Glory in Death - J. D. Robb [95]
“I’m not going to pass it on to Nadine Furst for broadcast. I’m just going to review it. Right now.” She dashed inside while he swore and ran after her.
She walked into her office at nine A.M. sharp with a spring to her step. Her eyes were clear and unshadowed, her system toned and her shoulders free of tension. She was all but humming.
“Somebody got lucky,” Feeney said mournfully and kept his feet planted on her desk. “Roarke’s back on planet, I take it.”
“I got a good night’s sleep,” she retorted and shoved his feet aside.
He grunted. “Be grateful, ’cause you’re not going to find much peace today. Lab report’s in. The fucking knife doesn’t match.”
Her sunny mood vanished. “What do you mean, the knife doesn’t match?”
“The blade’s too thick. A centimeter. Might as well be a meter, goddamn it.”
“That could be the angle of the wounds, the thrust of the blow.” Mexico vanished like a bubble of air. Thinking fast, she began to pace. “What about the blood?”
“They managed to scrape off enough to get type, DNA.” His already gloomy face sagged. “It matches our boy. It’s David Angelini’s blood, Dallas. Lab says it’s old, six months minimum. From the fibers they got, it looks like he used it to open packages, probably nicked himself somewhere along the line. It’s not our weapon.”
“Screw it.” She heaved a breath, refused to be discouraged. “If he had one knife, he could have had two. We’ll wait to hear from the other sweepers.” Taking a moment, she scrubbed her face with her hands. “Listen to me, Feeney, if we go with Marco’s confession as bogus, we have to ask why. He’s not a crank or a loony calling in trying to take credit. He’s saving his son’s ass is what he’s doing. So we work on him, and we work hard. I’ll bring him in to interview, try to crack him.”
“I’m with you there.”
“I’ve got a session with Mira in a couple hours. We’ll just let our main boy stew for awhile.”
“While we pray one of the teams turns up something.”
“Praying can’t hurt. Here’s the big one, Feeney, our boy’s lawyers get a hold of Marco’s confession, it’s going to corrupt the hearing on the minor charges. We’ll whistle for an indictment.”
“With that, and without physical evidence, he’s going back out, Dallas.”
“Yeah. Son of a bitch.”
Marco Angelini was like a boulder cemented to concrete. He wasn’t going to budge. Two hours of intense interrogation didn’t shake his story. Though, Eve consoled herself, he hadn’t shored up any of the holes in it, either. At the moment, she had little choice but to pin her hopes on Mira’s report.
“I can tell you,” Mira said in her usual unruffled fashion, “that David Angelini is a troubled young man with a highly developed sense of self-indulgence and protection.”
“Tell me he’s capable of slicing his mother’s throat.”
“Ah.” Mira sat back and folded her neat hands. “What I can tell you is, in my opinion, he is more capable of running from trouble than confronting it, on any level. When combining and averaging his placements on the Murdock-Lowell and the Synergy Evaluations—”
“Can we skip over the psych buzz, Doctor? I can read that in the report.”
“All right.” Mira shifted away from the screen where she had been about to bring up the evaluations. “We’ll keep this in simple terms for the time being. Your man is a liar, one who convinces himself with little effort that his lies are truth in order to maintain his self-esteem. He requires good opinion, even praise, and is accustomed to having it. And having his own way.”
“And if he doesn’t get his own way?”
“He casts blame elsewhere. It is not his fault, nor his responsibility. His world is insular, Lieutenant, comprised for the most part of himself alone. He considers himself successful and talented, and when he fails, it’s because someone else made a mistake. He gambles because he doesn’t believe he can lose, and he enjoys the thrill of risk. He loses because he believes himself above the game.”
“How would he react at the risk of having