almost certainly had some sort of transportation, but it would also serve if he could stalk any or all of his victims on foot.

People tended to shop and frequent restaurants in their comfort-zone. The soap and shampoo-downtown store was very likely the source unless he web-shopped or brought it into New York with him. Starlight was in Chelsea, the bakery downtown, the first dumping spot in this round on the Lower East. Gia Rossi worked midtown.

Maybe he wasn’t traveling far from home this time around.

Maybe.

She plugged her knowns and unknowns into her PPC, intending to transfer the information to her desk unit and run probabilities.

“I want whatever Summerset’s worked up on disc and on my unit,” she began as they drove through the gates. “We can get his take on the timing as far as shopping/cooking, but I want to check out what markets and stores Greenfeld most usually frequented. And other specialty places below Fiftieth. The way her neighbor talked, she’d have gotten a charge out of wandering some new food place. We’ll interview the others she went out with Saturday night. Maybe she let something slip about her Sunday plans.”

They got out on opposite sides of the car, but Roarke put a hand on her arm when they reached the base of the steps of home. “You never thought there was a chance for Rossi.”

“I never said that, and there’s always a chance.”

“Slim to none. It didn’t stop you pushing-hard and in every way you could push, but you knew her chances were all but nil, and on some level accepted it.”

“Listen-”

“No, don’t misunderstand me. That’s not a criticism. It’s a small, personal revelation that came to me on the way home. Watching you work, listening to you even when you weren’t speaking. Your mind says volumes. You don’t feel the same way about Ariel Greenfeld.”

He slid his hand down her arm until he found hers, linked fingers. “You believe there’s a real chance now. Not only in finding him, stopping him. That you have to believe every minute or you’d never be able to do what you do. But you believe you’ll find him, stop him before it’s too late for this woman, and because of it Gia Rossi’s chances have gone up from slim to none to slim. It has to energize you, and at the same time, it must weigh all the heavier. They have a chance. You’re their chance.”

“We,” Eve corrected. “Everyone working the case is their chance. And we’d better not let her down.”

She expected Summerset to materialize in the foyer and intended to have Roarke take point with him. But the minute they stepped in, she heard laughter in the parlor, and the bubbling sound of it was unmistakable.

“Mavis is here.”

“There’s your hour of downtime.” Roarke slipped Eve’s coat from her shoulders. “Difficult to find a more entertaining or distracting way to rest the brain cells than a portion of Mavis Freestone.”

It was tough to argue the point. But when Eve stepped to the parlor doorway, she saw Mavis had brought Trina along. If that wasn’t scary enough, they’d hauled the baby out for the evening.

Most terrifying, at the moment, the infant Belle was being held by Summerset, and having her chin chucked by his skeletal fingers.

“I’m traumatized,” Eve stated. “He’s not supposed to smile like that. It’s against the laws of man and nature.”

“Don’t be such a hard-ass.” Roarke gave her a little poke in the ribs. “Ladies,” he said in normal tones, and had the group looking over.

“Hey!” Mavis’s already glowing face brightened. “You’re back! We were about to head out, but Bella wanted another Summerset smoochie.”

Which, to Eve’s mind, confirmed the i

Mavis bounced over, sending the short, flirty skirt she wore swirling over polka-dot tights. The skirt was candy pink, the tights pink on brilliant blue. She’d gone for the blue in her hair, too, Eve noted, in a few wild streaks against silvery blond.