Free The Ties That Bind by Warren Adler Page A

jealousy. And regret. What Gail had was inborn and
uncontrived, a soothing force embedded in her own nature. Fiona generated heat
wherever she alighted. Gail had the gift of relating.
    "Perhaps the Herbert woman let ambition rule her
better judgment," Fiona speculated further, but without conviction.
    "That's a tough one, Fiona," Gail said.
    "That's why I'm inclined to stand by consensual,"
Fiona said, coming back to that again, wondering if she was, in her desire to
plant the idea in their minds, overstating.
    "I'm not there yet, Fiona," Gail said. In her own
way she was as relentless as Fiona.
    Fiona tried to appear laid back, as if she had merely
voiced casual speculations.
    "Sexual perversion is a very complex subject,"
Fiona said, pushing ahead, like a bulldozer preparing the road before the
asphalt was poured. She hoped she had assumed a pedagogic air. "I'm
inclined to believe that people who practice specific perversions, in this
case, bondage, sadism, masochism or whatever, know enough of the code words to
find and communicate with each other."
    "Her father may not appreciate that kind of
analysis," the Eggplant said. "I would appreciate it, FitzGerald, if
you didn't make my life more difficult for me than it is."
    "Believe me, Chief," Fiona sighed, "we'll
walk on eggshells with the man." She glanced toward Gail, who nodded.
    "I'm glad you understand that, Sergeant," the
Eggplant said.
    "But I'm not ready to deny the theory. Not yet."
    Enough, Fiona rebuked herself.
    "Just bring me the killer and an airtight case,"
the Eggplant said, standing up. It was his way of announcing that the meeting
was over. "And keep me apprised."
    He was remarkably taciturn for a man beset by problems at
every turn. Fiona wondered if the pressure of the job was making him lose his
edge.
    "I still feel she was coerced," Gail said, when
they left the Eggplant's office, revealing the obsessive durability of her
logic. Fiona decided that it was not the time to totally challenge her thesis.
Not yet.
    There was a subtext here, Fiona knew. The Eggplant had to
be pleased with his decision to pair two women to investigate crimes against
women. In this pairing, Fiona suspected that the Eggplant had been more lucky
than prescient.
    He might have expected bickering, backbiting, hysterics and
emotion to surface quickly in such a relationship, maybe even a down-and-dirty
cat fight. Perhaps he wanted an example that might offer a vital comment that
mirrored his opinion about women in a police setting, especially in the
homicide environment.
    The fact was that he was getting something exactly opposite
to his expectations and he seemed, inexplicably, to be reveling in it, a
condition that meant he was on the verge of taking credit for introducing what
others might think was a brilliant idea.
    Despite their different vantage points, both she and Gail
were viewing the crime through the eyes of the victim, which was the object of
the exercise. On that score Fiona seemed to have the advantage. After all,
she'd been there.
    As Fiona expected, Flannagan's tech boys found a plethora
of potential "clues" and a sparse collection of latent prints. A
place of transiency, like a hotel room, was a difficult place to pinpoint a
perpetrator through circumstantial evidence. Remnants of human hair, as well as
other signs of successive human occupation, were everywhere.
    Then there was the time-and-motion pressure on the tech
boys. In the murder capital of the world, they were vastly overworked and it was
impossible for anyone in the chain-of-evidence identification process to be as
thorough as homicide detectives would have liked.
    "I'm afraid there won't be much to go on here,"
Fiona said, handing the report to Gail. Fiona expressed her disappointment,
although it provided yet another addition to her theory. Farley Lipscomb, a
former prosecutor in his early days, would have the know-how to be quite
scrupulous in removing evidence, wiping down the room carefully to