by J. D. Robb
“Yes, sir. I won’t let you down. You took me off sidewalk sleeper detail,” he continued quickly. “You brought me into Central and assigned me to Baxter so he could train me. He’s taught me a lot, Lieutenant. A lot about a lot. I’m not going to let either of you down.”
“You do good work, Trueheart. As long as you do, you can’t let anybody down.”
“Yes, sir. All I want is to do good work. And a detective’s shield,” he added with a quick and easy grin.
“Don’t screw up the work, study, you’ll have the shield. Now beat it.”
Alone, she closed her office door, got her coffee. She sat at her desk, propped her feet up. Drinking, she studied the board.
Spoiled, entitled, and showy for one group. She’d define another as pompous, angry, and envious—with a side of timid thrown in.
And the third? Ambitious, tightly woven, and efficient.
But did any of those attributes equal murder?
Your Space. It just didn’t click. Maybe there was something she wasn’t seeing—yet—but she’d set them aside for now.
Young-Biden. They had more than the previous generation, and did less to earn it. Young-Sachs, not only sleeping with his admin, but depending on her for everything. From what Eve could see, he knew dick-all about his own company’s workings, and cared less if he got high during working hours. Maybe Biden knew more, she’d have a look-see on that, but from what she’d taken away from the brief meeting, he enjoyed his expensive suits, expensive lifestyle, and had no problem flinging insults around.
Alexander and Pope. Big-shot reveling in his big-shotiness. Treated his half brother like an underling, which Pope appeared to accept. Eve suspected Alexander treated everyone like an underling. Some Mommy resentment there, too, she thought, as the mommy had had the bad taste to give birth to Pope.
Was it funny or telling that Roarke’s name had come up in each interview?
She’d have to think about that, too.
She rose, rearranged her board. She had fifteen before her Mira consult. Enough time for another hit of coffee and a little more processing.
She didn’t manage to get her ass in the chair before somebody knocked on her door.
“Damn it.”
Peabody poked her head in. “Sorry, Lieutenant, but—”
“I need a moment.” Gennifer Yung pushed in. “I’ve been told all morning you were unavailable.”
Eve signaled Peabody to go out, shut the door. “I’ve been in the field.” She stepped over, started to turn her board around.
“There’s no need for that. I’ve seen a murder board before.”
“Have you seen one centered on a family member?”
“I’m not a novice at this, Lieutenant. Leave it. Please.”
Yung stood, shoulders rigid, back stiff, and stared at the board. “You’ve been busy.”
“Yes, I have. Your sister-in-law’s murder is my top priority.”
With a nod, Yung rubbed at the back of her neck. “I apologize for pushing my way in here. Waiting is misery, Lieutenant, and can be destructive. I made myself be patient regarding the warrant for the files in her office. I know these matters can be delicate, can take time. I’d already pushed, so I told myself to wait it out, to give the process time. And now someone took advantage of that time to steal valuable evidence. Evidence that might have led you to Marta’s killer.”
“Your Honor, you know I can’t discuss the particulars of the case with you, but I will tell you we’re analyzing and processing considerable data, following all possible leads, interviewing those we feel may connect to her death in some way.”
“You sent a unit to my brother’s home.”
“As a precaution after the break-in at your sister-in-law’s office.”
“Yes. All right. It’s easy to become accustomed to being in charge, to having the authority. It’s difficult to find yourself in a situation where you’re not in charge, you don’t have the authority. You have to leave that in the hands of someone else. It doesn’t matter if you know those hands are capable. They’re not your hands.”
She held hers out, looked at them, closed them.
“I went with my brother to see his wife this morning. To see Marta. Of all the things I’ve seen, of all the things that have come through my courtroom, nothing has been as horrible.” She cleared her throat.
“My brother and his family will stay with me and mine for the time being. He thought it would be easier for the children to be at home, with their own things around them. But it’s too painful for them, for all of us. He’ll be with me if you need to reach him.”
“Again, I’m sorry, sincerely sorry, Your Honor, for your loss. When I have something I can share, I’ll let you all know at the first possible opportunity.”
She nodded, then looked back at the board. “Do you think her killer is up there?”
“I don’t know. But I think the reason for her murder is up there. The reason leads to the person or persons.”
“I’ll take that away with me, and let you get back to work.”
As the door shut behind Yung, Eve dragged a hand through her hair. Grief, she thought, always left a weight on the air.
She grabbed the jacket she’d tossed off when she’d come in, and left that weight behind to keep her appointment with Mira.
She put some speed on, unwilling to face a spanking by Mira’s admin if she was so much as a minute late. She zipped up to the dragon’s desk with—according to her calculations—thirty-three seconds to spare.
And still earned a scolding scowl.
“The doctor has a very busy schedule today.”
“That’s going around.”
The admin folded her lips, tapped inter-office comm. “Lieutenant Dallas is here to see you.”
She sniffed. “Go right in.”
Mira stood, drawing pretty teacups from her office AutoChef. She wore a suit in a smoky sort of lavender with plum-colored heels and a trio of silver chains. Her soft brown hair swept back from her face, and her soft blue eyes warmed when they met Eve’s.
“Yes, I’ve made you tea, which you’re not very fond of, but can use. You’ve had a long, difficult couple of days.”
“That’s the job.”
“It is. And still, it’s good to see you look reasonably rested, and very smart today.”
“Roarke put the outfit together. I had to face off with a lot of business moguls.”
“An excellent choice. Powerful but not hard, fashionable but not flashy, authoritative but not threatening.”
“Clothes talk to you, too.”
“They do, and too often say: Buy me. Have a seat.” She chose one of her cozy scoop chairs, passed one of the pretty cups to Eve. “How is Judge Yung?”
“Hanging tough.”
“I like her very much, personally and professionally. I actually met Marta a few times. She struck me as a lovely and loving woman.”
“She’s coming off that way. She’s dead because she drew the short straw.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Everything points to it. Two auditors get banged up, put out of commission. She inherits some of their files. Hours later, she’s dead in what the killers hope we’ll see as a violent mugging. Hours after that, the offices where she works are compromised, her computer messed with, and the files—and the master copies—go missing.
“Short straw.”
“Yes, I see. I agree, insofar as her murder was impersonal and poorly masked. You call it semi-pro in your report. I think that’s very accurate.”
“I’ve got these honchos, okay? Companies I’m taking a hard look at. I’ve got Roarke doing his thing—who knows business and numbers and money better—so he may give me more to take a hard look at, or eliminate some I’m looking at now. But the honchos all have, let’s say, attributes that c
ould have them order the murder of an accountant. She’s just a tool, and the wrong tool at that, which makes her a potential liability.”
“It was rushed. Both the time frame and the profile of the killing were rushed. Still honchos as you say can afford full professionals.”
“Can afford,” Eve agreed, “but maybe don’t see the need to pay. You’ve got security of some kind on the payroll already. Put them on it, give them a little bonus on the side. She’s just a droid, basically, no big deal.”
“Their needs outweigh hers.” Mira nodded as she sipped tea. “They can’t concern themselves with the lives of those who work for them, work under them.” Mira sipped again and considered. “I’d like to read your interview reports from this morning.”
“I’ll get them to you.”
“I would say you’re dealing with brutish, cold-blooded, and physically trained individuals for the actual killing. Those who do what they’re told, but don’t think for themselves. Taking the victim away from her workplace, leaving her body blocks from where she would have been shows a lack of logic.”
“She was supposed to walk to the subway, but they didn’t know that. They, or the one who hired them, may have assumed she’d walk home. Added to it, the location was convenient.”
“An empty building, and one it appears they could easily access.”
“Not worried about the connection, maybe because it’s rushed, it’s convenient. It’s just a mugging, it’s just an accountant.”
“Whoever hired them, if they were indeed hired, also doesn’t consider the long view. It’s immediate, quick gratification rather than careful planning and finesse. The concern is the files, the data, which may be incriminating in some way, not the victim. She is disposable. It’s not cruelty. It’s callousness.”
“It’s business.”
“Yes. It’s business. And how do you run and maintain a successful business when you aren’t inclined to look at the long view, at the details, when you brute your way through a problem?”
Eve sat back. “You inherit it.”
Mira smiled. “Cynical, and in this case high probability. The killers themselves, as I said, brutes. No sexual aspect, no rage, no personal agenda. Though the actual killing is a kind of showing off.”
“Showing off?”
“I’m strong. See how strong—I can snap a neck with my bare hands. Quickly and cleanly according to Morris’s report. They have a stunner, which is lethal used on full with contact, but go with brute force. Yes, showing off, and completing the kill with his own hands rather than a weapon or tool. He’s the weapon.”
“Okay.” Eve tried it out in her head. “Yeah. Okay. And maybe he needed to show off since he stunned an unarmed woman in the back, and that’s cowardly. He . . . had to offset that maybe.”
“I believe so. And the source? Impatient, impulsive, accustomed to having what he wants and quickly, with a distinct lack of compassion or attention to those who do the work so that he can live as he lives.”
“That pretty much eliminates four of my suspects.”
Mira smiled. “Which four?”
“Four women, five counting their office manager. Your Space. They didn’t inherit anything, they came from the middle-class pool, and they pay attention to details. It’s part of what they do. They’re organized and they’re efficient. If they’d targeted the vic, I think it would’ve been done right. It would’ve been very tidy, very clean.”
“Is that a compliment?”
“It is, actually. And they understand time-budgeting. The vic didn’t have time to get that far in the files. Killing her was inefficient. Okay, I can’t take them off the list, but I can keep my focus elsewhere. It saves me time. Thanks.”
“I’ll let you know what I think after I look at your interview reports.”
“Good enough.” Eve rose, surprised to find her cup nearly empty. She didn’t remember drinking the damn stuff. “So . . . I thought I should tell you I had this dream last night.”
Concern clouded Mira’s eyes. “Dream?”
“Yeah. Not a nightmare. You could call it a kind of review of the day, sort of going over the murder, at the scene. Sometimes I get a different aspect of the vic that way, or the killer, or some line, some angle. Anyway, she was there. Stella.”
“I see.”
“It didn’t bother me, in the dream. It didn’t upset me or twist me up. I just told her to fuck off.”
Mira beamed at her as if she’d won a gold medal. “Perfect. Progress.”
“I guess. The thing is, her being there, it gave me that angle. I don’t know why exactly, except for the fact she never thought of me, never put me first—or anywhere. She not only didn’t protect me, she was one of the monsters under the bed. Mothers are supposed to think of their kids. You don’t have to say she wasn’t my mother in any sense but the DNA,” Eve said before Mira could. “I get that. I’m dealing with that. But it turned it on Marta. And I realized she thought of her kids, of her family. She’d copied the files to her home unit, but she didn’t tell her killers. They’d have gone after the husband, at least they’d have gone after the files. She knew that. I don’t know if she believed they’d kill her anyway or not. But I believe she’d have died before she put her family in the crosshairs.
“Anyway, it made a difference to me, when I woke up, when I came out of it. Thinking how Stella would have killed me herself if she risked so much as a paper cut. And how this woman would’ve died to protect her family. I slept easier, I think, knowing that.”
“You’re a resilient woman, Eve. Nothing Stella did will ever break you.”
“Dented me some. But I’m doing okay. I wanted you to know I’m doing okay.”
“I’m here when you are, and I’m here when you’re not.”
“I know. That helps me do okay. I’ve got to get back. Thanks for the time.”
Mira rose to walk her to the door. “I’m looking forward to the premiere.”
“Oh, man.”
With a laugh, Mira patted Eve’s shoulder. “I’m prepared to be absolutely dazzled by the celebrities, the fashion, the glamour. I made Dennis buy a new tux. He’s going to look so handsome.”
“He always looks good.” Eve’s soft spot for Dennis Mira smoothed out some of the anxiety over the event. “If I don’t close this before, you can get an up-front look at my suspects. Plenty of them are going to be there.”
“More excitement.”
“I guess.” A little surprised at Mira’s attitude, Eve headed out.
She decided to swing into EDD, check on McNab’s progress, and spitball it with Feeney if he had the time. She braced herself for the noise, the constant movement, the saturation of colors that looked as though they’d soaked in neon then baked on the rings of Saturn.
She found McNab chair-dancing in his cube, his bony butt bouncing, narrow shoulders jiggling as he talked to the vic’s office comp in the incomprehensible language of geek.
She tapped those rocking shoulders, half expecting him to jump as he was so obviously in his own world. But he only swiveled around.
“Hey, Dallas.”
“How’s it going here?”
“It’s up. I’m getting the same buried code as I did on the building security. Same guy hacked it, the same method. It’s like a fingerprint.”
“So you said. How can I use the fingerprint?”
“When I get done here, I figured I’d do some research, see if I can find out who wrote the code. It’s a style, you know. Like shoes.”
Shoes and fingerprints, she thought. E-style.
“Okay.”
“Here’s the thing. I’m not seeing any access of her outgoings. Me, if I’m hacking in, I’m hacking all, and looking through. But it’s like the job was get the files, compromise the unit, move on. I don’t think whoever did this bothered to find out she’d cop
ied them. She did it from a disc, see?”
He gestured to the screen where she understood nothing at all.
“If you say so.”
“I totally do. It’s right there. I figure accountant types are anal types, right? Back up your backups, then make a spare copy in case the world blows up. So she backed up the files on the discs, then went ahead and copied to her home unit from the discs, one disc for each file. Me, I’d’ve put it all on one, just separate docs, but the one for each is careful to analyze.”
“Okay.”
“She probably had the backup with her in the briefcase. In fact, she pretty much had to have them with her with the analysis factor. So when they got them, they figured they were covered. You have to be anal to deal with analysis.”
That she got. “So, it’s reading to you like someone got an assignment, did exactly what that entailed. Nothing more. No ‘let’s just be thorough.’”
“That’s the zip. Most hackers are going to play around some, scoot around. Hey, you’re in there anyway. This one didn’t. Straight through, no detours.” McNab zoomed his arm through the air. “At least nothing I’ve found yet.”
“Good, it fits.”
She left him to his bouncing and rocking, wove her way through the prancing and dancing traffic of other e-geeks to poke her head in the door of Feeney’s mercifully calm, dull-colored, and motionless office.
He sat at his desk in a beige shirt. As he still wore a shit-brown jacket over it she assumed he’d come in from the field. He’d loosened his shit-brown tie but hadn’t pulled it off, so he might have planned to go back out again. His hair, a combination of ginger and salt sprang untidily around his sleepy basset hound face.
He worked a touch screen and keyboard simultaneously.
He might’ve dressed like a cop, thought like a cop, walked like a cop, but he could outgeek McNab and the rest of his department combined.
She gave the doorjamb a quick rap. “Got five?”
Feeney held up a finger, continued to do whatever the hell he was doing, then gave a satisfied grunt.
“Now I got five. Son of a bitching cyberstalker. Thinks he can terrorize women, slide in through their security, rape and rob them, then stroll away whistling a tune? He’s going to be whistling in a cage before much longer.”