“Clutch piece.”
“There you are. We’ll have to watch some of them the next time we’re free. Now, Lieutenant, as Baxter would say, we’re gone.”
“Okay, okay.” She gathered up files. “You drive. I’ll mull.”
“You’re looking at his three friends, the partners,” Roarke said as they worked their way down to garage level.
“Easiest access to his personal space, most to gain, and most intimately acquainted with the vic’s habits, routines, the business itself, and the game at the center of it.”
“You’re leaning toward one.” With a regret and grim acceptance he thought they shared, they wormed their way onto a jammed elevator. “One more than the others,” he continued, jockeying for room in a space that smelled of boiled onions and stale sweat. ?
??Which?”
“I’m still structuring the theory. Besides that’s not how the game’s played.” She shoved her way off again. “Which would you pick?”
“It’s difficult for me to think of any of them as capable of this. I don’t know them especially well, but what I do know just rejects the idea.”
“Why, particularly?”
“I suppose, in part, because of the way they came up together. Longtime mates.”
“And you had yours,” Eve commented. “In Dublin.”
“I did, and while none of us would’ve been above a bit of a cheat, as that’s a kind of game as well, we’d never have hurt each other, or caused hurt.”
“Yeah, it’s one of the things I’ve been thinking about today. Friendships, long-term, short-term, what clicks and why. Friendships can enhance, right, complete in a way. But they can also erode and scrape, and simmer under the surface. Add money or sex or ego to the mix, and it can boil right over.”
“I’m hardly one to look at things through rose-colored glasses, or for that matter to doubt your instincts.” Their footsteps echoed as they crossed the garage. “Still, I’ve watched the four of them together, listened to them, and listened to Bart speak of them.”
“You know, I bet when the pizza lady first hooked up with the husband she wanted dead, she had really nice things to say about him, too.”
He had to shake his head, half in amusement, half in resignation. “Back to that, are we?”
“I’m saying relationships change, people change, or sometimes an event, an action, or a series of them just pisses somebody off.” She slid into the passenger’s seat when they reached her vehicle, waited until he’d taken the wheel. “Play the game. Let’s call it Deduction. If you had to choose which murdered or arranged to have murdered the friend and partner, which? And why?”
“All right.” If nothing else, he thought, it might help him reach some level of objectivity. “First, if one of them did the murder, Cill doesn’t have the muscle for it.”
“Well, you might be wrong there. She, like the others, practices martial arts, combat fighting, street defense, weaponry, and so on regularly. In fact, she has a black belt in karate, and she’s working on one in tae kwon do.”
“Ah, well. It doesn’t pay to underestimate small packages.”
“She’d be agile, quick, stronger than she looks. And the weapon itself may have given her more heft. Being a female with a small build doesn’t rule her out.”
“The blow came from above, but I suppose it’s possible she stood on something, or used a leap or jump to give her height and momentum.”
“Now you’re thinking.”
He shot her a mild look. “I can’t see it, but will agree for now she can’t be ruled out. Var. The same stipulations apply on the physicality. He’d be as capable of it physically as the others—I assume.”
“Correct.”
“Otherwise, from my outside observer’s view, Var and Bart were like two parts of the same whole.”
“Some people get tired of being a part, and want the whole.”
“Such a cop,” he murmured. “They both enjoyed digging down into the business side of things, digging into the nuts and bolts of sales, distribution, marketing as much as the creative side. They enjoyed having each other for the checks and balances, fine-tuning each other’s concepts when it came to promotion, expansion, that sort of thing. Bart told me once when they met Var, it was like the last piece clicked on. I know what that’s like.”
Eve stretched out her legs, comfortable with the way he wound through irritable traffic. “And if they disagreed?”