“I believe I can find something to occupy myself with there as well.”
She didn’t doubt it. By the time he walked onto the shuttle, she’d reread her notes and was writing a report on her Boston leg for her team and her commander.
Roarke set his briefcase aside, cleared the shuttle to take off when ready, then ordered them both a meal.
“How do you feel about basketball?” he asked her.
“It’s okay. Lacks the poetry of baseball and the sheer meanness of arena ball, but it’s got speed and drama. What’d you do, spend your hour buying the Celtics?”
“I did, yes.”
She looked up. “Get out.”
“Actually, it took a bit more than an hour. We’ve been in negotiations for a few months now. Since I was here, I gave it the last push and we finalized it. I thought it would be fun.”
“I spend an hour drinking a lukewarm beer and talking murder, and you buy a basketball team.”
“We should all play to our strengths.”
She ate because it was there, and filled Roarke in.
“Haggerty’s thorough. Bulldog type, not just in build. In mindset. He hasn’t let go of the case, and a lot of cops would have after this amount of time. He’s kept picking at it but hasn’t gotten anywhere. I just can’t see what he missed. Might catch something when I see the full file, but he did the steps.”
“And how does that help you?”
“Knowing he was here. Being sure of it. The dates. I can backtrack there, see if anybody on my list was in Boston, or just unaccounted for on the corresponding dates. See if maybe, just maybe, there’s a connection between any of them and Haggerty’s victim.”
“Someone else is a bulldog,” Roarke commented. “Not in body type, but certainly in mindset. I could check the transportation angle for you. See if any of your names show up on public or private transpos for those dates.”
“I don’t have the authorization for that. Yet. I’m going to get it. I pull the New L.A. and the European murders into the mix, and I’ll get it. Any and all of my current suspects are high-profile enough that if I brush too close to the line, they could use it to get evidence tossed in trial.”
“That’s assuming they, or their attorneys, saw the brush strokes.”
They wouldn’t see Roarke’s, Eve knew. No one would. “I can’t use the evidence if I don’t have the authorization to seek the evidence.” But she’d know enough to be able to narrow the list. Enough, potentially, to save a life.
“I take him down, give him any wiggle room in the courts and he gets off, he’ll kill someone else down the road. He won’t stop until he’s stopped. Not only because he enjoys it, he needs it, but because he’s been working toward this for a long, long time. If I screw this up, all I do is put a hitch in his stride. Once he gets his rhythm back, whoever he kills is on me. I can’t live with that.”
“All right. I understand that. But, Eve, look at me now, promise me that if he kills someone else before you’re able to stop him, you won’t feel the same way.”
She did look at him. “I wish I could” was all she said.
Detective Sloan was a young, eager beaver who’d caught the case with his older, more experienced, and less interested partner. The partner had since retired, and Sloan was partnered with a female counterpart who’d come along for the ride for the meet with Eve.
“It was the first homicide where I was primary,” Sloan told Eve over chilled juices in a health bar. New L.A.’s version, she supposed, of the cop haunt.
The place was bright and cool, done in crisp colors and boasting a cheery waitstaff who were bouncy on their feet.
Eve thanked God she lived and worked on the other coast, where waiters were appropriately surly and never felt obliged to off
er you something called Pineapple-Papaya Phizz as the special of the day.
“Trent gave it to me as a training exercise,” he added.
“He gave it to you so he didn’t have to lift his fat ass off his desk chair,” the partner put in.
Sloan grinned amiably. “Might’ve played into it. The victim was one of the disenfranchised. I did track some family after we identified her, but nobody cared to claim the body. I got conflictings from the witnesses I managed to convince to talk to me. Though they were impaired by some form of illegals, the most substantial described a male—race undetermined—wearing a gray or blue uniform who was seen entering the building at or around the time of the murder. Victim was squatting, and since anybody else in the building was also there illegally, everybody worked at ignoring everybody else.”
“You’ve got a hot one back in New York with a similar MO.” The new partner’s name was Baker, and both she and Sloan were attractive, healthy specimens with sun-bleached hair. They looked more like a couple of professional surfers than cops.