Vendetta in Death (In Death 49)

Interested, Mira sat back, lifted her eyebrows. “Do you have a reason to believe that?”

“Pettigrew’s ex-wife rings some bells for me.”

“What sort?”

“Her reaction to his murder? Way over the top. Divorced two years, right? And this is a guy who cheated on her, then dumped her for the younger skirt, and basically swindled her out of the company she’d built. For this guy she’s a weeping wreck? I don’t buy it.”

“Some love regardless of the insults and injuries.”

“Yeah, maybe so. But no.” The more she rolled it around, the more certain she felt. “Just no on this one. I can’t tell you exactly why, but just no. Add a shaky alibi, but one that’s corroborated, sort of. She has considerable e-skills and Pettigrew’s accounts were skillfully hacked. Big house, private house, plenty of room to do dirty deeds.”

“You believe she’s your killer.”

“At this point, yeah. I have to look at all the angles, but, if she’s not the killer, she’s not altogether right. Just off somehow.”

“Keep me apprised there.”

“I will. Otherwise, the killer has the connection, one way or the other, with this support group. No way she just happened to target two men with women they’d … misused in that group.”

“So it may be more than one involved.”

“We’ve seen it before, but … I don’t think the woman heading the group would have missed this sort of violent pact forming. And it feels like a single killer. It just feels as if it’s one who enjoys putting on the mask. Being this lure for this target, this lure for the next. When she hits again, she’ll present herself as his particular fantasy.”

“Lady Justice,” Mira added. “Yet another persona. Singular as well. Add the poems. Poetry tends to be highly personal to the poet. Yet the sheer physicality, the logistics, make it difficult to say, with confidence, the killer acts alone.”

“Not alone. Someone’s driving. It may be a partner, a hireling. It’s certainly someone she trusts not to betray her, so I lean toward another female first. Men are the betrayers.”

“Yes. She’s been betrayed or abused by a male. It may be a father or father figure if that betrayal was sexual.” Mira paused a moment, sipped tea as she studied Eve. “Is that aspect giving you any difficulty?”

“I can handle it.”

“That wasn’t the question.”

And until Mira had the answer to the question, Eve knew, she’d persist. So, get it out and done.

“I know what it’s like to be raped, to be helpless, to have the rapist be my father. I know what it’s like to kill, and kill violently. If it brings that back, I can use it. I will use it. Finding who killed these men, whatever they did in life, is my job. I have to do the job, or even after all this time, Richard Troy wins.”

“If you have any trouble, I hope you’ll come to me.”

“I’m here now. But I’m okay.”

And wanted to close that particular door.

“McEnroy was a predator,” Eve continued, “and it would have satisfied me to take him down, to see him live out the rest of his life in a cage. Pettigrew? Weak, greedy, a liar, but there’s no evidence he physically harmed anyone. Just cheated and cheated on his spouse, then continued to cheat on the woman he cheated with. Maybe a crappy human being, but not one who deserved what happened to him. I can stand for both of them.”

“All right. I’ll tell you you’re looking for a mature, goal-oriented killer. A female, at least thirty, probably somewhat older. Controlled until she has her target subdued. Controlled enough to stalk, to research, to plan, to prepare, to lure him. Once she has him bound, unable to defend, that control is let off the leash. She has the endurance to physically torture her victims for hours, the emotional distance to ignore their screams or pleas, as there’s no sign they were silenced during the torture.”

“She’d want to hear them beg and scream.”

“I agree. Their punishment sustains her, their pain feeds her. The castration is the last stage, unmanning them, literally. And allowing them to hang, from the medical examiner’s report, like meat, until they succumb to blood loss.”

“Why does she bring them back to their residence? She could dispose of the bodies altogether, or dump them—since she has to have transpo—miles away. But she risks, in both cases, bringing them back, leaving them outside, taking the time to leave them, and the poem, in plain sight.”

“She wants them found, and quickly. Doesn’t it show their loved ones who they were? What they were? It shows the city, the world they were punished for their deeds. By her. I believe she’ll be both pleased and upset that she’s now being hunted by a pair of female cops. She’d appreciate your power—female power is essential to her psyche. And she’ll be unhappy that, as women, you don’t see she’s doing what needs to be done when she would consider you colleagues.

“I suspect she has no man in her life now, nor does she wish to have that sort of connection. She may have female friends or companions, but men? Animals to be butchered, predators to be hunted. She believes in what she’s doing, and so is only more dangerous.”

“She’s not done.”