“You’d win that bet. It has to be Italian. The last interviews were in an Italian restaurant and it smelled like heaven coated in red sauce.”
“I can take care of that. Pour yourself a glass of that wine,” he advised as he eased back. “It’s exceptional. Then you can tell me about it while we eat.”
“ ‘We’? Didn’t you eat already?”
“I did some work, I did some reading. It’s not that late,” he added and started toward the kitchen. “Especially for an Italian meal.”
She poured the wine. He was right, as usual. Exceptional. And while he programmed the meal, she started on her murder board.
“Your victim?” He glanced at the ID shot on the board as he carried domed plates to the table by the window. “She was lovely.”
“Yeah. An actress—theater—doubled as a waitress at Broadway Babies.”
“Ah, the place where they sing while they dish up the pasta.” He went back into the kitchen, came out with salad, bread.
“That’s the one. Weird, but people sure looked happy.”
He glanced back at the board after he set the rest on the table. “Psycho? Was she hacked to death in the shower?”
“No, but that’s what she was watching when somebody jabbed a thin, sharp blade into the base of her skull. That smells really good.”
She stepped over. She could work her way through a salad if the reward was pasta.
“One of the vid palaces in Times Square,” she said as she sat. “Early evening show in the classic vid theater. Her name was Chanel Rylan.”
And she told him of murder and misery while they ate.
He listened, with little comment, until Eve cleared the salad bowls and he lifted the domes on one of his wife’s personal favorites. Spaghetti and meatballs.
As he knew her body language intimately, he noted she relaxed by a few degrees even before she wound the first forkful of pasta.
“Your conclusion would be a target-specific victim, with the emergency call to the friend the cap on that stone.”
“Bogus emergency,” Eve said with a mouthful of pasta. “Pretty exquisite timing.”
“It is.” Watching her relax with the meal made him glad he’d waited for her. “And the choice of that timing. The shower scene—the shocker, the murder of what the unsuspecting audience believes is the central character—thirty minutes into the vid. That forty-five seconds of stunning violence.”
“How do you know that?” She poked her fork in the air before stabbing a meatball. “Thirty minutes in, forty-five seconds.”
“It’s one of those things you pick up. I have no doubt that in the single viewing you had of the vid with me a year or so ago, your cop brain would have estimated that timing very precisely.”
“You’re not a cop, as you like to remind me.”
“Happily. But I live with one, and would make another wager. She’s already concluding the purpose of that exquisite timing.”
“Rich guy always making sure bets.” She ate more pasta. “Forty-five second
s, during which anybody who had an ass in a chair would be completely focused on the screen. Or have their hand slapped over their eyes, like Peabody on her first viewing. The timing, the method say target specific. The victim herself …” With a shake of her head, Eve picked up her wine.
“Tell me about her.”
“Happy, hardworking, talented. Three of the top words her friend, her parents, her employer, her coworkers all used to describe her. Sexually she batted for both teams, but didn’t take the game too seriously. The only long-term ex moved to Canada years ago—career deal. No big drama, according to her friend, and he’d have no motive to come back and stab her to death.”
“But you’ll look at him.”
“You’ve got to look. She was up for a part—a bigger one than usual—so I’ll look at whoever else is up for it.”
He knew her—the tone, the body language, the look in those cop’s eyes. “But?”