Calculated in Death (In Death 36)

“Ointment.”

“Same thing. He screwed up with me, so he needs to fix that so he feels good about himself. Plus the endlessly rolling vid of the flying baby damaged his internal rep.”

“He’d hope to lure you into a trap or ambush.” Roarke wasn’t the department’s top shrink, but he knew his wife. “And now you’re planning one for him with yourself as bait.”

“I wouldn’t call myself bait in this case. More . . . an incentive. If we ID him before, we’ll go scoop him up. If not, I’ve got an idea, and following Mira’s profile, I can’t see him resisting it.”

He took a disc from his pocket. “I think you’ll find everything on here to arrest and charge Sterling Alexander with multiple cases of fraud, embezzlement, and misappropriation of funds, with a side of tax evasion.”

“You nailed it down?”

“Easily enough, once the dominoes started to fall. It’s also easy enough to connect him to several other companies, some merely shells, and to individuals in those companies who would also be guilty of fraud.”

“Does anything in there tie him to three murders, and attempted murder of a police officer?”

“It’s easy, again, to draw the lines from his company, the other companies, to the recently dead accountant and the equally if more messily dead money manager. Were they alive, they’d have a lot of questions to answer.”

“So we could say Alexander had them killed so they couldn’t answer any questions. But without the trigger, we can’t prove it. We get him on fraud, and push him for conspiracy to murder, he can claim he didn’t have anything to do with it, had no idea.”

She held out her hand for the disc. “I’ll take it to the commander, and the prosecutor. And ask them to give me a couple days to cage him in on the murders. It’s good work, Roarke. Thanks.”

“How do you know? You haven’t looked at it.”

“Because it’s your work.”

He flipped a finger down her hair. “You’re trying to soften me up so I won’t make an issue of your . . . incentive to a murderer.”

“That doesn’t make it less true.”

He sat in her miserably uncomfortable visitor’s chair. “I suppose you’d best eat your soup and tell me what you have in mind.”

Eve took off the lid, sniffed. “What kind of soup is it?”

“It was billed as minestrone, but it’s your Vending.”

“It won’t be magic.” But she sampled it. “It’s not horrible. So, Nadine should be here before too long to do a quick interview with me about—woo-hoo—fun and excitement, glamour and glitter at the premiere tomorrow night. A premiere of the vid that’s based on the case I cracked like a rotten walnut. Though modesty will prevent me from playing my own fiddle—”

“Tooting your own horn.”

“What’s the difference? They both make noise.”

“I stand, if not corrected, forced to agree.” In a futile attempt to find comfort in the chair, Roarke stretched out his legs. “You want to manipulate a confrontation with a violent killer at a public event?”

“I’m going to manipulate a killer into the open at an event he won’t be able to resist because not only am I attending, I’m getting media play from it. It’s splashy, and it comes right on the heels of his own media humiliation in the form of flying baby.”

“And you see no downside to rubbing his face in it.”

“I see that as a side benefit. Listen,” she continued, knowing his reservations, “how’s he going to lure me into an ambush? Maybe he tries to hit me when I’ve driving home, or into Central, or when Peabody and I are in the field. We can take precautions on all that, but for how long? Or he goes at Peabody first when she’s walking to the subway, or in the market for a bag of chips.”

“All right, it’s too open, too unpredictable.”

“Exactly, and this narrows it down to a point. Tomorrow night, when I’m raking in the attention, he shows me—shows everyone, and more himself if Mira’s on it—he can do the job.”

He couldn’t argue with her logic, or her strategy to ambush the ambusher. “And there’ll be cops at the event, covering the event.”

“Lousy with cops,” she assured him. “And we should have a better description of him by then. It may be we’ll be able to get him prior, but if not, we’ll throw the net over him tomorrow.”

And he’d be beside her, start to finish, Roarke thought.