by J. D. Robb
‘You claim to have left her at about twelve thirty?’
‘That would be close.’
‘And she was alone?’
‘She only kept domestic droids. She didn’t like people around unless she summoned them. There was no one else in the house, to my knowledge.’
‘Where did you go when you left?’
‘I came here; tended to my shoulder. It was a nasty bite. I thought I’d do a little work, made some calls to the coast. Then I went to my club, used the after-hours entrance, and spent a couple of hours having a steam, a swim.’
‘What time did you get to your club?’
‘I’d say it was around two. I know it was well past four when I got home.’
‘Did you see or speak to anyone during the hours of two and five A.M.?’
‘No. One of the reasons I often use the club at those hours is for the privacy. I have my own facilities on the coast, but here, I have to make do with membership.’
‘The name of your club?’
‘The Olympus, on Madison.’ He arched a brow. ‘I see my alibi isn’t without its problems. I did, however, code in and out. It’s required.’
‘I’m sure it is.’ And she would certainly see if he had. ‘Are you aware of anyone who would have wished Pandora harm?’
‘Lieutenant, the list would be as long as life.’ He smiled again, perfect teeth, eyes that were both amused and predatory. ‘I don’t happen to count myself among them, merely because she didn’t matter that much to me.’
‘Did you share Pandora’s latest drug of choice?’
He stiffened, hesitated, then relaxed again. ‘That was an excellent ploy. Non sequiturs often catch the unwary off guard. I’ll state, for the record, that I never touch illegals of any kind.’ But his smile was wide and easy, and told her quite plainly, he lied. ‘I was aware that Pandora dabbled now and again. I considered it her own business. I’d have to agree that she’d found something new, something she seemed to be overdoing. In fact, I’d come into her bedroom earlier that last evening.’
He paused a moment, as if thinking back, bringing a scene into focus. ‘She’d taken a pill of some kind out of a small, beautiful little wooden box. Chinese, I think. The box,’ he added with a quick smile. ‘She was surprised because I was early, and shoved the box into a drawer on her vanity and locked it. I asked what she was protecting, and she said . . .’ He paused again, eyes narrowed. ‘What did she say? Her treasure, her fortune. No, no, something like: Her reward. Yes, I’m sure that’s what she said. Then she popped the pill, chased it with champagne. Then we had sex. It seemed to me she was distracted at first, then suddenly she was wild, insatiable. I don’t believe it had ever been quite that potent between us. We dressed and went down. Jerry and Justin were just arriving. I never asked her any more about it. It just didn’t apply to me.’
‘Impressions, Peabody?’
‘He’s slick.’
‘So’s slime.’ Eve shoved her hands into her pockets as the elevator descended, toyed with loose credit tokens. ‘He despised her, but he slept with her, was willing to use her.’
‘I think he found her pathetic, potentially dangerous, but marketable.’
‘And, if that marketability had waned or the danger increased, could he have killed her?’
‘In a heartbeat.’ Peabody stepped into the garage first. ‘Conscience isn’t his priority. If this deal they had were tipping the wrong way, or if she had anything to pressure him with, he’d erase her. People that smug, that controlled, tend to have a lot of violence bubbling somewhere. And his alibi sucks.’
‘Yeah, it does, doesn’t it?’ The possibilities made Eve grin. ‘We’re going to check that out, right after we go by Pandora’s and find her cache. Inform Dispatch,’ she ordered. ‘Make sure we’re clear to pop locks.’
‘That wouldn’t stop you,’ Peabody murmured, but engaged the ’link.
The box was gone. It was such a stunning letdown that Eve stood in Pandora’s lavishly ornate bedroom staring down at the drawer for a full ten seconds before it fully registered it was empty.
‘This is a vanity, right?’
‘That’s what they call it. Look at all the bottles and pots on it. Creams for this, creams for that. That’s why it’s called a vanity.’ She couldn’t help herself. Peabody picked up a jar the size of the first joint of her thumb. ‘Ever Young cream. You know what this shit goes for, Dallas? Five hundred over the counter at Saks. Five hundred for a lousy half ounce. Talk about vanity.’
She set it down again, ashamed she’d been tempted, even for an instant, to stick it in her pocket. ‘You add all this stuff up, she’s got ten, maybe fifteen thousand worth of enhancements. ’
‘Get a grip, Peabody.’
‘Yes, sir. Sorry.’
‘We’re looking for a box. The sweepers have already done the standard here, taken in the discs from her ’links. We know she didn’t get any calls that night, or make any. From here, anyway. She’s pissed. She’s revved. What does she do?’
Eve continued to open drawers, paw through them as she spoke. ‘She drinks more, maybe, rants around the house thinking of all the things she’d like to do to the people who’ve ticked her off. Bastards, bitches. Who the hell do they think they are? She can have anything and anyone she wants. Maybe she comes in here and pops another pill, just to keep the energy up.’
Hopeful, though it was a plain, enameled box rather than an ornate wooden one, Eve flipped a lid. Inside was an assortment of rings. Gold, silver, gleaming porcelain, carved ivory.
‘Funny place to keep jewelry,’ Peabody commented. ‘I mean she’s got this big glass chest here for her costume, and the safe for the real stuff.’
Eve glanced up, saw her aide was perfectly serious, and didn’t quite muffle the laugh. ‘They’re not exactly jewelry, Peabody. Cock rings. You know, you put them over it, then—’
‘Sure.’ Peabody shrugged, tried not to stare. ‘I knew that. Just - a funny place to keep them.’
‘Yeah, sure is silly to keep sex toys in a box next to the bed. Anyway, where was I? She’s using, chasing the pills with champagne. Somebody’s going to pay for ruining her evening. That fucker Leonardo is going to crawl, he’s going to beg. She’ll make him pay for screwing some worthless slut behind her back, and for letting the little bitch come around to her house - her house, goddamn it - and fuck with her.’
Eve closed a drawer, opened another. ‘Her security tags her as leaving the place just after two. The door’s on automatic lock. She doesn’t call a car. It’s at least a sixty-block walk to Leonardo’s, she’s in ice-pick heels, but she doesn’t take a cab. There’s no record of any company picking her up or dropping her. She’s registered for a palm ’link, but we haven’t found it. If she had it with her and made a call, either she or someone else disposed of the unit.’
‘If she called her killer, he or she should have been smart enough to ditch it.’ Peabody began a search of the two-level closet and managed not to hyperventilate over the racks of clothes, many with price tags still attached. ‘She might have been wired on something, but no way would she walk downtown. Half the shoes in this closet aren’t even scraped on the soles. She wasn’t the walking kind.’
‘She was wired, all right. Damned if she’s taking some stinking cab. All she has to do is snap her fingers and she can have half a dozen eager slaves slathering to take her anywhere she wants to go. So she snaps them. Somebody picks her up. They go to Leonardo’s. Why?’
Fascinated by the way Eve juggled Pandora’s point of view with her own, Peabody stopped the search and watched Eve. ‘She insists. She demands. She threatens.’
‘Maybe it’s Leonardo she calls. Or maybe it’s somebody else. They get there, the security camera’s smashed. Or she smashes it.’
‘Or the killer smashes it.’ Peabody pushed her way through a sea of ivory silk. ‘Because he’s already planning to do her.’
‘Why take her to Leonardo’s if he’s already planning it?�
� Eve demanded. ‘Or if it was Leonardo, why dirty your own nest? I’m not sure murder was the priority, not yet. They get there, and if Leonardo’s story holds, the place is empty. He’s off drinking himself into a stupor and looking for Mavis, who is drinking herself into a stupor. Pandora wants Leonardo there, she wants to punish him. She starts to wreck the place, maybe she takes out some of her rage on her companion. They fight. It escalates. He grabs the cane, maybe to defend himself, maybe to attack. She’s shocked, hurt, afraid. Nobody hurts her. What the hell is this? Then he can’t stop, or doesn’t want to stop. She’s lying there, and there’s blood everywhere.’
Peabody said nothing. She’d seen the pictures of the scene. Could imagine it all happening just as Eve related.
‘He’s standing over her, breathing hard.’ Eyes half closed, Eve tried to bring the shadowy figure into focus. ‘Her blood’s all over him. The smell of it’s everywhere. But he doesn’t panic, can’t afford to panic, doesn’t let himself panic. What ties her to him? The palm ’link. He takes that, pockets it. If he’s smart, and he has to be smart now, he goes through her things, makes sure there’s nothing that can lead to him. He wipes off the cane where he gripped it, anything else he thinks he might have touched.’
In Eve’s mind it played like an old video, cloudy and full of shadows. The figure - male, female - hurrying to cover tracks, moving around the body, stepping around the pools of blood. ‘Have to be quick. Someone might come back. But have to be thorough. Almost clean now. Then he hears someone coming in. Mavis. She calls out for Leonardo, rushes back, sees the body, kneels beside it. Now it’s even more perfect. He knocks her out, then he curls her fingers around the cane, maybe he even gives Pandora a few extra whacks. He takes that dead hand and rakes its nails over Mavis’s face, uses it to tear her clothes. He puts on something, one of Leonardo’s robes, to conceal his own clothes.’
She straightened from her search of a bottom drawer and found Peabody staring at her. ‘It’s like you were there,’ Peabody murmured. ‘I want to be able to do that, to go in the way you do.’
‘Walk in to a few more murder scenes, and you will. The hard part’s getting out again. Where the hell is the box?’
‘She could have taken it with her.’
‘I don’t buy that. Where’s the key, Peabody? She locked this drawer. Where’s the key?’
In silence, Peabody took out her field unit, requested the list of items found in the victim’s purse or on her person. ‘There was no key taken into evidence.’
‘So he got the key, didn’t he? And he came back here and took the box and anything else he needed. Let’s check the security disc.’
‘Wouldn’t the sweepers have done that?’
‘Why? She wasn’t killed here. All they were required to do was verify her time of departure.’ Eve walked over to the security monitor, ordered a replay for the date and time in question. She watched Pandora storm out of the house, stride quickly out of range. ‘Two oh eight. Okay, let’s see what shakes. Time of death was about three. Computer, advance to oh three hundred, proceed at triple real time.’ She focused on the chronometer. ‘Freeze image. Sonofabitch. See that, Peabody.’
‘I see it, time skipped from four oh three to four thirty-five. Someone disengaged the camera. Had to do it by remote. Had to know what they were doing.’
‘Someone wanted to get in bad enough, get something out bad enough, to risk it. For a box of illegals.’ Her smile was grim. ‘I’ve got a feeling dead in the gut, Peabody. Let’s go hassle the lab boys.’
Chapter Nine
‘Why you wanna give me grief, Dallas?’
Huddled in his lab coat, Chief Tech Dickie Berenski - Dickhead to those who knew and loathed him - tested a strand of pubic hair. He was a meticulous man, as well as a monster pain in the ass. Though notoriously slow in testing, his batting average in court was high enough to make him the MVP of the police and security lab.
‘Can’t you see I’m buried here? Jesus.’ With his fussy spider fingers he adjusted the focus on his micro-goggles. ‘Got us ten homicides, six rapes, a load of suspicious and unattended deaths, and too many B and Es to think about. I’m not a fucking robot.’
‘Closest thing to,’ Eve muttered. She didn’t like coming to the lab with its antiseptic air and white walls. It was too much like a hospital, or worse, Testing. Any cop who used maximum force resulting in termination was required to undergo Testing. Her experiences with that particular intrusive routine hadn’t been pleasant. ‘Look, Dickie, you’ve had plenty of time to analyze the substance.’
‘Plenty of time.’ He pushed back from the counter, and his eyes behind the goggles were big and bold as an owl’s. ‘You and every other cop in the city figures your shit’s a priority. Like we should drop every other thing and devote every minute to you. You know what happens when the temperature rises, Dallas? People go bat shit, that’s what happens. All you gotta do is take them down, but me and my team, we gotta shift through every hair and fiber. It takes time.’
His voice shifted into whine and set Eve’s teeth on edge. ‘I’ve got Homicide breathing down my neck, and Illegals snapping at my heels over some goddamn bag of powder. You got the prelim.’
‘I need the final.’
‘Well, I haven’t got it.’ His flappy lips pouted as he turned back and brought the enhanced view of the hair on screen. ‘I gotta finish DNA on this.’
Eve knew how to work him. She didn’t like it, but she knew. ‘I’ve got two box-seat tickets to the Yankee-Red Sox game tomorrow.’
His fingers moved slowly over the controls. ‘Box seats?’
‘Third-base side.’
Dickie tipped down his goggles to scan the room. Other techs were busy at their stations. ‘Maybe I could get you a little more.’ With one shove of his feet, he sent his chair sliding to the right until he faced another screen. Cautious, he engaged the keyboard and brought the file up manually. He tapped slowly, scanning the screen. ‘Here’s the problem, see? This element here.’
It was nothing but color and foreign symbols to Eve, but she grunted as the data scrolled. The unknown, she imagined, that even Roarke’s unit couldn’t identify. ‘That red thing?’
‘No, no, no, that’s a standard amphetamine. You find it in Zeus, in Buzz, in Smiley. Hell, you can get a mild derivative of that in any over-the-counter pep-up. This one.’ He tapped a finger against a green squiggle.
‘Okay, what is it?’
‘That’s the big question, Dallas. Never seen it before. The computer can’t identify. My best guess is it’s something from off planet.’
‘That ups the stakes, doesn’t it? Bringing an unknown from off planet can get you twenty years in maximum lockup. Can you tell what it does?’
‘I’m working on it. It appears to have some of the same properties as an antiaging drug, and with some of the same energizers. It beats hell out of free radicals. But there’s some nasty side effects when it’s mixed with the other chemicals found in the powder. You got most of it in the report. Enhanced sexual drive, which is not a bad thing, but that’s followed by violent mood swings. Increased physical strength hooked up to a lack of control. This shit really dances around in the old nervous system. You’re going to feel terrific for a while, practically invulnerable, you’ll want to fuck like a rabbit, but you won’t much care if your chosen mate is interested. When the crash comes, it’s going to be hard and fast and the only thing that’s going to level you out is another dose. Keep taking it, keep flying up and diving down, and the nervous system’s going to go nutso. Then you die.’
‘That’s pretty much what you’ve given me already.’
‘That’s because I’m stuck on Element X. It’s vegetation, I can tell you that. Similar to the sharpleaf valerian found in the Southwest. Indians used the leaves for healing. But valerian isn’t toxic, and this is.’
‘It’s poison?’
‘Taken alone and in sufficient dosage, it would be, yeah. So are a lot of herbs and plants used
in medicine.’
‘It’s a medicinal herb.’
‘I didn’t say that. It’s not yet identified.’ He puffed out his cheeks. ‘But it’s likely some off planet hybrid. That’s the best I’ve got right now. And you and Illegals hassling me isn’t going to make me find the answer quicker.’
‘This isn’t an Illegals case, it’s mine.’
‘Tell them that.’
‘I will. Now, Dickie, I need the toxicology on the Pandora homicide.’
‘That’s not my baby, Dallas. That was dumped on Suzie-Q, and it’s her twenty-four hours off.’
‘You’re chief tech, Dickie, and I need the report.’ She waited a beat. ‘There are two locker room passes that go along with those box seats.’
‘Yeah. Well, it never hurts to spot-check your team.’ He keyed in his code, then the file. ‘She secured it, good for her. Chief Tech Berenski, override security on File Pandora, ID 563922-H.’
VOICE PRINT VERIFIED.
‘Display toxicology.’
TOXICOLOGY TESTS STILL IN PROGRESS. PRELIMINARY RESULTS ON SCREEN.
‘She’d been drinking a lot,’ Dickie murmured. ‘Top French bubbly. Probably died happy. Looks like Dom, ’55. That’s good work for Suzie-Q. Added a little happy powder to it. Our dead girl liked to party. Looks like Zeus . . . No.’ His shoulders bowed in as they did when he was intrigued or irritated. ‘What the hell is this?’
When the computer started to detail elements, he cut it off with an annoyed flick of the finger and began to run the report manually. ‘Something mixed up here,’ he muttered. ‘Something screwy.’
His fingers played over the controls like those of a well-trained pianist giving his first recital. Slow, cautious, and accurate. Dallas watched symbols and shapes form, disperse, realign. And she, too, saw the pattern.
‘It’s the same.’ Eyes steely, she looked over at the silent Peabody. ‘It’s the same stuff.’
‘I didn’t say that,’ Dickie interrupted. ‘Shut up and let me finish running this test.’