Though Eve didn’t respond, she thought: Yeah, you’re smart, and you’re right.
“Dead,” Missy Lee continued, “somebody’s going to find her dirty data, and then, well. Boom.
“Jenny’s my sister. She’s my father’s daughter in every way but, possibly, DNA. He loves her, she loves him. It would break her heart to find out she might have come from someone else. Someone like that fucktoid my mother went off with. Paying to make sure she didn’t have to face that? It was nothing.”
“How did you pay her?”
“Cash. She’d set the amount. Seven, eight, nine thousand, dependin
g, I don’t know, on her mood maybe. I’d meet her at a bistro downtown or she’d tell me to just bring it to that night’s event if we were both attending one. I’ve never been in the bar where she was whiffed. Not legal.” She lifted her glass, smiled. “Can’t buy a drink yet, and drinking’s bad for the image. Anyway, I’m no wild child. I’m a working actor, and I intend to stay one.”
She set down the glass, looked straight into Eve’s eyes. “Don’t screw with my sister.”
“I don’t intend to. Did your father know you were paying?”
“Are you kidding?” She let out an easy laugh, an indulgent one, like an adult about a child’s antics. “No way. I’m in charge of my own money, and my own life, and my own choices. I love him, okay, but he has weak spots. You can’t deal with someone like Larinda Mars when you have weak spots. He’d tell my mother—he couldn’t stop himself—and she’d use that as an excuse to find a new supplier.”
Missy Lee circled her finger in the air. “And around and around we go.”
“You didn’t tell anyone.”
“I’ve been with Marsh for almost a year now. I know how to keep secrets.”
“Did she ever ask you to meet her anywhere private? Her place, or another?”
“No.” Her lips pursed in thought. “Weird, right? Always a public place. Maybe she got off knowing it was just a little humiliating that way. Or maybe she figured it kept me from punching her. Not just me,” Missy Lee said. “I wasn’t the only one, was I?”
Eve rose. “I know how to keep secrets, too.”
“That’s the perfect answer.” Missy Lee got to her feet, held out a hand. “I’m trusting you. I’m pretty good at figuring out who I can trust, and haven’t been burned yet.” Now she held out a hand to Roarke. “I’m trusting you.”
“I imagine your sister loves you very much,” Roarke said.
“She does. And I’m never going to let her down.”
16
On the way down to the lobby, Eve pulled out her PPC.
“You don’t suspect her,” Roarke said.
“I think the money didn’t matter to her—as it’s not going to have mattered to most of the marks. The threat, the invasion of privacy would have mattered more as time went by. But as time went by, I think she’d have had a sit-down with her sister. A few years down the line, then she’d have told Mars to stick it.”
As she spoke Eve scanned the screen on her handheld. “And I think she was telling us the truth. As she knows it.”
“Ah.”
“Yeah, so…” She let that settle as they stepped out of the elevator, moved outside. Picked it up again as they got into the car. “She believes her parents and her boyfriend don’t know anything about it. But her believing it doesn’t necessarily make it so.”
“Who are you running first?”
“The father. He’d be the most likely. If she gave us a clear picture of him, and it seemed to fit, he’s a protect-the-women sort. And he’s weak.”
“Those factors seem to contradict.”
“Only a man would think that straight off. He’s weak because he continues to take the wife back knowing she’s going to cycle again, put his kids—and it seems clear the younger sister is his kid in everything but, possibly, biology—through upheaval. He wants the wife, and puts that ahead of the welfare of his daughters. That’s weak.”
“It is, isn’t it? Love can make you so.”