by J. D. Robb
“You’re going to make something here,” she said and turned to lean back against the rail.
“That’s the plan.”
“No.” She shook her head, pleased that it was already starting to swim from the wine. “You’ll make something that people will talk about for centuries, that they’ll dream of. You’ve come a long way from the young thief who ran the back alleys of Dublin, Roarke.”
His smile was slow and just a little sly. “Not so very far, Lieutenant. I’m still picking pockets—I just do it as legally as I can. Being married to a cop limits certain activities.”
She frowned at him now. “I don’t want to hear about them.”
“Darling Eve.” He rose, brought the bottle with him. “So by-the-book. Still so unsettled that she’s fallen madly in love with a shady character.” He filled her glass again, then set the bottle aside. “One that only months ago was on her short list of murder suspects.”
“You enjoy that? Being suspicious?”
“I do.” He skimmed a thumb over a cheekbone where a bruise had faded away—except in his mind. “And I worry about you a little.” A lot, he admitted to himself.
“I’m a good cop.”
“I know. The only one I’ve ever completely admired. What an odd twist of fate that I would have fallen for a woman so devoted to justice.”
“It seems odder to me that I’ve linked up with someone who can buy and sell planets at a whim.”
“Married.” He laughed. Turning her around, he nuzzled the back of her neck. “Go on, say it. We’re married. The word won’t choke you.”
“I know what we are.” Ordering herself to relax, she leaned back against him. “Let me live with it for a while. I like being here, away with you.”
“Then I take it you’re glad you let me pressure you into the three weeks.”
“You didn’t pressure me.”
“I had to nag.” He nipped her ear. “Browbeat.” His hands slid up to her breasts. “Beg.”
She snorted. “You’ve never begged for anything. But maybe you did nag. I haven’t had three weeks off the job in . . . never.”
He decided against reminding her she hadn’t had it now, precisely. She rarely went through a twenty-four-hour period without running some program that put her up against a crime. “Why don’t we make it four?”
“Roarke—”
He chuckled. “Just testing. Drink your champagne. You’re not nearly drunk enough for what I have in mind.”
“Oh?” Her pulse leaped, making her feel foolish. “And what’s that?”
“It’ll lose in the telling,” he decided. “Let’s just say I intend to keep you occupied for the last forty-eight hours we have here.”
“Forty-eight hours?” With a laugh, she drained her glass. “When do we get started?”
“There’s no time like—” He broke off, scowling when the doorbell sounded. “I told the staff to leave the clearing up. Stay here.” He snugged together her robe, which he’d just untied. “I’ll send them away. Far away.”
“Get another bottle while you’re at it,” she told him, grinning as she shook the last drops into her glass. “Someone drank all of this one.”
Amused, he slipped back inside, crossed the wide living space with its clear glass ceiling and feather-soft carpets. He wanted her there, to start, he decided, on that yielding floor with the ice-edged stars wheeling overhead. He plucked a long white lily out of a porcelain dish, imagining how he would show her just what a clever man could do to a woman with the petals of a flower.
He was smiling as he turned into the foyer with its gilded walls and sweeping marble staircase. Flipping on the view screen, he prepared to send the room service waiter to perdition for the interruption.
With some surprise he saw the face of one of his assistant engineers. “Carter? Trouble?”
Carter rubbed a hand over a face that was dead pale and damp with sweat. “Sir. I’m afraid there is. I need to speak with you. Please.”
“All right. Just a moment.” Roarke let out a sigh as he flicked off the screen, disengaged the locks. Carter was young for his position, in his middle twenties, but he was a genius at design and execution. If there was a problem with the construction, it was best to deal with it now.
“Is it the sky glide at the salon?” Roarke asked as he opened the door. “I thought you’d worked out the kinks there.”
“No—I mean, yes, sir, I have. It’s working perfectly now.”
The man was trembling, Roarke realized, and forgot his annoyance. “Has there been an accident?” He took Carter’s arm, steered him into the living area, nudged him into a chair. “Has someone been hurt?”
“I don’t know—I mean, an accident?” Carter blinked, stared glassily. “Miss. Ma’am. Lieutenant,” he said as Eve came in. He started to rise, then fell weakly down again when she gave him a quick push.
“He’s in shock,” she said to Roarke, her voice brisk. “Try some of that fancy brandy you’ve got around here.” She crouched down, kept her face level with his. His pupils were pinpricks. “Carter, isn’t it? Take it slow.”
“I . . .” His face went waxy now. “I think I’m going to be—”
Before he could finish, Eve whipped his head down between his knees. “Breathe. Just breathe. Let’s have that brandy, Roarke.” She held out a hand, and he was there with a snifter.
“Pull it together, Carter.” Roarke eased him back onto the cushions. “Take a swallow of this.”
“Yes, sir.”
“For Christ’s sake, stop sirring me to death.”
Color came back into Carter’s cheeks, either from the brandy or from embarrassment. He nodded, swallowed, let out a breath. “I’m sorry. I thought I was okay. I came right up. I didn’t know if I should—I didn’t know what else to do.” He spread a hand over his face like a kid at a horror video. He hitched in a breath and said it quickly. “It’s Drew, Drew Mathias, my roomie. He’s dead.”
Air exploded out of his lungs, then shuddered back in. He took another deep gulp of brandy and choked on it.
Roarke’s eyes went flat. He pulled together a picture of Mathias: young, eager, red hair and freckles, an electronics expert with a specialty in autotronics. “Where, Carter? How did it happen?”
“I thought I should tell you right away.” Now there were two high bruising red flags riding on Carter’s pasty cheeks. “I came right up to tell you—and your wife. I thought since she’s—she’s the police, she could do something.”
“You need a cop, Carter?” Eve took the snifter out of his unsteady hand. “Why do you need a cop?”
“I think—he must have—he killed himself, Lieutenant. He was hanging there, just hanging there from the ceiling light in the living room. And his face . . . Oh God. Oh Jesus.”
Eve left Carter to bury his own face in his hands and turned to Roarke. “Who’s got authority on site for something like this?”
“We’ve got standard security, most of it automated.” Accepting, he inclined his head. “I’d say it’s you, Lieutenant.”
“Okay, see if you can put together a field kit for me. I need a recorder—audio and video—some Seal It, evidence bags, tweezers, a couple of small brushes.”
She hissed out a breath as she dragged a hand through her hair. He wasn’t going to have the equipment lying around that would pinpoint body temperature and time of death. There would be no scanner, no sweepers, none of the standard chemicals for forensics she carried habitually to crime scenes.
They’d have to wing it.
“There’s a doctor, right? Call him. He’ll have to stand in as the ME. I’ll get dressed.”
Most of the techs made use of the completed wings of the hotel for living quarters. Carter and Mathias had apparently hit it off well enough to share a spacious two-bedroom suite during their shift on the station. As they rode down to the tenth floor, Eve handed Roarke the palm recorder.
“You can run this, right?”
He lifted a bro
w. One of his companies had manufactured it. “I think I can manage.”
“Fine.” She offered a weak smile. “You’re deputized. You hanging in, Carter?”
“Yeah.” But he walked out of the elevator into the hallway on ten like a drunk trying to pass a competency test. He had to wipe his sweaty hand twice on his slacks to get a clear reading on the palm screen. When the door slid open, he stepped back. “I’d just as soon not go in again.”
“Stay here,” she told him. “I may need you.”
She stepped inside. The lights were blinding bright, up to full power. Music blared out of the wall unit: hard, clashing rock with a screeching vocalist that reminded Eve of her friend Mavis. The floor was tiled in a Caribbean blue and offered the illusion of walking on water.
Along the north and south walls, banks of computers were set up. Workstations, she assumed, cluttered with all manner of electronic boards, microchips, and tools.
She saw clothes heaped on the sofa, VR goggles lying on the coffee table with three tubes of Asian beer—two of them flattened and already rolled for the recycler—and a bowl of spiced pretzels.
And she saw Drew Mathias’s naked body swaying gently from a makeshift noose of sheets hitched to the glittering tier of a blue glass chandelier.
“Ah, hell.” She sighed it out. “What is he, Roarke, twenty?”
“Not much more than.” Roarke’s mouth thinned as he studied Mathias’s boyish face. It was purple now, the eyes bulging, the mouth frozen into a hideous, gaping grin. Some vicious whim of death had left him smiling.
“All right, let’s do what we can. Dallas, Lieutenant Eve, NYPSD, standing in until proper interspace authorities can be contacted and transported. Suspicious, unattended death. Mathias, Drew, Olympus Grand Hotel, Room ten thirty-six, August 1, 2058, one hundred hours.”
“I want to take him down,” Roarke said. It shouldn’t have surprised him how quickly, how seamlessly she’d shifted from woman to cop.
“Not yet. It doesn’t make any difference to him now, and I need the scene recorded before anything’s moved.” She turned in the doorway. “Did you touch anything, Carter?”
“No.” He scrubbed the back of his hand over his mouth. “I opened the door, just like now, and walked in. I saw him right away. You . . . you see him right away. I guess I stood there a minute. Just stood there. I knew he was dead. I saw his face.”
“Why don’t you go through the other door into the bedroom.” She gestured to the left. “You can lie down for a while. I’ll need to talk to you.”
“Okay.”
“Don’t call anyone,” she ordered.
“No. No, I won’t call anyone.”
She turned away again, secured the door. Her gaze shifted to Roarke’s, and their eyes held. She knew he was thinking, as she was, that there were some—like her—who had no escape from death.
“Let’s get started,” she told him.
chapter two
The doctor’s name was Wang, and he was old, as most medicals were on off planet projects. He could have retired at ninety, but like others of his ilk, he had chosen to bump from site to site, tending the scrapes and bruises, passing out drugs for space sickness and gravity balance, delivering the occasional baby, running required diagnostics.
But he knew a dead body when he saw one.
“Dead.” His voice was clipped, faintly exotic. His skin was parchment yellow and as wrinkled as an old map. His eyes were black, almond shaped. His head was glossy and slick, lending him the appearance of an ancient, somewhat battered billiard ball.
“Yeah, I got that much.” Eve rubbed her eyes. She’d never had to deal with a space med, but she’d heard about them. They didn’t care to have their cushy routine interrupted. “Give me the cause and the time.”
“Strangulation.” Wang tapped one long finger against the vicious marks on Mathias’s neck. “Self-induced. Time of death I would say between ten and eleven P.M. on this day, in this month, in this year.”
She offered a thin smile. “Thank you, Doctor. There aren’t any other signs of violence on the body, so I lean toward your diagnosis of self-termination. But I want the results of the drug run. Let’s see if it was chemically induced. Did you treat the deceased for anything?”
“I cannot say, but he looks unfamiliar. I would have his records, of course. He would have come to me for the standard diagnostic upon arrival.”
“I’ll want those as well.”
“I will do my best to accommodate you, Mrs. Roarke.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Dallas, Lieutenant Dallas. Put a rush on it, Wang.” She looked down at the body again. Small man, she thought, thin, pale. Dead.
Pursing her lips, she studied the face. She’d seen what odd tricks death, particularly violent death, could play with expressions, but she’d never seen anything like that wide, goggle-eyed grin. It made her shudder.
The waste, the pathetic waste of such a young life made her unbearably sad.
“Take him with you, Wang. Get me the reports. You can shoot his basic paperwork to the tele-link in my suite. I need the next of kin.”
“Assuredly.” He smiled at her. “Lieutenant Roarke.”
She smiled back, showed her teeth, and decided she didn’t want to play the name game. Standing, she put her hands on her hips as Wang directed his two assistants to transport the body.
“You find that amusing,” she muttered to Roarke.
He blinked, all innocence. “What?”
“Lieutenant Roarke.”
Roarke touched her face because he needed to. “Why not? Both of us could use some comic relief.”
“Yeah, your Dr. Wang’s a chuckle a minute.” She watched the doctor sail out in front of the dead boy on a gurney. “It pisses me off. It fucking pisses me off.”
“It’s not such a bad name.”
“No.” She nearly did laugh as she rubbed her hands over her face. “Not that. The boy. A kid like that tossing out his next hundred years of life. That pisses me off.”
“I know.” He reached out to rub her shoulders. “You’re sure it was suicide?”
“No sign of struggle. No additional insults to the body.” She shrugged under his hands. “I’ll interview Carter and talk to some others, but the way I see it, Drew Mathias came home, turned on the lights, the music. He drank himself a couple beers, maybe took a VR trip, ate a few pretzels. Then he went in, stripped the sheets off his bed, made himself a rope, fashioned a very precise, professional noose.”
She turned away, scanning the room, letting the scene into her head. “He took off his clothes, tossed them aside. He climbed up on the table. You can see the smears from his feet. He tied the rope to the light, probably gave it a good tug or two to make sure it was secure. Then he slipped his head into the noose, used the remote to raise the light, and choked himself to death.”
She picked up the remote she’d already bagged for evidence. “It wouldn’t have been quick. It’s a slow ascent, not enough to give him a nice clean broken neck, but he didn’t struggle, didn’t change his mind. If he had, you’d see scrapes from his nails on his neck and throat from where he’d tried to claw free.”
Roarke’s brow knit. “But wouldn’t it be instinctive, involuntary to do just that?”
“I don’t know. I’d say it depended on how strong a will he had, how much he wanted to die. And why. Could have been cruising on drugs. We’ll know that soon enough. The right mix of chemicals, the mind doesn’t register pain. He might even have enjoyed it.”
“I won’t deny there’s some illegals floating around here. It’s impossible to regulate and supervise every staff member’s habits and personal choices.” Roarke shrugged, frowned up at the gorgeous blue chandelier. “Mathias doesn’t strike me as the type for a habitual, even an occasional user.”
“People are a constant surprise, and it’s an unending wonder what they’ll pump into their bloodstreams.” Eve jerked her own shoulders in turn. “I’ll give the place the standard toss for
illegals, and I’ll see what I can find out from Carter.” She dragged her hair back with a hand. “Why don’t you go back up, get some sleep?”
“No, I’ll stay. Eve,” he said before she could argue, “you deputized me.”
It made her smile a little. “Any decent adjutant would know I need coffee to get through this.”
“Then I’ll see that you get some.” He framed her face in his hands. “I wanted you away from this for a while.” He let her go and walked into the adjoining kitchen to see about her coffee.
Eve stepped into the bedroom. The lights were low and Carter was sitting on the side of the bed, his head in his hands. He jerked straight when he heard her come in.
“Take it easy, Carter, you’re not under arrest yet.” When his cheeks paled, she sat beside him. “Sorry, bad cop humor. I’m recording this, okay?”
“Yeah.” He swallowed hard. “Okay.”
“Dallas, Lieutenant Eve, interview with Carter—what’s your full name, Carter?”
“Ah, Jack. Jack Carter.”
“Carter, Jack, regarding the unattended death of Mathias, Drew. Carter, you shared suite ten thirty-six with the deceased.”
“Yeah, for the past five months. We were friends.”
“Tell me about tonight. What time did you get home?”
“I don’t know. About twelve thirty, I guess. I had a date. I’ve been seeing someone—Lisa Cardeaux—she’s one of the landscape designers. We wanted to check out the entertainment complex. They were showing a new video. After that, we went to the Athena Club. It’s open to the complex employees. We had a couple of drinks, listened to some music. She’s got an early day tomorrow, so we didn’t stay late. I took her home.” He smiled weakly. “Tried to talk her into letting me come up, but she wasn’t having any.”
“Okay, so you struck out with Lisa. Did you come straight home?”
“Yeah. She’s just over at the staff bungalow. She likes it there. Doesn’t want to close herself up in a hotel room. That’s what she says. It only takes a couple minutes on the glide to get back here. I came up.” He drew a breath, rubbed a hand over his heart as if to calm it. “Drew had the door secured. He had a thing about that. Some of the crew leave the locks off, but Drew had all that equipment, and he was paranoid about anybody messing with it.”