by J. D. Robb
Eve hauled Maeve to her feet as the wind began to die. “We’re going to toss in breaking and entering and assault on an officer just for fun.”
“My name is Bobbie Bray, and you can’t touch me. I’m Bobbie Bray, do you hear me? I’m Bobbie Bray.”
“Yeah, I hear you.” Just as she heard the sudden frantic squawking of voices in her ear and the thunder of footsteps on the stairs.
“I couldn’t get to the stairs,” Peabody told her. “All of a sudden the place is full of people and music. Talk about jeebies. My communication’s down, and I’m trying to push through this wall of bodies. Live bodies—well, not live. I don’t know. It’s all jumbled.”
“We went to the doors soon as communications went down,” Feeney added. “Couldn’t get through them. Not even your man there with his magic fingers. Then all of a sudden, poof, com’s back, locks open, and we’re in. Damned place.” Feeney stared at Number twelve as they stood on the sidewalk. “Ought to be leveled, you ask me. Level the bastard and salt the ground.”
“Maeve Buchanan rigged it, that’s all. We’ll figure out how.” That was her story, Eve told herself, and she was sticking with it. “I’m heading in, taking her into interview. She’s just whacked enough she may not lawyer up straight off.”
“Can I get a lift?”
Eve turned to Roarke. “Yeah, I’ll haul you in. Uniforms are transporting the suspect to Central. Peabody, you want to supervise that?”
“On it. Glad to get the hell away from this place.”
When he settled in the car beside Eve, Roarke said simply, “Tell me.”
“Maeve was probably already inside. We just missed her in the sweep. She had a jammer and a program hidden somewhere.”
“Eve.”
She huffed out a breath, cursed a little. “If you want to be fanciful or whatever, I had a conversation with a dead woman.”
She told him, working hard to be matter-of-fact.
“So it wasn’t Maeve who bruised and scratched your face.”
“I don’t know what it was, but I know this is going to be wrapped, and wrapped tight tonight. Buchanan’s being picked up now. We’ll see if he was in this, or if Maeve worked alone. But I’m damn sure she’s the one who fired the gun. She’s the one who lured Hopkins there. He had a weakness for young women. He’d never have felt threatened by her. Walked right in, alone, unarmed.”
“If she sticks with this story about being Bobbie Bray, she could end up in a psychiatric facility instead of prison.”
“A cage is a cage—the shape of it isn’t my call.”
At Central, Eve let Maeve stew a little while as she waited for Mira to be brought in and take a post in observation. So she took Buchanan first.
He was shaking when she went into interview room B, his face pale, his eyes glossy with distress.
“They said—they said you arrested my daughter. I don’t understand. She’ll need a lawyer. I want to get her a lawyer.”
“She’s an adult, Mr. Buchanan. She’ll request her own representation if she wants it.”
“She won’t be thinking straight. She’ll be upset.”
“Hasn’t been thinking straight for a while, has she?”
“She’s . . . she’s delicate.”
“Here.” Peabody set a cup of water on the table for him. “Have a drink. Then you can help us help your daughter.”
“She needs help,” Eve added. “Do you know she claims to be Bobbie Bray?”
“Oh God. Oh God.” He put his face in his hands. “It’s my fault. It’s all my fault.”
“You are John Massey, grandson of Bobbie Bray and Radcliff Hopkins?”
“I got away from all that. I had to get away from it. It destroyed my mother. There was nothing I could do.”
“So during the Urbans, you saw your chance. Planted your ID after an explosion. Mostly body parts. All that confusion. You walked away.”
“I couldn’t take all the killing. I couldn’t go back home. I wanted peace. I just wanted some peace. I built a good life. Got married, had a child. When my wife died, I devoted myself to Maeve. She was the sweetest thing.”
“Then you told her where she’d come from, who she’d come from.”
He shook his head. “No. She told me. I don’t know how she came to suspect, but she tracked down Rad Hopkins. She said it was business, and I wanted to believe her. But I was afraid it was more. Then one day she told me she’d been to Number Twelve, and she understood. She was going to take care of everything, but I never thought she meant . . . Is this ruining her life now, too? Is this ruining her life?”
“You knew she went back out the night Hopkins was killed,” Eve said. “You knew what she’d done. She’d have told you. You covered for her. That makes you an accessory.”
“No.” Desperation was bright in his eyes as they darted around the room. “She was home all night. This is all a terrible mistake. She’s upset and she’s confused. That’s all.”
They let him sit, stepped out into the hall. “Impressions, Peabody?”
“I don’t think he had an active part in the murder. But he knew—maybe put his head in the sand about it, but he knew. We can get him on accessory after the fact. He’ll break once she has.”
“Agreed. So let’s go break her.”
Maeve sat quietly. Her hair was smoothed again, her face was placid. “Lieutenant, Detective.”
“Record on.” Eve read the data into the recorder, recited the revised Miranda. Do you understand your rights and obligations, Ms. Buchanan?”
“Of course.”
“So Maeve.” Eve sat at the table across from her. “How long did you know Hopkins?”
A smirky little smile curved her lips. “Which one?”
“The one you shot nine times in Number Twelve.”
“Oh, that Hopkins. I met him right after he bought the building. I read about it, and thought it was time we resolved some matters.”
“What matters?”
“Him killing me.”
“You don’t look dead.”
“He shot me so I couldn’t leave him, so I wouldn’t be someone else’s money train. Then he covered it up. He covered me up. I’ve waited a long time to make him pay for it.”
“So you sent him the message so he’d come to Number Twelve. Then you killed him.”
“Yes, but we’d had a number of liaisons there before. We had to uncover my remains from that life.”
“Bobbie Bray’s remains.”
“Yes. She’s in me. I am Bobbie.” She spoke calmly, as if they were once again sitting in the classy parlor in her brownstone. “I came back for justice. No one gave me any before.”
“How did you know where the remains were?”
“Who’d know better? Do you know what he wanted to do? He wanted to bring in the media, to make another fortune off me. He had it all worked out. He’d bring the media in, let them put my poor bones on-screen, give interviews—at a hefty fee, of course. Using me again, like he always did. Not this time.”
“You believed Rad Hopkins was Hop Hopkins reincarnated?” Peabody asked.
“Of course. It’s obvious. Only this time I played him. Told him my father would pay and pay and pay for the letters I’d written. I told him where we had to open the wall. He didn’t believe that part, but he wanted under my skirt.”
She wrinkled her nose to show her mild distaste. “I could make him do what I wanted. We worked for hours cutting that brick. Then he believed.”
“You took the hair clips and the gun.”
“Later. We left them while he worked on his plan. While, basically, he dug his own grave. I cleaned them up. I really loved those hair clips. Oh, there were ammunition clips, too. I took them. I was there.”
Her face changed, hardened, and her voice went raw, went throaty. “In me, in the building. So sad, so cold, so lost. Singing, singing every night. Why should I sing for him? Murdering bastard. I gave him a child, and he didn’t want it.”
�
��Did you?” Eve asked her.
“I was messed up. He got me hooked—the drugs, the life, the buzz, you know? Prime shit, always the prime shit for Hop. But I was going to get straight, give it up, go back for my kid. I was gonna—had my stuff packed up. I wrote and told my old lady, and I was walking on Hop. But he didn’t want that. Big ticket, that’s what I was. He never wanted the kid. Only me, only what I could bring in. Singing and singing.”
“You sent Rad a message, to get him to Number Twelve.”
“Sure. Public ’link, easy and quick. I told him to come, and when to come. He liked when I used Bobbie’s voice—spliced from old recordings—in the messages I sent him. He thought it was sexy. Asshole. He stood there, grinning at me. I brought it, he said.”
“What was it?”
“His watch. The watch he had on the night he shot me. The one I bought him when my album hit number one. He had it on his wrist and was grinning at me. I shot him, and I kept shooting him until the clip was empty. Then I pushed the murdering bastard over, and I put the gun right against his head, right against it, and I shot him again. Like he did to me.”
She sat back a little, smiled a little. “Now he can wander around in that damn place night after night after night. Let’s see how he likes it.”
Epilogue
When Eve stepped out, rubbed her hands over her face, Mira slipped out of observation.
“Don’t tell me,” Eve began. “Crazy as a shithouse rat.”
“That might not be my precise diagnosis, but I believe we’ll find with testing that Maeve Buchanan is legally insane and in desperate need of treatment.”
“As long as she gets it in a cage. Not a bit of remorse. Not a bit of fear. No hedging.”
“She believes everything she did was justified, even necessary. My impression, at least from observing this initial interview, is she’s telling you the truth exactly as she knows it. There’s the history of mental illness on both sides of her family. This may very well be genetic. Then discovering who her great-grandmother was helped push her over some edge she may very well have been teetering on.”
“How did she discover it?” Eve added. “There’s a question. Father must have let something slip.”
“Possibly. Haven’t you ever simply known something? Or felt it? Of course, you have. And from what I’m told happened tonight, you had an encounter.”
Frowning, Eve ran her fingers over her sore cheek. “I’m not going to stand here and say I was clocked by a ghost. I’m sure as hell not putting that in my report.”
“Regardless, you may at the end of this discover the only reasonable way Maeve learned of her heritage was from Bobbie Bray herself. That she also learned of the location of the remains from the same source.”
“That tips out of the reasonable.”
“But not the plausible. And that learning these things snapped something inside her. Her way of coping was to make herself Bobbie. To believe she’s the reincarnation of a woman who was killed before her full potential was realized. And who, if she’d lived—if she’d come back to claim her child—would have changed everything.”
“Putting a lot of faith in a junkie,” Eve commented. “And using, if you ask me, a woman who was used, exploited and murdered, to make your life a little more important.”
Now she rubbed her eyes. “I’m going to get some coffee, then hit the father again. Thanks for coming down.”
“It’s been fascinating. I’d like to do the testing on her personally. If you’ve no objection.”
“When I’m done, she’s all yours.”
Because her own AutoChef had the only real coffee in all of cop central, Eve detoured there first.
There he was, sitting at her desk, fiddling with his ppc.
“You should go home,” Eve told Roarke. “I’m going to have an all-nighter on this.”
“I will, but I wanted to see you first.” He rose, touched his hand to her cheek. “Put something on that, will you?” Until she did, he put his lips there. “Do you have a confession?”
“She’s singing—ha-ha. Chapter and verse. Mira says she’s nuts, but that won’t keep her out of lockup.”
“Sad, really, that an obsession with one woman could cause so much grief, and for so long.”
“Some of it ends tonight.”
This time he laid his lips on hers. “Come back to me when you can.”
“You can count on that one.”
Alone, she sat. And alone she wrote up a report, and the paperwork that charged Radcliff C. Hopkins I with murder in the first degree in the unlawful death of Bobbie Bray. She filed it, then after a moment’s thought, put in another form.
She requested the release of Bobbie Bray’s remains to herself—if they weren’t claimed by next of kin—so that she could arrange for their burial. Quietly.
“Somebody should do it,” she stated aloud.
She got her coffee, rolled her aching shoulders. Then headed back to work.
In Number Twelve, there was silence in the dark. No one sang, or wept or laughed. No one walked there.
For the first time in eighty-five years, Number Twelve sat empty.
Poppy’s Coin
MARYBLAYNEY
For Nora, Mary Kay and Ruth
Prologue
LONDON, ENGLAND
APRIL 2006
The bright blue door opened into another world. She could tell the minute she stepped into the entry hall that this small museum was exactly the sort of place she liked best. History was about people, not politics. How they lived was what mattered. Whoever had preserved this townhouse felt the same.
Inside it was a tribute to the Regency period. A time before trains changed village life forever, when fifty miles in a carriage was a good day’s travel. There was no electricity, computers or air-conditioning.
Jim groaned when she insisted she wanted to take the tour.
“How is this different from every other old house we’ve seen? I bet it has a basement kitchen, no bathroom, and they call the first floor the ground floor.”
“This is different because it’s in Mayfair, the primo neighborhood way back in 1800 and still one of the best addresses. It’s where the rich lived for the spring months, when they came to London to see and be seen.”
“Lots of parties.”
“Exactly.”
Jim shrugged, and she knew she could talk him into it. “Come on. We have one week left of our year abroad. We’ve spent enough time studying economics. Let’s learn a little history. Let’s see how they lived.”
“Yeah, without indoor plumbing.”
They dutifully worked their way through the belowstairs exhibits, the wine cellar, and servants’ hall; watched the cooking demonstration, accepting a sample of syllabub, a cream and sugar concoction that tasted faintly of lemon.
“Boring,” Jim said.
“Interesting,” she insisted.
The feeling that the tour was little more than a lecture ended when she stood in the bedroom, surrounded by the trappings of everyday life for the woman who had lived here two centuries ago.
There was a display of clothing from the inside out. No real underwear as she knew it, but a long slip that she would wear today as a dress, covered by a corset that did not look as uncomfortable as it sounded. Stockings in both silk and cotton, and charming flower-embroidered garters to hold them up.
The high-waisted gown would do nothing for her figure but she bet women with big hips and butts loved them. She smiled. Gowns like these would make life very interesting for a lover, like unwrapping a surprise package. There had been a military uniform in the man’s dressing room. If all guys wore breeches that form-fitting, then their bodies were much less of a mystery.
She stopped in front of a vanity, the top outlined with a Plexiglas cover, filled with the familiar combs and brushes, though these were silver-backed and monogrammed. A pile of coins spilled from the tiniest of purses. A “reticule,” the posted sign called it.
“H
ey, Jim, look at this.”
He was halfway out the door but came back to her side.
“The sign says coinage has changed since 1810, but surely that shiny gold one with the dent in it is way different from the usual even in those days.”
“Who knows. The money here is still a mystery to me. I hand over a pound coin and the only thing I know is that it’s way more than a dollar.”
The girl leaned closer. “It’s weird. It has writing on it, but it’s definitely not in any language I know. Is there a docent on this floor?”
She looked up to find that Jim was gone. But she was not alone. A man sat in a chair tucked behind the door. Dressed in something like a naval uniform, he stood up and bowed to her, his face all smiles.
“You wish to know something of the coin, miss? The writing is Arabic. The East India Company minted the coins to be used in India. This particular one never made it that far. It’s one of the few that was saved when the ship sank in the Bay of Biscay barely a week after leaving port.” He stood up. “Would you like to hold it?”
“Yes, please.” She turned back to the vanity, surprised to see that the Plexiglas was gone. How did they do that?
The man picked up the coin and handed it to her. Just as she bent to look at it, Jim leaned in the doorway. “Hey, let’s go. I’m starved and I want to catch that soccer match.”
“Come look at this, Jim.”
He shook his head, impatient to be gone. “I’ll meet you at Earl’s Place.”
She nodded and let him go. Walking over to the window, she inspected the coin, tested its weight and wondered what could have happened that dented it so. She turned back to the docent.
“I wish I could have known what life was like then.”
“Ach, miss,” the man scolded, “don’t waste a wish on that. Have a seat. I can tell you all you want to know.”
One
LONDON, ENGLAND
MARCH 1817