Reunion in Death

«And I know I wouldn't have had him if he did,» she added. «I loved him, Lieutenant, and he'll always be a vital part of my life. Even now that's he's gone. This is a man I lived with, slept with, had and raised children with. We share a grandson we both adore. Memories no one else has, and those are precious. But we weren't in love with each other anymore. And I've come to like the life I'm making on my own. I enjoy the challenge, and the independence of it. And while that baffles Anna and some of my other friends, I'm not ready to give that independence up. I don't know that I ever will be. Walter was a good man, a very, very good man. But he wasn't my man anymore.»

She handed the photographs back to Eve. «You didn't tell me who she was.»

She would hear it, Eve thought, either through the media or her connection with Anna Whitney. «She's the woman who gave Walter Pettibone poisoned champagne. And our prime suspect.»

«I liked her,» Peabody said as they drove back to the city.

«So did I.»

«I can't see her hiring a hit. She's too direct, and I don't know, sensible. And if the motive was payback for the divorce, why not target Bambi, too? Why should the replacement get to play grieving widow and roll around in an inheritance?»

Since Eve had come to the same conclusions herself, she nodded. «I'll see if Whitney can give me any different angle on the divorce and her attitude toward Pettibone. But at this point we bump her down the list.»

«What's the next step?»

«If Julianna was a hired hitter, she'd be costly. We'll start on financials, see if anybody spent some serious money recently.»

Julianna wasn't concerned about money. Her husbands, God rest them, had been very generous with the commodity. Long before she'd killed them, she'd opened secure, numbered accounts under various names in several discreet financial institutions.

She'd invested well, and even during her hideous time in prison, her money had made money for her.

She could have lived a long and indulgent life anywhere in the world or its satellites. But that life would never have been complete unless she could take the lives of others.

She really enjoyed killing. It was such interesting work.

The one benefit of incarceration had been the time, endless time, for her to consider how to continue that work once she was free again.

She didn't hate men. She abhorred them. Their minds, their bodies, their sweaty, groping hands. Most of all, she detested their simplicity. With men, it all came down to sex. However they dressed it up romanticized, justified, dignified it a man's primary goal was to stuff his cock inside you.

And they were too stupid to know that once they did, they gave you all the power.

She had no sympathy for women who claimed they'd been abused or raped or molested. If a woman was too stupid, too weak, to know how to seize a man's power and use it against him, she deserved whatever she got.

Julianna had never been stupid. And she'd learned quickly. Her mother had been nothing but a fool who'd been tossed away by one man and gone scrambling for another. And always at their beck and call, always biddable and malleable.

She'd never learned. Not even when Julianna had seduced her idiot second husband, had lured him to bed, and let him do all the disgusting things men lived to do to her fresh and supple fifteen-year-old body.

It had been so easy to make him want her, to draw him in so that he would sneak out of his wife's bed and into his wife's daughter. Panting for her like an eager puppy.

It had been so easy to use it against him. All she'd had to do was dangle sex, and he'd given her whatever she'd wanted. All she'd had to do was threaten exposure, and he'd given her more.

She'd walked away from that house at eighteen, with a great deal of money and without a backward glance. She'd never forget her mother's face when she'd told her just what had gone on under her nose for three long years.

It had been so viciously satisfying to see the shock, the horror, the grief. To see the weight of it all crash down and crush.

Naturally, she'd said she'd been raped, forced, threatened. It always paid to protect yourself.

Maybe her mother had believed it, and maybe she hadn't. It didn't matter. What mattered was that in that moment Julianna had realized she had the power to destroy.

And it had made her.

Now, years later, she stood in the bedroom of the townhouse off Madison Avenue she'd purchased more than two years before. Under yet another name. Studying herself in the mirror, she decided she liked herself as a brunette. It was a sultry look, particularly with the gold dust tone she'd chosen for her skin.

She lit an herbal cigarette, turned sideways in the mirror. Ran a hand over her flat belly. She'd taken advantage of the health facilities in prison, had kept herself in shape.