Peabody drew out the sealed knife, walked over to show it to Reva. “Do you recognize this knife, Ms. Ewing?”
Reva stared at the smeared blade, the smeared handle, then lifted her gaze, full of stunned confusion, to Eve’s. “It’s Blair’s. It’s one of the set he bought last year, when he decided we should both take cooking classes. I told him to go right ahead, but I’d stick with the AutoChef or take-out. He actually took the classes, and did some cooking now and then. This looks like one of his kitchen knives.”
“Did you bring it with you tonight, Reva? Were you so angry that you put it in your bag, maybe to threaten them, to scare them?”
“No.” She took a step back from it. “No, I didn’t bring it.”
This time Eve held out an evidence bag. “Is this your stunner?”
“No.” Reva’s fingers curled into her palms. “That’s a recent military model. Mine’s over six years old, a reconfigured Secret Service make. That doesn’t belong to me. I’ve never seen it before.”
“Both this and the knife were used on the victims. Both this and the knife have your fingerprints on them.”
“This is crazy.”
“The violence of the stabbings would have resulted in considerable blood spatter. On your hands, your arms, your face, as well as your clothes.”
Dully now, Reva looked down at her hands, rubbed them gently together. “I know there’s blood on my shirt. I don’t know . . . Maybe I touched something up there. I don’t remember. But I didn’t kill them. I never touched that knife, that stunner. There’s no blood on my hands.”
“There’s blood in the bathroom drain, and your fingerprints are on the sink.”
“You think I washed my hands? You think I tried to clean up, cover up, then called my mother?”
Eve could tell that Reva’s head was clearing, and her temper was coming back along with her coherency. Those dark eyes were hot, and her teeth clamped together as her color came up. “What the hell do you think I am? You think I’d rip my husband and my friend to pieces, to goddamn pieces because they made a fool out of me? And if I did, I wouldn’t have the fucking sense to get rid of the murder weapon and cover myself? For God’s sake, they were dead. They were dead when I got here.”
She pushed out of her chair as she spat out the words, and the anger so alive on her face pushed her to whirl around the room. “What the hell is going on? What the hell is this?”
“Why did you come here tonight, Reva?”
“To confront them, to shout and yell and maybe to knee Blair in the balls. To slap Felicity in that gorgeous, lying face. To break something and create one hell of an ugly scene.”
“Why tonight?”
“Because I only found out tonight, goddamn it.”
“How? How did you find out?”
Reva stopped, stared at Eve as if trying to understand some odd, half-remembered language. “The package. Oh Jesus, the photographs and the receipts. There was a package delivered to my house. I was already in bed. It was early, just after eleven, but I was bored and went to bed. I heard the bell from the gate. It irritated me. I couldn’t think who’d be coming by at eleven, but
I went down. There was a package left at the gate. I went out and got it.”
“Did you see anyone?”
“No. Just the package, and being a suspicious sort, I ran a scanner over it. I didn’t expect a boomer,” she said with a wry smile, “but, it’s habit. I got the all-clear and brought it in. I thought it was from Blair. An I-already-miss-you present. He did that sort of thing—silly, romantic . . .”
She trailed off, struggled as her eyes went shiny with tears. “I just figured it was from him, and I opened it up. There were photographs, a lot of surveillance-type shots of Blair with Felicity. Intimate, unmistakable sort of photos of the two of them, and copies of receipts from hotels and restaurants. Shit.”
She pressed her fingers to her lips. “Receipts for jewelry and lingerie he’d bought—and not for me. All from an account I didn’t know he had. And there were two discs—one of ’link calls between them, one of e-mail text they’d exchanged. Love calls, love letters—very intimate and graphic.”
“There was nothing to indicate who’d send these things to you.”
“No, and I didn’t look or even wonder at the time. I was too shocked and angry and hurt. The last transmission on the disc was the two of them talking about how they were going to have two days together, right here in her place while I thought he was out of town. They laughed at me,” she murmured. “Had a good laugh over how oblivious I was to what was going on right under my nose. Some security expert who couldn’t even keep tabs on her own husband.”
She sat again, heavily. “This doesn’t make sense. It’s just crazy. Who would kill them, and set me up to take the fall?”
“Where’s the package?” Eve asked her.
“In my ride. I brought it with me in case I softened up on the way over, though there wasn’t much chance of it. It’s in the passenger seat where I could see it.”