“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. Feeding 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.”
“He’s desperate, and he’s pissed, and he overthinks. He’s so worried about covering his ass, he keeps exposing it. He needs to stay dead, needs to collect his fee. Hard to do both. Killing Powell and destroying the body identified as his own was stupid. It prevents positive ID, but it also turns the trail around and heads it right back at him. He’s the only one who’d want that evidence destroyed.”
“Then he tries to take you out.”
“Like I said, he’s pissed. And he’s desperate. And you know what he is, under all this espionage, artsy, woman-sniffing bullshit, Peabody? He’s a screw-up. The kind that keeps making bigger, splashier mistakes to cover up the last one. He thinks he’s a stone-cold killer, but he’s a selfish, spoiled little boy playing-what’s that guy’s name-James Bond-then having a tantrum when he doesn’t quite pull it off.”
“He may not be stone-cold, but he’s killed four people, knocked you around pretty good, and put an assistant director of the HSO in the hospital.”
“I didn’t say he wasn’t dangerous. Kids having temper tantrums are pretty damn dangerous. Scare the hell out of me.”
“So, according to your theory, we have a cranky, immature, HSO-trained killer.”
“Pretty much.”
Peabody blew out a breath that fluttered her ruler-straight bangs. “That is pretty scary. How do we catch him?”
“Working on that.” Eve started to prop her feet on the desk, had the twinge of revolting muscles shoot straight through her body. “Shit.”
“You’d better work on those bruises.”
“I don’t have bruises on my brain. I can still think. Let’s get the rest of the team in here, civilians included, and kick this ball around.”
“You want Ewing in on this?”
“She was married to him for two years. It might have been a convenience to him, but she still would’ve learned something about him. Habits, fantasies, hangouts. If Sparrow lives, regains consciousness, and opts to share information on Bissel, that may help, but right now, Reva Ewing’s our best source.”
“You’re going to tell her that the husband she was accused of murdering is not only alive, in your opinion, but is the one who set her up?”
“If she can’t deal with it, she’s no help and we’re no worse off. Let’s see if she inherited any of her mother’s spine.”
Feeney came in muttering figures and command codes into a PPC. His chin was stubbled with ginger and gray and the bags under his eyes could’ve held a week’s marketing for a family of three-but there was a gleam in them.
“Bad time to interrupt, kid,” he said to Eve. “We’re on the verge.”
“There’s another prong to this investigation, and that may be on the verge, too. Where are the others?”
“Roarke and Tokimoto are finishing up running a series. Don’t want to walk away in the middle of that, not after what it’s taken to get there. We got one of Kade’s units as clean as it’s going to get. McNab and Ewing are just about done reinstalling some…”
He stopped, pursed his lips as he finally lifted his head and took a good look at her. “Said you got slammed around. They meant it. Ought to put some ice on that eye.”
“Is it going black? Damn it.” She pressed her fingers gingerly along the top edge of her cheekbone, and felt the bolt of pain right down to her toes. “I took a blocker. Isn’t that enough?”
Peabody came out of the kitchen with an ice bandage. “If you let me put this on it, it’ll sting a minute, and look stupid. But it’ll decrease the bruising and swelling. You may not end up with a full shiner.”
“Just do it, don’t talk about it.”
Eve set her teeth while Peabody fixed the bandage. The sting drowned out the throbbing, which wasn’t that much of an improvement.