by J. D. Robb
“Yeah. Any woman would kill for a bathroom that size all her own. But she showed how even that mag space can be ruined.”
“Her side. Her bath, her closet/dressing room, her sitting room, her side of the bed, her dresser—the one with all the pink bottles. Right?”
“Yeah. His side.” Peabody jerked a thumb. “You know they’ve got a toddler, but you don’t see any kid stuff in here. Not even a stray teddy bear. It’s a little sad.”
“When your nanny has a helper, you don’t spend a lot of time with the kid, and this space is adults only. With a definite line of demarcation. Anyway, you’re the woman of the house.”
“I’m the queen of my castle,” Peabody agreed, and got a wink from McNab.
“This house, Peabody. Keep up. You’ve got staff and servants, and three floors to decorate into terrible death. Where’s the one room you don’t go into?”
“The doll room. Okay, that’s just me. She must like dolls. Well, from my brief conversation with her, I’d cross off the laundry facilities. That’s staff territory. And she probably doesn’t go into the kitchen much.”
“Try this. What’s the one place he goes you don’t go?”
“I . . . his bathroom!” Peabody shot her two index fingers in the air. “She’s all pink and shiny in hers, and his is full of man. What woman wants to go into a bathroom after a guy?”
“We do all right,” McNab said.
“Abso-true.” But when his back was turned again, Peabody rolled her eyes at Eve. “You’re thinking potential hidey-hole.”
“Let’s check it out.”
If the hers bathroom was an explosion of pink and fuss, the his was a study in desperate masculinity. Black tile with red flashes covered the floors, the walls. The odd addition of a bar—red, with cherub carvings—along one wall stood before a portrait of a zaftig reclining woman eating a fat purple plum. The black counter held a large square of red sink with a wolf’s head faucet that would vomit out the water.
Shelves held bottles and bowls, the manly versions of creams and lotions and oils, as they were all cased in red or black leather.
The rest of the wolf pack occupied the shower, where they’d spit out water from the showerhead and jets.
The drying tube had a padded bench, in case its occupant grew too tired and needed to rest in the two minutes it took to dry most humans.
He had a vanity of his own, fashioned to resemble a desk. Peabody started there.
“I think this may be uglier than hers, but it’s neck and neck,” Peabody said. “Wow, he’s got as many face and body enhancements in here as she does—almost. Big on the tanners and bronzers, and hair products. This vanity’s an eyesore, Dallas, but it’s well-constructed. I’m not finding anything out of proportion, nothing that looks like a secret compartment.”
“How about the bar?” Eve circled around it. “You’ve got a good eye for compartments.”
It was how Peabody had first come to her notice, as a uniform finding a hidey-hole in a murderer’s apartment.
“Well. Again, really good work wasted on the ugly.”
Peabody swiveled on the vanity stool, studied the bar from that perspective. “All that carving—I mean it mirrors what they’ve got all through the house, but it’s also the kind of thing that can hide a mechanism. And a cabinetmaker this good? He could hide one really well. My dad’s done some totally mag hideys.”
She angled her head as Eve ran her hands over cherubs. “Maybe microgoggles would help—if there’s anything to see.”
“Go get some from the field kits.”
Eve hunkered down, putting aside how odd it was to rub her fingers all over fat, naked butts.
Wouldn’t be on the front face, she decided. What if someone inadvertently hit the release? If there was one.
She straightened, moved around the back.
Glasses and mixers and liquor on shelves, and a single cabinet with the carved front. She opened it, peered in at the ice machine, the wine friggie.
Closed it again, opened it. Closed it.
“Got the goggles.”
“Why have a door in front of the ice-maker thing, the wine friggie? Anytime you want ice, you have to open the door. Everything else is on open shelves. Handy.”
“Could just be the design. Or he didn’t want the mechanics to show.”
“Maybe. But how deep are these units? They wouldn’t be the depth of the bar, right?”
Now Peabody hunkered down beside her. “Dad and Zeke have made some nice bars—fully outfitted, custom. One this size . . . Seems like the ice deal wouldn’t need that much depth.”
Eve closed the door again, wiggled her fingers for the goggles. With them on, she began to scan inch by inch.
“This one.” Eyes huge behind the goggles, Peabody gripped a cherub butt between her fingers. It turned fractionally.
“Why does it turn and not open any damn thing?”
“A code or a pattern,” Peabody muttered, “like a puzzle. Yeah, yeah, I’ve seen this kind of thing. We have to figure out which ones to turn, in what order. It’s pretty damn clever. It’s really good work.”
“I’m getting a hammer.”
“No!” Sincerely appalled, Peabody scooted over. “I can figure it out. Give me a little room. You can’t bust up this kind of work.”
“It’s fucking ugly.”
“It’s still art. Here! Here’s another. I bet there’s three. A combo of three. We’ve got this.”
Eve would’ve preferred the hammer, but since she didn’t have one handy, she let Peabody tap and twist and rub cherubs.
“Hey, Dallas?” McNab stepped to the doorway. “I’ve got a transmission from Marshall Easterday, unanswered. It came in today, at eight-fifty-two.”
“Right after we talked to him,” Eve said. “About the time he went upstairs ‘to rest.’”
“He doesn’t sound restful. He says it’s urgent they speak, and says he’s tried his personal ’link, tried the office. Guy’s sweating scared, LT.”
“He should be.” Eve started to push up, to listen for herself, when something clicked and Peabody let out a “Woo!” When she opened the door, the shelves holding the ice machine and friggie slowly swung open.
“Frosted,” McNab said, coming in to hunker down with them.
As they were hip to hip, Eve caught his scent and thought of cherry lollipops.
A small silver box sat in the hidden compartment. Eve pulled it out, stood, set it on the bar top.
“That’s old,” Peabody said. “Like antique old. I know it’s locked, Dallas, but you can’t just smash it.”
“McNab, get my field kit, would you?”
“Sure.” He rose, turned, grinned. “Hey, Captain, my girl found a secret compartment in the john bar, and we got ourselves an antique box.”
“What kind of sick fun house is this?” Feeney wondered as he looked around. Curious, he poked at a power pad. The black tiles shimmered into mirrors. “Oh, hell no,” he said and deactivated. “Dug out an e-mail from Marshall Easterday on the office comp.”
“From this morning,” Eve said.
“Yeah. Copied to an Ethan MacNamee. Marked urgent. ‘My brothers,’” he quoted, “‘beware. Contact me immediately. Seek safety. Come home.’”
“‘Come home,’” Eve murmured.
“Got your field kit.” McNab brought it in, set it beside the box. “We could scan that thing and work on getting it open back at Central.”
“Give me a minute.”
From the field kit, Eve took a small leather wallet (a gift from Roarke), opened it, and selected lock picks.
“Extra frosted,” was McNab’s opinion.
“We’ll see about that.” She went to work and, as Roarke had taught her, used her ears, her instincts as much as the feel.
“Step back.”
Annoyed, she rolled her shoulders. “You’re crowding me. Just stop breathing all over me.”
Maybe Roarke would have had it open in a finger snap, but she felt enormous satisfaction when after three struggling minutes, the lock fell.
“New skills,” Peabody said.
“I’ve been practicing.” Eve opened the lid, looked at the two large, old-fashioned keys and the two twenty-first-century key swipes resting on dark blue velvet.
“Little hidey-hole to hold the keys to bigger ones. Old doors,” Eve decided. “Those are too big for anything but doors—I think. And new doors.”
She used tweezers to pick up one of the swipes, turned it. “No logo, no name or code. Probably a code buried in it, right? Can you get that out, Feeney?”
“I’d have to turn in my bars if I couldn’t.”
McNab pulled a scanner out of one of the dozen pockets in his neon orange baggies, offered it to Feeney.
“Let’s have a look.”
Feeney ran it, frowned. “Got a shield, and we can break that down. This kind of code and protection? It’s probably a bank box or a secured area. He’s a chem guy, right? So maybe a secured area, lab deal. Let’s see the other.”
He repeated the process. “Shielded, but thinner—this isn’t the high-security level.”
He did something to McNab’s scanner that made it whine, picked up and put on Eve’s goggles. He scanned the first swipe again.
“Security code for the swiper. And . . . Can just make it out. LNB. FKB. Ah . . . 842.”
“FKB—Franklin Kyle Betz. LNB. That’s not the name of his company. Maybe a bank?”
Feeney nodded. “More likely. Too simple below the shield for a high security area. So, bank box, I’m thinking. Liberty National’s my best guess. They got branches everywhere.”
“And the number, that would be the box.” Eve nodded, looked ahead. “We’re going to need another warrant. Peabody, tag Reo. We need authorization, enough to pry out whether or not Betz has a box in the branches we’re going to be contacting. And the authorization to go into said box when we locate it. What about the other one?” she asked Feeney.
“Back up once. We take this in, we maybe can ID the branch. It’s too deep an embed for a handheld. Save you making half a million contacts.”
“Do that,” Eve agreed.
“And this one.” He repeated the process. “Got his initials again, and numbers: 5206.”
“Just that? But not another bank?”
“Doesn’t read bank to me. Maybe a mail drop or a locker. Or an address. People lose their swipe, they cancel, get another. What you don’t want is data embedded that leads somebody where it goes so they can use it before you cancel. We’ll take them back to the shop, see what else we can dig out.”
He looked back in the box at the keys. Studied them with his basset-hound eyes, rubbed his chin. “Those? That’s a whole different kettle. Lab might be able to tell you what kind of lock, give you the age. But location’s on you.”
“Yeah. I’ve got some ideas on that.”
She pulled Baxter and Trueheart in, continued to search the house while she waited for them. But her gut told her they’d already hit the mother lode.
She let them in herself. “Give me what you’ve got.”
“It’s not much. Lots of shock, and a few tears at Wymann’s offices. We got the warrant and Callendar and another e-geek came in to take the electronics. The admin says she thinks the biographer approached Wymann, maybe at a party. He made the follow-up appointment himself, had the admin put it in his schedule. She herself never saw the woman or spoke with her. It seems spur-of-the-moment.”
“Any sense he was dipping in the office pool?”
“Nope. But Trueheart turned his earnest young detective’s face on the admin and eased a couple names out of her. No cross with your first vic’s ladies. We talked to both of them, and the alibis look solid.”
He looked around. “Is that a koi pond? Who has a koi pond twelve steps inside their front door? Then again, who has a fat baby orgy on their front door?”
“You haven’t seen half of it. Here’s where we stand.”
She gave him the progress.
“I’ve got to see this bathroom.”
“You’ll have time. The two of you need to sit on the house in case the killers decide to bring him back and hang him over the koi pond. I need to get back in the field, check out a couple leads. Most likely is they bring him back in after dark, but you sit on it, and I’m getting backup on the off chance they come before I can get back.”
She held up a finger when her ’link sounded. “Dallas,” she began, pacing away.
When she paced back, she shouted, “Peabody!”
“I don’t get having fish in the house.” Baxter stood looking down at koi. “It’s unnatural.”
“I used to win a goldfish every summer at the county fair. Ringtoss,” Trueheart said. “It never made it through the fall.”
“See, unnatural.”
“You want unnatural? There’s a room full of dolls on the second floor.”
“Well, don’t they have a little girl?” Trueheart began.
“If a kid walked in that room, her screams would be heard from here to Queens, and she’d be traumatized for life. I’m saying hundreds of dolls. Staring dolls. Staring-at-the-door dolls. Waiting dolls.”
“Jesus, Dallas.” Muttering it, Baxter shuddered.
“They’re up there. We’re heading out,” she said as Peabody came down the stairs. “Detective Bennet cleared the path to the social worker.”
“Mike Bennet? Nice guy,” Baxter said.
“Sit on the house. Maybe feed those fish something. Nobody’s been here since yesterday. Maybe they’ll start eating each other.”
“Staring dolls, cannibal fish. What the hell kind of place is this?”
“Sit tight. Stay alert. We don’t want to add dead guy swinging over the cannibal fish.”
“Did she give Mike any names?” Peabody asked, winding her long, long scarf as they started to the car.
“No, and he doesn’t think she will. But she might give us a yes or no when we show her photos.”
“That’s a fine line.”
“What I get is she likes him—that nice-guy vibe. And she really respects his future mothers-in-law. We push on how these people used Anson to kill Wymann, and if we don’t stop them, will kill Betz, we’ve got a decent shot at getting a nod if we show her the right face.”
The minute she was in the car, Peabody ordered the seat warmer. “Reo says hey, and that she’ll have a warrant for us when we get the locations on the swipes. You never said what ideas you had about the old keys.”
“Old keys, old doors. These guys go back to old times. Group house. Maybe they’ve still got it. Or another. A place they get together, as brothers.”
“If so, and Betz went to all that trouble to hide the keys, it follows they go there, as brothers, to do stuff he doesn’t want his wife to know about.”
“If the senator had keys, he wouldn’t bother hiding them. We’ll get another warrant to go through his apartment, since it’s easy money his wife won’t cooperate. If Wymann had keys, we didn’t look in the right place, with the right eye. We’re going to need to have this Ethan MacNamee picked up, arrange a ’link or holo interview.”
“Senator Fordham?”
“Not one of them, but we’ll leave his security detail to watch him, in case he’s just a late entry. And let’s get the file on the suicide: William Stevenson.”
She answered the dash ’link when she noted Roarke’s display. “Hey.”
“I thought you’d want to know, security did the run-through at the hotel. Wymann has never registered, and doesn’t show up on any feed in the last year.”
“Okay. How about Frederick Betz?”
Roa
rke gave her a quiet stare. “Why don’t you contact Lloyd Kowalski, at the Palace, and ask him whatever you like. Your middleman on this is a bit busy today.”
“Sure, thanks. Just so you know, I didn’t tap you when we were after a hidey-hole, or when we had a locked box. Peabody found the hole, I picked the lock.”
“I’m so proud of both of you. Don’t skip lunch again, and if you need me I’ll be much more free after three.”
“Okay. Might need a copter and a pilot.”
“Now, that’s so much more fun than talking to Kowalski. Let me know. Later,” he added and clicked off.
“Copter? Pilot?”
“Group house—if it’s still standing, I want a look at it once we find it. Maybe those keys fit a door there, maybe they don’t. But I’d like to see it either way. Once we find out where the hell it is.”
“I can dig it up—it’ll take some time unless one of them owned or owns it. Maybe Mr. Mira knows.”
Eve let out a sigh, and once again went on the hunt for a parking space. “Yeah. He might know. We’ll ask before we dig.”
—
Suzanne Lipski had a cramped little office space in a dilapidated building that housed a rape crisis center. The center did its best, Eve imagined, with whatever funding it could scrape up, to offer support, information, medical and emotional assistance to victims. The walls of that space—one smaller than her division at Central—held soothing and uplifting posters. Calm water, misty forests, sunny beaches. And a bulletin board full of emergency numbers, counseling information, support group information.
Eve stopped, studied a flyer—a pretty summer meadow under a perfect blue sky—for Inner Peace.
“Bang,” she murmured.
Lipski sat at a battered, overburdened metal desk on a squeaky swivel chair. She had no window, but a pot of greenery thrived on an ancient file cabinet under some sort of grow light.
She was a bone-thin woman of about sixty, with a messily curling mop of stone-gray hair. Her face was long, narrow, and brown as a cashew. She had dark eyes that told Eve the woman had seen it all, and was fully expecting to see it all again before she was done.
“We appreciate you seeing us,” Eve began.