“I skim ten off mine. I don’t know why. It’s a compulsion.”
“We expect to see Blair Bissel, so we see him. Why should we question the identity of the victim?”
“But why would he go along with it? Carter? There wasn’t any sign of force, no ligatures. How do you induce somebody to undergo surgery, change appearance?”
“Could’ve paid him. Money, sex—probably both. Let’s screw with big brother and screw his girlfriend while we’re at it. No love lost between the brothers.”
“There’s a wide gulf between no love lost and deliberately, coldly murdering your brother and your lover. If Kade was helping to set Carter up—”
“Then Blair planned to do her all along. Yeah, that’s what I think. You want to fake your own death, do it in a big way. A vicious way that tosses the blood in your wife’s face, at least initially, and gets rid of the monkey on your back and one of the people who knew you intimately enough to muck the deal. They’ll say you were a cheat, a liar, a bastard. What do you care, you’re dead.”
“I have to think about this.” Peabody pushed away from the desk to pace. “With this theory, Blair and Kade did a number on Carter outside the HSO directive.”
“Maybe they started inside, probably did, but I figure they started coloring outside the lines at some point.”
“As a solution for the blackmail.”
“Partially. It’s money, it’s adventure, it’s risk. All those fit their profiles. But they had bigger goals. Keep going.”
“Crap. Blair was a liaison, doubling under HSO directive, as a liaison for Doomsday. F
eeding them selected data for payment, and establishing himself as a source, a traitor, a free agent. Part of this cloak was his marriage to Reva Ewing, blueprinted by the HSO.”
“Corporate espionage on one hand—a lucrative game, and with so much privatization of intel- and data-gathering sources over the last couple of decades, the HSO has to compete with civilian companies for revenue.”
“Like Securecomp.”
“Like that, and the dozens of others on and off planet they arranged for Blair to plant his listening posts. And think about this, Peabody. You always have to have a backup plan. You require plausible deniability. What contingency plan do you suppose the architects of this blueprint drew up in the event one of the sculptures was detected?”
Peabody stopped in front of the screens, studied the faces. “Blair Bissel, fall guy.”
“You bet, and by association, Reva would fall with him and Securecomp is compromised. It could—and I think would—have been said that they’d worked together. After all, they were husband and wife.”
“So they were building a frame after all.”
“Contingencies. Blair’d been in the organization long enough for this to occur to him. And if not him, it occurred to Kade.”
“So he took steps to protect himself?” Peabody shook her head. “Really big steps.”
“Not only protection. Factor in the satisfaction of getting back at his blackmailing brother, Homeland—the people, the government who’d use and discard him if things went wrong. Then add a big shit-pile of money.”
“From the technos? He makes a deal with them. Unauthorized information. Something big.”
“He’s the bridge between points A and B, and he knows more about both points, in this aspect, than either point knows of each other. Because he’s the one passing the data. He’s in control of that. Heady stuff for a guy with his personality profile. Why not take more? More control, more power, more money, and get out? Only one way out. Go rogue, and they’ll hunt you down. Both sides.”
“But they won’t hunt if they think you’re dead.”
“There you go. Add to that the HSO busy trying to cover up the mess you left behind, the cops busy investigating a prime suspect handed them on a platter, and the death of the only person who had knowledge of your plans, and you’re in the cozy part of fat city.”
“What went wrong? Why isn’t he sitting in the surf on some island paradise, slurping rum punch and counting his money?”
“Maybe the payment wasn’t made. You don’t want to go putting all your eggs in a terrorist’s basket. They often end up scrambled. But he’d been trained well enough to have a contingency plan of his own. He gave McCoy something. He had to go back for it. She had to die for it.”
“And meanwhile, the primary isn’t buying his served-on-a-platter prime suspect. With the cops taking a closer look, so’s everyone else.”
“Yeah, things got screwed for him, almost from the start. Roarke’s into this Yeats guy who’s an old, dead Irish writer. He said something about things falling apart. The center doesn’t hold. The center hasn’t been holding for Blair Bissel.”
“And it’s been falling apart since you walked into the first crime scene.”