“Don’t I? He’s stood behind me plenty of times. Now he’s asking me to stand behind him, and I have to say sorry, no chance. That’s pretty fucking personal, Feeney.” She shook off his hand. “Let’s take a rain check on the drinks. I’m not feeling sociable.”
At a loss, Feeney dumped his hands in his pockets. Eve strode off in one direction, the commander remained behind closed doors in the other. Feeney stood unhappily between them.
Eve supervised the search of Marco Angelini’s brownstone personally. She wasn’t needed there. The sweepers knew their job, and their equipment was as good as the budget allowed. Still, she sprayed her hands, coated her boots, and moved through the three-story home looking for anything that would tie up the case, or, thinking of Whitney’s face, break it.
Marco Angelini remained on the premises. That was his right as owner of the property, and as the father of the prime suspect. Eve blocked out his presence, the cold azure eyes that followed her moves, the haggard look to his face, the quick muscle twitch in his jaw.
One of the sweepers did a thorough check of David’s wardrobe with a porta-sensor, looking for bloodstains. While he worked, Eve meticulously searched the rest of the room.
“Coulda ditched the weapon,” the sweeper commented. He was an old, buck-toothed vet nicknamed Beaver. He traced the sensor, the arm of it wrapped over his left shoulder, down a thousand-dollar sport coat.
“He used the same one on all three women,” Eve answered, speaking more to herself than Beaver. “The lab confirms it. Why would he ditch it now?”
“Maybe he was done.” The sensor switched from its muted hum to a quick beep. “Just a little salad oil,” Beaver announced. “Extra virgin olive. Spotted his pretty tie. Maybe he was done,” Beaver said again.
He admired detectives, had once had ambitions to become one. The closest he’d managed to get was as a field tech. But he read every detective story available on disc.
“See, three’s like a magic number. An important number.” His eyes sharpened behind his tinted glasses as the treated lenses picked up a minute spot of talc on a cuff. He moved on, warming to the theme. “So this guy, see, he fixes on three women, women he knows, sees all the time on the screen. Maybe he’s hot for them.”
“The first victim was his mother.”
“Hey.” Beaver paused long enough to swivel a look toward Eve. “You never heard of Oedipus? That Greek guy, you know, had the hots for his mama. Anyhow, he does the three, then ditches the weapon and the clothes he was wearing when he did them. This guy’s got enough clothes for six people, anyway.”
Frowning, Eve walked over to the spacious closet, scanned the automatic racks, the motorized shelves. “He doesn’t even live here.”
“Dude’s rich, right?” To Beaver that explained everything. “He’s got a couple suits in here ain’t never been worn. Shoes, too.” He reached down, picked up one of a pair of leather half boots, turned them over. “Nothing, see?” He skimmed the sensor over the unscuffed bottom. “No dirt, no dust, no sidewalk scrapes, no fibers.”
“That only makes him guilty of self-indulgence. Goddamn it, Beaver, get me some blood.”
“I’m working on it. Probably tossed what he was wearing, though.”
“You’re a real optimist, Beaver
.”
In disgust, she turned toward a U-shaped lacquered desk and began to rifle through the drawers. The discs she would bag and run through her own computer. They could get lucky and find some correspondence between David Angelini and his mother or Metcalf. Or luckier yet, she mused, and find some rambling confessional diary that described the murders.
Where the hell had he put the umbrella? she wondered. The shoe? She wondered if the sweepers in N.L.A. or the ones in Europe were having any better luck. The thought of backtracking and searching all the cozy little homes and luxury hideaways of David Angelini was giving her a bad case of indigestion.
Then she found the knife.
It was so simple. Open the middle drawer of the work console, and there it was. Long, slim, and lethal. It had a fancy handle, carved out of what might have been genuine ivory, which would have made it an antique—or an international crime. Harvesting ivory, or purchasing it in any form had been outlawed planetwide for more than half a century after the near extinction of African elephants.
Eve wasn’t an antique buff, nor was she an expert on environmental crime, but she’d studied forensics enough to know that the shape and length of the blade were right.
“Well, well.” Her indigestion was gone, like a bad guest. In its place was the clear, clean high of success. “Maybe three wasn’t his magic number after all.”
“He kept it? Son of a bitch.” Disappointed in the foolishness of a murderer, Beaver shook his head. “Guy’s an idiot.”
“Scan it,” she ordered, crossing to him.
Beaver shifted the bulk of the scanner, changed the program from clothing. After a quick adjustment of his lenses, he ran the funnel of the arm up the knife. The scanner beeped helpfully.
“Got some shit on it,” Beaver muttered, his thick fingertips playing over controls like a concert pianist’s over keys. “Fiber—maybe paper. Some kind of adhesive. Prints on the handle. Want a hard copy of ’em?”
“Yeah.”
“’Kay.” The scanner spit out a square of paper dotted with fingerprints. “Turn her over. And bingo. There’s your blood. Not much of it.” He frowned, skimming the funnel along the edge of the blade. “Going to be lucky if it’s enough for typing, much less DNA.”