With a half laugh, Roarke hooked his arm around her neck, reminding her of Blaine DeLano’s headlock of affection that afternoon.
It made her smile.
10
Roarke checked his incoming and found he had a couple of things to attend to after all. Eve programmed coffee, updated her board and book.
Took a few minutes to study Jefferson’s ID shot.
If life ran to the fair and the just, he’d be guilty of the murders, and she’d put him in a cage. But though he was, undoubtedly, guilty of being a bullying, abusive asshole currently training his son to be the same, if not worse, life didn’t run to the fair and just.
Without a lot of work.
Maybe one day
he’d cross a line, and she’d have a shot at him. But for now his picture graced her board only because she’d eliminated him as a suspect.
She went to her command center, poured coffee, checked her own incoming.
The report from Jenkinson and Reineke held a faint glimmer.
One of the LCs they’d reinterviewed remembered—maybe—she’d noticed a woman hanging around a time or two during Christmas week.
Remembered, she said, because it was damn fucking cold and pickings were slim. The penguin coat had sparked the possible memory more than the person inside it.
It looked warm, the statement read, but tragic lame, so she’d recognized it when she’d seen it again a few days later. And had called out to ask if the woman was looking to hustle or to party. If it was hustle, to get the fuck off her turf.
Both detectives deemed the sightings real, as they’d pinned down a bouncer at a sex club half a block away who’d noticed the same “ugly, dumpy coat.”
Neither disinterested witness could verify race, build, coloring.
Still, probability put the penguin coat stalking Rosie Kent since the end of December. The timing worked.
She plugged in the fan mail disc, winced at the number of communications calibrated. She did the math, dumped a third on Peabody, another third on Roarke, then settled down with her own.
She considered doing the first run on multiples, calculated the potential for any communication from the killer—if so—to have been sent under various names.
Very possible, and still, you had to start somewhere.
“Computer, calibrate and organize any and all multiple communications from the same individual.”
Acknowledged. Working …
In a fraction of the time it would have taken her clunker at Central, the computer finished the task.
“Okay, that’s not small potatoes, either. Why potatoes? Why not elephants or trucks? Computer, prioritize any and all communications from the same individual numbering five or more instances.”
She waited, nodded, then tackled the smaller batch.
In the middle of it, Roarke came in, ordered the fire on, as she’d forgotten.
“Sorry, just a little of this and a bit of that.”
“No problem.” She stopped long enough to look up when he poured his own coffee from the pot. “Not the irritating stuff?”
“No, that’s all well in hand again. And so now is the this and the that. You now own a small, ramshackle farm of just over sixteen acres in Nebraska.”
“Huh? What?”