Kindred In Death

No, she hadn’t been smart. She’d been dazzled. Why would anyone expect Deena to be otherwise?

“I know what you felt, or thought you felt,” Eve murmured. “I know how he got to you, broke down your resistance, your defenses, your better judgment. Me, I got lucky. You didn’t. But I know how he got under your guard.”

So now, instead of thinking like the girl, she needed to think like the pursuer.

She turned toward the AutoChef-stopped.

Coffee, she remembered. Roarke’s first gift to her had been a bag of coffee. The real deal. Irresistible to her, and worth more to her mind than a fistful of diamonds.

Charming and thoughtful-and exactly right.

Had there been a token given? she wondered. Something small and exactly right?

She stepped back to her desk, studied Deena’s photo. Music and theater, she recalled. Big interests. And reading. All those music discs, she thought. Maybe he put together a music mix, designed just for her. Or poems-didn’t women get off on poetry, especially if it was from a man?

Wanted to join the Peace Corps or Education For All. But damned if she could think of a token that applied there.

Her computer signaled the first search was complete. Letting the other angle simmer, Eve sat down to read case files on rape-murder.

Nothing popped, though she read, analyzed, ran probabilities for more than an hour. The search through IRCCA gave her the same results. She had a handful of long shots to track down, but her gut told her it was just for form. Had to be done.

She’d eliminated half the long shots when Peabody stepped in.

“I got a partial list from Columbia-the currents. It’s going to be tomorrow before I can get the formers. At this time there are sixty-three male students from the great state of Georgia, and four instructors, one security guard, and two other employees. The guard’s on the high side at thirty, a groundskeeper at twenty-four, and a maintenance tech, twenty-six.”

“We’ll do background runs on them, all of them.”

“It just doesn’t feel like he’d have given her that much truth.”

“I think he gave her enough truth, so if she played cop’s daughter, checked him out, it would fly. He’s too careful to leave himself open.”

Peabody gestured toward the AutoChef, got a nod. “You think he’s a student there?” she asked as she walked over to program coffee.

“I think he may have set it up so if she checked, he’d pop up as a student. He may have already taken care of that, wiped the record. Here’s what you could do, if you were being careful. You find a student, clone his ID, take his name, or change it-dealer’s choice. You can bet your ass he had what would look like student ID. You get discounts, right, when you go to vids, theater, concerts. He took her out, he’d have to show it-and it would have to pass the scan.”

“I didn’t think of that. Which is why you get the slightly less crappy bucks than I do.” She passed Eve fresh coffee. “So maybe, one of these sixty-three is his dupe. Or… it could be he had a partner.”

“He works alone. A partner means you have to trust. Who could he trust this much? No loose ends if you work alone. I’m going to bet one of those students had their ID stolen or lost it within the last six months. He clones it, replaces the photo with one of himself, tweaks the basic data if necessary. If Deena gets a buzz, and checks, she’s going to find he’s registered as a student. For now, we run them. Dot every i. Tomorrow, we check to see if any of them replaced their ID. Take the top thirty,” she ordered. “I’ll take the rest. Work here or at home, and report to my home office in the morning, oh-seven-hundred.”

“Where are you going?”

“I want to go back to the scene, walk through it, then I’ll pick up the runs at home. Copy the data from Columbia to my home unit.”

“Okay. If I hit anything, I’ll let you know.”

Eve downed more coffee, and tagged Roarke. “Any progress?”

“This won’t be quick or easy.”

“I’m done here. I’m going to go back to the scene, do a walk-through, then take the rest home.”

“I’ll meet you in the garage.”

“Not quick or easy, remember?”

“With the captain’s blessing, I’m having some of the units sent to my lab at home. I’ve got better equipment. Five minutes.”

He clicked off.

She loaded up what she needed, sent copies of all reports, notes, files to her home unit. On the way to the garage she took a tag from one of the officers on the knock-on-doors. All residents on the victim’s block had been located and interviewed. And not one of them had seen anyone enter or exit the MacMasters home, save Deena herself, over the weekend.

Maybe Baxter and his faithful aide, Trueheart, would have better luck, she thought. Or she and Peabody would get a hit from the morning circuit of the park. But when a man left no trace of himself at a rape murder, when he took hours to complete the task and left nothing behind, the likelihood of him being careless enough to be seen with his victim was low.

Still, someone somewhere had seen them. Remembering was a different matter.

They’d walked, talked, eaten, played in the city, and over a number of weeks. She only had to find one venue, one person, one crack in the whole to pry open.

She walked to her car, leaned back against the trunk as she took out her memo book to key in more notes.

Columbia. Student ID.

Georgia. Southern accent.

Truth or lie? Why truth, why lie?

Missing pocket ’link, PPC-possible e-diary?-handbag. Other contents of handbag important? Protection and trophy?

She looked up when Roarke crossed the garage. “When you worked a mark, did you ever fake an accent?”

“A cop shop’s an odd place to discuss such matters from my standpoint. Since you’re working, I’ll drive.”

He waited until they were in the vehicle before he answered the question. “Yes, now and then, tailoring such to suit the mark. But more often the Irish suited well enough. I might layer it on-switching to a thicker West County brogue, or posh it up with public school tones.”

“But, especially if it was a long con, or some job that would take several weeks and a lot of communication with the mark, it would be easier and safer to stick close to natural. Posh it up or thicken it up, but stay with the basics.”

“That’s true enough,” he agreed as he headed uptown. “One slip and the whole thing can fall apart.”

“Guy tells her he’s from Georgia. She likes the accent, tells her friend that part. He’s smart, so the smart thing is to use what you have, what you’re comfortable with. Maybe he lived in the south, at least for a while. He tells her he goes to Columbia, so maybe he did, or he knows enough about it to be able to speak intelligently when she says, hey, I have a friend who goes there. No point in getting tripped up on those kinds of details. It’s hard to believe he’s nineteen, and has this kind of patience and control, this kind of focus.”

She glanced at Roarke. “Though some do.”

He switched lanes to slide into a narrow gap in traffic. “At nineteen I had a lifetime behind me, of being a street rat, of ru

“Murder’s different from thievery.”

“It is indeed entirely different. And more yet when it’s the deliberate murder of an i

“It doesn’t feel like a thrill killing. It’s too exacting for that. And too cold.”

He said nothing for a few moments as he nipped around a Rapid Cab and through a light seconds before it flashed red. “When I went for the men who’d tortured and killed Marlena, it was cold. Cold-blooded, cold-minded. Some might have looked at the results and thought otherwise, but there was no thrill involved in it. None of it.”