The In Death Collection Books 26-29 - J.D. Robb [343]
“Love, lust, or gain?”
“If gain, or only gain, why risk the connection, the closeness? To continue in the relationship for more than a year, to go to the trouble to hide it from her colleagues, her family? Lust can start the fire, but it rarely keeps it burning for long. It may have been all three.”
“The attraction first—the lust. Hot guy, interesting guy, classy. Dangerous. The good girl gets a tingle from the bad boy.”
Mira smiled a little. “Are you projecting?”
“I didn’t get a tingle. I got hit with a brick. Yeah, I see some parallels, but the way she played it . . .”
“Wasn’t the way you did,” Mira finished, “or ever would. It’s possible the clandestine nature added some excitement. Everything I’ve studied about it indicates she followed the rules. Except here. That’s another form of excitement.”
“So she leads with lust, and there’s all those tingles—the excitement. Come away with me to Paris tonight. Hotdog. And yeah, she jumped through a lot of hoops to be with him,” Eve considered, “and to stay with him, so love—or what she thought was—had to play a part. She’s in love, and he says, maybe you could do me this little favor. Not a big thing. Stars in the eyes, you do the little favor. What does it hurt?”
“And the next favor’s bigger. You’re in deeper.” Mira nodded. “It’s a logical pattern.”
“Maybe he starts to ask too much. There’s more risk for a woman not wired for them, and it starts going south. It went south, according to my source, right around the time Ricker went down. She sees what happened, wonders if that’s going to happen to the son and to her.”
“It changes the pattern,” Mira agreed. “Alex is now, with his father’s defeat, in charge.”
“She can’t handle it, breaks it off. Puts distance between them. Clean slate, that’s what she told Morris. Fresh start. Alex Ricker loses a lover and a resource. Bad break for him.”
“His father is a violent, unstable man. A known criminal, a man of power and no conscience. His mother died when he was very young. Accident, suicide.”
“Or murder,” Eve added.
“Yes, or. While he was given a superior education, and raised with the advantages money can buy, he was placed in confined institutions, regimented schools. As his only acknowledged blood kin—as only son—Max Ricker would have expected a great deal. Demanded it. He’d be expected to excel, and expected—when his father was ready—to step up and take the helm. He, too, from what I’ve studied, is a careful man. While he may be in the business of risk, he’s certainly minimized it by covering himself with layers of protection. His public persona is much more polished than his father’s. He has, with careful, even meticulous PR, evaded the scandal of having a parent convicted of all the crimes Max Ricker was convicted of.”
“It stings him anyway.”
“Oh, it would have to. His only surviving parent, and the one who saw to his needs for most of his life, is locked away. Much of his wealth confiscated. And as you said, his father’s arrest, the repercussion of that, closely coincided with the breakup with Detective Coltraine.”
“He had a real bad week, I bet.”
“He’d have to be angry, feel betrayed, deserted. Again. His mother left him, now his father’s taken, and the woman he loves—or is intimately connected to—leaves.”
“A careful man could bide his time.”
“Yes, a careful man could. But—”
“Damn it. I knew it.”
“There’s no intimacy in the killing. No passion, no retribution. It’s cold, calculated, distant. She belonged to him, in a very real sense. Either just as a woman or as a woman and as a resource. If that sense of betrayal and that anger—even cold and controlled—led him to kill her, I’d expect to see some sign.”
Mira sipped her tea, shifted. “Could he resist hurting her, taking more time? Certainly a