Fantasy in Death

  “It’s still a good possibility, but killing a friend, a partner, it’s an absolute betrayal of trust.”

  He nodded. “And anyone who’s capable of that sort of betrayal wouldn’t easily trust someone else.”

  She tapped her fork in the air. “You got it in one. These people live by creating scenarios, and calculating all the steps. Take this choice, get this result, and that leads to the next. I think the killer would have calculated the pros and cons of pulling someone into it with him.”

  “If the other weakens, makes a mistake, threatens, it’s a new problem. Difficult to kill another partner,” Roarke commented. “It would shine your light brightly on the remaining two. But . . .” He knew her, too. Her routine, her thought patterns. “You’re concerned that might happen.”

  “It depends on what’s to be gained, or lost—and how much ego and satisfaction were stoked by the first kill. When someone believes they’re smarter, more talented, just plain more right than anyone else, and they harbor this kind of need, they’re very, very dangerous.”

  Eve tried Cher Reo first. The APA was another friend, and Eve supposed in a broad sense, another partner. I knock them down, she thought as she pushed her way through morning traffic, you put them away.

  When she contacted Reo’s office she learned the APA was already at Central overseeing Reineke’s case.

  That didn’t take long, she mused, and cut west, away from Broadway and the crowds that inevitably partied there.

  The pizza would roll on the pipe wrench, she concluded—or vice versa. One would take a deal, and the other would do the full weight.

  And that had to be enough.

  She left a voice mail on Reo’s ’link, requesting a meet as soon as she finished sealing the deal, but it surprised her to find Reo already waiting—with coffee, in her visitor’s chair.

  “Thought you’d take longer,” Eve commented.

  “They were at it since just after two this morning, which was when your boys decided the happy couple had had enough snuggle time.” Reo stretched, rolled her shoulders. “She’d slipped into his place about eight. Lights went off at midnight. Or thereabouts. They have it documented.”

  She yawned, combed her fingers through her fluffy blond hair. “They got sloppy. Didn’t even bother to pull the privacy screen. Your guys got quite a little show before and after the lights went out.”

  “I’m betting the wife rolled on the lover.”

  “Like a wheel down a steep road. Tried all the usual first, apparently. She was just looking for comfort after the loss.” Reo widened her eyes, batted her lashes. “Oh my God, he killed my husband! Shock, dismay, tears. Anyway.” She shrugged. “They got very detailed confessions out of both, and I saved the taxpayers a bundle. She’ll do a solid dime, he’ll do double that.”

  She held up a finger before Eve could speak. “Yeah, we probably could’ve gotten them both life in a trial, but this seals them up. It’s not a bad way to start the middle of the night.”

  She might’ve argued, for form’s sake, but Eve wanted Reo’s good graces. “I need three search warrants.”

  “For what?”

  Eve got her own coffee, sat, and spelled it out.

  Frowning, Reo tapped a finger to the side of her mug. “No physical evidence on any of them?”

  “That’s why I need the warrants. To find some.”

  “You don’t really know what you’re looking for.”

  “But I’ll know it when I find it. The weight’s there, Reo. Motive, means, opportunity, e-skills—and an intimate knowledge of the vic’s domicile, habits, and security. Add in by their own statements only those three had full knowledge of the game.”

  “They’re alibied.”

  Eve shook her head, dismissing it. “The alibis are soft. They’re so soft they’re squishy. You haven’t seen the place. I have. It’s like a beehive, with the bees buzzing everywhere. It’s a five-minute walk to the scene. Any one of them could have slipped out for an hour without anybody knowing. And if someone had, the killer would’ve had another alibi ready. It’s the way they think—in cause and effect, action and reaction. Mira’s profile adds more. He knew his killer.”

  Reo puffed out her cheeks. “I can work it. You say they’ve been cooperative so far?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “You could always request a search, see how each of them reacts.”

  “And that gives any of them time to ditch whatever it is I might find.”

  “I can work it,” she said again. “And I sure hope you find something.” She rose. “Do you know how uncomfortable that chair is?”

  “Yeah.”

  Reo laughed, rubbed tired blue eyes. “Regardless, if you’d been another ten minutes, I’d’ve been asleep in it. I need a damn nap. See you tonight? Nadine’s party?”

  “I’ll be there.”

  “I’m going to have to trowel on the enhancers to look half human. I’ll get your warrants,” she added as she headed out.

  “Thanks.”

  One down, Eve thought, then walked out to pull Peabody away from her desk. “Let’s go have another talk with CeeCee.”

  As they started for the glide, she spotted Reineke at one of the machines in Vending. “Good work, Detective.”

  “Thanks, Lieutenant. Jenkinson’s walking them through processing.” He drew a very sad-looking Danish out of the slot. “You know, turns out in the end they were just a couple of idiots. He still had the clone phone he used to tag her before he went out and bashed the dead husband, and the pizza box hadn’t run through his recycler yet. And her? She bought fancy underwear online a couple hours after she’s notified she’s got a dead husband. Stupidity shoulda gotten them more than ten and twenty.”

  “I bet they don’t come out any smarter. Good work,” she said again. “And I don’t want to find out you and Jenkinson shared the surveillance doc around the bullpen.”

  “It’s too bad because they may be stupid, but they’re damn flexible.”

  She waited until she was on the glide to grin.

  “We’re not looking at the girlfriend? CeeCee?” Peabody asked.

  “No. It’s one of the partners, but she may know more than she thinks. She’s had some time to settle. I want to poke at her memory, and impressions.”

  They found CeeCee at home, in a tidy little apartment she shared with a trio of goldfish in a glass bowl.

  Eve wondered about people who kept fish. Did they like to watch them circle, circle, staring out with those weird eyes? What was the appeal?

  “I took some time off work.” CeeCee sat in a high-backed scoop chair. She’d pulled her hair back in a tail and hadn’t bothered with enhancements. She looked pale and tired. “I just can’t go back yet. It feels like if I do, it’s saying Bart didn’t matter enough for me to stay home. And he did.”

  “Have you called a counselor?”

  “No. I guess . . . I guess I’m not ready to feel better. That sounds stupid.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” Peabody told her.

  “I don’t know if we’d have stuck. I mean, things were good, and I think maybe . . . But I don’t know, and I keep thinking about that. Would we have moved in together, or even gotten married? I don’t know.”

  “Did you ever talk about it?” Eve wondered. “Moving in together?”

  CeeCee managed a little smile. “We sort of circled around it. I don’t think either of us was ready for that. I think if we’d stayed together a few more months, we’d have talked about it, seriously. We weren’t in a hurry, you know? We thought we had plenty of time.”

  “And you each had your own interests,” Eve prompted. “Your own routines and your own friends.”

  “That’s true. I had a boyfriend once, and he crowded me. It was like if we weren’t together twenty-four/seven, I didn’t care enough. It wasn’t like that with Bart. We did a lot together, and he liked my friends, I liked his. But we didn’t have to be together every minute.”

  “You got along
well with his partners. His closest friends.”

  “Sure. They’re great. Good thing,” she added with a smile that warmed her tired eyes. “I don’t think I’d’ve been Bart’s girl if I hadn’t liked his friends, and they hadn’t liked me back.”

  “Oh?”

  “Well, they’re like family. Some people have trouble with family. I could tell you about my sister.” She rolled her eyes now, and Eve began to see some of the charm and energy that must have attracted Bart eke through the grief. “But I guess, I don’t know, when you choose your family it’s different. You can still disagree or argue, but you’re always going to stand up for each other, too. I guess that’s true with my sister, even when I’m mad at her.”

  “It’d be natural for Bart to get mad at his partners sometimes.”

  “Maybe, but he really didn’t. It was more like he’d shake his head and go, Jeez, what’s Cill thinking about this, or What’s Benny doing that for, or Var’s out of orbit on this one.”

  “He’d talk to you about them.”

  “Sure. I’d be a kind of decompression chamber for him, if they’d had a rough few days. I know they’d been working really hard on a new project. Long hours and lots of testing stuff. Maybe they argued a little, the way you do over stuff like that, especially when you’re overdoing it.”

  “Anything specific? Every detail helps,” Eve added when CeeCee bit her lip. “One thing can lead to another, give us a better picture.”

  “Oh. Well. I know he was miffed at Cill a couple weeks ago. Nothing big, but he was upset that she’d gone overbudget for a marketing campaign proposal. And she was miffed because she put a lot of time into it and thought it was worth the extra. And he didn’t. She gets madder than he does. Did.”

  She sighed, then shook it off.

  “He said they yelled at each other, but he doesn’t—didn’t—really yell, so I’d say she did that part. But they made up, like always. He bought her flowers. He liked giving flowers. And he and Var got into it about the direction of this new game. It was technical, so Bart didn’t really say what. Just about how they weren’t going off mission statement, and not everything should reach its full potential. That’s a weird thing to say, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah. What did he mean?”

  “I don’t know. He just said U-Play was about play, and that was that. He could be a little stubborn. Not often, but when he was . . . It was kind of cute.”

  “How about Bart and Benny? Any tension?”

  “They go back so far. They’d tease each other a lot—that kind of ragging guys do on each other. Like I was over there last week, because we were going to catch a vid after work. He and Benny were testing one of the games, going one-on-one, and Bart just slaughtered him. And Bart rubbed his face in it. They do that all the time, but I guess all the work they’d been putting in was starting to tell, because Benny got steamed. I could see it. Benny said maybe they’d try it IRL—in real life—next time and stalked off. Bart just laughed. I told him when we left he’d hurt Benny’s feelings.”

  She shrugged. “It was just guy stuff. Stupid guy stuff.”

  “She’s a nice woman,” Peabody commented when they got back in the car. “I know it’s pointless to speculate, but I think they would’ve stuck. His history indicates he’s the sticking kind.”

  “Yeah. And he feels a little more normal now. Gets irritated with friends, has some arguments.”

  “None of them seemed murderous.”

  “Not to him. We can’t be sure about the friend. Cill—questioning her authority and creativity. Var—shutting down an idea for change. Benny—skewering his ego and e-skills. It tells us he’s normal, that two of the partners wanted something he didn’t and were overruled, and the third got his ass kicked in front of others. It’s unlikely any of those incidents were the first of their kind, and very possible any of those incidents was, for one of them, a last straw.”

  “You and I argue, and you’ve been known to shut me down and kick my ass. I’m not plotting your murder. At this time.”

  “I bet you’ve imagined kicking my ass.”

  Peabody cast her gaze up to the roof of the vehicle. “Imagination is not against the law or any departmental regulations.”

  “That’s the point. It takes a certain type, or a flashpoint incident to cause someone to turn imagination into reality.” She drummed her fingers on the wheel, thinking it through as she drove. “They all fit the profile, in my opinion. And turning imagination into something as close as possible to reality is what they try to do every day. So, one step more, and it’s absolutely real.”

  She glanced down at her dash ’link, smiled at the text on-screen. “Reo came through. Put three teams together,” she ordered Peabody.

  “Me?”

  “Is someone else here?”

  “No, but—”

  “An e-man with each team. We’ll circulate. I want all weapons confiscated, even the toys. I want all discs evaluated, all comps, all coms evaled on-site.” She ran down the list briskly while Peabody scrambled to key tasks into her PPC. “Any question on any of them, they come in. I want all sinks, tubs, showers, and drains tested for blood. I want any and all droids on any of the premises also evaled.”

  “Okay.” Peabody swallowed, then nodded. “I follow you.”

  “Good. Make it happen. You and I are going by U-Play to notify the partners. Tell the ranking officer on each team to secure the warrant for his or her area.”

  “Copy that. Dallas, do you really think, if one of the partners killed Bart, they’d leave evidence in their own space?”

  She thought of a simple pizza box. “It happens.”

  15

  While Peabody put the teams together via ’link, Eve con tacted the commander with an update.

  “Are you looking at all three partners, acting in concert?”

  “No, sir. I don’t believe they could’ve pulled it off, nor do I believe all three of them could or would have turned against the victim and toward murder. It’s possible, and it’s possible two of them conspired as Mira’s profile indicates a strong probability for two killers. But . . .”

  How to explain?

  “It doesn’t fit for two of them in a conspiracy. It’s too off-balance. If half the whole goes bad, how can the other half not notice? I believe they’ve all been under a lot of pressure to complete the project, and that caused some friction in the group. But to plan a murder like this takes time and thought, and goes deeper than friction between friends and partners. It may have been the excuse, the catalyst for one to act, but it was always under there.”

  “Which one?”

  She hesitated. “I’ll be better able to answer that after we see what the searches turn up. Having their personal space searched also adds pressure. I want to see the reactions.”

  “Turn up the heat and see if one of them boils over?”

  “Something like that, sir.”

  When she completed her update, Eve glanced over to see Peabody staring at her with cool, narrowed eyes. “What?”

  “You know.”

  “Many things.”

  “You know which one.”

  Eve shook her head. “I lean toward one.”

  “Which one?”

  “You tell me.”

  “That’s not fair.” The cool look edged into a pout. “We’re partners. You’re supposed to tell me.”

  “You’re a detective. You’re supposed to figure it out.”

  “Fine. Fine. Okay, I get the whole half of the whole, off-balance, how could two of them turn on their old pal. But I think it had to be two. Not just because of Mira’s profile, which plays out for me, but because logistically it’s more solid. One to slip out and do the job, the other to hang back and cover.”

  “You’re right. It’s more solid.”

  “And you still think it’s just one of them?”

  “Yeah, I do. They’re a tight circle—square, whatever. A closely knit and tied group. One of them veers off on thi
s. That individual could disguise the resentment, envy, hate, ambition. Whatever of those served as driving force or excuse. Bad mood, overwork, distracted. Now make the individual a pair, which first means the spearhead in this has to take on a partner, has to trust.”

  Off-balance, she thought again. Too much weight—or hate—on one side of the whole.

  “Now you have two people trying to hide murderous intent,” Eve continued, “and by and large people aren’t that good at strapping down their more passionate feelings. And after the deed’s done, both those people have to project shock and grief, not only to us but to the last remaining member of the group.”

  “If all three of them conspired?”

  “Then Bart Minnock would have to have been completely oblivious to what was going on in his circle of close friends and partners. That’s not how I read him, certainly not how I read him after this last interview with the girlfriend. He had a sensitivity, a read on his people. And at the base, there’s just no motive, no sense in the three of them plotting to kill him. They’d be the majority. If they all wanted something from him, from the business, wanted a change or were just fucking sick of him, they vote him out or off, or push as a unit.”

  The murder and the method equaled more than business, Eve thought. More than a bigger share of the pie.

  “In the legal sense, the partnership agreement, they went with majority rule. And he didn’t have any more authority or power than any of the others. They gave him the authority and power, a tacit sort of deal. They let him run the show because he was best suited for it, and it was working.”

  “Okay, you’re talking me into it,” Peabody said. “And one of them didn’t want him to run the show anymore, but that meant it was three against one, so, take him out and it’s no longer a problem.”

  “That’s part of it. It has to be deeper, but the method of murder says raging ego to me, and serious loathing. The loathing may have built over time. Bart got the majority of the media attention, and he was the go-to guy at U-Play. He said no, or let’s go this way, they tended to go along.”