“I never spied on him.” She sent a long look toward Caro. “I never spied on him. Maybe I should have, maybe if I had I’d’ve known about him and Felicity long ago. But I respected his space and his privacy, and expected the same from him.”

“Did you know about him and Chloe McCoy?”

“Who?”

“Chloe McCoy, Reva. The pretty young thing who works in his gallery?”

“The little drama queen?” She laughed. “Oh, please. Blair couldn’t possibly have . . .” She trailed off as the cool, direct gaze had her belly trembling. “No. She’s hardly more than a child. She’s still in college, for God’s sake.” She curled herself into a ball and rocked. “Oh God. Oh God.”

“Baby. Reva.” Caro moved quickly to sit beside her daughter, wrap her arms around her. “Don’t cry. Don’t cry over him.”

“I don’t know if it’s over him, or over me. First Felicity, and now that—that brainless little coed. How many others?”

“It only takes one.”

Reva turned her face into her mother’s neck. “Like mother, like daughter,” Reva murmured. “If what you’re saying is true, Lieutenant, maybe it was some jealous boyfriend who killed them. Somebody who knew they were being cheated on.”

“That doesn’t explain why you were lured there at exactly the right time. It doesn’t explain why the passcodes on the elevator to the studio were changed at nearly the same time Blair Bissel and Felicity Kade were being murdered. It doesn’t explain why the computers at your home, at Bissel’s gallery and studio, and at Felicity Kade’s home—Feeney just verified”—she said to Roarke—“have all been infected with an as yet unidentified worm that has corrupted all data thereon.”

“A worm?” She pushed away from Caro. “All those computers, in all those locations? Corrupted. You’re sure?”

“I’ve examined two of them myself,” Roarke told her. “There’s every indication they were infected with the Doomsday worm. We’ll test to be certain, but I know what to look for.”

“It can’t be done by remote. We know it has to be done on site.” Reva sprang up to pace. “It’s a flaw in the system. It has to be uploaded directly into one of the units in a network to infect the network. It requires an operator.”

“That’s right.”

“If the units were infected with the Doomsday, it means someone got through the security. At my house, at the gallery, the studio, at Felicity’s. I can check those systems. I designed and installed all of them. I can run scans to see if they were compromised, and when.”

“If you run the scans, the results are inadmissible,” Eve told her.

“I’ll run them.” Roarke waited until she’d stopped pacing long enough to look at him. “You’ll trust me for that.”

“Damn right. Lieutenant.” Reva came back, sat on the edge of the sofa. “If this is—if what happened has something to do with the project, it means Blair was set up, too. It was all staged, all put together so I’d go running over there, so it would look to me, to everyone as if Blair and Felicity had been lovers. He’s dead because of what he was to me. They’re both dead because of me.”

“You can believe that if you want. Me, I’d rather deal with the truth.”

“But there’s no proof that he was ever unfaithful. It could all be faked. The photographs, the receipts, the discs. He could’ve been kidnapped and taken to Felicity’s. He might’ve been . . .”

She was running down as the facts, the timelines, the sheer weight of her fantasy began to bear down. “It doesn’t make any sense that way. I know it. But it doesn’t make sense any other way either.”

“It makes sense if Bissel was not only unfaithful with Felicity Kade and Chloe McCoy, but if the terrorists believed he had intel. More sense yet if they had reason to believe it.”

“Because they think I talk to him? But—”

“No. Because he talked to them.”

She jerked back as if Eve had struck her. “That’s not possible.” The words came out in a croak. “You’re saying that Blair had knowledge of, had contact with this radical terrorist group? That he fed them information? That’s ludicrous.”

“I’m saying it’s a possibility I’m going to explore. I’m saying person or persons unknown went to a lot of trouble to kill Bissel and Kade and point the finger at you. And if this had been taken as the classic crime of passion it appeared to be, those units wouldn’t have been given more than a cursory look.”

She waited, just a beat, as she watched the possibilities hit home with Reva. “It would be assumed that you, with your knowledge of computers and your temper, destroyed them out of spite. That the changes in security at Bissel’s gallery would be considered a glitch.”

“I can’t—I can’t believe this of him.”

“What you believe or don’t believe is up to you. But if you look deeper, if you start tugging on all the threads, you start to see there’s a lot more here than a couple of murders and a suspect served up to the cops on a shiny, silver platter.”

Reva got up, walked to the wide window that looked out over the river. “I can’t . . . You want me to believe this, to accept it, and if I do, it means everything was a lie. Right from the beginning, it was a lie. He never loved me. Or he loved me so little, he was seduced by whatever these people offered him. Money, or power, or just the thrill of playing techno-espionage for real instead of on VR. You want me to believe he used me, exploited everything I’ve worked for, the trust and respect I’ve earned in my field.”

Tags: J.D. Robb In Death Mystery
Source: readsnovelonline.net