“Bet you’re not.”
He only smiled. “You can search me later. Clever little thing there. Where’d you get it?”
“Souvenir from Peabody and McNab.” She cocked it. It’s small, but it’s mean. Just like me.
He laughed and stepped forward to take a better look at it. “There was this screen show-television,” he corrected, “as it was about a century ago. What was it? In any case, it was in the American West, and the hero was a mercenary-a gun for hire. He carried one of these.”
“I hope he didn’t charge much.”
“He had the full-size as well, but this was his-”
“Clutch piece.”
“There you are. We’ll have to watch some of them the next time we’re free. Now, Lieutenant, as Baxter would say, we’re gone.”
“Okay, okay.” She gathered up files. “You drive. I’ll mull.”
“You’re looking at his three friends, the partners,” Roarke said as they worked their way down to garage level.
“Easiest access to his personal space, most to gain, and most intimately acquainted with the vic’s habits, routines, the business itself, and the game at the center of it.”
“You’re leaning toward one.” With a regret and grim acceptance he thought they shared, they wormed their way onto a jammed elevator. “One more than the others,” he continued, jockeying for room in a space that smelled of boiled onions and stale sweat. “Which?”
“I’m still structuring the theory. Besides that’s not how the game’s played.” She shoved her way off again. “Which would you pick?”
“It’s difficult for me to think of any of them as capable of this. I don’t know them especially well, but what I do know just rejects the idea.”
“Why, particularly?”
“I suppose, in part, because of the way they came up together. Longtime mates.”
“And you had yours,” Eve commented. “In Dublin.”
“I did, and while none of us would’ve been above a bit of a cheat, as that’s a kind of game as well, we’d never have hurt each other, or caused hurt.”
“Yeah, it’s one of the things I’ve been thinking about today. Friendships, long-term, short-term, what clicks and why. Friendships can enhance, right, complete in a way. But they can also erode and scrape, and simmer under the surface. Add money or sex or ego to the mix, and it can boil right over.”
“I’m hardly one to look at things through rose-colored glasses, or for that matter to doubt your instincts.” Their footsteps echoed as they crossed the garage. “Still, I’ve watched the four of them together, listened to them, and listened to Bart speak of them.”
“You know, I bet when the pizza lady first hooked up with the husband she wanted dead, she had really nice things to say about him, too.”
He had to shake his head, half in amusement, half in resignation. “Back to that, are we?”
“I’m saying relationships change, people change, or sometimes an event, an action, or a series of them just pisses somebody off.” She slid into the passenger’s seat when they reached her vehicle, waited until he’d taken the wheel. “Play the game. Let’s call it Deduction. If you had to choose which murdered or arranged to have murdered the friend and partner, which? And why?”
“All right.” If nothing else, he thought, it might help him reach some level of objectivity. “First, if one of them did the murder, Cill doesn’t have the muscle for it.”
“Well, you might be wrong there. She, like the others, practices martial arts, combat fighting, street defense, weaponry, and so on regularly. In fact, she has a black belt in karate, and she’s working on one in tae kwon do.”
“Ah, well. It doesn’t pay to underestimate small packages.”
“She’d be agile, quick, stronger than she looks. And the weapon itself may have given her more heft. Being a female with a small build doesn’t rule her out.”
“The blow came from above, but I suppose it’s possible she stood on something, or used a leap or jump to give her height and momentum.”
“Now you’re thinking.”
He shot her a mild look. “I can’t see it, but will agree for now she can’t be ruled out. Var. The same stipulations apply on the physicality. He’d be as capable of it physically as the others-I assume.”
“Correct.”
“Otherwise, from my outside observer’s view, Var and Bart were like two parts of the same whole.”
“Some people get tired of being a part, and want the whole.”
“Such a cop,” he murmured. “They both enjoyed digging down into the business side of things, digging into the nuts and bolts of sales, distribution, marketing as much as the creative side. They enjoyed having each other for the checks and balances, fine-tuning each other’s concepts when it came to promotion, expansion, that sort of thing. Bart told me once when they met Var, it was like the last piece clicked on. I know what that’s like.”
Eve stretched out her legs, comfortable with the way he wound through irritable traffic. “And if they disagreed?”
“I can’t tell you how they worked things out as I wasn’t involved. But I never heard Bart express any sort of frustration on that score.”
“We’ll agree the victim was loyal and content with the status quo. That doesn’t mean Var, or any of the others were. Are.”
“There are considerably less messy ways of dissolving a partnership or changing the status quo.”
Her smile edged toward smirk. “Easier ways to get rid of a husband than cracking him open with a pipe wrench.”
“I believe I’m going to see that any tools we might have around the house are locked away. On to Benny. He’d be, to my mind, the most intellectual of the four. He enjoys spending his hours in research, sifting through details, theorizing about the underlying meaning of a game, and the reasons they’re played. He’ll research myths, real crimes, historical figures, wars and battles and strategies to add other layers to a game.”
“Good with details, strategy, and the art of combat.”
“You don’t seriously believe-”
“Just pointing out the facts.” She pulled out her PPC, added something to her notes. “When it comes down to it, they all had the means and the motive, and all could easily have arranged the opportunity. In fact, they all, or any two of them, might have planned it out together.”
“To what end, really?” Roarke asked. “U-Play will likely get a quick boost in sales from curiosity and the public’s thirst for scandal. But without Bart, they’re going to be set back on their heels, at least for a bit. He was, and this is from a business standpoint, essentially the glue that held those four parts together into a productive whole.”
Nodding, she keyed in more, spared Roarke an absent glance. “I agree with that. But that doesn’t account for ego, and again, that deep, passionate fury that only people who are intimate in some way can feel for one another. These four were intimate.”
“Family.”
“Yeah. And nobody kills more often than family.”
“In fact I believe I’ll have the tools taken out of the house altogether.” He swung over to grab a parking spot, and watched her frown.
“What’s this? I thought we were going home.”
“I see for once you were caught up enough in a game not to pay attention to your surroundings. I didn’t say home,” he reminded her. “I said dinner.”
“I haven’t updated my reports, or finished with the analysis of the runs. I have to run a full series of-”
As he stepped out and shut the door of the car, that was all he heard. He came around, opened her door. “Come on, Lieutenant, put it away for an hour. It’s a pretty night. Time for a little walk and a meal.”
“See?” She poked a finger in his chest when she got out. “This is why people in intimate relationships bash each other over the head.”
He took her hand, kissed it. “An hour shouldn’t kill either one of us.”
“I have to go through the game scenarios on the disc.”
“I’ve eliminated half of them. You’re looking for one that uses a sword. There’s only the two. Quest-1 and Usurper. The others involve more modern weaponry.”