Obsession in Death (10 page)

She went from lawyer to shrink, opened Mira’s messages.

Eve, I’m sending you a list of five individuals, with their communication to you. While it will take several days to read and evaluate all the communication, I felt these five warranted a closer look. Although only one of the five resides in New York, all have written to you multiple times, and correspondence shows an unhealthy attachment. There are three males, two females, with age ranges between twenty-eight and sixty-nine.

Please let me know immediately if your investigation into them turns up any additional element of concern or connection.

I’m also sending you, by separate cover, my profile of Leanore Bastwick’s killer. Please contact me, at any time, to discuss. Meanwhile, I expect to provide you with another list of names sometime tomorrow.

Okay, Eve thought, took a breath, poured more coffee. And opened the first name with its correspondence.

When Roarke came back in, she was up and pacing.

“People are fucked up,” she told him.

“So you’ve said before.”

“How can they be even more fucked up than I thought? I’ve seen what they’ll do to each other over a harsh word, or because they wake up one day and think: Hey, disemboweling somebody could be fun. But that’s violence, and mostly I understand violence. But where does stupid and fucked up come from? Screw it,” she decided. “Nobody knows that.”

She strode over to the coffeepot, but Roarke beat her to it, held it out of reach.

“Enough.”

“I say when it’s enough. I want some goddamn coffee.”

“There’ll be no more coffee, at all, if you abuse it.” When her eyes fired hot into his, he just lifted his brows over his cool ones. “You want to punch something. You can take a shot at me, but it won’t be free.”

“Fuck it.” She spun away, paced again. “Just fuck it.”

To solve the problem, he took the pot back into the kitchen, came back with a bottle of water. “Hydrate,” he suggested, but she ignored him.

“Read that!” She pointed to the wall screen, kept pacing.

Dear Eve,

I understand few call you Eve, but it’s how I think of you, and always have. All my life I’ve felt something – someone – was missing. I searched, and I let people come in and go out of my life during that search. But no one really connected. You know what I mean, I know you do. I sense it’s been the same for you.

Then one day, I saw you, only on screen, but the rush of feeling that swept through me was amazing. You stood on the steps of Cop Central in New York, so fierce, so strong, so real. And I knew. There you are, I thought. At last.

Did you sense me? I think you did. For a moment, just one moment, our eyes met. You looked right into me, Eve. I know you felt it.

I felt giddy and whole at the same time.

We’ve been together before, time and time before. Loved as few love, time and time before. I’ve been to a sensitive, and had this confirmed. We’re destined to meet, to be together, life after life.

I know I must be patient. I’ve followed your life now, your career. I’m so proud of you! I understand you’re married – as was I – and I must wait for you to come to the end of that relationship. It will be soon, though every day without you is a thousand years.

Only know I’m waiting.

Yours, always yours, throughout time,

Morgan

“Well,” Roarke said, “well. At least he’s patient until you give me the boot.”

“She,” Eve corrected. “Morgan Larkin, a forty-year-old woman, a mother of an eight-year-old boy. Three divorces – all from guys. A systems analyst from Columbus, Ohio, who ought to know better.

“And you can wipe that smirk off your face, pal.”

“Sorry, but my wife getting love letters from a thrice-divorced woman with a son does have some amusing factors.”

“You won’t think it’s so funny if you read the following fourteen letters she’s sent.”

“Ah. All right then, she’s one of your suspects. But you say she lives in Ohio?”

“And has a full-time job. A kid. I don’t find any travel to New York except for a long weekend last February. And she doesn’t have the scratch to hire a pro. This first letter came in three years ago this coming March. I barely remember it. I think I rolled my eyes, tossed it in the file. You’ve got to keep this kind of thing – for reasons that are pretty fucking clear right now. I sort of remember another coming in a few months later, but by then Peabody was working as my admin, and I had her deal. No answer because the standard is not to encourage.”

She sat, opened the water after all. “She came to New York specifically to meet me – there’s a letter dealing with that. She understands I’m unable to come to her, to dump you right away, but she needs to see me, to hear my voice and blah blah, so we’d meet on Valentine’s Day at the top of the Empire State Building.”

“An Affair to Remember,”
Roarke murmured. “A classic vid. A love story.”

“Yeah, she put that in there. I got the next in March. She was a little pissed that time. How could I break her heart and all that. You could say we had our first spat. Then a couple months later, it’s like it never happened when she writes again, but she starts getting explicit about our physical love, more demanding about starting our lives together.”

Eve rolled the cool bottle over her forehead. “I don’t see how it could be this one. Whoever killed Bastwick spent time here, studied her routines, knows the city and how to get around. Knows something about cop work. But this is…”

“Disturbing.” He moved over, stood behind her, rubbed her shoulders.

“There’s a sixty-nine-year-old man in Boca Raton who’s been writing me once a month like clockwork since he read Nadine’s book. Starts off kind of normal. Admiration, thank you for your service, then it gets progressively more personal until he’s asking me to run away with him, how we’ll sail around the world and he’ll treat me like a queen. Christ, I’m half his age, and
he
should know better. He’s got the scratch.” She sighed. “Not Roarke scratch, but he’s not hurting. So we’ll give him a closer look, but he’s never had any criminal. A couple stints in facilities for emotional issues.

“Another guy in England,” she continued, wound up. “Apparently I come to him in dreams, and we bang like jackrabbits. Over and above the sex, we have this connection – emotional, psychic, depends on the day. He’s the only one I can trust. Dark forces surround me. The law, stupid as it is, hampers my destiny, so when we’re not dream-banging, he’s helping me on my cases. He tried to enlist in the cops over there, but failed the psych.”

“I’m shocked.”

“Yeah.” She pressed her fingers to her eyes. “One more guy, out in California. Seems sane initially if over-the-top. Big fan of book, vid, me. He, too, fights crime in his way – he claims. And would like to work with me. Then sleep with me. He’s also fine if you participate in that.”

The back of her neck was tight, knotted like twisted wires. Roarke used his thumbs to try to loosen them, kept his voice easy. “The work or the sex?”

“Both. He’s very open-minded. With my assistance, he’d like to come to New York, work as my consultant, one who will find ways around the system to bring the bad guys to justice. He doesn’t believe I get the admiration or respect I’m due, as – according to his last letter – I should be commanding the NYPSD, and he’s outraged on my behalf.”

“Travel?”

“He’s been to New York twice, but not in the last six months. I’ll take a closer look at all of them, but…”

“Another?”

“The last Mira sent tonight. Twenty-eight-year-old female, lives in New York, Lower West Side, works as a paralegal for a firm – her specialty is family law. She’s written eight times in the last year, with the gap between the correspondence narrowing as it goes. She knows we’d be best friends if we ever got together. She tries to advocate for victims and the innocent, too. We’re so much alike. Her boyfriend dumped her last summer, and there’s a long letter – more like a short story – where she cried on my shoulder, knew I was the only one who would understand. Nothing sexual in this one, it’s more like she’s decided we’re like sisters, best friends, and she wants to help me the way she thinks I’ve helped her. I helped her stand up for herself, take better care of herself, to be strong and find her courage.

“God.”

“Criminal?”

“No, nothing. A light tap for illegals possession a few years back. I’ve got a couple of DD calls. Neighbors complaining about shouting, crashing around. Fights with boyfriend, but no charges. I can’t find a connection to Bastwick. Can’t find a trigger, but… She comes off smart, has an unhealthy and completely fictional relationship with me, sees our work as similar, and is often frustrated by the rules of law not fully serving justice. She sounds weird but harmless, and yet —”

He leaned down, kissed the top of her head. “You’re upset because whether or not any of these apply to your investigation, you now understand you’re a central point in the lives of people you don’t know – and don’t really want to know. You dislike the center stage at the best of times. For you, it’s the victim, the perpetrator, the survivors, the job. Your life, our life.”

“Is that wrong?”

“It’s absolutely not wrong. But it’s a fact you’ll need to deal with to do your job this time.”

“It’s not just the book, the book and the vid. I wanted to blame it all on that – this weird attention – but some of it started before that. It’s fucking creepy.”

He made a sound of agreement, kissed the top of her head again. “You’ll deal with it because you are who you are, you do what you do. What you haven’t said, and we both know, is some of it springs from me – from the media and attention you get being mine.”

“I am what I am, do what I do, and a big part of that is being yours.”

“All right.” He came around, sat on the edge of her desk so they were face-to-face. “My people will also start looking at correspondence. I get quite a bit myself, so we’ll coordinate there, see if there’s any cross. Meanwhile, the finances I’ve looked at so far don’t lead to hiring a hit man. Stern does indeed have a couple of tucked-away accounts, as one might expect. But I haven’t found any withdrawals or transfers of funds that apply here.”

“Are they illegal enough I could use them as leverage?”

“Weak.” With a shake of his head, Roarke took a pull of her water. “Leverage for what?”

“Letting me see all of Bastwick’s client correspondence. He’s citing privilege. Reo’s on it,” she added, “and hell, if there was anything, Bastwick would’ve pulled it for the threat file. But it pisses me off getting blocked out.”

“That’s for tomorrow, as is all the rest.”

She would’ve argued, but the simple fact was she’d done all she could until morning.

Roarke waited until she’d shut down, took her hand. As he walked out of the room with her, he glanced at her board.

Seeing her face there brought him a quick and violent anger, and a cold, clammy fear.

6

She knew it for a dream, had been resigned to dreaming even before Roarke wrapped her close, before she’d shut her eyes.

She’d floated through them, dream to dream, a voice, an image, a memory.

In the car with Roarke, stopped in the driveway, falling on each other, tearing clothes, desperate, insane to feel, needing him inside her, pounding, pounding, as if her life depended on it.

And neither of them aware Barrow had planted that subliminal command, that life-or-death desperation to mate.

In the closet, at the party, and she injured and bruised. Roarke pushing her against the wall, tearing into her with no care, driven to the wild and feral by that same planted seed.

“Ssh, just a dream.”

Somewhere outside that dream she heard him, felt him soothing her, stroking all that hurt and insult away again.

That’s what Barrow had done, to both of them. That’s what Bastwick had defended.

And worse. Worse.

Mathias, hanged by his own hand, Fitzhugh bathed in his own blood. Devane, throwing her arms out, embracing death as she threw herself off the ledge of the Tattler Building.

He hadn’t used what had done that to them – someone else had – but he’d created it. For money, for profit, for power.

And Roarke, Roarke had very nearly been next. The trap had been laid, the seed waiting to be planted for him to take his own life.

And Bastwick had defended.

“I do my job, you do yours, correct, Lieutenant?”

In the packed courtroom, faces strange and familiar looked on as Bastwick rose from the defense table. She wore one of her sharp, lawyerly suits, bold red, perfect cut, with high, high heels in a steely metallic gray that would catch the eye. A subtle method of drawing attention to her legs. Her hair swept back from her coolly beautiful face, a sleek blond roll just above the nape of her neck.

Eve sat in the witness chair. A wide beam of sunlight poured through the window, flooding her. Behind her, oddly, a huge statue stood. Blind Justice with a smirk on her face.

“I’m doing mine,” Eve responded.

“Are you? Are you, Lieutenant, or are you just looking for yet another way to seek revenge on my client, Jess Barrow?”

Bastwick swept her arm, and part of that flooding sunlight fell over Barrow. He sat at a control center, turning knobs, adjusting levers. He grinned, winked at Eve. “Hey, sugar.”

“You’re not in this,” she said to him. “Not this time.” She turned her attention back to Bastwick. “I’m looking for your killer.”

“Oh really? Then why waste time with Jess? He’s in prison because you coerced a confession out of him, after you physically assaulted him. Your husband assaulted him.”