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“I’ll have a talk with the guy with sticky fingers.” She rose, eating pizza as she paced. “It should be about money. It’s the logical motive. But it doesn’t feel like it’s about money. Why does she come back to New York and target a man she’s never met?”

“Maybe she had met him, or at least was planning to before she was interrupted nearly ten years ago.”

“He was married ten years ago,” Eve began, then paused to let it all sink in. “But maybe he was restless about the marriage even then. Maybe there are signs of that kind of dissatisfaction that a wife, a family, close friends don’t see. But an outsider, one who looks for discord might spot it. He could have been on her list as a possible, someone she was researching with the idea of luring him away from his wife and into a relationship, then marriage. He’d have been a real challenge to her because he’s basically a very decent, very honest man. Could she corrupt him?”

Considering, Eve turned back. “That would have appealed to her. We never pinned down how long she kept each of her targets in her sights. She may very well have been keeping Pettibone for a future mark, then she’s caught, tried, imprisoned. While she’s out of the picture, he divorces his wife, ends up with a fresh new wife. Maybe she killed him just because she never got the chance to play out her hand before.”

“If that theory holds, you’d have no link.”

“No, but I’d have a fucking motive. If she’s not killing for money, then she’s already got money, because she needs the lavish life. And maybe she killed just because she missed the rush. She had the money from the East Washington victim, but she hasn’t touched it. I checked on that. So she’s got other income and it’s been sitting waiting for a decade. I find it, I find her.”

“If I were stashing money away for a rainy day, it would be in numbered accounts, various institutions, various locations.” He washed down pizza with some excellent cabernet Sauvignon. “Both in and out of the country, both on and off planet. Not too much in any one pot,” he added when Eve frowned at him. “In that way, if you can’t easily or safely get to that particular pot, there’s always another.”

“It wouldn’t just be money. She liked stocks, bonds, that kind of thing. If you earmarked goodly chunks for the market, you couldn’t just sit back and let it ride for almost a decade. Could you?”

“Not if you had a brain cell still working. You’d need to keep an eye on things, shift funds, sell, buy, and so on. Or have someone you trusted to handle it.”

“She didn’t trust anyone. That tells me she found a way from prison to deal with it personally. That means transmissions, to and from, and they’re supposed to be monitored.”

“A bribe in the right hand would take care of that. Conservative investments, blue chip and so on, and she wouldn’t need much time to supervise her accounts. A few hours a week at most.”

“Feeney and I will have to find the hand she greased.”

“Do you plan to come home again in this century?” He angled his head. “Looking for a prison guard or inmate who’d be open to bribes shouldn’t take more than twenty, thirty years to pin down.”

“Have a little faith.” She licked pizza sauce from her thumb. “I’ll be home by dinnertime.”

“Two nights running? I’m going to mark my calendar.” When she only continued to frown, he shook his head. “What?”

“Nothing. I was just thinking.” She wandered back, pushed at another slice of pizza, decided against it.

Because he knew his woman, Roarke said nothing and waited her out.

“When I was interviewing Shelly Pettibone today, she was talking about her marriage. It came off like she still had a lot of feelings for him, even though he dumped her and married someone half her age, and with big tits. But it was more as if she were talking about a brother than a husband at this point. She said. . . Anyway, do you think the passion, the sex, the way it is with us is just going to mellow out and fade off after a while?”

“Bite your tongue.”

“I mean, people don’t end up on the floor of the shower all the time. And when that sort of