Page 82 of Passions in Death
Since she’d asked Mira for the consult, Eve didn’t feel she could escape to the glides. So suffered the elevator’s stops and starts, Peabody’s house bubbling, and Mira’s enthusiasm for the bubbling until they reached her level.
“Push on the alibi,” Eve ordered.
She winced at Jenkinson’s tie with a big, bug-eyed mouse the color of a tropical sea nibbling on cheese the color of spring daffodils.
He called out, “Hey, Dr. Mira. Got a second, boss?”
She risked her retinas and stepped to his desk.
“We want to follow up on a lead, on the cold one. It’s warming up, but we need to talk to a possible source living in Boston. It’s delicate, since she was married to the vic, and later married and divorced his best friend. Since the best friend’s our prime suspect, we want to do it in person.”
Eve considered the time, the budget. “How warm?”
“Getting pretty warm. I talked to Feeney—not his case, but he was LT back in the day—and he thinks we’re on track. Running it through? Guy gets his head bashed in with a fireplace poker. Staged like a break-in, but that was bogus, sloppy. Only other person in the house, the wife. And she claims she had a headache, took some meds and a sleeping pill like nine o’clock. Found him dead downstairs in the morning. Before that, they’re out to dinner and have a fight, she tells him she could kill him for that, and sails out.
“We got her going into their place—nice place, Upper East—twenty-thirty. Then the security system goes off-line just after twenty-three hundred. Vic hadn’t come home by that time. Left the restaurant about fifteen after she did, and we can’t trace his whereabouts.”
“Why isn’t it the wife?”
“She never broke, LT. Stuck with the story. And the ME said how she’d’ve needed a stool to have bashed him from the angle he was bashed, and maybe some Zeus to bash with that amount of force. Last thing, the security system went down by remote, outside. And she was in.”
“Then why are you going to Boston? And why the best friend?”
“Three years later, she ends up married to the first husband’s best friend. No evidence they did the hanky previous to the murder. They divorced like nine years ago, and she moved to Boston—and he got a pretty sweet settlement.”
“So you’re thinking the vic goes bitching to his best friend after the fight, the best friend decides to kill his ass, jams the security?”
“The best friend installed the system, so he’d have a leg up there. Vic and best pal go to college together, roomies, he’s best man at the vic’s wedding when the vic marries money. And a looker with money. Vic was pretty liquored up at TOD, so say best pal’s ‘Hey, I’ll get you home,’ does the deed, stages the break-in, then he’s there to comfort the widow—who about a year after she got to be a widow, lent him money to start his own security business. He lived pretty high on her money. Still is.”
Jenkinson lifted his hands. “Nothing to hang on him back when, Dallas, but you look at the pattern since, and it starts to smell. She was married to the guy for six years before she booted him. She may know something she doesn’t know she knows. But it’s delicate.”
Since she trusted Jenkinson’s instincts as much as her own, she gave the nod. “Go to Boston.”
“Thanks.”
Mira joined her in the walk to her office. “By my math, he’s working a case that’s eighteen years old.”
“Guy got his head bashed in and nobody paid for it. That’s first. Then? There’s a different kind of satisfaction in taking someone down when they’re sure they’ve gotten away with it.”
“And you think they will, take the best friend down?”
“I think if Feeney says they’re on the right track, he probably caught a whiff of what Jenkinson smells now when the case was fresh, but the investigator couldn’t pin it. And what he just ran down for me? Yeah, it smells.”
Mira looked toward the board when they stepped into Eve’s office.
“Yours is fresh now.”
“Yeah, and I can’t pin it. Take the desk chair. I’ve got that tea stuff.”
“I wouldn’t mind some, along with your rundown.”
“The victim, Erin Albright, garroted with piano wire at her pre-wedding girl party. Inside a privacy room, one she’d booked, at the Down and Dirty.”
“At Crack’s. That’s difficult for him.” Mira crossed her legs, watched Eve with her quiet blue eyes. “And you, as you were attacked there on the eve of your wedding.”
“In the same privacy room. Adds to that.” Eve offered the tea, took coffee for herself. “Her fiancée, another female, was also in attendance.”
Eve gave the rundown.
