Triple Threat by Jeffery Deaver Page B

ebullient, Game-addicted personality real well.
    The actual job description is “security consultant.”
    Nowadays, everybody cares about security. They don’t about investigating. Why should they? A credit card and the Internet make us all Sam Spades.
    Still, Eddie Caruso likes to think of himself as a PI.
    Caruso has a scuffed, boring, nondescript office in a building those same adjectives apply to, Forty-sixth near Eighth—decorated (office, not building) with close to twenty pictures he himself has taken with a very high-speed Canon of athletes in action. You’d think he was a sports lawyer. The building features mostly orthodontists, plastic surgeons, accountants, one-man law firms and a copy shop. That’s one great thing about New York: Even in the Theater District, the Mecca of all things artistic, people need teeth and boobs fixed up, their taxes paid and resumes exaggerated. Next door is a touristy but dependable restaurant of some nebulous Middle Eastern/Mediterranean affiliation; it excels at the grilled calamari. Caruso, who lives in Greenwich Village and who often walks the three miles to work (to banish the overhang of gut), likes the five-story bathwater-gray building, the location, too. Though if the city doesn’t stop digging up the street in front of the building Caruso may just write a letter.
    Which he’ll never get around to, of course.
    Now, Eddie Caruso finished reading the account of the murder, well,
skimming
the account of the murder, and pushed the material back toward Carmel.
    Yep, Game…
    Sarah Lieberman’s story had indeed interested Caruso, as Mrs. Rodriguez here had suggested. Sarah’s itinerant younger days, a bit of a rebel, her settling into life in New York City quite easily. She seemed to be irreverent and clever and to have no patience for the pretense that breeds in the Upper East Side like germs in a four-year-old’s nose. Caruso decided he would have liked the woman.
    And he was mightily pissed off that the Westerfields had beat her to death with a hammer, wrapped the body in a garbage bag, and dumped her in an unmarked grave.
    It seemed that mother and son had met Sarah at a fundraiser and saw a chance to run a grift. They recognized her as a wealthy, elderly vulnerable woman with no family, living alone. A perfect target. They leased the apartment on the ground floor of her Upper East Side townhouse and began a relentless campaign to take control of her life. She had finally had enough and one morning in July, a year ago, tried to record them threatening her. They’d caught her in the act, though, and forced her to sign a contract selling them the townhouse for next to nothing. Then they zapped her with a Taser and bludgeoned her to death.
    That afternoon Carmel returned to the townhouse from shopping and found her missing. Knowing that the Westerfields had been asking about her valuables and that Sarah was going to record them threatening her, the housekeeper suspected what had happened. She called the police. Given that—and the fact that a routine search revealed the Westerfields had a criminal history in Missouri and Kansas—officers responded immediately. They found some fresh blood in the garage. That was enough for a search warrant. Crime scene found the Taser with Sarah’s skin in the barbs, a hammer with John’s prints and Sarah’s blood and hair, and duct tape with both Sarah’s and Miriam’s DNA. A roll of garbage bags, too, three of them missing.
    The clerk from a local spy and security shop verified the Taser had been bought, with cash, by John Westerfield a week earlier. Computer forensic experts found the couple had tried to hack into Sarah’s financial accounts—without success. Investigators did, however, find insurance documents covering close to seven hundred thousand dollars in cash and jewelry kept on her premises. Two necklaces identified as Sarah’s were found in Miriam’s jewelry box. All of the valuables had been stolen.
    The defense