The In Death Collection, Books 16-20

by J. D. Robb

  “And she was a nutritionist, did a lot of families, or had clients with families. So maybe Swisher lost a case—or won one—that pissed one of his clients or opposings off. Or she pushed the wrong buttons on somebody’s fat kid, or had a client die. And the kids went to private schools. Maybe one of the kids screwed with somebody else’s kid.”

  “A lot of avenues.”

  “Just have to find the right one.”

  “One of the adults might have had an affair with someone else’s spouse. It’s been known to annoy.”

  “Looking there.” She slid behind the wheel of her vehicle. “But it’s not solidifying. These two, they had what looks like a pretty solid marriage, and a lot of focus on family. Took trips together, went out together. Like a group. The picture I’m getting doesn’t leave much time for extramarital. And sex takes time.”

  “Done well, certainly.”

  “I haven’t found anything in their data, their possessions, their schedules that points to an affair. Not yet, anyway. Neighborhood canvass didn’t shake out anything,” she added as she pulled away from the curb. “Nobody saw anything. I figure one of them lives in the area, or they had a bogus permit, or—Jesus—they took the goddamn subway, hailed a cab a couple of blocks away. I can’t pin any of it down.”

  “Eve, it’s been less than twenty-four hours.”

  She glanced in the rearview, thought of the quiet house on the quiet street. “Feels longer.”

  It was always weird, in Eve’s opinion, to have Summerset materialize in the foyer like a recurring nightmare the minute she walked in the door, but it was weirder yet to see him there, with a small blonde girl at his side.

  The kid’s hair was shiny, wavy blonde, as if it had been freshly washed and brushed. Who did that? Eve wondered. Did the kid deal with her own hair, or had Summerset done it? And the thought of that gave her the heebies.

  But the kid looked comfortable enough with him, even had her hand in his, and the cat at her feet.

  “Isn’t this a fine welcome?” Roarke shrugged out of his coat. “How are you, Nixie?”

  She looked at him—all blue eyes—and nearly smiled. “Okay. We made apple pie.”

  “Did you now?” Roarke bent to pick up the cat when Galahad slithered over to rub against his legs. “That’s a favorite of mine.”

  “You can make a little one with the leftovers. That’s what I did.” Then those eyes, big and blue, lasered into Eve’s. “Did you catch them yet?”

  “No.” Eve tossed her jacket over the newel post, and for once Summerset didn’t snark or sneer at the habit. “Investigations like this take some time.”

  “Why? Screen shows with cops don’t take very long.”

  “This isn’t a vid.” She wanted to go upstairs, clear her mind for five minutes, then start back over the case, point by point. But those eyes stayed on her face, both accusing and pleading.

  “I told you I’d get them, and I will.”

  “When?”

  She started to swear, might not have choked it back in time, but Roarke played a hand gently down her arm and spoke first. “Do you know, Nixie, that Lieutenant Dallas is the best cop in the city?”

  Something, maybe it was speculation, passed over Nixie’s face. “Why?”

  “Because she won’t stop. Because it matters so much to her that she takes care of people who’ve been hurt, she can’t stop. If someone of mine had been hurt, I’d want her to be the one in charge.”

  “Baxter says she’s a major butt-kicker.”

  “Well, then.” Now Roarke smiled fully. “He’d be right.”

  “Where are they?” Eve asked. “Baxter and Trueheart?”

  “In your office,” Summerset told her. “Dinner will be served in fifteen minutes. Nixie, we need to set the table.”

  “I’m just going to—”

  This time Roarke took Eve’s hand, squeezed. “We’ll be down.”

  “I’ve got work,” Eve began as they went up the stairs. “I don’t have time to—”

  “I think we need to make time. An hour won’t hurt, Eve, and I’d say that child needs as much normalcy as we can manage. Dinner, at the table, is normal.”

  “I don’t see what’s more normal about shoveling in food off a big flat surface than shoveling it in at your desk. It’s multitasking. It’s efficient.”

  “She scares you.”

  She stopped dead, and her eyes went to lethal slits. “Just where the hell do you come off saying that?”

  “Because she scares me, too.”

  Temper flickered over her face for a moment, then everything relaxed. “Really? Really? You’re not just saying that?”

  “Those big eyes, full of courage and terror and grief. What could be more frightening? There she stands, such a little thing, all that pretty hair, tidy jeans and jumper—sweater,” he corrected. “And that need just radiating out of her. We’re supposed to have the answers, and we don’t.”

  Eve let out a breath as she looked back toward the stairs. “I haven’t even figured out all the questions.”

  “So we’ll have dinner with her, and do what we can to show her that there’s normalcy and decency left in the world.”

  “Okay, okay, but I need to debrief my men.”

  “I’ll meet you downstairs. Fifteen minutes.”

  She found normal in her office, where a couple of cops—who’d obviously raided her AutoChef—were chowing down while they studied murder. On her wall screens, each Swisher bedroom, each victim, was displayed while Baxter and Trueheart chomped on cow meat.

  “Steak.” Baxter forked up another bite. “Do you know the last time I had real cow? I’d kiss you, Dallas, but my mouth’s full.”

  “Summerset said it was okay.” Trueheart, young and fresh in his uniform, offered her a hopeful grin.

  She merely shrugged, then turned so that she, too, had full view of the screens. “What’s your take?”

  “Big red check to everything in your report.” Baxter continued to eat, but his expression was sober now. “Slick job. And a mean one. Even without the eyewit, I’d have said two or more to pull it off, and even then it went down damn fast. The tox came in from the ME. No illegals, no drugs of any kind in any of them. No illegals on the premises. Even the pain remedies were herbal and holistic.”

  “Fits with the adult female’s career choice,” Eve murmured. “No defensives, no struggle, no missing valuables.”

  “No trace,” she added. “Sweepers got zip. You dump your currents?”

  “With pleasure.” Baxter stabbed his fork into another bite of steak. “Carmichael now hates me like a case of genital warts. Made my day.”

  “The two of you are relieved here. Report back at oh eight hundred. Double duty. You babysit, and start running the names I pulled out of the Swishers’ client lists. Anybody with so much as a parking violation gets a deeper look. We look at them, their family, their friends and associates, their next-door neighbors, and their little pets. We look until we find.”

  “The housekeeper?” Baxter asked.

  “I’ll do her tonight. We look at them all, kids included. School, activities, neighbors, where they shopped, where they ate, where they worked, where they played. Before we’re done, we’ll know these people better than they knew themselves.”

  “A lot of names,” Baxter commented.

  “It’s only going to take one.”

  Though she now had steak and murder on her mind, Eve ate roasted chicken and tried to keep her conversation away from the investigation. But what the hell were you supposed to talk to a kid about over dinner?

  They didn’t use the dining room often—well, she didn’t, she admitted. So much easier to grab something upstairs. But she couldn’t call it a hardship to sit at the big, gleaming table, with a fire simmering in the grate, the scent of food and candles in the air.

  “How come you eat so fancy?” Nixie wanted to know.

  “Don’t ask me.” Eve jabbed a fork toward Roarke. “It’s his house
.”

  “Do I have to go to school tomorrow?”

  Eve blinked twice, then realized the question was directed at her, and Roarke wasn’t stepping in to field the ball.

  “No.”

  “When do I go back to school?”

  Eve felt the back of her neck begin to ache. “I don’t know.”

  “But if I don’t do my work, I’ll get behind. If you get behind, you can’t be in the band or the plays.” Tears started to shimmer.

  “Oh. Well.” Shit.

  “We can arrange for you to do your school work here, for now.” Roarke spoke matter-of-factly. As if, Eve thought, he’d been born answering thorny questions. “You enjoy school?”

  “Mostly. Who’ll help me with my work? Dad always did.”

  No, Eve thought. Absolutely not. She wasn’t moving into that area if somebody planted a boomer under her ass.

  “The lieutenant and I weren’t the best of students. But Summerset could help you, for the time being.”

  “I’ll never get to go home again. Or see my mom and dad, or Coyle or Linnie. I don’t want them to be dead.”

  Okay, Eve decided. Maybe she was a kid, but she was still the eyewit. The case was back on the table along with the chicken.

  Thank God.

  “Tell me what everybody was doing. The whole day before it happened.” When Roarke started to object, Eve only shook her head. “Everything you remember.”

  “Dad had to yell at Coyle because he got up late. He’s always getting up late, then everybody has to rush. Mom gets mad if you rush your breakfast because it’s important you eat right.”

  “What did you eat?”

  “We had fruit and cereal in the kitchen.” Nixie cut a spear of asparagus neatly, and ate without complaint. “Inga fixes it. And juice. Dad had coffee, ’cause he gets to have one cup. And Coyle wanted new airskids, and Mom said no, and he said that sucked, and she gave him the look because you’re not supposed to say ‘suck,’ especially at the table. Then we got our things and went to school.”

  “Did anyone use the ’link?”

  “No.”

  “Did anyone come to the door?”

  She ate a bite of chicken in the same tidy way. Chewed and swallowed before she answered. “No.”

  “How did you get to school?”

  “Dad walked us, because it wasn’t too cold. If it’s too cold, we can take a cab. Then he goes to work. Mom goes downstairs to work. And Inga was going shopping because Linnie was coming after school and Mom wanted more fresh fruit.”

  “Did either your mother or father seem upset by anything?”

  “Coyle said ‘suck’ and didn’t finish his juice, so Mom was down on him. Can I see them even though they’re dead?” Her lips trembled. “Can I?”

  It was a human need, Eve knew. Why should it be different for a child? “I’ll arrange it. It may take a little while. You do okay today with Baxter and Trueheart?”

  “Baxter’s funny, and Trueheart’s nice. He knows how to play a lot of games. When you catch the bad guys, can I see them, too?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay.” Nixie looked back down at her plate, nodded slowly. “Okay.”

  I feel like I’ve been in the Interview box, getting sweated by a pro. Eve rolled her shoulders when she walked into her office.

  “You handled it, and very well. I thought you’d overstepped when you asked her to go over the day before the murders, but you were right. She’ll need to talk about this. All of this.”

  “She’ll think about it anyway. She talks, maybe she’ll remember something.” She sat at her desk, brooded a minute. “Now here’s something I never thought would come out of my mouth—and if you ever repeat it, I’ll twist your tongue into a square knot, but thank God Summerset’s around.”

  He grinned as he eased a hip onto the corner of her desk. “Sorry, I don’t think I quite heard that.”

  Her look, her voice, went dark. “I meant it about the square knot. I’m just saying the kid’s easy with him, and he seems to know what to do with her.”

  “Well, he raised one of his own, then took me on besides. He has a soft spot for troubled children.”

  “He has no soft spots whatsoever, but he’s good with the kid. So yay.” She dragged a hand through her hair. “I’ll be talking with the Dysons again tomorrow. Depending on how things go, we could be moving her into a safe house with them in a day or two. Tonight, I’m going to focus on the housekeeper, see where that takes me. Need to send a memo to Peabody,” she remembered. “She’s already hit the school, so she can swing by there in the morning, get the kid’s work and whatever. Listen, let me ask you, why would you want, I mean, actually want to do the school thing if you had an escape hatch?”

  “On that, I have absolutely no idea. Maybe it’s like your work is to you, mine is to me. Somehow essential.”

  “It’s school. It’s like prison.”

  “So I always thought, too. Maybe we’re wrong.” He leaned over, traced his finger down the dent in her chin. “Want some help with this?”

  “Don’t you have work?”

  “A bit of this, a bit of that, but nothing I can’t do while assisting New York’s best cop.”

  “Yeah, that was a good one. You know the security at the scene. Maybe you could tag Feeney at home, exchange data. See if you can figure out what kind of equipment these bastards needed to bypass. And where they might’ve come by it.”

  “All right.” This time he brushed her cheek. “You’ve put in a long day already.”

  “I’ve got another couple hours in me.”

  “Save some for me,” he said, and walked into his own office.

  Alone, she set up a second murder board, programmed a short pot of coffee, then ordered Inga’s data on-screen.

  She studied the ID photo. Attractive, but in a nonthreatening, homey sort of way. She wondered if Swisher had specified nonthreatening, nothing too young and pretty to tempt her husband.

  Whatever the requirements, the match seemed to have worked. Inga had put plenty of years in with the Swishers. Enough, Eve noted, to see the kids grow up.

  None of her own, Eve saw. One marriage, one divorce, full-time domestic since she was in her twenties. Though Eve couldn’t understand why anyone would volunteer to clean up for someone else, she supposed it took all kinds.

  Her financials were steady, reasonable considering her occupation, and her outlays within the normal range.

  Normal, normal, normal, Eve thought. Well, Inga, let’s go deeper.

  An hour later she was circling her board.

  Nothing, she thought. If there were hidden pockets, they were expertly concealed. Inga’s life had been so utterly normal it was bordering on boring. She worked, she shopped, she took two vacations a year—one with the family she worked for, and the other, at least for the last five years, with a couple of other women to the same relaxation spa in upstate New York.

  She’d check with, and on, the other women, but nothing had popped out on them when she’d run their data.

  The ex lived in Chicago, had remarried, and had one offspring, male. He was a drone for a restaurant supply company, and had made no on-record trips to New York in over seven years.

  The idea that the housekeeper had heard or seen something dire while buying plums or cleaning supplies just seemed ludicrous.

  But life was full of the ludicrous that ended in bloody murder.

  She acknowledged Roarke when he came in. “Nothing jingles my bell on this one.” She nodded toward the screen. “Still a lot of legwork to do to cover the bases, but I think she’s going down as innocent bystander.”

  “Feeney and I are of the same opinion regarding the bypass equipment. It could have been homemade by someone expert in the field, with access to prime materials. If it was purchased, it had to come from military, police, or security sources. Or black market. It’s not something you’d find in your local electronics store.”

  “Doesn’t narrow the field muc
h, but it jibes.”

  “Let’s shut it down for the night.”

  “Nothing much more I can do.” She ordered her machine to save, file, close. “I’m going to start here tomorrow, then leave Baxter and Trueheart on wit duty.”

  “I’ll take it to some of my R&D people tomorrow, see if anybody in my brain trust comes up with something more specific on the security system.”

  “None of the vics had any military or security training—or as far as I’ve found, any connections thereto.” She pushed it around in her head as they walked toward their bedroom. “I can’t find any link with organized crime, with paramilitary. As far as my data shows, they didn’t gamble, fool around, were not overly political. The closest to an obsession I can get is the woman’s devotion to nutrition.”

  “Maybe something had come into their possession, even by accident, that had to be reclaimed.”

  “Then if you’re so damn good at B&E, you go in when the house is empty and you take it. You don’t go in, kill everybody. The only thing taken from the house was lives. The Swishers are dead because someone wanted them dead.”

  “Agreed. What do you say we have a glass of wine and relax for a bit?”

  She nearly refused. She could just think, let it all wind around in her head awhile. Pace and let it play until something jiggled loose, or she was too damn fried to do anything but pass out for a few hours.

  Their lives would never be like the Swishers’. She didn’t want them to be, didn’t think she could handle trying to navigate something quite that straightforward. But they did have a life. And lives deserved attention.

  “I’d say you’ve got a pretty good idea. I’ve got to let it simmer.” She tapped the back of her head. “Since boiling it up front isn’t doing the job.”

  “How about this for a better idea?” He shifted so they faced each other and a dip of his head had his teeth closing lightly over her jaw.

  “Getting me naked is your usual idea.”

  “But with variation, and that’s the key.”

  It made her laugh. “Sooner or later even you have to run out of variations.”

  “Now there’s a challenge. Why don’t we take that wine down to the pool, have a little water sport?”