by J. D. Robb
She closed her eyes again. “Sometimes I am.”
“No, that you never are. You’re strong, and you’re moral, and sometimes you make yourself ill with compassion for the innocent.”
Her eyes stung behind her closed lids. “Someone I admire and respect asked me for help, asked me for a favor. I turned him down flat. What does that make me?”
“A woman who had a choice to make.”
“Roarke, the last woman who was killed. Louise Kirski. That’s on my head. She was twenty-four, talented, eager, in love with a second-rate musician. She had a cluttered one-room apartment on West Twenty-sixth and liked Chinese food. She had a family in Texas that will never be the same. She was innocent, Roarke, and she’s haunting me.”
Relieved, Eve let out a long breath. “I haven’t been able to tell anyone that. I wasn’t sure I could say it out loud.”
“I’m glad you could say it to me. Now, listen.” He set his glass down, scooted forward to take her face in his hands. Her skin was soft, her eyes a narrow slant of dark amber. “Fate rules, Eve. You follow the steps, and you plan and you work, then fate slips in laughing and makes fools of us. Sometimes we can trick it or outguess it, but most often it’s already written. For some, it’s written in blood. That doesn’t mean we stop, but it does mean we can’t always comfort ourselves with blame.”
“Is that what you think I’m doing? Comforting myself?”
“It’s easier to take the blame than it is to admit there was nothing you could do to stop what happened. You’re an arrogant woman, Eve. Just one more aspect of you that I find attractive. It’s arrogant to assume responsibility for events beyond our control.”
“I should have controlled it.”
“Ah, yes.” He smiled. “Of course.”
“It’s not arrogance,” she insisted, miffed. “It’s my job.”
“You taunted him, assuming he’d come after you.” Because the thought of that still twisted in his gut like hissing snakes, Roarke tightened his grip on her face. “Now you’re insulted, annoyed that he didn’t follow your rules.”
“That’s a hideous thing to say. Goddamn you, I don’t—” She broke off, sucked in her breath. “You’re pissing me off so I’ll stop feeling sorry for myself.”
“It seems to have worked.”
“All right.” She let her eyes close again. “All right. I’m not going to think about it anymore right now. Maybe by tomorrow I’ll have a better shot at sorting it out. You’re pretty good, Roarke,” she said with a ghost of a smile.
“Thousands concur,” he murmured and caught her nipple lightly between his thumb and forefinger.
The ripple effect made it all the way down to her toes. “That’s not what I meant.”
“It’s what I meant.” He tugged gently, listened to her breath catch.
“Maybe if I can manage to crawl out of here, I can take you up on your interesting offer.”
“Just relax.” Watching her face, he slid his hand between her legs, cupped her. “Let me.” He managed to catch her glass as it slipped from her hand, and he set it aside. “Let me have you, Eve.”
Before she could answer, he shot her to a fast, wracking orgasm. Her hips arched up, pumped against his busy hand, then went lax.
She wouldn’t think now, he knew. She would be wrapped in layered sensations. She never seemed to expect it. And her surprise, her sweet and naive response was, as always, murderously arousing. He could have pleasured her endlessly, for the simple delight of watching her absorb every touch, every jolt.
So he indulged himself, exploring that long, lean body, suckling the small, hot breasts, wet with perfumed water, gulping in the rapid breath that gasped from her lips.
She felt drugged, helpless, her mind and body burdened with pleasure. Part of her was shocked, or tried to be. Not so much at what she let him do, but at the fact that she allowed him complete and total control of her. She couldn’t have stopped him, wouldn’t have, even when he held her near to screaming on the edge before shoving her over into another shuddering climax.
“Again.” Greedy, he dragged her head back by the hair and stabbed his fingers inside her, worked her ruthlessly until her hands splashed bonelessly in the water. “I’m all there is tonight. We’re all there is.” He savaged her throat on the way to her mouth, and his eyes were like fierce blue suns. “Tell me you love me. Say it.”
“I do. I do love you.” A moan ripped from her throat when he plunged himself into her, jerked her hips high, and plunged deeper.
“Tell me again.” He felt her muscles squeeze him like a fist and gritted his teeth to keep from exploding. “Tell me again.”
“I love you.” Trembling from it, she wrapped her legs around him and let him batter her past delirium.
She did have to crawl out of the pool. Her head was spinning, her body limp. “I don’t have any bones left.”
Roarke chuckled and gave her a friendly slap on the butt. “I’m not carrying you this time, darling. We’d both end up on our faces.”
“Maybe I’ll just lie down right here.” It was a struggle to remain on her hands and knees on the smooth tiles.
“You’ll get cold.” With an effort, he summoned the strength to drag her to her feet where they rocked together like drunks.
She began to snicker, teetering. “What the hell did you do to me? I feel like I’ve downed a couple of Freebirds.”
He managed to grip her waist. “Since when did you play with illegals?”
“Standard police training.” She bit experimentally at her bottom lip and found that it was, indeed, numb. “We have to take a course in illegals at the academy. I palmed most of mine and flushed them. Is your head spinning?”
“I’ll let you know when I regain feeling above the waist.” He tipped her head back and kissed her lightly. “Why don’t we see if we can make it inside. We can . . .” He trailed off, eyes narrowing over her shoulder.
She might have been impaired, but she was still a cop. Instinctively, she whirled and braced, unconsciously shielding his body with hers. “What? What is it?”
“Nothing.” He cleared his throat, patted her shoulder. “Nothing,” he repeated. “Go on in, I’ll be right along.”
“What?” She stood her ground, scanning for trouble.
“It’s nothing, really. I just . . . I neglected to disengage the security camera. It’s, ah, activated by motion or voice.” Naked, he strode over toward a low stone wall, flicked a switch and palmed a disc.
“Camera.” Eve held up a finger. “There was a recording on the entire time we’ve been out here?” She flicked a narrow-eyed stare at the lagoon. “The entire time.”
“Which is why I generally prefer people to automations.”
“We’re on there? All on there?”
“I’ll take care of it.”
She started to speak again, then got a good look at his face. The devil took over. “I’ll be damned, Roarke. You’re embarrassed.”
“Certainly not.” If he’d been wearing anything but skin, he would have pushed his hands into his pockets. “It was simply an oversight. I said I’d take care of it.”
“Let’s play it back.”
He stopped short, and gave Eve the rare pleasure of seeing him goggle. “I beg your pardon?”
“You are embarrassed.” She leaned over to kiss him, and while he was distracted, snatched the disc. “That’s cute. Really cute.”
“Shut up. Give me that.”
“I don’t think so.” Delighted, she danced back a step and held the disc out of reach. “I bet this is very hot. Aren’t you curious?”
“No.” He made a grab, but she was very quick. “Eve, give me the damn thing.”
“This is fascinating.” She edged back toward the open patio doors. “The sophisticated, seen-it-all Roarke is blushing.”
“I am not.” He hoped to Christ he wasn’t. That would top it. “I simply see no reason to document lovemaking. It’s private.”
“I’m not
going to pass it on to Nadine Furst for broadcast. I’m just going to review it. Right now.” She dashed inside while he swore and ran after her.
She walked into her office at nine A.M. sharp with a spring to her step. Her eyes were clear and unshadowed, her system toned and her shoulders free of tension. She was all but humming.
“Somebody got lucky,” Feeney said mournfully and kept his feet planted on her desk. “Roarke’s back on planet, I take it.”
“I got a good night’s sleep,” she retorted and shoved his feet aside.
He grunted. “Be grateful, ’cause you’re not going to find much peace today. Lab report’s in. The fucking knife doesn’t match.”
Her sunny mood vanished. “What do you mean, the knife doesn’t match?”
“The blade’s too thick. A centimeter. Might as well be a meter, goddamn it.”
“That could be the angle of the wounds, the thrust of the blow.” Mexico vanished like a bubble of air. Thinking fast, she began to pace. “What about the blood?”
“They managed to scrape off enough to get type, DNA.” His already gloomy face sagged. “It matches our boy. It’s David Angelini’s blood, Dallas. Lab says it’s old, six months minimum. From the fibers they got, it looks like he used it to open packages, probably nicked himself somewhere along the line. It’s not our weapon.”
“Screw it.” She heaved a breath, refused to be discouraged. “If he had one knife, he could have had two. We’ll wait to hear from the other sweepers.” Taking a moment, she scrubbed her face with her hands. “Listen to me, Feeney, if we go with Marco’s confession as bogus, we have to ask why. He’s not a crank or a loony calling in trying to take credit. He’s saving his son’s ass is what he’s doing. So we work on him, and we work hard. I’ll bring him in to interview, try to crack him.”
“I’m with you there.”
“I’ve got a session with Mira in a couple hours. We’ll just let our main boy stew for awhile.”
“While we pray one of the teams turns up something.”
“Praying can’t hurt. Here’s the big one, Feeney, our boy’s lawyers get a hold of Marco’s confession, it’s going to corrupt the hearing on the minor charges. We’ll whistle for an indictment.”
“With that, and without physical evidence, he’s going back out, Dallas.”
“Yeah. Son of a bitch.”
Marco Angelini was like a boulder cemented to concrete. He wasn’t going to budge. Two hours of intense interrogation didn’t shake his story. Though, Eve consoled herself, he hadn’t shored up any of the holes in it, either. At the moment, she had little choice but to pin her hopes on Mira’s report.
“I can tell you,” Mira said in her usual unruffled fashion, “that David Angelini is a troubled young man with a highly developed sense of self-indulgence and protection.”
“Tell me he’s capable of slicing his mother’s throat.”
“Ah.” Mira sat back and folded her neat hands. “What I can tell you is, in my opinion, he is more capable of running from trouble than confronting it, on any level. When combining and averaging his placements on the Murdock-Lowell and the Synergy Evaluations—”
“Can we skip over the psych buzz, Doctor? I can read that in the report.”
“All right.” Mira shifted away from the screen where she had been about to bring up the evaluations. “We’ll keep this in simple terms for the time being. Your man is a liar, one who convinces himself with little effort that his lies are truth in order to maintain his self-esteem. He requires good opinion, even praise, and is accustomed to having it. And having his own way.”
“And if he doesn’t get his own way?”
“He casts blame elsewhere. It is not his fault, nor his responsibility. His world is insular, Lieutenant, comprised for the most part of himself alone. He considers himself successful and talented, and when he fails, it’s because someone else made a mistake. He gambles because he doesn’t believe he can lose, and he enjoys the thrill of risk. He loses because he believes himself above the game.”
“How would he react at the risk of having his bones snapped over gambling debts?”
“He would run and he would hide, and being abnormally dependent on his parents, he would expect them to clean up the mess.”
“And if they refused?”
Mira was silent for a moment. “You want me to tell you that he would strike out, react violently, even murderously. I can’t do that. It is, of course, a possibility that can’t be ruled out in any of us. No test, no evaluation can absolutely conclude the reaction of an individual under certain circumstances. But in those tests and those evaluations, the subject reacted consistently by covering, by running, by shifting blame rather than by attacking the source of his problem.”
“And he could be covering his reaction, to skew the evaluation.”
“It’s possible, but unlikely. I’m sorry.”
Eve stopped pacing and sank into a chair. “You’re saying that in your opinion, the murderer may still be out there.”
“I’m afraid so. It makes your job more difficult.”
“If I’m looking in the wrong place,” Eve said to herself, “where’s the right place? And who’s next?”
“Unfortunately, neither science nor technology is yet able to forecast the future. You can program possibilities, even probabilities, but they can’t take into account impulse or emotion. Do you have Nadine Furst under protection?”
“As much as possible.” Eve tapped a finger on her knee. “She’s difficult, and she’s torn up about Louise Kirski.”
“And so are you.”
Eve slid her gaze over, nodded stiffly. “Yeah, you could say that.”
“Yet you look uncommonly rested this morning.”
“I got a good night’s sleep.”
“Untroubled?”
Eve moved a shoulder, tucked Angelini and the case into a corner of her mind where she hoped it would simmer into something fresh. “What would you say about a woman who can’t seem to sleep well unless this man’s in bed with her?”
“I’d say she may be in love with him, is certainly growing used to him.”
“You wouldn’t say she’s overly dependent?”
“Can you function without him? Do you feel able to make a decision without asking his advice, opinion, or direction?”
“Well, sure, but . . .” She trailed off, feeling foolish. Well, if one was to feel foolish, what better place than a shrink’s office? “The other day, when he was off planet, I wore one of his shirts to work. That’s—”
“Lovely,” Mira said with a slow, easy smile. “Romantic. Why does romance worry you?”
“It doesn’t. I— Okay, it scares the shit out of me, and I don’t know why. I’m not used to having someone there, having someone look at me like—the way he does. Sometimes it’s unnerving.”
“Why is that?”
“Because I haven’t done anything to make him care about me as much as he does. I know he does.”
“Eve, your self-worth has always been focused on your job. Now a relationship has forced you to begin evaluating yourself as a woman. Are you afraid of what you’ll find?”
“I haven’t figured that out. It’s always been the job. The highs and lows, the rush, the monotony. Everything I needed to be was there. I busted my ass to make lieutenant, and I figure I can sweat my way up to captain, maybe more. Doing the job was it, all of it. It was important to be the best, to make a mark. It’s still important, but it’s not all anymore.”
“I would say, Eve, that you’ll be a better cop, and a better woman because of it. Single focus limits us, and can too often obsess us. A healthy life needs more than one goal, one passion.”
“Then I guess my life’s getting healthier.”
Eve’s communicator beeped, reminding her that she was on the clock, a cop first. “Dallas.”
“You’re going to want to switch over to public broadcast, Channel 75,” Feeney announced. “Then get your butt back here to the Towe
r. The new chief wants to fry our asses.”
Eve cut him off, and Mira had already opened her viewing screen. They came in on C. J. Morse’s noon update.
“. . . continuing problems with the investigation of the murders. A Cop Central source has confirmed that while David Angelini has been charged with obstruction of justice, and remains prime suspect for the three murders, Marco Angelini, the accused’s father, has confessed to those murders. The senior Angelini, president of Angelini Exports and former husband of the first victim, Prosecuting Attorney Cicely Towers, surrendered to the police yesterday. Though he has confessed to all three murders, he has not been charged, and the police continue to hold David Angelini.”
Morse paused, shifted slightly to face a new camera angle. His pleasant, youthful face radiated concern. “In other developments, a knife taken from the Angelini home during a police search has proven through testing not to be the murder weapon. Mirina Angelini, daughter of the late Cicely Towers, spoke to this reporter in an exclusive interview this morning.”
The screen snapped to a new video and filled with Mirina’s lovely, outraged face. “The police are persecuting my family. It isn’t enough that my mother is dead, murdered on the street. Now, in a desperate attempt to cover their own ineptitude, they’ve arrested my brother and they’re holding my father. It wouldn’t surprise me to find myself taken away in restraints at any moment.”
Eve ground her teeth while Morse led Mirina through questions, prodded her to make accusations, tears gleaming in her eyes. When the broadcast switched back to the news desk, he was frowning seriously.
“A family under siege? There are rumors of cover-ups clouding the investigation. Primary investigating officer, Lieutenant Eve Dallas could not be reached for comment.”
“Little bastard. Little bastard,” Eve muttered and swung away from the screen. “He never tried to reach me for comment. I’d give him a comment.” Furious, she snatched up her bag and shot Mira one last look. “You ought to analyze that one,” she said jerking her head toward the screen. “That little prick has delusions of grandeur.”
chapter seventeen