Secrets in Death

“It matters, Eve, that you came from monsters. Matters, because, coming from them, you chose to make yourself into a woman who hunts the monsters. Not for vengeance, as would surely have been my choice, but for justice. I built a house. You built a hero.” - Roarke to Eve, Secrets in Death

Secrets in Death
Book Number	45
Release Date	September 5, 2017
Publisher	St. Martin's Press
ISBN	978-1250123152
Publication order
Previous	Echoes in Death
Next	Dark in Death

Plot Summary

Lt. Eve Dallas must separate rumors from reality when a woman who traffics in other people’s secrets is silenced.

The chic Manhattan nightspot Du Vin is not the kind of place Eve Dallas would usually patronize, and it’s not the kind of bar where a lot of blood gets spilled. But that’s exactly what happens one cold February evening.

The mortally wounded woman is Larinda Mars, a self-described “social information reporter,” or as most people would call it, a professional gossip. As it turns out, she was keeping the most shocking stories quiet, for profitable use in her side business as a blackmailer. Setting her sights on rich, prominent marks, she’d find out what they most wanted to keep hidden and then bleed them dry. Now someone’s done the same to her, literally―with a knife to the brachial artery.

Eve didn’t like Larinda Mars. But she likes murder even less. To find justice for this victim, she’ll have to plunge into the dirty little secrets of all the people Larinda Mars victimized herself. But along the way, she may be exposed to some information she really didn’t want to know...

Spoiler warning! This article contains plot details about an upcoming episode.

Timeline

Story Date: mid-February, 2061

Day 1 – Tuesday

Chapter 1

• Eve is dreading her upcoming chore, but thinks it probably won’t kill her. Although “she’d rather engage in mortal combat in some downtown alleyway with a Zeused-up chemi-head than head for some fussy fern bar,” she puts on her big girl panties and takes off the snowflake hat Dennis Mira gave her in Concealed in Death (see Gifts#Concealed_in_Death). “A deal was a deal, and she’d run out of excuses.” The murder cop was going to have to deal with fancy drinks and small talk, and reminded herself that “drinks with Garnet DeWinter, fashion plate, forensic anthropologist, and mild irritant, couldn’t annoy or bore her to actual death.”
• A quick scan of Du Vin reveals gossip reporter (aka social information reporter) Larinda Mars, much too focused on her table companion to notice Eve, and she is led to DeWinter’s empty table, where she orders a red wine from one of Roarke’s vineyards. DeWinter returns to the table, telling Eve she expected a cancellation text from her, and adding that she’s surprised Eve hadn’t been there before given that Roarke owns the place. Eve points out that “if I hit every place Roarke owns, just in the city, I wouldn’t have time to do anything else.” DeWinter says it’s a favorite place of hers – close to work, beautiful décor, great people watching, and excellent service.
• DeWinter asks Eve why she doesn’t like her, stressing that she doesn’t need everybody to like her, and doesn’t even need to know why the people who don’t, don’t, but since she and Eve will continue to work together occasionally, she wants to know why. Eve asks her if she rehearsed her speech, DeWinter says no but she’s had a lot of time to think about it, and then continues by telling Eve she’s friendly with some of Eve’s very tight circle of friends, doesn’t expect to become besties with her, but wants to know what it is about her that irritates Eve so much.
• DeWinter says, “You’re not the type of person I’d look for, for a friend, being you’re rude more often than not, single-minded, and manage to be a hard-ass and a tight-ass at the same time.” Eve lets the tight-ass comment go and asks her, “Then what are we doing here?” DeWinter says, “You also inspire amazing and unquestionable loyalty, not only in those who work under you, but in your personal life. You have a man I respect and admire quite a bit madly in love with you.” Eve tells her, “Maybe he likes rude hard-asses.” DeWinter says, “He must. But I also know him to be a superior judge of character, a man who studies and sees the big picture. And I see that close circle of friends, the diversity of them. I’m a small-details-open-the-big-picture sort of person, so I’m curious.”
• DeWinter asks if it’s Morris, realizes it is, telling Eve he’s one of Eve’s, to which Eve replies, “Morris is his own man.” DeWinter calls Eve a tight-ass again, saying she and Morris are not bedmates. They aren’t drawn to each other that way. Eve says he’s still grieving Amaryllis. DeWinter says her daughter, Miranda, is the love of her life, and she’s not looking for Morris or anybody else to fill some void in her. She thinks Miranda helps Morris find more light and comfort, and she wanted to meet Eve at Bella’s birthday party, but Eve left too soon and by the time she came back, she and Miranda had left to work on a school project.
• Eve tells her, “I don’t know you, and what I do know I don’t really get. You strike me as a snob, and one with her own tight ass who’s plenty puffed up about all the letters after her name.” She’s enjoying getting under DeWinter’s skin until being told that she’s wearing six-thousand-dollar boots, although she does point out that “The difference is, I wouldn’t have a clue how much your boots cost, only that nobody with any sense would wear them when they’re going to stand on them for hours at a time,” adding that how DeWinter dresses is systemic, and that she’s too quick to preen in front of a camera, finally throwing in, “You stole a dog, because it was being neglected and abused, and nobody else would do anything about it. You kept the dog. I believe in serve and protect, and when somebody – even a dog – is being abused, somebody needs to stop it. You did. That’s a point for you.” She also says Morris is steadier because of her.
• They agree that they half like each other, which Eve takes as her chance to escape, but just then, Larinda Mars walks by them, bleeding and mostly dead. Eve catches her before she hits the ground, but she and DeWinter are unable to save her. Eve locks the bar so nobody will leave and only medicals and police will be let in, calls it in, and takes charge, moving everybody to the other side of the room.
• When the MTs arrive, she tells them to “deal with the fainter. It’s too late for the bleeder,” and starts taking names and statements, with the help of a couple of beat droids. Peabody and McNab arrive as well; Eve has McNab review the exterior security feed while she and Peabody follow the blood trail to the bathroom downstairs.

Chapter 2

• The murder scene is easy to reconstruct, since there’s so much blood. Mars left her handbag on a hook in the ladies’ room, and it contains pepper spray, a panic button, and an illegal stunner.
• Eve calls Roarke to break the news, as in “good news, your place is awesome, bad news, somebody was killed here and now you’ll have to repaint the bathroom walls.”
• The bar manager tells Eve that Mars’s drinking companion was Fabio Bellami, and gives her his contact information. Eve has DeWinter seal up so they can examine the body together, officially identifying it and getting TOD. DeWinter scoffs at the age on Mars’s record (37 – she’s thinking 40-45) and she says she was stabbed in the brachial artery in her right arm, was basically dead as soon as she was knifed, and was only able to walk upstairs thanks to instinct. The artery is a largish target (room for error if the cut is an inch higher or lower), not as messy as the throat, and no need to be as precise as with the heart. Eve sends DeWinter to Peabody to give a witness statement, and then home to her daughter for a hug, while she runs Bellami.
• Roarke arrives and Eve has him work with McNab on the security feed and keeping the staff calm (everybody else has been released) while she interviews Mars’s server, Kyle Spinder, who confirms that Mars was a regular, and met with different people there, but he hadn’t seen Bellami before, and the conversation didn’t appear to be a friendly one. Roarke gives his vehicle codes to an ecstatic Peabody so she and McNab can get started on Mars’s electronics at EDD while Eve and Roarke visit Fabio to get his story.

Chapter 3

• Fabio lives in a three-story house that Roarke used to own a few years ago (his representatives sold it to Bellami’s representatives). He is third or fourth generation money, international banking with tentacles in broadcasting and entertainment, primarily theater. He had a reputation as a wastrel in his youth, but has steadied up since his marriage. He squandered his trust fund, buzzing about the globe and off-planet to clubs and other rich-boy hangouts, and causing enough trouble to require payoffs and restitution. He had a taste for women ― often a few at the same time, so the stories go ― along with drink and illegals.
• He is now reformed, and has produced a couple of well-received plays, become involved in charitable causes, and appears well married, with triplet daughters due in about a month who will probably arrive early, in a couple of weeks.
• Mars set him up, had him drugged and has a video of him in bed with two women who weren't his wife. She had him meet her at Du Vin so she could start blackmailing him, asking for $8,000 this month, $6,000 next month, $7,000 the following month, and so on, varying the amounts. She offered him the chance to feed her information, which would lower his payments. She got up to use the restroom, and he paid the bill and left.
• Eve wonders why people don’t go to the police when things like that happen, and Roarke counts the ways. Eve figures Mars did the same thing to a lot of people and decides they need to look at her place.

Chapter 4

• Eve thinks Mars wasn’t afraid of her killer since she either kept applying her lip dye or set the tube down, but never reached in her purse for her pepper spray, panic button, or stunner, all within easy reach.
• At Mars’s building, we learn that she tried to bribe the staff to dish about the other residents and their guests, but was unsuccessful; she filed a complaint against at least one staff member – it didn’t go anywhere – and a couple of complaints against the children in the penthouse opposite hers for being too noisy – bottom line: she wasn’t well-liked there.
• Her apartment is full of stuff, including art reminiscent of Jenkinson’s ties, a sex droid in a loincloth, and lots of trendy furnishings. Roarke calls it “a space for entertaining, but certainly not for relaxing. It’s tasteful, in the way a high-end ultra-contemporary furniture showroom would be, but without warmth or personality.”
• Just as Eve finds a safe and is debating trying to open it herself, Peabody tags her to tell her she and McNab think Mars was blackmailing people. Peabody is sad to learn that Eve already knows this, but says she still has some juice left, so she’ll keep working on Mars’s electronics. Eve allows Roarke to open Mars’s safe (“no point in letting pride get in the way of progress”), which contains about a million dollars in cash, along with expensive jewelry. Roarke reprograms the safe so it will open for Eve when she brings it into Central (using her badge number, thumbprint, and “Stickyfingers”).

Chapter 5

• Roarke and Eve arrive home, with Eve wondering if the house is based on Irish castles. Roarke talks about Summerset taking him in and teaching him the importance of learning history. Roarke would see the illustrations of great houses, forts, castles, etc., and think “I’ll have that one day, and build it just as I like it. A great house in a great city with towers and treasure rooms, and every comfort I could devise.”
• Eve sets up her murder board and watches the last moments of Mars’s life. Roarke is impressed with Eve’s reaction time from hearing breaking glass to turning on the recorder, saying she reached Mars in under five seconds. They watch the security feed of people leaving the bar three minutes before Mars’s death and see a group of five people – three males, two females, but Eve thinks the extra male is the killer and attached himself to a group to look less conspicuous. The third man is about a step behind the others and doesn’t appear engaged in what the others are saying. He’s wearing a ski cap and gloves, and the others in the group don’t look back at him.
• Over warm apple pie topped with vanilla ice cream, Eve tells Roarke he needs to get Summerset to bake another pie before he leaves for his vacation, Roarke tells her “they” are leaving in three days, meaning Summerset and Ivanna. Eve’s mind is blown that they’re going on vacation together since that means sex, which puts Roarke off pie (thinking about basically his father having sex). Eve starts going through the bar’s receipts to try to ID the killer, who of course paid cash for his two mineral waters and serving of spiced almonds, all of which he ordered through the menu app. Eve finds receipts for the man who paid for the group of four, and for everyone else who left around the same time.
• Eve tries to picture the room, and where the killer sat, realizing that he must have been there before because he picked the perfect spot to watch Mars without drawing attention to himself – she has a usual table, so he found a quieter table, a high top off to the side, behind flowers. Roarke points out it’s past midnight, so Eve agrees to wait until morning to tag the waitress who served the killer, who is also the one who served Eve and DeWinter.
• Roarke fills Eve in on Mars’s extremely healthy portfolio under her own name and the two additional accounts he’s found so far under aliases – Lorilie Saturn out of Argentina (“a tax haven for accounts people don’t want reported to the U.S. tax hounds”) has about three million dollars, with more than ten million dollars going in and out of the account over the past three years for art and jewelry purchases and Linda Venus, an off-planet haven used strictly for cash in and out, always under $10,000 so it’s conveniently unreported. The Venus account currently holds over six million dollars, with a monthly cash withdrawal of $5200 they presume is for a second place. They head for bed, with Roarke still running queries in the background.

Chapter 6

• Eve figures somebody Mars was blackmailing was tired of it. She tells Roarke she’ll check with Nadine, who he says “is a reporter with standards and ethics,” basically the “polar opposite” of Mars. Roarke tells Eve Mars tried to blackmail him about three years ago, shortly before they were married, and says “Darling Eve, if I told you about everyone who tried, in various ways, to shake me down, milk me, exploit some dubious connection, or issue threats – veiled or overt – we’d talk of little else.” He asks her if she tells him about everybody who threatens to make her pay for doing her job, which she is forced to admit she does not do.
• Roarke says Mars’s aim was poor – she was wrangling for an interview, kept getting blocked by Caro, but finally managed to corner Roarke at a fund-raiser for the New York City Library and told him she needed an exclusive on their upcoming wedding; when he told her no she told him she could make things uncomfortable for him, but had nothing specific, and since Roarke doesn’t leave traces or fingerprints, she didn’t worry him. Eve sums it up as “You went Scary Roarke on her.” He asked Mars if she enjoyed her work and outlined a hypothetical of buying Channel 75, breaking her contract, and planting “seeds that would root in such a way that she’d be fortunate to find a job as a gofer in broadcasting at some third-rate station in Bumfuck.”
• Eve says nobody intimidates “Scary Roarke” but she plays “Bitch Cop” and they close out the night with sex, Roarke telling Eve he knows how to handle his cop, and she telling him she knows how to handle her criminal (“Never convicted,” Roarke chimes in).

Day 2 – Wednesday

• Because Eve won the round as “Bitch Cop” her reward is waffles for breakfast. She slaps on face cream before leaving because she thinks Trina will be lurking around Channel 75 when she visits Nadine, and Eve thinks Trina will know whether or not she used it (it turns out she is correct on both counts).

Chapter 7

• Eve drives to the morgue, feeling guilty about her four-figure boots, but reminding herself that they “would likely see considerable mileage before the closet fairies disappeared them.” She tags Nadine to set up an interview at Channel 75 in two hours, and tags her waitress from the previous night, Cesca, to bring her into Central in about an hour for follow-up questions. At the morgue, Morris tells her Mars’s autopsy was bumped by teenagers with a suicide pact (Baxter and Trueheart’s case) so he’s just finishing her up now. Mars was killed face-to-face with a scalpel and lost too much blood too quickly for DeWinter or the other doctor to have saved her life. She lived for about four, maybe five, minutes, but passed the point of saving within about ninety seconds, and Morris recommends The Walking Dead as a marvelous, classic screen series about a zombie apocalypse.
• Morris tells her that although Mars’s data shows her as 37, she’s a full decade older, which is what DeWinter had thought as well, and that Mars had considerable face and body work done, including complete facial reconstruction, breast enhancement, body sculpting, calf implants, permanent hair removal, sterilization, and hair root system coloring. He agrees to work with DeWinter on the forensic anthropology since who she used to be might play into why she was killed.
• Peabody, who arrived during the latter part of Eve’s morgue stop, tells her Mars paid serious scratch for the security on her e-toys, and McNab is burnt out and she’s thinking of surprising him with a mini-vacation. Eve offers the Mexican villa for a five-day vacation, beginning after shift on Friday so they don’t use up more than three days leave. Peabody is wise enough to not hug Eve, although in her head she’s giving her a big, sloppy hug and dancing.
• At Central, Eve checks in with Baxter and Trueheart to confirm the suicide was solid, and advises them to move on, which they assure her they are working on doing.
• Cesca has arrived with Mars’s waiter, Kyle Spinder, who wonders if they should get a lawyer. Eve says she’s using an interview room because it’s private, not because they did anything wrong, and asks if they want to use a different room. She also lets Cesca know she thinks she waited on the killer, and Peabody steps out to get them fizzies. Cesca recreates the tables in her head, remembering the single man who ordered digitally and paid cash – he was wearing a coat, watch cap, and gray scarf and kept his head down the whole time, waving her away when she asked if she could get him anything else. She says they’re trained to leave customers alone if that’s what they want. He was supposed to call for his bill but he just left cash instead, with a decent enough tip, so she cashed him out. There wasn’t enough to go on to bring Yancy in for identification, so Eve let them leave.

Chapter 8

• Eve updates Commander Whitney, including telling him that during the C. J. Morse murder investigation three years ago (Glory in Death), Mars was allowed to attend one of Roarke’s parties in exchange for info on Morse on the provision that she didn’t bring in a camera or mic (Note: she did, but Roarke relieved her of both), and that Mars tried to blackmail Roarke into attending their wedding. She tells Whitney it only applies to the current investigation, as it appears to be her M.O. for obtaining information and access, and is a strong motive for her murder. Whitney is unconcerned about this and adds that Mars probably has files on him, Chief Tibble, and the mayor as well in that case, and he will push on warrants to get her electronics taken in.
• Whitney tells Eve the reason she hasn’t been getting media requests about the murder is that the NYPSD media liaison, Kyung Beaverton, who is not an asshole, has been diverting them to his office. Kyung joins them, telling Eve she should speak with Nadine first in an exclusive, holding back the alleged blackmail for now, since she represents Channel 75 (“Larinda Mars’s family”). Nadine will act as the pool reporter, agreeing to share the content of the interview with the other media, and then Eve will do a media conference in the afternoon.
• Eve stops by to talk to Feeney in EDD on the way to the garage, letting him know McNab is burned out, which he acknowledges, saying he’s putting him in for a commendation for a case he just closed. Feeney’s ok with McNab taking time off for Mexico, and says McNab’s a better cop since he’s been with Peabody, that it settled him down, and he will help McNab with Mars’s e’s once he finishes what he’s working on.
• On the way to Channel 75, Peabody runs Mitch L. Day, showing that he’s married even though he and Mars were having an affair. Everybody at the station is wearing black armbands. Eve starts with the majority owner and head of broadcasting, Bebe Hewitt, who didn’t like Mars, but said “she was superior at her work, had an amazing network of contacts, an enthusiastic fan base - she knew how to keep them happy and tuning in. She had a strong and appealing on-screen presence, and her ratings were stellar and growing. She will be missed, and she’ll be very hard to replace.” Mars was a piranha off camera, away from the public - careless with people, with feelings, full of herself, full of demands, most of which Hewitt met because she brought in revenue.
• Bebe was having dinner out with family when Mars was killed - she was tagged by a reporter who had a tip from somebody who had been at the bar when Mars was killed. Eve’s warrant comes through, and Hewitt lets her know that she locked down Mars’s office the previous night to ensure nobody went in and disturbed anything, and security shows that nobody had been in her office since Mars at 5:10 p.m. Bebe was unaware of Mars’s side hustle, but not surprised that somebody killed her, given that she made her living exposing dirty little secrets on air.

Chapter 9

• Peabody makes sure Mars’s office is extra sealed off while Eve visits Nadine in makeup, where Trina is working on her. When Trina finishes with Nadine’s makeup, she does Eve’s hair (telling her she either does it here and now or goes to her place and gives her the full treatment). Nadine gave Mars a couple of interviews related to The Icove Agenda (book and vid), because the station wanted it and it was to her (Nadine’s) advantage, but she didn’t like Mars at all – thought she was sneaky, underhanded, disloyal, had shaky ethics, and was downright mean. She booted two interns just this past year, sent them both off in tears, and went out of her way to badmouth her last assistant to screw with her chances of getting another job. She also went after Nadine’s staff because they wouldn’t give her info on Nadine, and she tried strong-arming Nadine to get to Eve.
• One of the stories Mars tried to push was that Nadine and Eve banged each other, and Trina added, “Sometimes you made a Roarke sandwich. Yummy mmm-mmm.” Nadine played Mars a recording of a conversation she and Nadine had where Mars told Nadine she’d violated Channel 75’s rules of conduct, where she’d threatened Nadine, attempted to extort her, opening her up to both criminal and civil action, and said if Mars continued to smear the reputations of Eve, Roarke, or Nadine, or to pressure her staff, she would take the recording straight to the top and if they didn’t terminate her immediately she would offer them the choice of Mars or her.
• Nadine goes to get the recording from her office, and Trina says Nadine is upset because she has to go on screen and say nice things about an asshole. She says Mars had nice skin and took care of it – she tried buying Trina away from Nadine, and came into Trina’s salon for work. Eve agrees to more makeup for Trina breaking the Cone of Silence and spilling the tea on Mars. Mars tried to get info from Trina, including offering to pay for a vid of Mavis, Leonardo, and Bella, belatedly adding “with their permission” when she saw how pissed Trina was for even asking. Trina overheard Mars on her ’link since to Mars, Trina was like a droid when she worked on her, and suspected Mars was blackmailing Annie Knight, the queen of talk screen, and Wylee Stamford, a third baseman for the Mets, based on how Mars spoke to them.
• Peabody comes in and tells Eve Mars’s office is secure, and she tracked down the reporter who sent the tag about Mars being killed – he didn’t say how he knew, but his brother was on the list of wits from the bar, so she figures the brother to be the source. Trina says that Day had his own stylist, but knew he was previously banging one of the interns, Monicka Poole, before he started banging Mars, and the intern got the axe and cried to a friend, who told Trina about that. Trina says Mars had serious work done on her face, and Eve tells her they know about that. Peabody stays with Trina to get makeup done while Eve does a live one-on-one interview with Nadine in her office.
• Eve confirms that she was at Du Vin when Mars was killed, meeting a colleague, saying the person Mars was having drinks with wasn’t a suspect at this time, the victim was target-specific, and she might have been followed into the bar. She tells Nadine it was an advantage that an NYPSD officer was on scene since the investigation began right away, and is continuing with all possible resources. On the record but not on screen, Eve tells Nadine Mars was a regular at Du Vin, the police interviewed all of the bar staff and reinterviewed two that morning, and don’t suspect anybody on the bar staff.
• Off the record, Eve tells Nadine that Mars had substantial face and body work and DeWinter is working on a possible reconstruction so they can determine who Mars really was. She also tells Nadine Mars had a cache of about a million dollars in her home safe, with jewelry worth easily as much, and art that’s up there in value also, and Roarke has found two underground accounts with several million dollars each so far. Nadine assumes blackmail, and Eve says Mars will have tallied up a long enemies list, with some Channel 75 employees on it, and the killer is probably male, but may be connected to a female she was blackmailing. Eve tells Nadine to tell her if she digs up something on somebody at 75 because once he killed, the killer is going to have an easy time killing again. Eve tells her to watch her six and Nadine wonders what happened to the delicious young Bruno from Obsession in Death.

Chapter 10

• A freshly made up Peabody joins Eve as they interview Mitch L. Day about his adulterous, sexual relationship with Mars. Once he recognizes Dallas, he tells Eve he’s campaigning to have Marlo Durn and her on his show before the Oscars, and would love to build an entire hour around the two of them. He was supposed to meet Mars for dinner the previous night, but on the way to the restaurant he got a bulletin across his ’link that Mars had died and had his driver take him to the station instead.
• His alibi was that he was having sex with a porn actress, and he tells Eve she misunderstood his sleeping with his intern, who he then fired, that she misunderstood his affection and generosity, making inappropriate demands and overtures. Eve decides she’s rarely seen anyone lie so poorly. Peabody verifies his alibi once they leave his office, and Nadine says Mitch is a complete dog, but she doesn’t see it in his makeup to kill. Eve says Day gave Mars info on other people, which disappoints Nadine.
• In Mars’s office, Nadine also says that Mars broke the rules by keeping clothes wardrobe provided since she was supposed to either buy them at a discount or return them to the rack for return to the vendor; Eve figures it goes with her collector/hoarder mentality. Eve tells Peabody to arrange for EDD to bring in all of her electronics and start on her office, while she interviews Mars’s staff. Peabody says her staff looked up to her – Mars worked them like slaves, but gave out swag that she didn’t want – perfume or scarves from events, for example, and Peabody doesn’t think any of them were in on her sideline. Eve agrees, saying Mars wouldn’t have wanted to share.
• On the way back to Central for a media conference, Eve wonders why somebody would change their face, and who Mars was before she became Mars. They stop at Ongar’s house – he’s the one who paid for his group of four who left the bar just before the killer. He’s home sick from food poisoning from the restaurant he and his friends went to after Du Vin, and he only vaguely remembers the man who left right after them. Eve instructs Peabody to contact the rest of the party in case any of them got a better look at the man, while she handles the dreaded press conference.

Chapter 11

• Eve arrives at her office, where Roarke has left her an insulated tote with a cowburger and fries, which she splits with Peabody. McNab and Roarke are working on decrypting Mars’s blackmail target list. Eve joins the media conference, taking questions after Whitney gives the official statement.
• At EDD, McNab, Feeney, and Roarke have gotten far enough in the decryption to give her another potential blackmail target, Durante, and another location where she presumably met her marks, Gino’s, along with notations about DV (Du Vin) and Bellami. Eve tells Roarke she offered the Mexican villa and travel to Peabody and McNab, and asks if he knew the tabloids had bullshit about him and Nadine and her and three-way sex. He thanks her for the image, and tells her it’s the nature of tabloids and easily dismissed.
• Santiago stops her to tell her about a case he and Carmichael have. A woman claims to have stabbed her ex when she caught him raping her fifteen-year-old daughter, but really the teenager is the one who stabbed the ex to death. Eve advises Santiago to call the father, who is a lawyer, lay it out for him straight, and have Reo talk to him, lawyer-to-lawyer so they’re assured not only will no charges be brought but it’ll be kept out of the media. She tells Santiago to take off the cop face when he’s talking to the father, to make sure they knows they matter, that it’s not just another case.
• Peabody spoke with the other three members of Ongar’s party, and nobody got a good look at the killer, but one of them thinks he’s about six feet based on the height of Ongar’s friend, maybe Caucasian, age 30-60. Peabody knows of Missy Lee Durante, an actress who had a fall break in the Canary Islands, where Mars first had Durante’s name listed. Eve and Peabody head to DeWinter first, with plans to visit Stamford, Knight, and Durante after.
• DeWinter says the work done on Mars was superior, and she doesn’t see any evidence of an accident or previous trauma or damage, but all of the work was done at the same time, between twenty and twenty-five years ago. Since her DNA coordinates with Mars’s name, she paid to have her records altered as well. Elsie, the formerly pregnant, and now new mother of twins is working on the face. So far they think that Mars was heavier, with smaller breasts, much less muscle tone, and a rounder face. Peabody doesn’t think she will have been really pretty before the transformation, because it would have been harder for her to change everything – she would have wanted to keep some feature she liked about herself. DeWinter thinks the total bill would have been hundreds of thousands of dollars, so Eve thinks it wasn’t just for vanity.

Chapter 12

• On the way to Brooklyn, Peabody digs up Stamford’s stats, finding that his grades dipped when he was around twelve, in seventh and eighth grades, and there was an urgent-care visit with records sealed from around that time.
• Wylee reluctantly admits that when he was twelve, he was repeatedly sexually assaulted by a childhood hero. He tried to kill himself when he was thirteen, after the abuse had stopped. Somebody killed his abuser eventually, but Mars had been blackmailing him for about two years, insinuating that she could make people think Wylee had killed the man. He doesn’t know how she found out what happened, and his best friend/manager, Brian O’Keefe, and psychiatrist advised him to go to the police, but he was afraid if the story got out it would reflect badly on his family and the foundation, so he kept paying her the between $6,000 and $8,000 monthly blackmail, always sending the money to Mars by messenger rather than meeting her.
• Brian says he wouldn’t have wanted Mars dead, he wanted her sitting in a cell. Eve says she’ll verify their alibis, and tells Wylee he should listen to his friend: “She didn’t deserve to die. She deserved to sit in a cell. Humiliated and locked up. You’re entitled to your privacy. A twelve-and thirteen-year-old’s bound to be scared and ashamed and not know what the fuck to do when a trusted adult twists a relationship into the sick and the selfish. A grown man who’s a goddamn miracle on the ball field, one with a strong family and solid friends behind him, ought to have the sense to know when to go to the cops.”
• After they leave, Peabody asks Eve what she would have done, and after thinking about it, Eve says she wouldn’t have allowed Mars to victimize her, and Roarke would have stood by her. The badge gave Eve “the will to survive – the goal of getting it, the work of upholding it.” Betraying the badge, Roarke, Peabody would not be an option. She would have made sure Mars did time in a cage even if it was the last thing she could do with her badge. Peabody tells Eve she needs to stop thinking of what she did to her father as murder, since it was self-defense and Eve was eight.

Chapter 13

• Eve and Peabody head for the West Village, where Missy Lee Durante’s show is filming exterior scenes. They agree to meet Durante that evening rather than take her away from work, at an address that turns out to be her co-star’s Upper West Side apartment.
• Next stop is Annie Knight’s midtown studio, with a quick stop to apprehend a pair of street thieves; Eve tripped the one who lifted a purse left on a stroller, had Peabody keep a boot on his back, and chased his partner, who had picked the father’s wallet from his back pocket while he was taking a home vid, until she was close enough to grab her by the collar of her coat. When the teenage thief turned on the waterworks, Eve kneed a man in the groin who decided to try to rescue the thief even after Eve identified herself as police. Since one of the girl’s loot pockets held the Good Samaritan’s wrist unit, he came around to Eve’s point of view.
• Whereas the first time Peabody contacted Annie Knight’s office, she was given her schedule and cooperation, now that they are actually there the same person has been told to push back, saying Knight is unavailable, in meetings. The receptionist, Melissa Forenski, tells Eve that her PA, Bill Hyatt, gave her direct orders not to disturb Knight. Eve tells her to contact the PA and tell him she can either speak with Knight here or at Central. When Melissa takes them back to Hyatt’s office, he tries to give Eve the runaround and she tells Peabody to start generating the paperwork that will require Knight to report to Central. He grabs his ‘link and tells whoever’s on the other end to get him the lawyer and then the mayor, but before he gets the chance to talk to the mayor, Annie shows up and is willing to speak with Eve and Peabody in her office.
• Annie had decided to stop paying blackmail the previous day, the day Mars was murdered; her next payment was due in a week and she had planned to send a message instead and then reveal the secret Mars was blackmailing her with. She had her attorney come over and told him everything, then heard about the murder. She had last heard from Mars a week ago – she would get contacted two weeks before payments were due with the location and amount in a semi-cryptic message, like “There had to be eight thousand people at the party” or “I feel as if I’ve walked seven thousand miles in these shoes” – always between seven and nine thousand dollars. Mars wanted them to be seen together having drinks as if they were friends, but Knight refused to meet with her, always sending the money by messenger. She used Du Vin or Gino’s, with the Russian Tea Room once or twice, and this had been going on for 21 months.
• Annie’s birth mother, Carly Ellison, was a prostitute, but she was raised by her mother’s sister. Annie didn’t know this until Ellison showed up when Annie was thirteen, threatened to take her unless her parents (Annie’s grandparents) paid her $10,000. Annie was angry and shocked, and tracked Ellison down at a party. When a man solicited her, offering to pay her a hundred for a two-fer, her mother and the man pulled her into an alley and started to go at her. The man hit Ellison, backslapped her away, and she hit him, He started waving a knife around, and then Annie grabbed the knife and stabbed him in the throat. Ellison was laughing and Annie ran home. Her aunt/real mother bagged her clothes and they were going to go to the police in the morning but there was a media report about a man and a woman found dead in an alley, multiple stab wounds on both.
• Annie didn’t know if she killed him or if Ellison did, and if he killed Ellison before bleeding to death, but the report said it appeared they’d fought, both of them high on illegals, and they’d succumbed to their injuries. Annie’s mother burned the clothes she’d been wearing, saying it wouldn’t change anything to go to the police, and it was her fault for not being honest with Annie to begin with. They moved back home, and when she was sixteen, her mother married Abe Knight, and they both took his name. She told him everything, and they built a good life, with two more kids. She planned to go back to St. Louis that weekend to tell them Mars had been blackmailing them and to talk to the police, “to take that weapon out of Larinda’s hand.”
• Eve says she will check with the police in St. Louis, review the facts and the evidence, and the investigative steps in the two deaths. She asks for Knight’s files (she documented the blackmail), and a copy of her home security feed for the night Mars was murdered. If she thinks an arrest is in order she will give her twenty-four hours per Knight’s request. Off the record Eve tells Annie “If you’ve told me the truth, if you haven’t left out any salient details or slanted the angles, no one’s going to arrest or prosecute you for defending yourself against an assault, or arrest or prosecute the woman who protected her minor child from additional trauma.”

Chapter 14

• Eve swings by Hyatt’s office on the way out, where he informs her he intends to file a complaint on Knight’s behalf, and Eve requests his whereabouts the previous evening. He says he was in his office, which she could have determined by checking the log. Eve has Peabody run him because neither of them like him.
• Back at Central, she follows up with homicide in St. Louis, where they tell her it’s been more than 40 years and it was just a john/prossy case. She counters the attitude with offering to have her commander contact the detective’s. He tells her he’ll get to it when he gets to it and she says if she doesn’t have the case file within two hours she’ll contact his commanding officer with a formal complaint and his IAB, and that this communication has been recorded, as is SOP. From the doorway, Roarke says “He seemed remarkably uncooperative” and Eve says he was lazy, didn’t want to deal with the paperwork, and doesn’t like New York. Roarke says “He doesn’t like young, female New York rank.” He’s also sure that Mars has another place.
• Roarke asks Eve what’s wrong, and she admits it’s about evil. Roarke tells Eve “Your potential for evil is far, far outweighed by your absolute dedication to protecting and serving, not just people, but that amorphous goal of justice.” Eve says Mars is on the scale of evil – “she didn’t kill or rape or beat small children. She didn’t disembowel some stranger for kicks. I’ve seen worse. We’ve seen worse.” She tells Roarke about Annie, and about the case Santiago and Carmichael have where the mother is protecting her daughter, saying they have people trying to protect loved ones as much, maybe more, than themselves. Mars’s skill was sniffing out people with dark secrets who could pay, and in at least one case (Bellami), had somebody drug a potential mark’s drink, set him up to squeeze him, unlikely the first time she’d done that.
• Feeney’s report arrives, so Eve and Roarke arrange to visit Durante at seven since it’s on their way home, and that way she can cut Peabody and McNab loose to go home. When she talks to Peabody about leaving, Peabody tells her Knight’s family comes off clean, and there was no New York travel yesterday or for months. Feeney’s list has fifteen more names, including sports figures, a defense attorney, and an actor. Nadine calls to request she visit her at home, and on the way to meet Roarke in the garage, she runs into a grim-faced Trueheart, who’s upset about a case he and Baxter caught – a seventeen-year-old killed his fifteen-year-old sister with one of his father’s gold clubs because she beat his high score at Marauders and wouldn’t stop crowing about it; their parents were away on a ten-day cruise vacation and left the son in charge. Eve says the APA will push for and get adult status and advises Trueheart to have a beer with Baxter before his date.
• On the way to Nadine’s, Roarke tells Eve he just finished selling a property in Nevada for a tidy profit. She asks how he knew about the property to begin with, and he says the same way he knows about underrated properties elsewhere – he sniffs them out. She asks about rural Nebraska, and he offers to buy her a property there to flip. Roarke owns Nadine’s building, and admits to buying it when it was undervalued, saying some things you keep. He admires Nadine’s furnishings and she fills them in on Mars’s fake past (no siblings, parents died when she was eighteen, no other relatives). She found a new mark for Eve, Phoebe Michaelson, who is coming by in about five minutes. Michaelson is going to resign from Channel 75 after Eve talks to her, and Nadine asks that Eve not arrest her because she’s not a criminal, but another victim.

Chapter 15

• Phoebe’s father is Larson K. Derick, aka “Black Hat Derick,” a notorious hacker. He used his considerable skills to drain financial accounts about twenty-five years ago, briefly turning Wall Street inside out. While he could have bought his own country and retired there, instead he turned to politics and became a terrorist. He broke into government facilities, exposed or held ransom highly sensitive information. He instigated a fire sale in East Washington, i.e., shut down the city - the communications and the utilities in the dead of winter.
• He demanded the president, vice president, and their families be executed because the government was corrupt and needed to be leveled. She was two when they caught him, and her mother had left him right after she was born because he started getting crazy. They put her mother and her into lockdown and questioned her for days and days, even though her mother hadn’t been with her father for two years. Eventually she and her mother were put into witness protection and given new names. Her mother wasn’t allowed to do any e-work, but since she was only two there were no such restrictions on her.
• Mars found out and threatened to ruin her and her mother if Phoebe didn’t hack for her. Mars told her if she hacked into Roarke’s systems, she might let her off the hook, but she was unable to; Mars then slapped her. Phoebe says she’s going to resign the next day. Nadine offers her a reference, later telling Eve she wishes she could hire her since she’s brutally honest, but Phoebe is better off back home planting bushes. She does think she would like to take on an intern, somebody young and smart and looking to learn, somebody she can mentor, which gives Eve an idea.
• Eve once again wonders why nobody goes to the police, or in this case the station head. Roarke thinks Mars had good aim, and he is continuing to search, using Mars’s space theme for aliases. It turns out Marshall Poster lives in one of Roarke’s buildings, so Eve doesn’t get to intimidate the staff. Poster invites them in and then leaves so Eve and Roarke can speak to Durante and her attorney; she and Poster are dating but keeping it quiet for now.
• Durante tells the story of her mother, who has major substance abuse issues, but has been clean for almost three years now, and Missy Lee’s sister, Jenny, who may or may not be the result of a bender affair her mother had with her dealer; Mars was blackmailing Missy Lee about Jenny’s paternity. Mars would tell Missy Lee where to meet every month, and she would bring her the specified amount (between seven and nine thousand) in cash – usually to a bistro or an event, since Missy Lee isn’t legal to go to bars.

Chapter 16

• Eve believes Missy Lee, but starts running the father since she sees him as weak – he keeps taking his wife back despite the upheaval, putting her ahead of his daughters’ welfare. Eve is pretty sure somebody connected to one of Mars’s marks did the murder, not one of her marks directly. They arrive home to Summerset and Galahad and cocido (a hearty Spanish stew) just before the Nor’easter hits. Eve warns Summerset to watch his step, telling him “No tripping over the cat” since he’s leaving for vacation in another day.
• Before dinner, Eve checks on Hyatt since she sees him as aggressively territorial about Annie Knight, but the security for Knight Productions confirms he was in his office during Mars’s murder window. Over dinner, Roarke tells Eve that Summerset insisted on teaching him how to prepare a few basic meals, which Roarke hated, until Summerset gave up on him learning to cook. Eve says ones of her state schools had Life Science, and she sucked at making fake scrambled eggs – they’d either be hard and dry or runny and mostly raw, but the instructor finally passed her out of pity or desperation. Eve figured she knew she was coming to New York, and there would always be pizza, and Roarke figured he was plenty used to being hungry and could always steal food if it came to that. He did, in fact, keep stealing food after he came to live with Summerset, until Summerset sat him down one day and told him he was taking that food out of someone else’s mouth and that person might go hungry, so knock it off. Roarke said it made him a better thief, a more thoughtful one, because he wouldn’t steal from people who didn’t have extra, even if it was easy pickings.
• Eve researched the Ellison/Sarvino murder and came to the same conclusion as the police – they killed each other, sloppily and stupidly, because they were high and pissed off. Carly Ellison died because she dragged a thirteen-year-old girl into an alley so she could make some money by allowing a junkie to rape her. Eve calls Annie to tell her she wasn’t responsible for what happened in that alley, and Mars knew that also but exploited her anyway. Sarvino died from a gut wound, and Ellison from a fatal stab to the heart, which was among two other chest wounds she had received.
• Roarke hasn’t found any new aliases for Mars. Eve thinks she knows who killed Wylee’s pedophile, but doesn’t reveal the name, saying it’s not her case - it’s a father with two other children, who has worked at the same company for thirty years, started volunteering at a youth crisis center six months after Keith’s death, and coaches a Little League team. They talk about how Summerset saved Roarke, and Eve saved herself, with Roarke mentioning that somebody did him the favor of putting a knife in Patrick Roarke as he’d probably have found Roarke and done that to him sooner or later, and Eve keeping mum about Summerset being the one who stabbed Patrick Roarke to death. Roarke says he can’t know what it would be like to have a child and what they wouldn’t do to protect what they loved and cherished. Eve says “If it turns out either the father or the son learned what Mars was doing to Stamford and took action to stop her, it all comes out. If not, I don’t know.” They decide to let it settle for the night.

Chapter 17

• Eve dreams about her father, Patrick Roarke, and Wylee’s tormenter, all dead – three monsters disguised as men. It is in an alley, but not in Dallas - “it was anywhere, it was nowhere, it was everywhere.” Eve knows their secrets and who killed them, and her badge weighs heavy on her. Mars strolls up to ask what about her, what Eve is doing to catch her murderer. Eve says she’s doing her job and asks Mars what her job is. Mars says it’s to get the dish, to dig it out, cook it up, and serve it to millions on a silver platter, and nobody did it better. Eve tells her that’s because nobody else stooped to blackmail and extortion. Mars says her killer’s not there in the alley, so what’s Eve doing there? Eve says sometimes old business crawls up over the new, and Mars tells Eve that’s bullshit, that she would kill Troy again to save herself – she wouldn’t go to the police any more than any of Mars’s marks did – they all made their choice to pay her. Mars tells Eve she’s protecting Summerset for murder, and protecting Keith’s murderer, that she feels for the man who bashed his head in and broke his bones. Eve tells her even though Mars is a stone bitch, she’s still working her ass off to find her killer, just the way she’d have put her away for screwing with people’s lives.

Day 3 – Thursday

• When she wakes up, she doesn’t tell Roarke the details of the dream, not wanting to admit about knowing Summerset killed Patrick, so Roarke confronts Summerset, asking him directly if he killed his father; Summerset admits it, saying at first he didn’t want to burden him, and then it simply didn’t matter. He says he wondered when Eve would tell him, but Roarke sets him straight, saying Eve never said a word – in fact, he didn’t know Eve knew.
• Summerset explains that Patrick Roarke wanted his property (Roarke) back, and agreed to meet him to buy him back. Summerset knew it would never end with Roarke getting to stay with Summerset. He thought about just taking Roarke and Marlena and leaving Ireland, but Patrick Roarke told him he would have him charged with sexually abusing Roarke and Marlena before he could pack a bag, and selling them to others, saying he would come up with the proof. Summerset wasn’t willing to risk that and knew Patrick would never let it go while he was alive. Roarke says he was right not to tell him sooner because he (Roarke) would have celebrated; now he just feels relieved and grateful.
• Eve gets up and showers, then Roarke asks her if she wants to know why Summerset killed his father. He tells her he wondered what she was hiding, and she says she didn’t know for sure, just suspected and didn’t push on it. He tells her the world isn’t so black-and-white, and he knows Eve telling him about what she suspected might’ve unburdened her but it would have been a betrayal and would have burdened him, so he understands why she didn’t tell him. Eve says she would have said Summerset should have gone to the police, but given how corrupt they were, she gets it – the cops would have gone along with Patrick’s story, would have participated in the brutalization of children. Summerset did what he did in defense of the defenseless.
• Eve tells Roarke, “Patrick Roarke killed your mother because she was inconvenient. He nearly beat you to death. He threatened you and an innocent girl. I can’t say what Summerset did was right, but I can believe it was just.” She then tells him the details of her dream, including that unless the man who killed Keith killed Mars, she’s not going to pursue that investigation. It’s gray, and she’s not altogether comfortable there, but she can live with it and she’s not sure she could live with destroying the lives of good people to walk the straight line.
• Galahad tries to sneak his paw under the warming domes, interrupting their moment. Eve is incredulous that he would do that for oatmeal, but Roarke lets her know there’s bacon as well, and she sits down to breakfast.

Chapter 18

• Roarke presents the results of his alias search, with Eve removing two right away for being older, saying she was too vain to use an ID that made her significantly older, another with average looks, same reason, and a fourth for being named Carly Mae Juno since Juno is an asteroid, which isn’t big or important enough. She also rules out another one, Brite Luna, proprietor of Moonstruck Life Embracing Therapy, as too embarrassing. Roarke helps her dress, with her belatedly realizing that he has boots made for her, since “My cop walks miles on any given day, and often runs after bad guys. Her feet are rather precious to me.”
• On the way to the address for the alias she suspects Mars was using, Angela Terra, a duplex just two blocks from Du Vin, she notes that Terra’s record is clean as a whistle; when she wonders aloud what that even means, her in-dash comp tells her it refers to the clean, pure sound a whistle makes, indicating that the tube is clean and dry.
• The other half of the duplex is being rented by Jean-Paul Larouche, who works for an Airbnb-type company called Travel Home; he and his family are staying there for the three months they will be in New York and rented it through his company, which listed it. They haven’t met their neighbor, who owns the entire duplex, saying they’ve only been there a week and the other side is always dark. Eve has Peabody get a search warrant and starts knocking on doors to see if anybody has seen/met Angela Terra, with no luck. Eve is able to get through two doors with her master once she gets the warrant, but the third one is a cop-proof lock that takes Eve ten minutes with lock picks. They enter to find a house full of stuff – tables, lamps, vases, paintings, bedrooms crammed with clothes, including furs, some with the tags still attached, a room full of shoes, boots, and handbags, and the master bedroom, where she worked.
• They pull in EDD and find a vault. Eve shows Roarke the vault, asking if he wants a challenge, and he all but rubs his hands together with glee. The office is full of scrapbooks for each mark or potential mark, including ones for Mavis, Leonardo, and Bella. Eve immediately calls Mavis, who’s vacationing in Aruba and says Mars never tried to blackmail her, was sometimes pushy but that’s the business, and when she checks with Leonardo finds out he just acted dumb and not clued in, which worked to hold Mars off.
• Eve and Peabody figure out Mars’s rating system, which is 1 star for not blackmailable up to five and bold red for being blackmailed by her. She had Leonardo at a one and Mavis at a two. Eve is a one, and also rates her own book, with a lot of question marks and commentary, like “Bullshit, bitch” and “Slut,” along with pictures of Eve and Peabody on the job and Summerset shopping, ones of the premiere, and lots of Roarke (also rated a one), including the staged picture of Magdelana hugging Roarke that she set up, info on her ex-husbands, and a note asking “Where the hell did she go? Did Roarke sleep with her? Weak spot? Possible seduction route? How much does she know? Have on him? On Dallas?”

Chapter 19

• Eve finds notes about somebody with three stars who’s connected to Bellami, and shows using sex drugs and having access to questionable sex workers, so she figures that’s who doctored Bellami’s drink for the setup. Eve also finds info on somebody who works in wardrobe for Annie Knight, Ilene Riff, with two stars next to her name. Her daughter is an addict with emotional issues, an eating disorder, is a cutter with a taste for punch. She has bumps for solicitation without a license, petty theft, assault, two rounds of rehab, two short stints in a cage, and is currently in a halfway house and clean, but Riff is working a second job to pay off the second round of rehab and was feeding Mars information about Annie Knight in exchange for silence about her daughter’s problems.
• Mars also has notes on Nadine, but again, she has a low score and is very disliked by Mars. McNab arrives, and Eve lets him know Roarke is on his way to work on the vault. Eve asks McNab to check the security feed to see the last time Mars came in and out and check the domestic droid while he waits. He thanks her for the Mexico trip. Roarke arrives while she’s searching the books on marks, barely into the B’s, and he is starry-eyed over the Podark vault, saying since Eve is doing him a solid by letting him at the vault, he won’t say too much about all the signs Eve left that she’d picked the lock on the main door. She says she has a warrant and Roarke tells her to have some pride in her work.
• Roarke reminiscences about cracking his first Podark in a lovely and graceful Tuscan villa when he was twenty, saying he can still smell the lemon blossoms. It takes him 18 minutes and thirty-two seconds to crack it, which wows McNab, who didn’t think it could be done in under twenty minutes. McNab says it has twenty-eight locking bolts, up to six passcodes and two fail-safes. Roarke adds that he wouldn’t have been able to drill it because “she’s built to snap drill bits like dry twigs under a bootheel. If you’re crude enough to try explosives, she’ll laugh at you. You don’t force or bully a lady like this. You... convince her.”
• Eve asks if the three of them need a moment or if it’s ok to open the door and see what’s inside. Even with the vault not full, Roarke estimated that it held sixty million dollars in cash (various currencies), about triple that in baubles, and about a hundred twenty million more in other items, for a total of about 360-400 million. The building itself is worth around fifty to one hundred million, and Roarke didn’t try to estimate the non-vault contents. Eve zeroes in on the ID kit and the bugs, saying the list of people with motive is going to be ridiculous, but at least everything’s labeled.
• Commander Whitney takes over the transfer details, and Eve tells Roarke about the blackmail books Mars had on them, and on Mavis and Leonardo and Bella. She says Mars had a disease, and some stupid part of her wants to feel sorry for her. Eve tells McNab to start at the end of the alphabet and work her way back, and she and Peabody head for DeWinter’s lab to check on the reconstruction. Peabody says how handy it was to have somebody who designs and manufactures security devices available because otherwise they would have had to call in a specialist and they’d still be waiting, and how it fits with their squad slogan, “how we protect and serve no matter, blah blah – even our expert civilian consultant – even when the one who got dead was an asshole. And she pretty much was.”
• Elsie is able to show Eve what Larinda would have looked like before surgery – wider face, rounder eyes, higher forehead, thinner mouth, and what she would have looked like at age ten. Eve does a search, and finds a face match for Lari Jane Mercury from Lawrence, Kansas. Her parents and sister are still alive and living there. Mars had her identity erased after age twelve. Her father is a pediatrician, her mother co-owns a nursery and landscaping company with her sister, and her sister Clara, age 39, owns a farm with her husband. The family looks to be solid upper middle-class, financially solvent, community active, and rooted.

Chapter 20

• Eve consults with Mira, where she reveals that she spoke with Mars’s family. Her wealthy maternal grandmother, for whom she was named, was a socialite and would feed gossip to Mars and bring her with her to parties and events. She drowned in her backyard pool when Mars was nineteen, leaving her about five million dollars, triple that with the sale of her house and the stuff she collected. Mars used the money to reinvent herself and sever all ties with her family. Mira thinks Mars was a narcissist with a sociopath’s lack of feelings, but probably had a touch of the sensitive to be able to read people so well.
• Eve thinks the killer wasn’t one of her marks, but somebody who was connected to a mark, and killing her in the bathroom was of the moment – he had been planning to kill her when she left, on the street. It was premeditated since he brought the scalpel to the bar with him, and he either has medical knowledge or researched and practiced. Mars believed she had the upper hand with the killer, and Eve thinks it wasn’t a celebrity or well-known figure.
• Mira thinks it’s somebody old enough to control impulse, educated enough to have that medical knowledge or to have the skills and intelligence to gain it, patient enough to learn her routine, and able to easily blend into a crown at an upscale, trendy bar. He could have killed Mars differently but wanted the symbolism of her bleeding to death since she bled people. Eve thinks Mars didn’t have books on Dr. or Mr. Mira because they’re unassailable and therefore not worth the time or trouble.
• Eve sees Santiago coming out of her office when she returns, saying he was giving Peabody a hand with evidence boxes on Eve’s desk. He tells her about a case he and Carmichael just closed – a guy broke into a loft in SoHo, but the occupant was home sick from work and woke up when she heard him unhooking electronics. She thought it was her cohab, but the thief goes for her, knocks her around a little as she’s medicated. Since she’s a competitive boxer and instructor at a local gym, she gives him a solid roundhouse, he takes a header down the stairs and breaks his neck, and she calls 911. The thief has a sheet a mile wide for B and E – he goes for female households and assaults, again female. The locks and security were compromised and he’d piled up all the easily portable electronics and valuables on the first floor. He had an empty sack with him going up but dropped it when he charged her and then tripped over it when she fought back. She took some solid hits in the first round, but came back at him.
• Santiago says Eve was right about the rape and stabbing – when they brought Reo in to talk to the dad, the mother told the truth. The kid is working with a rape counselor and has good parents, so she’ll get through. Eve sees the evidence boxes and checks her candy stash after closing and locking her door; it’s still taped to the bottom of her AutoChef. She hears Nadine’s heels and gets a cream donut that Nadine separated out from the ones she used to bribe the bullpen. Nadine tells Eve Mars was blackmailing Annie Knight, but realizes Eve already knows this.
• Eve tells Nadine about Mars’s second home and her books and records, including that Nadine has a book, and that Mars talked to a guy Nadine dated in college, along with people Nadine fired, but didn’t get anything. Eve tells Nadine Mars had books on Mavis and her family, and Nadine guesses that she had books on Eve and Roarke. Eve asks her to look into Knight Productions and Missy Lee Durante – the people surrounding Knight and Durante who might object to their being targeted by Mars. She gives Nadine a box to take downstairs, which Baxter takes for her (Nadine shows Eve how to carry a box, i.e., bat your lashes and have somebody carry it for you), and they head out to their respective homes to work, with Eve telling Peabody to work on the comp stuff until end of shift.

Chapter 21

• Eve brings her boxes home, surprised to find Summerset already gone – Roarke said he told him to leave early to avoid the bad weather coming their way, and he should be done with his work in about twenty minutes. She brings the boxes to her office, where she updates her board and proceeds to get to work in just her boots and sexy underwear since the house is Summerset-free. Roarke comes in, she asks him if he’s all done and he says he’s just about to start. She tells him she had a donut and is riding a high. They make love – command center sex, Eve tells him; she’d been saving it up.
• They shower and then sit down to Eve’s beloved spaghetti and meatballs. She tells him she needs to look at all of Mars’s five ratings and cross-check them with the financial ledger to see who paid, then check travel since her marks weren’t all local. She can’t figure a connection to Lari Jane Mercury, but she feels like she has to include it. They get Galahad tuna to appease their guilt over ignoring him in lieu of sex and dinner. Eve decides it’s not going to be somebody she used for information, because they would have just quit, and also she used lower-level people there who were more easily intimidated. She also thinks some of the people she used to gather information liked it, and Mars probably rewarded them – gave them money once in a while, which she lists as an expense. She also lists expenses like the two street LCs she hired to have sex with Bellami.
• Eve doesn’t think the killer is in Mars’s ledgers because the logic would be once Mars is dead the truth will come out, and cops will look into the people she was blackmailing and uncover their secrets. The murder wasn’t a crime of passion, but of cold calculation. She’s leaning toward a female victim, with a male killer as the white knight. Eve tells her even Magdelana (“the red dress”) rated a few pages in their books and they talk about her a little. Roarke says she tried to stay at one of Roarke’s hotels in Port-au-Prince a few days ago in the company of another guest, but was turned out and away per his directive that she is not allowed on his property.
• Baxter tags Dallas to say they caught one that links to Mars, an employee of Knight Productions was murdered outside of 30 Rock, stabbed, and bled out the same way Mars did. When Eve and Trueheart talk to Kellie Lowry’s roommate, they realize that Knight’s PA, Bill Hyatt, is guilty – he used Lowry’s swipe card the night he murdered Mars.

Chapter 22

• Eve tells Baxter Trueheart is arranging transpo for Lowry’s roommate, and then she needs them to make the notification so she can arrest Hyatt, who killed Lowry for her log-in. She thinks Hyatt confronted Mars, told her to back off, and Mars just laughed in his face since he’s just an assistant, a lackey. Hyatt lives about five blocks away, so she tags Reo for warrants and they go bring Hyatt in. Eve tells Peabody to tag McNab, tell him to pack so they can leave for Mexico that night, since she has Roarke with her for the electronics. Peabody double hugs Roarke since she knows Eve will get pissed at her if she hugs her.
• One of Wyatt’s neighbors is leaving her apartment when Eve, Peabody, and Roarke arrive on his floor, so Eve has the attractive blond ring Wyatt’s bell and get him to answer the door, and then Eve arrests him and begins to search his apartment. He starts to run away, she chases him across his bedroom, and ducks his sloppy swing, letting the momentum carry him around, kicking him in the ass and sending him sprawling. She adds attempting to flee and resisting arrest, attempting to assault a police officer to his count, and then when she mentions that she’ll probably find the murder weapon, his eyes flick to the dresser where it’s stashed, making it really easy for Eve.
• She tells him he probably didn’t clean off all the blood, and even if he did “the question will be just what is the lapboy of some mediocre talk-show host doing with a medical scalpel under his gym socks?” Eve’s goading works, and he tells her Annie Knight is an icon, and Eve isn’t fit to speak her name. Eve continues to mock him, adding “Aw, are you in love?” and when he starts to lunge up, Roarke puts his hand on Hyatt’s shoulder, shoving him back down, telling him “You’ll want to sit where the lieutenant put you.”
• Uniforms arrive to take Hyatt into Central, and he has asked for a lawyer, but he still asks Eve why she didn’t arrest her, meaning Mars. She tells him “Bill, you’ve invoked your right to counsel, but you keep talking. You really ought to shut the hell up.” He falls for it and waives his right to an attorney for now so Eve will listen to him. He says Mars bled Annie month after month for defending herself against a rapist when she was a teenager. Annie would lock herself in her office and cry her heart out, and Bic did nothing to ease her pain, to protect her. She lost weight and wasn’t sleeping. He admits he listened to conversations she and Bic had in her private office, saying he needs to know what she needs, often before she does. He’s the one who looks after Annie, not Bic. He’s the one who confronted that bitch (Mars), not Bic. Mars just laughed at him, daring him to go to the police, saying if he did Annie would be ruined and he’d be to blame.
• Wyatt tells Eve that Mars wouldn’t, couldn’t be reasoned with. He says he exterminated a spider, that he did what had to be done. He found out she was doing the same thing to other people, making them pay so she wouldn’t expose them. “No doubt some of them deserved it, but she was despicable.” He learned Mars’s routine (Tuesday nights at Du Vin, letting her marks pay for her drinks, finishing up in the restroom to primp herself up for wherever she was going next). He says she had to be stopped, and when he walked into the restroom she smirked at him and made a “comment about knowing I didn’t have a dick so I needed the women’s room. I walked right up to her – my ears were buzzing, buzzing, but I walked right up to her. I sliced her arm just where I’d practiced. She didn’t smirk then.” He told her “That’s for Annie” and walked out.
• He says he was surprised the police found out what Mars was doing so fast – if they could figure it out so fast, why didn’t they stop her before? Eve asks why he didn’t call Mars’s bluff and go to the police when he found out what she was doing, and he said that he would never have betrayed Annie or risked her welfare. He says he killed to defend someone – it’s not a crime, it’s heroism. Kellie was collateral damage, Eve’s fault for pushing him. He says he stabbed Kellie in her leg so it would be faster, saying, “I didn’t want her to suffer, I’m not cruel.” Eve tells him Annie won’t thank him for the murders – she’ll feel disgust and grief, and she’ll suffer more now because Wyatt used her as an excuse to kill.
• Eve has the uniforms take him now that he’s confessed everything, and Peabody hugs Eve hard, telling her “Adios, amiga!” as she leaves for the transpo station to go to Mexico with McNab. Roarke, who’s in Hyatt’s office/shrine to Annie, tells her to put away the idea that if she’d gotten to him sooner or hadn’t pushed at him, Kellie Lowry would still be alive, telling her it’s as egotistic as blaming herself that Mars died while she was having a drink with a colleague. Meanwhile he’s found Wyatt’s online searches about killing with a scalpel, and his online purchase two months prior. He practiced on a droid, which is in the closet, and has numerous gashes on the arms and thighs. Roarke says it was just a matter of time before he decided he needed to kill Bic, and then probably Annie herself when she didn’t live up to his ideal, so consider that she saved those lives. She leaves the rest for Baxter and they head home to tag DeWinter and Nadine and watch a stupid funny ridiculous vid and drink a bottle of wine.

Character List

List of Main Characters Appearing in this Book

• Eve Dallas
• Roarke

List of Secondary Characters Appearing in this Book

• David Baxter
• Detective Carmichael
• Ryan Feeney
• Mavis Freestone
• Nadine Furst
• Galahad
• Jenkinson
• Leonardo
• Ian McNab
• Charlotte Mira
• Morris
• Delia Peabody
• Reineke
• Detective Santiago
• Lawrence Summerset
• Troy Trueheart
• Jack Whitney

List of Recurring Characters Appearing or Mentioned in this Book

• Kyung Beaverton
• Bella Eve
• Callendar
• Garnet DeWinter
• Caro Ewing
• Harvo
• Cher Reo
• Chief Tibble
• Trina
• Detective Yancy

List of Minor Characters Appearing in this Book

• Terren Alta
• Becca
• DeAnna Bellami
• Fabio Bellami
• Terrance Bicford
• Cynthia
• Mitch L. Day
• Missy Lee Durante
• Melissa Forenski
• Emily Francis
• Cesca Garlini
• Anson Gregory
• Barry Hewitt
• Bebe Hewitt
• Bill Hyatt
• Jed
• Clarice Jenner
• Elsie Kendrick
• Annie Knight
• Lanie
• Claudette Larouche
• Jean-Paul Larouche
• Julian Larouche
• Marie-Clare Larouche
• Curtis Liebowitz
• Marlee
• Phoebe Michaelson
• Brian O’Keefe
• Jonah R. Ongar
• Marshall Poster
• Roxie
• Kyle Spinder
• Wylee Stamford
• Dr. Bryce Sterling
• Vi

List of Peripheral Characters Appearing or Mentioned in this Book

• Mr. Aaron
• Amber Grace
• Austen Dean
• Mallie Baxter
• Bentley
• Bones
• Bruno
• Mickey Bullion
• Randy Bullion
• Ross Burkoff
• Cheyenne Case
• Clara
• Amaryllis Coltraine
• Larson K. Derick
• Dory
• Sashay DuPris
• Guy Durante
• Iris Durante
• Jenny Durante
• Marlo Durn
• Carly Ellison
• Sheila Feeney
• Mr. Franks
• APA Fruimski
• Gio
• Haley
• Mr. Hardy
• Henri (droid)
• J.C.
• Gretchen Johannsen
• Junie
• Carly Mae Juno
• Rod C. Keith
• Kendra
• Kit
• Abe Knight
• Marlena Kolchek
• Larinda
• Ivanna Liski
• Kellie Lowry
• Luke
• Brite Luna
• Sylvie MacGruder
• Malory
• Larinda Mars
• Dr. James Mercury
• Marilee Mercury
• Michael
• Miranda
• Misha
• C. J. Morse
• Nick Patelli
• Monicka Poole
• Magdelana Percell
• Dr. Preston
• Valerie Race
• Ilene Riff
• Patrick Roarke
• Sam
• Wayne Sarvino
• Scarboro
• Scotty
• Sherry
• Scarlet Silk
• Richard Troy
• Bob Turnbill
• Starr Venus
• Wally
• Mrs. Wilbur

YANNIs

• Fabio Bellami was described by Eve as being in his mid-thirties and then as late thirties. His actual age was never given.
• When Larinda Mars was introduced in Glory in Death, her voice held the faintest whiff of upper-class Brit., though, at one point, her voice lost some of its sophistication and whispered unmistakably of Queens. However, in Secrets in Death, it was revealed she was from Lawrence, Kansas.