"Well, you've got more."
"Several. One is even now dealing with your husband." The flash in her eyes delighted him. "Ah, that concerns you, I see. I've never been a believer in true love, but the two of you do make a lovely couple. Did."
Roarke was armed, she reminded herself. And he was good. "Roarke isn't easy to deal with."
"He doesn't trouble me overmuch." The arrogance seeped through as Waverly shrugged. "Now, the two of you together were an irritant, but…well, you were asking about Bowers. It simply fell into place. She was a paranoid violent tendency that slipped through the system and ended up in uniform. There are others, you know."
"It happens."
"Every day. You being assigned to the investigation on—what was his name?"
"Petrinsky. Snooks."
"Yes, yes, that's right. Rosswell was supposed to be assigned to that matter, but there was some slipup in dispatch."
"How long have you owned him?"
"Oh, only a few months. If all had gone according to plan, the entire business would have been filed and forgotten."
"Who've you got in the ME's department?"
"Just a mid-level clerk with an affection for pharmaceuticals." He smiled slowly, winningly. "It's a simple matter to find the right person with the right weakness."
"You killed Snooks for nothing. You failed with him."
"A disappointment to us. His heart didn't respond. But there must be failures in any serious search for progress, just as there are obstacles to be overcome. You've been quite an obstacle. It was clear very quickly that you'd dig hard and
deep and uncomfortably close. We had this problem in Chicago, but we handled it quite easily. You weren't so quickly dispatched, so it took other means. A little cooperation from Rosswell, a bit of ruffling of Bowers's feathers, false data planted, then, of course, we arranged for both of you to meet on another murder scene. She reacted very much as predicted, and while you were admirably controlled, it was enough."
"So you had her killed, knowing procedure would require my suspension and an investigation."
"It seemed that had solved our little problem, and with Senator Waylan putting pressure on the mayor, we'd have time to finish. We were so very close to complete success."
"Organ regeneration."
"Exactly." He all but beamed at her. "You have filled in blanks. I told the others you would."
"Yeah, I've filled them. Friend screwed up your cushy circle with his artificial implants, knocked away your funding." She hooked her thumbs in her pockets, moved a little closer. "You'd have been pretty young then, maybe just getting your toehold. Must've pissed you off."
"Oh, it did. It took me years to establish myself enough to gather the resources, the team, the equipment to compatently continue the work we'd been doing when Friend destroyed it. I hadn't quite reached the brass ring of prominence when he and some colleagues began experimenting with melding live tissue with the artificial material. But Tia, she believed in me, in my passions. She kept me well informed."
"Did she help you kill him?"
"No, that I did unassisted. Friend had gotten wind of my interests, experiments. Didn't care for them. He intended to use his influence to cancel my funding—pitiful as it was—to research the regeneration of animal organs. I canceled him and his little project first."
"But then you had to go under," she said easing forward with her eyes steady on his. "You planned to move to human organs eventually, so you covered your tracks."
"And covered them well. Enlisted some of the very best hands and minds in the medical field. And all's well that ends well. Watch your step."
She stopped at the foot of the gurney, laid a hand casually on the guard. "You know they've got Young. He'll roll over on you."
"He'd die first." Waverly chuckled. "The man is obsessed with this project. He sees his name shining in medical journals for the ages. He believes I'm a god. He would bite through the artery in his own wrist before he'd betray me."
"Maybe. I guess you couldn't count on that kind of loyalty from Wo."
"No. She was always a risk, always on the outskirts of the project. A skilled doctor but a fairly unstable woman. She began to balk when she discovered our human samples had been…appropriated without permission."
"She didn't expect you to kill people."