Now he looked insulted. “I’m a man! A man faces his enemy head-on. She’s only a woman, so has to use wile and subterfuge. I would have spared her that if I could have gotten through.”
“How will you communicate with her?” Mira asked.
“Mind to mind, heart to heart. She can speak to me now. I hear her song.” Closing his eyes, he laid a hand on his temple and smiled. “She sings for me. Only for me now.”
Enough, Eve thought. Just enough.
“Okay. Ethan, you broke your parole and threatened a police officer with a weapon. You’re going to be taken down and booked, and wait until you can be transferred back to your facility, reevaluated.”
“You can chain me as before, lock me away, but love will rise, love will triumph.”
“Okay. Interview end. Peabody.”
“I’ll take him down.”
Eve went out with Mira, rubbing her eyes as they walked away from Interview. “He’s crazy as a box of rabid monkeys, but he didn’t kill Fitzhugh.”
“I suspect learning of Fitzhugh’s death caused yet another breakdown. I also believe he was misdiagnosed and should never have been released. I’ll write a report, and trust me, share my considerable thoughts with Dr. Horowitz. Crommell shouldn’t go back under his care, and I’ll throw my weight on that.”
She glanced back as Peabody led Crommell away. “Poor man.”
“I’m having his place tossed in case he was bullshitting us in there. And no, I don’t think he was. But it’s possible somebody could have used him and his delusions to work the murder. The timing,” she added. “He hasn’t been out long, and Fitzhugh’s dead. We’d have to look at him for it.”
Eve paused at the entrance to Homicide. “He’d have gone after Lane, sooner or later.”
“Absolutely.”
“Thanks for taking the time to sit in.”
Eve went to her office, sat, looked at her board and Crommell’s ID shot. “Crazy as fuck, and pathetic with it.”
Turning away, she wrote her report.
Once done, rather than go back to doing runs on guests, she walked out to Peabody.
“Rico Estaban, that’s Vera Harrow’s plus-one, is shooting some deal in the West Village. Let’s go talk to him.”
“He’s a small-screen guy,” Peabody informed her as they started out. “Mostly one-off parts in series. Did some daytime dramas, and those holiday romance deals I can’t help watching during the season.”
The thought put a dreamy look on her face.
“Like gorgeous, cranky guy hates Christmas, gets stuck in a small town for a couple of weeks during the season, finds love with small-town girl—maybe the local vet with a sweet, frisky puppy—and the true meaning of Christmas. Or he’s the gorgeous, Christmas-loving guy who owns the local diner in another small town where the gorgeous, high-powered ad exec gets stuck, and she falls for him, his adorable niece, and Christmas.”
“I love those damn movies.”
Eve glanced back at the burly uniform wedged into the elevator with them. “Seriously?”
“And I ain’t ashamed. Did you see the one where the big-shot developer comes into town? He’s going to tear down this old Christmassy inn to build a fancy resort.”
“And he falls for the daughter of the family who’s run the inn for three generations,” Peabody continued. “With Christmas renewed in his heart, he buys the inn, but to restore it, and the whole town comes to sing carols on Christmas Eve. Made me cry.”
“Me, too.”
“Jesus” was all Eve could say. She pushed off the elevator to clang down the last two flights of steps to her garage level.
“I especially like to watch them when I’m baking during the holidays.”
“It’s summer,” Eve reminded her. “I refuse to discuss Christmas and think of all the stupid presents I have to come up with when it’s eighty and sunny.”
“Maybe you need to get stuck in a small town and find Christmas in your heart.”
“That’ll be the day.”
She zipped out of the garage.
“I want to pump him about Vera Harrow. He’s small-time, she’s not. What’s she doing bringing him to the party?”
“Did you get a look at him? Absolute frosty supreme. I did the brief on-scene interview with him, and he piled on the charm. He looks you right in the eyes.” She two-fingered her own, tapped them out. “Sexy.”
“Might be that simple. Might be, ‘Hey, sexy B-lister, how about I take you to this bash, you dump a little of this into my ex-lover’s drink, and I make you a big star.’”
“Well…”
“Yeah, probably not, especially since she struck me as a woman who takes care of her own business. But we’ll get a sense. We know Fitzhugh had the glass when he stopped to talk to them.”
“The more I think about it, the more I think Lane was the target.”
“Expand.”
“Her drink of choice. He took it to her, and according to witnesses said just that as he moved through. The only reason she didn’t drink it is because Bowen nudged her to perform first. And the only reason he drank it instead was to toast her performance. I’m leaning toward she got lucky, and he didn’t.”
“Agreed.”
“You think she was the target?”
“Probability and logic point there.” Stopping at a light, watching the pedestrian river flow, Eve tapped her fingers on the wheel. “The other possibility is it didn’t matter to the killer which one of them drank it.”
“Vera Harrow.”
“She had it in for both of them. Women opt for poison more often than men. A violent death—and cyanide’s not bloody, but it’s sure as hell violent—at a big, splashy, media-attended party gets a lot of attention. Attendees are already getting that attention. Seems to me attention is vital to people in this line of work.”
“Publicity as motive?”
“Or a handy by-product.”
The production shut down a block, with plenty of lookie-loos neck-craning outside the barricades. Rather than hunt for parking, Eve pulled up behind them, flipped on her On Duty light.
“Estaban’s got a guest shot in City Living,” Peabody read off her PPC as she got out of the car. “It’s a new series about three roommates—struggling actor, chef, blogger—looking for love and their big break.”
Eve signaled a bored cop posted at the barricade.
“What’s up, Lieutenant?”
“We need to speak with Rico Estaban.”
“They’re doing a scene. See, right down there?” He gestured about halfway down the block where cameras and crew converged outside a coffee shop. “They’ll start people walking by in a second, then these two come out, stand there talking. They’ll walk this way, stop, talk. She walks off, he stands looking after her. Then they’ll go back and do it all over again. And a-freaking-gain.”
“Let whoever needs to know we need Estaban.”
“You got it. Hold on once. Here they go again.”
She watched people begin to walk, then the door to the coffee shop opened. It ran as the cop had told her. With the couple—a woman and Estaban—pausing to talk as people streamed around them. The woman shook her head, laughing as her long blond ponytail swayed. They walked again, stopped again. This time she gave him a playful smack on the arm before walking on alone with him watching her.