Imitation in Death

  “Isn’t that what he’s hoping for? That he’ll frustrate you by assuming a different personality, different method, different victim type, all of it?”

  “So far, mission accomplished. I’m trying to separate him from, let’s say, the cloak he wears. To see him as he is so I’ll know if my gut’s right. So I can move from instinct to evidence to arrest.”

  “And what do you see?”

  “Arrogance, intelligence, rage. Focus. He has excellent focus. Fear, too, I think. I’m wondering if it’s fear that makes him imitate others, instead of striking out in his own way. But what does he fear?”

  “Capture?”

  “Failure. I think it’s failure. And maybe that fear of failure has its roots in the female authority figure.”

  “I think you see him more clearly than you give yourself credit for.”

  “I see the victims,” she continued. “The two he’s killed already, and the shadow of the one who’ll be next. I don’t know who she’ll be, or where, or why he’ll choose her. And if I don’t figure it out, he’ll get to her before I get to him.”

  Her appetite was gone, as was the euphoria of good sex. “You’re a busy guy, Roarke,” she said. “Got a lot on your plate.”

  “I prefer that to an empty one. So do you.”

  “Good thing for us. I need to look into my list of suspects. I need to find this female authority figure, because when I do, I find him. I could use a hand.”

  He took hers, squeezed it. “I happen to have one available.”

  The most practical way to begin, she thought, was alphabetically. And, though it still scraped the pride a bit, to let Roarke man the computer.

  He may have gotten spanked by a barbecue grill, but on a desk unit, he was king.

  “We’ll start with Breen,” she told him. “I want everything I can get on Thomas A. Breen and his wife, without trampling on privacy laws.”

  He sent her a pained look as he sat at her desk. “Now, what fun is that?”

  “Keep it clean, ace.”

  “Well then, I want coffee. And a cookie.”

  “A cookie?”

  “Yes.” The cat leaped on the desk to bump his head against Roarke’s hand. “You have a cookie cache in here. I want one.”

  She stuck her hands on her hips, tapped her fingers. “How do you know I have a cache?”

  He stroked the cat and smiled at her. “Unsupervised, you forget to eat half the time, and when you remember, you go for the sugar.”

  She took some exception to the “unsupervised” remark, but had another priority. Eyes slit, she came closer, watched his face as keenly as she would a prime suspect. “You haven’t been sneaking into my office at Central and riffling my candy stash?”

  “Certainly not. I can get my own candy.”

  “You could be lying,” she said after a moment. “You’re pretty slippery.”

  “And so you said in the shower.”

  “Har-har. But I don’t see you skulking around Central lifting my chocolate just to drive me buggy.”

  “Not when I can easily find more convenient ways to do so. Where’s my coffee?”

  “Okay, okay. Thomas A. Breen.”

  She went into the kitchen off her home office, felt the cat ribbon around her legs despite the fact he’d had a slice of pizza. She programmed a pot of coffee, got down mugs, then—sending a cautious glance toward the office—went to the small utility closet and dug into the space behind the cat food for the bag of triple chocolate chunk cookies.

  She started to take one out for Roarke, decided she could go for one herself. Then thought, what the hell, he was helping her out. They’d blow what was left in the bag.

  Sensing dessert, Galahad went into serious purr-and-rub mode. She poured a handful of cat treats into his bowl, watched him pounce on them like a lion on a gazelle as she loaded the coffee and cookies on a tray.

  “Initial data’s up, though I assume you already have the basics,” Roarke said. “More’s coming. Why are you looking at Breen?”

  “First, it’s standard to run anybody I interview during an investigation.” She set down the tray. “I’m going deeper because he flicked my switch. Don’t know why, exactly.”

  She walked toward the wall screen where Roarke had already brought up the standard data. “Thomas Aquinas Breen, age thirty-three, married, one child, male, age two. Writer and professional father. Decent reported income. He makes a solid living, and appears to be on the track to making more. One bust for illegals—Zoner—age twenty-one. College smoke, nothing surprising. Native New Yorker, NYU grad: fine arts with post-grad work in criminology—I like that one—and creative writing. Earns his living writing magazine articles, short stories, and the two published nonfiction books to date, both substantial best-sellers. Married five years, both parents living and in Florida.”

  “Sounds normal.”

  “Yeah.” But it wasn’t, Eve thought. It wasn’t quite the pretty picture it presented. “Got a nice house in a nice neighborhood. Couldn’t afford it on what he made prior to the second hit book, but the wife has a high-powered job, so you assume they combined incomes as they’ve lived there since their second year of marriage. He deals with the kid, she makes the more regular bucks.”

  He sampled a cookie. His wife, he thought as the chocolate exploded in his mouth, had an unerring sweet tooth. “I have any number of employees with a similar setup.”

  “There was just something off, that’s all. Hard to pin. Then you add that this guy spends his day thinking about murder, reconstructing it with words, reading about it, imagining it.”

  “Really?” He poured coffee for both of them. “Who would devote so much time and energy to murder?”

  “I heard the sarcasm. The difference is a murder cop’s supposed to find murder abhorrent. This guy gets off on it. Not that big a leap between fascination and experimentation. He’s got the education, the flexible schedule, the knowledge, and a motive if you figure over and above the thrill, these murders, once it hits the media big, will juice up sales of his books. His wife’s a fashion exec, and I bet she knows the value of publicity, too.”

  Studying the screen, she rocked back and forth on her heels. “He’s got the paper. Claims it was a gift from a fan, one he doesn’t remember. No way to prove or disprove. Yet. Be interesting if I find out he or his wife bought it though. That would be interesting.”

  “I could smudge those privacy lines a bit, see what I can dig up on that.”

  It was tempting, but Eve shook her head. “It wasn’t charged to his or his wife’s account. Not that we’ve found. Pushing that angle would mean more than a little smudge. We’ll stick to the bio for now.”

  “Spoilsport.”

  “He has the paper, and that’s enough. He has it, and he let me see it. That’s interesting enough for now.”

  “If he’s your man, wouldn’t the wife know?”

  “Seems to me, unless she’s an idiot. Her bio doesn’t read idiot to me. Julietta Gates, same age, another NYU grad. Bet they met in college. Fashion and public relations, double major. She had her path mapped out, and she’s moved right along it. Minimal break for birthing, then back to work. Made double what he did up until two years ago, and still pulls in about the same annually, and more regularly. Wonder how their financials are set up?”

  “What are you looking for?”

  “Who runs the show? Money’s power, right? I bet she calls the shots in that household.”

  “If that’s the criterion, I feel I’m not as fully in charge as I should be around here.”

  “Too bad for you. I don’t give a damn about your money. I bet Tom cares about hers.” She brought him, the house, the child, the feeling of the home back into her mind. “Needs her share to run that nice house, raise the kid the way he wants, until he rises up another level in his own line. Good clothes, good toys, good child-care droid as backup, while he works at his own pace, so he can take time off to play horsey with his son, take him to the par
k.”

  “And those marks of a good father make him a murder suspect. As I’m following you, I’m afraid that makes us a very cynical pair.”

  She glanced over her shoulder just to look at him. Cynical or not, she reflected, they were a pair. “He never talked about her as a partner, or as one of the points of the family triangle. You saw his stuff and the boy’s lying around. Toys, shoes, and so on, but nothing of hers. Interesting, that’s all. Interesting that they’re not a unit. Bring up the parental data.”

  She scanned it, filling in the blanks from the bare essentials she’d studied earlier. “See, the mother’s the alpha dog here, too. Important career, the main wage earner. Father retired from his job to take over as professional parent. And look here, Mom served as an officer, including president, of the International Women’s Coalition, and is a contributing editor to The Feminist Voice. An NYU alum, while Dad went to Kent State. Yeah, that’s interesting.”

  “Scenario being, Breen grew up in a female-dominant household, controlled by a woman with strong ideas and a political bent while his father changed the nappies and so forth. The mother pushed him to study at her alma mater, or he did so to gain her approval. And when choosing a mate, he selected another strong personality who would control his world while he took the more historically typical female role of nurturer.”

  “Yeah, which doesn’t make him a whacked-out psychopath, but it’s something to consider. Copy and file the data here and to my unit at Central.”

  He smiled as he did so. “It appears I’ve selected a strong personality as well. What does that say about me, I wonder?”

  “Please,” she added, and remembering the cookies walked over to take one. “I’ll have a face-to-face with Julietta Gates tomorrow. Meanwhile, let’s move on to Fortney, Leo.”

  Fortney was thirty-eight, and had two marriages, two divorces, no offspring. With Roarke’s quick work, and his understanding of what she wanted, she read that his first wife had been a minor vid star, in the porn category. The marriage had lasted just over a year. The second was a successful theatrical agent.

  “There’s some buzz here,” Roarke added. “The juicy gossip sort from media reports. You want them up, or do you want the highlights?”

  “Start with the highlights.”

  “It appears Leo was a very bad boy.” Roarke sipped coffee as he read from his own screen. “Got caught with his pants down, literally, in a hotel suite in New L.A., entertaining a pair of well-endowed starlets. Besides the two naked nubile starlets—that’s a quote, by the way—there were rumors that considerable chemical enhancements and appliances of a sexual nature were also involved. Obviously, suspecting something of the sort, his wife had a P.I. on him. He was skinned to the bone in the divorce, and endured considerable snickering publicity as several other women were happy to talk to the media about their experiences with the hapless Leo. One is quoted as saying: ‘He’s a walking hard-on, always coming on and usually petering out at the sticking point.’ Ouch.”

  “Sexually promiscuous, unable to maintain, and embarrassed publicly by a woman. Got a sheet with a couple of sexual assaults and an indecent exposure. I like it. And look at his financials. No way he can maintain the lifestyle he wants on what he pulls in. He needs a woman—currently Pepper Franklin—to keep him.”

  “I don’t like him,” Roarke muttered, continuing to read. “She deserves better.”

  “He hit on Peabody.”

  He looked up now, a dark gleam in his eye. “I really don’t like him. Did he move on you?”

  “Nah. He’s scared of me.”

  “At least he isn’t completely brainless then.”

  “What he is, is an ego-soaked liar who likes to take bimbos to bed—Peabody played up the bimbo angle on him—and use stronger women to take care of him, then cheat on them. He’s educated, knows how to put on a polished front. Likes the good life, including high-dollar writing paper, is theatrical enough to enjoy the imitation route, and has the necessary freedom to troll and hunt. What have we got on his parents, family background?”

  “On screen. You can see his mother’s an actress. Largely supporting roles, character parts. I actually know some of her work. She’s good, stays busy.”

  “Had Leo with husband number two out of five. I’ll say she stays busy. So he’s got a number of step- and half-sibs. Father’s a theatrical broker. Same as Leo. Somebody who puts projects together, right?”

  “Mmm. There you go. There are snippets of gossip here, too.” He was scanning quickly on this first pass, looking for buzz words. “Our man would’ve been six when his parents divorced, both having very public affairs during the marriage, and afterward. His mother also claimed the father was physically abusive. Then again, he claimed the same about her. Reading bits and pieces here, it sounds as if the household was a war zone.”

  “So add a violent childhood and potential parental neglect. Mom’s a public figure, which makes her powerful. They probably had household staff, right? Maids, gardeners, full-time child care. You could see what you could dig up on who looked after little Leo while you display the Renquists for me.”

  “Then I’m having another cookie.”

  She glanced back as he spoke, ready to make some sarcastic comment. But the look of him, just the look of him sitting there at her desk, his hair shining from the shower, his eyes vivid and focused on the screen, had her heart tripping.

  Ridiculous, it was ridiculous. She knew what he looked like, and he could still turn her inside out without even trying.

  He must have sensed her stare as he shifted his eyes, met hers. An absurdly handsome man with a cookie in his hand. “I think I deserve it.”

  Her mind blanked. “What?”

  “The cookie,” he said and took a bite. Then he cocked his head. “What?”

  “Nothing.” Vaguely embarrassed, she turned around again and ordered her heart to settle back down. Time, she told herself, to move to the next.

  Renquist, Niles, she thought. Self-important, snotty bastard. But that was just personal opinion. Time for facts.

  He’d been born in London, to a society deb who was half Brit, half Yank. Fourth cousin to the king on her mother’s side and tons of money on her father’s. His father was Lord Renquist, a member of Parliament and a staunch conservative. One younger sister who’d settled in Australia with husband number two.

  Renquist had the full British educational package. The Stonebridge School to Eton, Eton to Edinburg University. Served two years in the RAF, as commissioned officer, rank of captain. Fluent in Italian and French and joined the diplomatic corps at age thirty, the same year as his marriage to Pamela Elizabeth Dysert.

  She had a similar background and education. Well-placed parents, high-class education, which had included six years at a boarding school in Switzerland. She was an only child, and had considerable money of her own.

  They were, Eve supposed, what people of that class would call a good match.

  Eve remembered the little girl who’d come to the steps while she’d been questioning Pamela Renquist. The little pink-and-gold doll, Rose, who’d given the nanny’s hand one impatient tug before falling in.

  No, not nanny. She’d called her the “au pair.” People of that ilk always had a fancy name for everything.

  Wouldn’t Renquist have had an au pair growing up?

  His schedule, daytime, wasn’t as flexible as the others. But would an assistant or admin question him if he told them to block out a couple of hours? She studied the ID image of Renquist on-screen, and doubted it.

  No criminal on him or the wife. No little smudges as there had been with Breen and Fortney. Just a perfect picture, all polished and shiny.

  She didn’t buy it.

  He hadn’t married until thirty, she thought. A reasonable age, if you were going the “till death” route. Plus, a man with political ambitions did better in the field if he presented the package of wife and family. But unless he’d taken a vow of celibacy, there’d have bee
n other relationships before the marriage.

  And maybe after it.

  It might be worth having a conversation with the current au pair. Who knew family dynamics better than live-in help?

  She went back for more coffee. “You could shoot up the data on Carmichael Smith.”

  “Do you want that before the data on the Fortney nanny?”

  “You’ve got that already?”

  “What can I say? I earn my cookies.”

  “Fortney first, smart guy. Let’s keep it ordered.”

  “Difficult, as it appears there were several child-care providers used. It appears his mother chewed through them like gumdrops. Baby nurses, au pairs, whatever. Seven total over a period of just under ten years. None stayed on the job longer than two years, with an average stay of six months.”

  “Doesn’t seem long enough to have any serious impact. So my thought would be the mother remained the authority figure.”

  “And from this data, one assumes an incendiary one. Three of the former employees filed hardship suits against her. All were settled out of court.”

  “I’m going to have to take a closer look at the mother.” She paced back and forth in front of the screen while she ran it through her head. “Leo has a mother who’s an actress, and his current lover is in the same profession. He goes into a profession where he’ll deal with actors, have some control over them—be controlled, I imagine, by them. That says something. The killer is acting. Assuming a role, and proving he can play the part better than the original, and with more finesse. When I run a probability with this data, it’s going to come out high on Leo.”

  She considered. “Let’s go down the list before we do another layer. Find me Renquist’s nanny, or whatever they call them over in England.”

  “Roberta Janet Gable,” Roarke announced, then smiled. “I’m multitasking.”

  “Usually do,” she replied, then looked up at the image on-screen. “Man.” Eve gave a mock shudder. “Scary.”

  “This is current. She’d have been considerably younger when working for Renquist’s mother, but”—having anticipated her, Roarke called up the earlier photo—“still scary.”