Purity in Death

Eve saw him massaging his right thigh as he set up for the search. "No, not now. Morning's soon enough. Pack it in for the night. Why don't you and Peabody go use the pool or something? Or just get out for a while."

"Yeah? Taking pity on the recovering crip?"

"Grab it while you can, pal. It won't last."

He gri

"If you're going to program in some perverted sexual fantasy, I don't want to hear about it."

"Mum's the word."

She went back to her own office and spent the next hour dissecting Nick Greene's life.

College man, a business major who'd started picking up trouble in his teens. Minor possession fines, criminal trespass, bootlegging vids. Always the entrepreneur, she thought.

It had paid off for a while. Classy Park Avenue digs, closet full of snazzy designer duds.

She frowned as she continued through his financials. He'd garaged two high-end vehicles, and had kept a third, and a watercraft, stored at his weekend place in the Hamptons. He had art and jewelry insured in excess of three million.

"Doesn't add up."

She went to the 'link and beeped Roarke. "I need you to look at something in my office."

He came in, looking mildly irritated. "If you want the job done, Lieutenant, you have to let me do it."

"I need your expert opinion on something else. Look at these assets, reported income, debits. Give me your take."

She had the numbers on-screen, and paced the office while Roarke studied them.

"Obviously someone didn't report all their income. That's shocking."

"Ditch the sarcasm. How much in excess of this could you make from a mid-level illegals business, ru

"I've decided to be flattered rather than insulted that you assumed I'd know of such matters. Depends, of course, on the overhead. You'd have to buy or cook the illegals before you could sell them, outfit and maintain the prostitutes, generate the vids. Then there's the outlay for bribes, security, employees. If you were good at it, had a steady clientele, you'd pull in two or three million in profit."

"Still doesn't add up. He kept it small, exclusive. You don't get busted as hard or as often if you keep it low profile. So say you add the three million to what he reported last year. That keeps him under five million. You could live real comfortable on that."

"Some could. Are we done now?"

"No. You've got five million to play with. Look at his clothing expenditures last year."

Stifling impatience, Roarke sca

"But he was. Closet full of designer labels. Had to have a hundred pairs of shoes. Since I live with someone with the same baffling addiction, I can recognize the pricey stuff. There was an easy million in the closet. Probably more."

"He prefers paying cash then," Roarke said, but he was becoming interested despite himself.

"Okay, subtract a million from the five. He has art and baubles insured for over three."

"One rarely buys all their baubles in a single year."

"Yeah, but there're appraisals for over three-quarters of a million last year. No debit entries. Cash again. Subtract another seventy-five. Vid equipment, insured for one point five mil. Two new cams on the list last year to the tune of half a mil. Two garaged vehicles in the city. A

"Ah… two hundred K, if he got it loaded."

"Three-bedroom condo on Park. A

He was doing the math in his head. "Close enough."

"Then you add a five-bedroom beach house in the Hamptons, the slip fee for his watercraft. What's that?"

"Run him near a million."

"Okay. You add in he goes out dining and debauchering almost nightly. Basic living expenses over that. What do you get?"

"Either I'm well off on the estimate of his business profit, or he had another source of income."

"Another source." She hitched a hip onto her desk. "Follow me here. You got an underground business that caters to fairly exclusive clientele. Some of whom might blush if their little hobby came out in the light. You've got expensive taste, and your business does pretty good, but hell, you want better. What do you do?"

"Blackmail."

"And we have a wi

"All right, so he ran a shakedown on the side. A profitable one by all accounts. What does that have to do with the matter at hand?"

"The matter at hand is homicide. It's a Purity hit, and it's co

"Want company?"

"Two could toss it faster than one."

He thought she was wasting her time and his. But he supposed the cop in her needed to snip off any loose ends.

And he'd had no intention of letting her go back alone to a place that had taunted her nightmares.

He waited until she bypassed the police seal, uncoded the locks.

The air still carried death. It was the first thing that struck him when he stepped in beside her. The raw, pitiably human stench of it lingered under the odor of chemicals used by the crime scene team and sweepers.

Red stains, splatters, streams were a virulent horror over the white. Walls, carpet, furniture. He could see where the girl had fallen. Could see where she had crawled. Where she had died.

"Christ, how do you face it? How do you look at this and not break?"

"Because it's there whether you look or not. And if you break, you're done."

He touched her arm. He hadn't realized he'd spoken aloud. "Did you need to see this again? To face this again to prove you could?"

"Maybe. But if that was all, I'd've come on my own. Second bedroom and the office are over there. We went through the place thoroughly on the first sweep. But we weren't looking for a hidey-hole. Now we do."

She put Roarke in the second bedroom and started on the office herself. They'd taken the data andcommunication center away, had gone over the work area, through the closet where Greene had kept his extra supplies.

She did it all again, point by point. There was a safe. One of the crime scene techs had run his sca

Not enough cash, she thought now. Not nearly enough. If three clients had come by in the last few days-at least two of them when Greene's symptoms would have been increasing-where was the payoff?

Would he have sent Wade out with cash to tuck it into a safebox? She didn't think so. You might bang a teenager, sell her off to clients, but you didn't put cash in her hand and wave bye-bye.

She took two paintings and a sculpture off the wall, searched behind them for panels.

"Bedroom's clean," Roarke told her.

"He's got another safe. He's got a hole. This is the logical place. The office is the logical place."

"Maybe it's too logical. First place you looked, isn't it?"

She stopped scooting along the baseboard and sat back on her heels. "Okay, if this was your place, where's your stash?"

"If I liked combining business and pleasure, as it appeared he did, the master bedroom."

"Okay, let's try it."

She led the way, then stood in the doorway with him, sca