Page 35 of Devoted in Death

“Yeah.” She stepped in so the door could close behind her. “I’ve been learning how to breathe. I thought I already knew, being alive and all, but apparently not. Did you know you can breathe into your toes? I think I did it. It sounds like bullshit, but I think I breathed into my toes.”

He laughed and, putting his hands on her hips, drew her to him. “You were the fish, not the pebble. I reviewed the first couple of lessons.” His hands slid around her waist. “Here’s what I missed today.” He pulled back, kissed her—slow and deep, like breathing. “I got used to being able to do that at any time of the day or night.”

“Back to reality. Detroit?”

“Just a few bolts that needed tightening, and my hand on the spanner—wrench,” he corrected. “And you, I hear, a murder already?”

“They probably had a few while I was gone, too.”

“Undoubtedly. Dorian Kuper, the cellist.”

“Did you know him?”

With a shake of his head, Roarke stepped back, took off his shirt. “By reputation only, and I’ve heard him play. How was he killed? The reports were very thin—deliberately so, I assume.”

“He was tortured for two days before they—and it was they—sliced open his belly and let him bleed out.”

Roarke pulled on a gray sweater, and made Eve wonder why the color had looked so dull and stiff in Earnestina’s apartment, and was so rich and soft over Roarke’s torso.

“Back to reality, indeed,” Roarke murmured. “‘They’? You’ve identified his killers?”

“Not yet, but there are two, and he wasn’t their first. He was a long way from their first.”

“It sounds as if we should have a glass of wine, a meal, and you should tell me.”

“I could use a glass of wine. Sexual sadists,” she began as they walked out of the bedroom together. “With a twist.”

She ran it through for him as she would for another cop. He might’ve winced at the comparison, but he could—and did—think like a cop.

While she arranged her board, he put a meal together. Which meant she wouldn’t get pizza, but compromises had to be made. It was in the marriage rules. He certainly made them, she thought, just by having the meal in her office at the little table with murder and death on full display.

“You believe New York was their destination.”

“Long-term, can’t say, but you’ve only got to look at the map, see their kill spots. It’s not an arrow from point to point, but any time they veered off, then shifted right back—north and east.”

She took the wine he offered, gestured with it to the map. “Detours, that’s how it looks to me. Maybe you need fuel for your vehicle, for yourselves, or there’s some attraction, or someone you know, so you jog off a few miles.”

“But come back,” he said, nodding, “to that same direction. What do they take from their victims?”

See, she thought. Cop thinking. “Cash and jewelry if there is any. A vehicle, or in some cases parts from a vehicle. Most—not all—of their known victims run in the high-risk area. LCs, the homeless, but they target others. Often remote areas. A woman in her seventies living alone. They used her residence as their torture/kill zone, took her easy-to-transport valuables. A guy in his twenties heading home on the back roads, late—from a bar. They used some vacant cabin for him.”

“And no trace?”

“They wipe it clean—maybe they seal up, maybe the forensics have been sloppy.” Too many to know, she thought, too many to pick over, step-by-step. “I can’t say for certain. But at least one of them’s organized enough to be careful. They haven’t found all the kill zones. The killers don’t leave the body where they work as a rule. They use dump sites, and generally a fair distance off. And plastic tarps.”

“So, someone might think they’ve had a break-in, but without the blood, the gore, not report a possible murder.”

“Exactly. And by the time they’ve put some of it together, the crime scene’s been thoroughly compromised. Lucky,” she mused. “Some of it’s just luck. Organized, careful, but lucky.”

“Come eat.” He took her hand, drew her over to the table.

The square white plates held a line of pork medallions drizzled with some sort of sauce, a golden huddle of roasted potatoes flecked with herbs, and a colorful medley of winter vegetables.

He had a much more creative hand with the AutoChef, she considered, than she ever would.

“The heart, the initials,” he began.

“Their signature.”