“What went wrong? Why isn’t he sitting in the surf on some island paradise, slurping rum punch and counting his money?”
“Maybe the payment wasn’t made. You don’t want to go putting all your eggs in a terrorist’s basket. They often end up scrambled. But he’d been trained well enough to have a contingency plan of his own. He gave McCoy something. He had to go back for it. She had to die for it.”
“And meanwhile, the primary isn’t buying his served-on-a-platter prime suspect. With the cops taking a closer look, so’s everyone else.”
“Yeah, things got screwed for him, almost from the start. Roarke’s into this Yeats guy who’s an old, dead Irish writer. He said something about things falling apart. The center doesn’t hold. The center hasn’t been holding for Blair Bissel.”
“And it’s been falling apart since you walked into the first crime scene.”
“He’s desperate, and he’s pissed, and he overthinks. He’s so worried about covering his ass, he keeps exposing it. He needs to stay dead, needs to collect his fee. Hard to do both. Killing Powell and destroying the body identified as his own was stupid. It prevents positive ID, but it also turns the trail around and heads it right back at him. He’s the only one who’d want that evidence destroyed.”
“Then he tries to take you out.”
“Like I said, he’s pissed. And he’s desperate. And you know what he is, under all this espionage, artsy, woman-sniffing bullshit, Peabody? He’s a screwup. The kind that keeps making bigger, splashier mistakes to cover up the last one. He thinks he’s a stone-cold killer, but he’s a selfish, spoiled little boy playing—what’s that guy’s name—James Bond—then having a tantrum when he doesn’t quite pull it off.”
“He may not be stone-cold, but he’s killed four people, knocked you around pretty good, and put an assistant director of the HSO in the hospital.”
“I didn’t say he wasn’t dangerous. Kids having temper tantrums are pretty damn dangerous. Scare the hell out of me.”
“So, according to your theory, we have a cranky, immature, HSO-trained killer.”
“Pretty much.”
Peabody blew out a breath that fluttered her ruler-straight bangs. “That is pretty scary. How do we catch him?”
“Working on that.” Eve started to prop her feet on the desk, had the twinge of revolting muscles shoot straight through her body. “Shit.”
“You’d better work on those bruises.”
“I don’t have bruises on my brain. I can still think. Let’s get the rest of the team in here, civilians included, and kick this ball around.”
“You want Ewing in on this?”
“She was married to him for two years. It might have been a convenience to him, but she still would’ve learned something about him. Habits, fantasies, hangouts. If Sparrow lives, regains consciousness, and opts to share information on Bissel, that may help, but right now, Reva Ewing’s our best source.”
“You’re going to tell her that the husband she was accused of murdering is not only alive, in your opinion, but is the one who set her up?”
“If she can’t deal with it, she’s no help and we’re no worse off. Let’s see if she inherited any of her mother’s spine.”
Feeney came in muttering figures and command codes into a PPC. His chin was stubbled with ginger and gray and the bags under his eyes could’ve held a week’s marketing for a family of three—but there was a gleam in them.
“Bad time to interrupt, kid,” he said to Eve. “We’re on the verge.”
“There’s another prong to this investigation, and that may be on the verge, too. Where are the others?”
“Roarke and Tokimoto are finishing up running a series. Don’t want to walk away in the middle of that, not after what it’s taken to get there. We got one of Kade’s units as clean as it’s going to get. McNab and Ewing are just about done reinstalling some . . .”
He stopped, pursed his lips as he finally lifted his head and took a good look at her. “Said you got slammed around. They meant it. Ought to put some ice on that eye.”
“Is it going black? Damn it.” She pressed her fingers gingerly along the top edge of her cheekbone, and felt the bolt of pain right down to her toes. “I took a blocker. Isn’t that enough?”
Peabody came out of the kitchen with an ice bandage. “If you let me put this on it, it’ll sting a minute, and look stupid. But it’ll decrease the bruising and swelling. You may not end up with a full shiner.”
“Just do it, don’t talk about it.”
Eve set her teeth while Peabody fixed the bandage. The sting drowned out the throbbing, which wasn’t that much of an improvement.
“Ouch,” McNab commented with a sympathetic wince as he strolled in. “Heard you lost your ride, too.”
“Wasn’t much of a loss. Where’s Ewing?”
“Right behind me. Just had to make a pit stop. Okay if I pump some fuel? I’m empty.”
“There’s cobbler,” Peabody called out as he was already heading to the kitchen. “Apple-cranberry.”
“Cobbler?” Feeney repeated.
“Jeez. Go ahead.” Eve threw up her hands. “Eat, drink, be merry. Every multiple homicide investigation should have cobbler.”
“I’m going to get you something cold to drink,” Peabody decided. “You should probably be pushing fluids.”
With that Eve found herself alone in her office, wondering how she’d so easily lost the reins of her team.
Marital discord, she decided, was like some sort of low-grade fever that threw the whole system just slightly out of whack so you couldn’t manage to function at full capacity.
She wasn’t at the top of her game, that was for sure, and had no idea how to get back there again.
“You want food,” she snapped out the minute Reva came in, “get food. You want drink, get drink. But make it fast. This isn’t a damn twenty-four/seven.”
Reva merely angled her head. “I’m fine, thanks. But I’m betting you feel as bad as you look. Roarke and Tokimoto are going to be a few more minutes. They’re at a flash point.”
“They aren’t the only ones. We’re not going to wait for them. Or for anybody else!” she called out. “You’re going to want to sit down for this.”
“Because this is going to be a really long lecture or because you’re going to, metaphorically, give me a punch?”
“I’m hoping you can take a punch.”
Reva nodded and took the closest chair. “Don’t pull it. Whatever it is, I’d rather you go for the knockout instead of a lot of testing jabs. I’m tired. And with every hour that passes, I feel more of an idiot for not seeing what was in front of my face, day after day, for over two years.”
“What was in front of your face was a guy who behaved and portrayed himself as someone who loved you, and was brought into your life by someone else you trusted.”
“Goes a long way to measuring how well I judge people.”
“They were pros at what they did, and they worked hard to set you up, right along. Were you supposed to look at this guy and think: Hey, secret agent?”
“No.” Reva’s lips curved. “But you’d think I’d get some vibes about liar and cheat.”
“They screened you and they studied you. They knew everything there was to know about you before you met either of them. They knew what was public and private. You were laid up for months for shielding a president, for doing your job. Maybe they hoped you’d have some resentment about that, or that your work for the government would make you open to working with them.”
“Fat fucking chance.”
“And when they got that, they moved on you personally. He knew what you liked to eat, what flowers you preferred, your hobbies, your finances, who you slept with or cared about. You were nothing to them but a tool, and they knew how to use you.”
“The first night, at the art showing, he asked me if I’d have a drink with him. Great-looking guy, funny, sweet, hey, why not. We sat for hours, talking. I felt like
I’d known him all my life. Like I’d been waiting for him all my life.”
She looked down at her hands. “I’d been involved before, pretty serious involvement before I was injured, then that fell apart. But nothing came close to what I felt for Blair. And it was all fabrication. It wasn’t perfect. He’d get sulky or irritated at the least slight or criticism, but I figured that was part of the deal, you know? Part of being married and figuring each other out, making each other happy. I wanted to make him happy. I wanted to make it work.”
“It’s never perfect,” Eve said half to herself. “Whenever you think it is, something sneaks up and bites you on the ass.”
“I’ll say. Anyway, I’m tired. Tired of feeling stupid, of feeling sorry for myself. So tell me why I’m sitting down. One punch.”
“Okay. It’s my belief that Blair Bissel orchestrated and committed the homicides at Felicity Kade’s apartment, killing her and his brother in order to fake his own death and implicate you.”
“That’s just crazy.” The words wheezed out as if the punch had landed hard on her throat. “He’s dead. Blair’s dead. I saw him.”
“You saw what you were meant to see, just as you saw what you were meant to see when he approached you two and a half years ago. And this time, you were in shock and almost immediately incapacitated.”
“But . . . it was verified.”
“I think he switched his identification records with his brother’s, in preparation. I believe he set an elaborate stage so that you, the police, and the clandestine organizations he’d been playing against each other would believe him dead. Nobody looks for the dead, Reva.”
“It’s insane. I’m telling you it’s insane, Dallas.” Reva got to her feet as the others came in from the kitchen. “Blair was a liar and a cheat. He used me. I’m doing everything I can to accept all that. I’ll live with that. But he wasn’t a killer, he wasn’t someone who could . . . could hack two people to death.”
“Who stood to gain from his death?”
“I—you mean financially?”
“In any way.”
“I did, I guess. There’s money, decent money. You know all that.”
“Decent money,” Eve repeated. “You’ve got decent money of your own. He’ll have hidden accounts, and once we find them—”
“Located, listed, and filed on your computer,” Roarke said as he walked in. “As requested, Lieutenant.”
“How much?”
“In excess of four million spread over five accounts.”
“Not enough.”
Roarke inclined his head. “Perhaps not, but it’s all there is. He was neither particularly frugal nor skilled in investment areas. All the accounts have slow, steady leaks over the six years they’ve been opened. He spends, and he speculates, and most usually loses his capital.”
“That plays.” She began to re-evaluate. “Okay, that plays. He goes through money, he needs more money. A big score.”
“So he kills Felicity and his brother to get it, implicates me? You’re painting a monster. I wasn’t married to a monster.”
“You were married to an illusion.”
Reva’s head jerked back as if the blow had landed. “You’re grabbing at air because you don’t have anything else. And because you don’t want to leave me with nothing. I loved him, whether or not he was an illusion. Do you understand the concept?”
“I’m familiar with it.”
“You want me to believe I loved someone capable of murder. Cold-blooded, cold-minded murder.”
It took all her will to keep her gaze from flicking, even for an instant, toward Roarke. And to keep her heart and mind from asking herself that same question.
“What you believe is your own business. How you handle this is up to you. If you can’t deal with the direction of my investigation, you’re no use to me.”
“You’re the cold-blooded one. The cold-minded one. And I’ve been used just about enough.”
When she strode out, Tokimoto eased away from the door and followed her.
“Gee, she took that well.” Now Eve allowed herself a slow scan of faces. “Would anyone like to complete this briefing, or should we break for comments about my need for sensitivity training?”
“It’s a hard knock, Dallas,” Feeney said. “No way for you to pretty it up for her. She’ll be back when she shakes it off.”
“We’ll work without her. Bissel has accounts in various locations, odds are he’s got a bolt-hole—a lavish one, maybe more than one. He’s still in the city, cleaning up after himself, so he must have one here. We find it.”
“I found two properties,” Roarke put in. “One in the Canary Islands, the other in Singapore. Neither were very well cloaked, meaning if I found them so easily, others would.”
“So they’re probably blinds. He’s not completely stupid. Let’s look in his brother’s name, or Kade’s, Ewing’s. He might have set himself up, using them as cover, then if . . . No, no. Shit! McCoy. Chloe McCoy. He had to have more use for her than the occasional bang. Check it out. See if he tucked away funds and/or property in her name somehow. He killed her for a reason, and my take is this guy kills for money and self-preservation.”
“I’ll take that,” McNab volunteered. “Working on a cobbler rush.”
“Get started. I’m going to check on Sparrow, see if he’s coherent and I can dig anything out of him. Feeney, I’m leaving you and Roarke on the machines. If Reva’s backed out and Tokimoto’s busy patting her head, you’re going to be short-handed.”
“Another tanker of coffee ought to keep us in the game.”
“You may want an update before you rush off, Lieutenant. We’re retrieving data from Kade’s unit. It’s encrypted, but we’ll get through that.”
“Great, good. Let me know when—”
“I’m not finished. Each of Kade’s units was corrupted, but not through a networking worm. They were burned individually.”
“So what? Look, this is EDD territory. All I need is the bottom line. I need the data.”
“You don’t give electronics enough respect,” Feeney stated.
“And neither, I’d venture, does Bissel.” As Eve hadn’t touched the glass of chilled juice Peabody had brought her, Roarke picked it up and helped himself. “The potential worm’s import is its theoretic ability to corrupt an entire networking system, however small or large, however simple or complex, with one stroke, to corrupt and shut down, irretrievably. That’s not what we’re dealing with. It’s a shade of that, an early version perhaps, but not nearly as powerful as we’ve been led to believe. It’s been relatively easy to clean and retrieve from the units we’ve got.”
“Relatively.” Feeney rolled his aching eyes. “It’s nasty business, but it’s not global security shit. What it is, is smoke.”
“Which means he doesn’t have what he thought he had—what he was going to parlay into a nice retirement fund. But maybe someone else does, or maybe . . . Son of a bitch. He wasn’t trying to take me out.” She tapped her fingers absently over her bruised eye. “He hit his target. Aim was a little off, but he hit.”
Roarke inclined his head as his thoughts marched with hers. “Sparrow.”
“It’d help to have somebody on the inside, somebody with some juice who could adjust or create data in-house. And provide protection. Sparrow. He’s the organized thinker. The planner. Look at Bissel. He’s not brave, he’s not very smart, he hasn’t been able to work himself up in the organization. Just a delivery boy. And here’s a big opportunity, handed to him from one of the brass. The big score. Little scores all along. The corporate espionage. Could be, just could be, some of that was outside Homeland, a little personal partnership. Bissel though, he can’t capitalize. Just a screwup with money. I bet his partner’s done better. A hell of a lot better.”
“Why not just kill Bissel then?” Peabody asked.
“Because you need a contingency. You need a fall guy. He set the putz up. Still the delivery boy. Bissel goes to deliver th
e worm disc to the high bidder, and it’s not the deal. He gets the shaft. Now he’s a dead man, a desperate one. He’s running, he’s hiding, and at all costs he has to stay dead. Our friend from the HSO wants him to stay dead, too, and he’s ready with the company line about global security when the investigation doesn’t turn the way he anticipated.”
“I imagine he planned to make an honest man out of Bissel by turning him into a dead man,” Roarke said. “Quietly, at some point.”
“Should’ve moved on that sooner rather than later, and he wouldn’t be in the hospital. I think he forgot to factor one vital element into the equation. When somebody like Bissel starts killing, it gets easier every time.”
She pulled out her communicator. “I want a block on Sparrow. I don’t want anybody, not even the medicals, talking to him until I get my shot. Start reeling in that data.”
“Hook up that tanker of coffee,” Feeney reminded her, then headed out.
“I need a moment, Lieutenant.” Roarke glanced at Peabody. “A private one.”
“I’ll wait outside.” Peabody slipped out, shut the door.
“I don’t have time to go into personal business,” Eve began.
“Sparrow has access to your data, to what happened in Dallas. If you’re right about all of this, he might very well use it against you. Make it public, even altering it in some way that twists the truth.”
“I can’t worry about that.”
“I can make it disappear. If you want that . . . element removed, I can remove it. You’re entitled to your privacy, Eve. You’re entitled to be secure that your own victimization won’t be used to draw speculation, gossip—and the pity you’d hate more than either.”
“You want me to give you the nod to tamper with government files?”
“No, I want you to tell me if you’d prefer those files didn’t exist. Hypothetically.”
“Which would let me off the hook. Legally. I wouldn’t be an accessory if I just made a little wish, and poof. This is a hell of a day. This is a hell of a funny day.”