"Could she have had a partner?" Peabody asked. "Somebody who removed or destroyed evidence?"

"Unlikely. As far as any of the investigators were able to ascertain, she worked alone. Her psych profile corroborated that. Her basic pathology was pretty straightforward. Her mother divorced her father when Julianna was fifteen. Her stepfather was also divorced, wealthy, older, a Texas yeehaw type who called the shots at home.

She claimed he sexually molested her. The police psychiatrist was unable to determine whether or not Julianna's sexual relationship- which he did not deny- with her stepfather was consensual or forced, though she leaned toward believing Julianna. In any case, as she was a minor it was abuse."

"And the main weight that kept her time down," Feeney added.

"So she's killing her stepfather." Peabody glanced back at the wall screen. "Again and again." "Maybe."

And staring at the screen, Eve could see the child she herself had been, cowering in the corner of a cold, filthy room, mad from the pain of the last beating, the last rape. Covered in blood-his blood- with the knife she'd used to kill her father still slick and dripping in her eight-year-old hand.

Her stomach pitched, and she forced the image away.

"I never bought it." Eve kept her voice quiet, waiting for control to snap completely back into place. "She did the killing with calculation. Where was the rage, the terror, the despair? Whatever happened with her stepfather, she used it. She's a stone cold killer.

She was born that way, not made."

"I gotta go with Dallas on this one," Feeney agreed. "This one has ice for blood, and she's nobody's victim. She hunts."

"The APB hasn't turned up anything yet," Eve went on. "I don't figure it will. She'd have planned carefully, would already have a new name, new personality, new story. She won't change her looks much. She's too vain, and she likes the way she looks. She's girly.

Likes clothes, hair, baubles, salons. She'll stick to better shops and restaurants. You won't find her at bargain basements, or in sex clubs or bars. She prefers major cities, on planet. We'll flash her picture on the media, and we could get lucky."

It would take some luck added to the cop work, Eve thought.

Julianna made few mistakes. "Our problem is she blends. She's very skilled at it. People who notice her see an attractive woman, going about her business. If she makes friends, they're only temporary tools. No one gets close to her."

"If she's gone pro, you can bet your ass she'll be good at it." Feeney puffed out his cheeks. "She could be any-fucking-where by now, Dallas." "So we start looking. Every-fucking-where. You remember the primary in Chicago?"

"Yeah. Yeah, ah... Spindler."

"Right. And Block in East Washington. Can you contact them? See how far they'll reach out." "Yeah. I've got some personal notes on her, too. I'll dig them out, add them to the mix." "Profiler who did the work and the testing on Julianna's retired.

I'm going to pass this onto Mira, ask her to consult with the profiler on record. McNab, right now you're a drone. I want you to take all data from all cases, index, cross-reference any and all similarities. Make me files. Family connections, known associates, financials. I want you to tag the prisoner liaison at Dockport and get the names of the inmates she worked with, the ones on her block. I want to know the people inside she spent any time with. I'm going to see what I can shake out of the first Mrs. Pettibone.

"Peabody, you're with me."

Eve got behind the wheel, and as Shelly Pettibone lived in Westchester, hit the in-dash map for the best route and directions.

It was a pleasant surprise when the route actually popped onto the screen.

"Look at that! It worked."

"Technology is our friend, Lieutenant."

"Sure, when it's not screwing with us for its own sick enjoyment.

This is only a couple miles from Commander Whitney's place. With my luck Mrs. Pettibone's the commander's wife's best pal."

Brooding over the possibility, she headed down the drive.

"Dad said he and Mom were going to head downtown today. Take in the Village and SoHo and stuff." "Hmm? Oh yeah. Good."

"I'm going to take them out for dinner tonight, so they won't be in your hair." "Uh-huh."

"Then I'm taking them to a sex joint, and me and McNab are going to perform various exotic sexual acts for them." "Sounds good."

"I thought if you and Roarke wanted to come along, we could make it a nice little orgy. You know, a quartet." "You think I don't hear you, but you're wrong." Eve squeezed into traffic.

"Oh. Oops."

Eve nipped through a light on yellow, snarled at the maxibus that lumbered into her lane. With a wrench of the wheel, she punched through a narrow break, slapped the accelerator, wrenched back, and cut the bus off as neatly as it had her.

The irritable blast of its horn brought her a nice little glow.

"So I guess between your parents and the fresh case, you haven't had much time to work on Stibbs."

"I did some. Maureen Stibbs, formerly Brighton, not only lived in the same building as the deceased, but on the same floor. As he does now, Boyd Stibbs often worked from home, while his first wife traveled to her place of employment during the work week. The former Ms. Brighton, while employed as a home design consultant, also worked out of her home office when not traveling to and from clients. This gives the currently married couple time and opportunity for hanky-panky."

"Hanky-panky. Is that a legal term?"

"Boyd Stibbs married Maureen Brighton two and a half years after Marsha Stibbs's tragic death. I figure that's a pretty long time if they were canoodling-"

"Another legal term. Peabody, I'm so impressed."

"-while Marsha was alive," Peabody continued. "But it would also be pretty smart. Still, if they were doing the horizontal rumba, that's a medical term, and wanted to make it a permanent deal, divorce was the easiest option. It's not like Marsha had a bunch of money Boyd would lose out on if he ditched her. I can't figure any motive for premeditation."

"And you're looking for premeditation because?"

"The letters. If we say that all the statements from friends, relatives, people she worked with, even her husband and her replacement are valid, we work the angle that there never was a lover. So somebody had to plant the letters. Somebody had to write them, and put them in her drawer. After the murder."

"Why after?"

"Because a woman knows what's in her underwear drawer. She goes into it for a pair of panties, she's going to find the letters." Peabody paused. "Is this like a test?" "Just keep going. Play it out for me."

"Okay, somebody with access to her apartment, somebody who was there the night she died, put the letters in her drawer. And it seems to me that the choice of drawer is female. A guy isn't as likely to pick the lingerie department to hide something. We don't know when the letters were written because there were no envelopes, no date stamps. They all could've been written the night she was killed.

And if they were, that might rule out premeditation and move into covering up an impulse. Crime of passion."

"So the theory is person or persons unknown killed Marsha Stibbs on impulse, then put her into the bathtub hoping to cover up murder as an accident. Concerned perhaps that wasn't enough, this person or persons then wrote letters from some nonexistent lover, planted them in the victim's underwear drawer so that it might then appear she was killed by said nonexistent lover during an argument."

"Okay, it sounds a little out-there." "Then bring it in."

"I'm just nervous, because this really feels like a test." Peabody cleared her throat when Eve merely sent her a stony stare. "Some of the rest of the theory is just instinct. You look at the way the two of them reacted to us. Boyd seemed sad, a little shaky initially, but was glad we were there. It could've been an act, but with no time to prepare, it just feels real as does his insistence that Marsha didn't have a lover."

She paused, waiting for Eve's affirmation or rebuttal, and got nothing but silence. "Okay, on my own. His alibi's solid, and even if he knew or arranged the killing, it seems to me he'd have been nervous or annoyed that we'd walked into his nice new life and opened the possibility of exposing him. On the other hand, when she comes in, she's scared, she's angry, and she wants us out. Away from her nice new life with her dead pal's husband. Maybe that's a normal reaction, but it could just as easily be guilt and fear of exposure."

"Guilt because she was-what was it?-canoodling with said dead pal's husband before said pal was dead?"

"Maybe, but what if she wasn't?" Anxious, and just a little excited, Peabody shifted in her seat so she could see Eve's profile. "What if she just wanted to? What if she was in love with him, and here he is, just across the hall, day after day, happily married, seeing her as a friend of his wife's. She wants him for herself, but he's never going to look at her that way as long as Marsha's in the picture. It's Marsha's fault he doesn't love her. Marsha's fault she's not living that dream-nice home, great husband, maybe a couple of pretty kids down the line. Pisses her off, makes her unhappy. She's always got to be acting like the friend and neighbor and she just can't get the fantasy of what it could be like out of her head."

"What does she do?"

"She has a showdown with Marsha. Boyd's out of town, now's the time. She blasts Marsha for going off to work every day instead of staying home and taking care of her man. She doesn't deserve Boyd. If she was his wife, she'd be there to fix the meals, buy the groceries. She'd give him a child. She'd give him a family. They fight about it."

She wanted to see it, as she knew Eve could see such things. But the imagery was still indistinct. "Marsha probably tells her to get the hell out. To stay away from her husband. I bet she said she was going to tell Boyd everything. That neither of them would have anything to do with her again. That's too much for Maureen. She shoves Marsha, and Marsha falls, cracks her head. File said it was a fall against the corner of a reinforced glass table that killed her. She panics, tries to cover it up. Strips Marsha down, puts her in the bathtub. Maybe they'll think she slipped, hit her head on the tub and drowned.

"But then she starts to think again, and realizes that maybe they won't think it's an accident. More, this is an opportunity. Like a gift.

She didn't mean to kill her, but it was done. She couldn't take it back. If Boyd and the police think Marsha'd had a lover on the side, it would solve everything. They'd go off looking for him as a suspect.

Why should they ever look at her? So she writes the letters, plants them, then she goes home and waits for it to play out. I bet, after a while, she started to believe it really did happen the way she'd made it seem. It was the only way she could live with it, the only way she could sleep beside him night after night and not go crazy."

She blew out a breath, swallowed hard because her throat was dry.

"That's the theory I'm working. Are you going to tell me it blows?"

"How'd you come to it?"

"I kept looking at the reports, the data, the photographs. I read the statements until my eyes hurt. Then I was lying in bed last night with all that running around inside my head. So I put it all like in this corner of my brain, and used the rest of it to try to think like you. Or how I thought you'd think. You know, how you walk onto a crime scene and you start visualizing, sort of like you're watching it all happen. And that was the way I watched it all happen. A little murky, but that's how I saw it."