“Son of a bitch.” She walked over to Roarke’s open office door. “Come have a look at this, will you? I need a fresh eye.”
“I have two you can borrow. I’ve just been playing around a bit with the financials,” he said as he rose.
“There may be more of that to come.”
“I do love the legitimate opportunity to poke into other people’s private affairs. It keeps me honest.”
“More or less.”
“You’ve expanded, I see,” he commented about her second board. She’d centered Steinburger’s ID shot, fanned out others from it. Below each circling photo was a date.
“What do these people have to do with Steinburger, and your current case?”
“Oddly? They’re all dead. Chronologically. Bryson Kane, college roommate. They, along with two others, shared an off-campus rental. Kane died as the result of injuries sustained in a fall down a flight of stairs. His death was ruled accidental, the high level of alcohol in his system a contributing factor. Due to a similar intake of alcohol, the other roommates, including Steinburger, slept through the sound of the fall. The body was discovered by one of the other roommates in the morning. Kane was twenty.”
“Young.”
“The next wasn’t so young. Marlin Dressler, eighty-seven, greatgrandfather of Steinburger’s fiancée at the time—and first ex-wife. Also a bigwig in Horizon Studios, where Steinburger had his first job in the industry—basically an assistant to Dressler’s assistant. Dressler had a getaway place in Northern California. He fell off a cliff.”
“Is that so?”
“He was an avid hiker, an amateur botanist. He had, allegedly, hiked up the canyon from his getaway place, collecting samples. He lost his footing, broke his leg, a couple of ribs, incurred internal bleeding. The ME estimated it took him twelve hours to die. After Dressler’s death, Steinburger moved a couple rungs up the ladder.”
“Handy for him.”
“Yeah, isn’t it? Dressler died six years after Kane. Three years later—I’ll add Steinburger had married the fiancée, and had moved up again at Horizon—Angelica Caulfield, an actress—”
“Yes, I’ve seen her work.”
“She was known for her excesses as much as her work. Nobody was particularly surprised when she died of an overdose. There was some surprise that she was pregnant at the time of her death, about five weeks into it. Father unknown. While it was rumored Steinburger might have been romantically involved with her—which he vehemently denied—the rumor was never substantiated, and in fact there were plenty of rumors about Caulfield’s other lovers. Steinburger, however, was one of the producers of her last project, and had, in fact, campaigned hard with the studio to cast her. His wife was also expecting their first child at the time of Caulfield’s death. While her death was officially ruled accidental, there was—and still is—speculation of self-termination.”
“But not foul play.”
“Not yet. Forward four years. Jacoby Miles, a paparazzo who’d hounded Steinburger, among hordes of others, was beaten to death with a ten-pound dumbbell inside his home. All of his cameras and electronics had been taken. Police believed Miles had walked in on a robbery in progress, and in fact, subsequently arrested a B-and-E man apprehended in the same neighborhood a few weeks later. While the B-and-E man denied the burglary and murder, he served twenty-five years for same. Within a month of the murder, Steinburger and his wife separated and filed for divorce. Two days after the divorce was final, Steinburger married his second ex-wife.
“Sherri Wendall,” Eve added, tapping the next ID. “An actress known for her comedic timing and fierce temper. Their marriage lasted four years, was described as tumultuous. Three years after their divorce, Wendall died in what was determined to be an accidental drowning due to a fall and alcohol consumption. It was the tragedy and scandal of the Cannes Film Festival that year. Steinburger attended, as one of the partners in the fledgling Big Bang Productions.”
“She was brilliant, really. You’ve seen some of her vids.”
“Yeah. Funny lady. Five years after the funny lady drowned in the south of France, Buster Pearlman, one of Steinburger’s partners, ingested a terminal cocktail of barbiturates and single malt scotch. The ruling of self-termination was additionally fueled by speculation of embezzlement on his part, and what Steinburger regretfully testified was the threat of internal audit.”
“Yes,” Roarke murmured, “I’ll be looking more at finances.”
“We go seven years. A long stretch, so I’ll be going over the interim again. Allys Beaker, twenty-two. An intern at the studio, found dead in her apartment. She’d slipped in the shower, the report claims, and fractured her skull. Her ex-boyfriend was detained and questioned, but there was no evidence to charge him with anything. He did, in his statement, claim he believed Allys was seeing someone else, an older man, a married man. This supposition was reinforced by a female friend of the deceased, who stated Beaker believed the man she was involved with intended to leave his wife and marry her. Steinburger was two years married to his last ex-wife.
“Which brings us to current events. So, with this data, what do you see here on the board?”
“A pattern. You believe he’s been killing for—Christ—forty years? Without slipping, without suspicion?”
“I stopped thinking it halfway through the forty. I know it. It’s a way to solve a problem, it’s a choice. It’s going to take more to find out what the problem might have been in each case. Some are obvious,” she continued, gesturing at the board as she paced in front of it. “An affair resulting in a pregnancy, and the other party wouldn’t let go. Money difficulties pawned off on a partner, one who might have either been in on the skimming or learned of it. A nosy photographer who saw or photographed something damaging. A stupid young girl who pushed for marriage, likely threatened to tell his wife.”
“Sex and money, as you said all along.”
“Most are violent, somewhat impulsive. A shove, a blow. A cover-up. He might even see them as accidents. Or self-defense in a twisted way.”
Roarke laid a hand on her shoulder when she stopped beside him. “Nine people.”
“Very likely more, but it’s a hell of a start. He’s a serial killer who doesn’t fit the standard profile. He doesn’t escalate, or stick to type, stick to method. His connections or involvements with each pop out when you lay it out, but otherwise, it’s just a four-decade span of accidents, suicide, misadventure. Just bad luck. Who’s going to connect an almost ninety-year-old hiker slipping off a canyon path with a drunk twenty-year-old college kid falling down the stairs six years earlier?”
“You.”
She shook her head. “I don’t know if I would have. I looked at this—at Harris—as a first kill. I looked at the list of suspects and thought argument, impulse. Period. Panic, cover-up. Mira thought the same, though she did talk about there being two different styles—the impulse, the calculation. I saw it, but I didn’t. Not clearly. Then you said maybe he’d done it before. I never considered that. Never considered this.”
“What do you see now, when you look at the pattern?”
“Ambition, greed, self-indulgence, an obsessive need to preserve status and reputation. Sociopathic tendencies and a need to control, absolutely. He killed Asner rather than pay him off, risking that second kill. But there’s calculation there. He’s alibied, and while Asner was connected to Harris, he was also connected to any number of unsavory types given his line of work. He paid Valerie off for the alibi. He can’t afford a third kill, not now. But eventually she’ll have an accident. He’ll make sure she’s paid and rewarded until he can get rid of her.”
“He killed Harris because she’d seen the pattern.”
Eve nodded. “Or some of it—even one element—and she hired Asner to dig into it. He may have seen more of the pattern. We’ll probably never know the full extent of what he and Harris knew.”
She sat on the edge of her desk, picked up her empty coffee cup, scowled at it. “I can’t prove any of it.”