“Baxter would have had EDD check all Custer’s ’links, her comp for communication and activity before her husband’s murder, and-I assume-for a week or so after it.”
“Yeah, but not for before Anders.” Eve planted a finger on Thomas Anders’s name on her notes. “No point. She wasn’t a suspect, not with her alibi, in her husband’s. You look, you check, but Baxter didn’t feel it. Because it wasn’t there to feel. We’ll pull them now, all of them. Anders’s, too. We’ll go back to before the Custer murder on them.”
She drummed her fingers. “Asshole like Custer, I bet he kept cock enhancers around. The barbs, now…where’s a nice mom of two like Suzanne going to get her hand on them? They came from her. That part wasn’t in Ava’s plan.”
“A terrible thing when your husband’s murdered that way,” Roarke commented. “I’ll bet a kindly doctor would prescribe tranquilizers for the widow. Put them all together instead of doling them out for yourself…”
“Good. That’s good. A medical won’t want to give us that information, not without a warrant, but we start with her financials, see if she paid a doctor, paid a pharmacy between the murders. Close to the second murder, yeah, close, I bet. Got cold feet as it got toward the sticking point.”
She engaged her ’link, put through to Baxter’s home. When she hit voice mail, she ordered a transfer to his mobile.
She heard music first, something low and bluesy that said sexual foreplay to her. Baxter’s face came on with dim lighting in the background.
“This better be damn good.”
“My home office, tomorrow, eight hundred hours.”
“I’m not on the roll till Monday. I’ve got-”
“You are now. Tag your boy, too.”
“Give me a break, Dallas. I’ve got a clear field and a hot brunette on tap.”
“Then you’d better turn her on full tonight, because you’re here at eight. How much do you want to close the Custer case, Baxter?”
The irritated scowl vanished. “You got something there?”
“Hotter than any brunette who’d give you a clear field. Eight hundred. If you’ve got any personal notes not in the murder book, bring them.”
“Give me a goddamn hint, will you?”
“Strangers on a Train. Look it up.” She clicked off, contacted Peabody, then Feeney.
“Sounds like we’ll need the standard cop breakfast buffet,” Roarke decided. “And a Saturday one at that.”
“You don’t have to feed them. I want Mira, too,” she considered. “I’d like her take on the suspect profiles.” She glanced at her wrist unit. “It’s not really all that late.”
“While you’re interrupting the Miras’ evening, send me the file. I’ll poke into the financials.”
She frowned at him. “It’s still open and active. Yeah, you could do that. And I can order the full search on the electronics. When you do the financials, see if anything pops back a ways that points toward Suzanne Custer buying the sex aids.”
After copying and sending the file, Eve stared at her ’link. It wasn’t really that late, she reminded herself. But she had sex aids on the brain, and that nudged her into thinking how the Miras might be spending their night together. “Jesus, way to wig myself out.”
She hedged, and ordered the transmission to go straight to voice mail. “Dr. Mira, I didn’t want to disturb your evening. I’ve got something on the Anders case, a strong possibility of a connection with a previous homicide that’s still open and active. I realize tomorrow’s Saturday-” Or she did now that Roarke had mentioned it. “But I have a team meeting at my home office tomorrow at eight-”
“Eve?”
“Oh, hey.” There was music again. It wasn’t porn vid music, thank God, but it spoke of an intimate evening at home to Eve. “Sorry to bother you when you’re…whatever. I have something I’d like to pull you in on. I’ve set a meeting at my home office in the morning, if your schedule-”
“What time?”
“Eight hundred.”
“I can make that. I’ll be there. Do you want me to study anything in the meantime?”
“I’d actually like you to come into this fresh.”
“Fine.” Mira glanced away, laughed as she sent a warm look off screen. “Dennis sends his best. I’ll see you in the morning.”
“Thanks.”
Eve swiveled away from the ’link, pressed her fingers to her eyes. “They’re going to do it,” she mumbled. “If not now, soon. I wish I didn’t have to know that.”
To clear the image, and the thought, out of her head, she turned back to Baxter’s file, and started digging.
At some point the cat wandered in to leap on her desk. When he got nothing but, “Don’t sit on my stuff,” he leaped back down to stalk into Roarke’s domain.
She started a new file listing the correlations, the connections-actual and possible-the time lines. Using the backside of her murder board, she arranged photos, notes, reports. Stood back, studied it.
She could see it, actually see it. The steps, the stages, the moves, the mistakes. Not enough, she admitted, not for an arrest, not for a conviction. But there would be.
Lock and key, that’s how she saw it. The Anders case the lock, the Custer case the key. Once she fit them together, turned it just right, it would open. Then she’d reach in and grab Ava by the throat.
She turned to Roarke’s office. He sat at his desk, the cat draped over his lap. “Find anything?”
“Custer’s financials don’t allow her much wiggle room. From what I can see, the husband ran the show there previously. Most of the withdrawals, debits are in his name. There are several in one particular sex shop-Just Sex-in the six months before his untimely. As it wouldn’t have surprised me to find certain items you had interest in-”
“Hopefully you mean professional interest.”
He only smiled. “As, and so forth, I entertained myself and did a bit of searching at the vendor’s…”
“You hacked.”
“You say that in such a disapproving tone. I explored. You’ll certainly do so yourself, legally and tediously, but I like having my curiosity satisfied.”
He said nothing more, only picked up the bottle of water on his desk and drank. And his eyes laughed at her over the bottle.
“Crap. Yes, I’ll get the data by fully legal means, but what did you find?”
“Multiple purchases of what’s delightfully marketed as Hard-on. It comes in a phallic-shaped bottle.”
“Check one.”
“Purchases of various sexual aids and toys. Cock rings, probes, textured condoms, vibrators.”
“Check two.”
“Nothing on the ropes, I’m afraid.”
“But they carry them. We checked venues for that type of rope, and they carry them. Did Suzanne pay a visit there?”
“No record of that, no. They do take cash. She did, however, visit a clinic two weeks before Anders’s death. She saw a Dr. Yin there according to the records-”
“Which you hacked into?”
“Which I explored,” he said mildly. “And she incurred a debit at the attached pharmacy, filling a prescription for a box of home pressure syringes, and a liquid form of lotrominaphine-a barbiturate used to aid sleep and nervous conditions.”
“Big, fat, red check. I have to get all this data through channels, get it all lined up. Then I’m going to knock her down with it.”
“Where are you going?”
“It’s never too late to call an APA,” she said as she hurried back to her desk. “I’m going to contact Reo, do the fast talk, and get the paperwork started on warrants for the data you just gave me.”