Page 37 of Devoted in Death

“Not even close.” She blew out a breath, picked up her wine. “I’m going to run probabilities, using the current route, working back from the first known.”

“I can do that for you, and faster. You don’t have any financial data searches to entertain me. The geography and navigation should.”

“It’s all yours, ace. Thanks.” She cut a small bite of pork. “This couple, they came from somewhere, that’s another key. They grew up with parents or fosters, had some education, some source of income. And, given their profile, one or both of them probably has a sheet and some history of violent behavior.”

“History together?” Roarke wondered. “That bond.”

“I don’t see long-term history, unless we find the killings go back years. And I don’t see them getting away with this for years before it hit the radar. They’re not kids,” she continued. “People tend to notice kids. Yeah, I saw a couple of kids hanging out around there. Why aren’t they in school? What trouble are they getting into? Plus anybody skewing teens, early twenties, isn’t likely to have the control needed to target a vic, have a place to hold one, wipe everything. Probably not out of their thirties, either.”

“And why is that?”

“How do you squash these impulses that long? They’re in there—they just needed the right trigger. Everybody’s capable of killing, given the right circumstances. Not everybody’s capable of torture. Add the heart in again? Not everyone’s capable of enjoying or romanticizing torture.”

She nudged her plate aside. “Would you kill for me?”

“I would, yes, of course.”

“Jesus, don’t say it without even a second’s thought.”

“I don’t need a second’s thought. Consider who we are, Eve. We’re both capable of killing, and have done so. But there’s... criteria. Would I kill to protect you, to save your life, to save you from harm? Without hesitation. Would I kill because you said, Do me a favor, I’d like this person dead? I don’t have to give it a second thought as you’d never say that, want that, ask that.”

“If I did.”

He polished off his wine. “I think we’d have to have quite a conversation.”

“Okay.” That satisfied her. “Would you torture someone for me?”

His brow lifted. “We are stepping into odd territories. All right, then, I’ll follow you in. To save or protect you from harm, if I believed torture—of any nature—would accomplish that, then, yes, I would. Would I—or you in the same circumstances—find that increased sexual passion, no. Deliberately causing pain is an ugly business. We’ve both been used physically, emotionally, and know how ugly it is.”

“That’s right. Some people who’ve experienced abuse become abusers. So I need to look at that, too. Somebody hurt her—a parent, authority figure, spouse, partner. Now you’re the one in control. You’re the one who gets to deliver the pain and the fear.”

She rose, wandered to the board. “But not for payback, not right out anyway. Because it feels good. Who knew how good, how exciting it could be to cause the pain, the fear? And now that you know it, you can’t stop.”

“An addiction.”

“Exactly. And again that’s why it didn’t start here.” She tapped the board, the image of the first victim. “This wasn’t the first taste. They knew what it was going to feel like here. The first? That was a surprise. Maybe what you’d call a revelation. I know what they are. I’ve got a pretty good sense of what they are already. But who, and why. I can’t see it.”

He rose as well, came over to stand behind her. He laid his hands on her shoulders, brushed his lips over the top of her head. “And it worries you because you know there’ll be another.”

“New York’s the biggest urban area they’ve been in, that we know. And when I look at the map, the route, that holds true. Here, they can pick and choose like nowhere else. That has to be exciting. And motivating.”

“So they’ll want another quickly.”

“If they don’t already have one, they will within another day. I’d be surprised if it took any longer. Two days to play with the victim before the kill. The last two, Kuper and the vic in New Jersey, barely a week between the grabs. Addicts always need more and quicker. It won’t be long before they need another.”

“As who they are and when they started are key, I’ll work up your probabilities.”

“Thanks. You put the meal on the table, I’ll take care of the debris.”

“Fair enough.” He tipped her face up to his a moment, tapped the shallow dent in her chin. “All and all—considering who we are—it’s good to be home.”

When he went into his adjoining office she carted the dishes into the kitchen, stacked them in the washer. They made a good team, she thought, worked well together—the cop and the (former) criminal. The ridiculously rich man with his roots in the alleyways of Dublin, and the woman who’d squeezed out a life on a cop’s salary who’d grown up in the system after the nightmare of her first eight years.

Few—including herself—would have predicted they’d match and mesh as they had. That they’d become all to each other.

She doubted the killers she sought seemed so ill-matched on the surface. People noticed such things, too. They looked right together, she believed. Looked as people expected a couple to look.

And they sure as hell worked well together.