by J. D. Robb
“You’d think, but the PA’s just chomping to challenge that, and given the fact you were neither arrested nor charged for that crime before or during the Clemency period, you’re fair game.”
“What kind of shit is this? It’s bull.” She looked to her lawyer. “It’s bull. I was a minor.”
“Just don’t say anything. Lieutenant,” Montoya began, in a tone of outrage, “my client—”
“Not done yet. You’ll also find on the menu conspiracy to murder Lino Martinez. She didn’t toss the ’link, Penny. And now that she knows your finger was on the button, she’s cooperating fully.”
“That bitch Juanita killed Lino.” Penny shoved to her feet, stabbing a finger in the air. “I never touched him. I was never in that goddamn church. Juanita Turner did Lino, and she can’t pin it on me.”
“I never said who she was,” Eve commented.
“I don’t give a shit what you said. Juanita poisoned Lino, over her kid. You can’t pin that on me. I wasn’t fucking there.”
“That’s why it’s called conspiracy to murder.”
“I want a deal. I want a deal and I’ll tell you just how she did it. Shut the fuck up!” she screamed at Montoya when he tried to silence her. “Listen, just listen.” She sat back down. “The bitch went psycho when she found out Lino was back, that he’d been back, using the priest cover.”
“How’d she find that out?”
“Look, so I let it slip one day, that’s all. I let it slip. It’s not a crime. She’s the one who did it. She used Old Man Ortiz’s funeral for cover, got the keys out of the rectory. She poisoned the wine. She did it because her son got blown to hell, and her old man offed himself.”
“Thanks for confirming it, on record—which is, again, why it’s called conspiracy to murder. There’s also accessory after the fact in the matter of the murders of Miguel Flores and José Ortega and Steven Chávez.”
“What the fuck! What the fuck! Why don’t you say something?” she demanded of the lawyer.
“I think he’s struck dumb.”
“We had a deal. On record—”
“For the fraud, for the assault with intent on a police officer. No deal on the rest.” Now it was Eve who tipped back in her chair. “I could afford to let those slide, seeing as you’ll be in for, oh, a couple lifetimes. Off-planet, concrete cage, no possibility of parole. And even though those words sing to me, that’s not everything you deserve. Detectives.”
At her word, Stuben and Kohn came in. “The charges are murder in the first,” Stuben began, “in the deaths of . . .”
He spoke all the names, all the dead from 2043. When Penny leaped up, Eve simply wrenched her arms behind her back and cuffed her.
“I thought you’d like to take her down, book her,” she said to the detectives. “On all the charges.”
“It’d be a nice cap on it. Thanks, Lieutenant. Thanks.”
She listened to Penny scream obscenities as they hauled her out. “Record off. This is probably a lot more than you bargained for,” she said, casually to the lawyer. “If I were you? I’d run.”
She turned, walked out. Roarke stepped out of observation.
“Would we be leaving for Nevada tonight?” he asked.
Hardly a wonder she was raving nuts about the man. “Yeah, that’d be best. I’m going to want to take someone along, if that’s okay with you.”
EPILOGUE
THE ROCK CROSS CAST A SHADOW ON SAND STRUCK GOLD BY A vicious sun. That sun bleached the sky white, and forced a breathless heat into the air.
Eve stood under it, under the shadow and the sun.
The gauges found the bodies quickly, and the diggers unearthed them, the remains of what had once been men. And in one burning grave, with the bones, lay a silver cross, and a silver medal. Santa Anna, in honor of a dead priest’s mother.
It was enough.
Still, they verified with DNA, with dental.
She stood and remembered what the local cop, the detective who’d run the missing persons on Ortega had said.
“You know how you smell something, but you can’t figure out where it’s coming from? I smelled something on this one. But the guy—the ID, the records, wits—it all checked out.”
“No reason for you not to think he wasn’t who he said he was.”
“Except that smell. We checked out the house they’d rented. Sweet place, let me tell you. Fancy. No signs of foul play. We looked good, too. I like to think we looked good. We didn’t find a damn thing. MP’s clothes, or most of them, gone and this guy Aldo—Martinez—leaking like a bad faucet. I get the background on the MP, see he’s got some illegals trouble. You figure he took off, went on a binge. And the other, he asks for a priest, a counselor. Jesus, I watched that priest walk off with him. Just let them go.”
Wrong place, Eve thought. Wrong time. Like young Quinto Turner.
Death was a mean bastard.
So she’d come back, to the shadow of the cross, to the graves dug in the sand under the violent sun. Because the priest had asked her to.
She knew he was praying over those now empty graves. And suspected he prayed for all three with equal devotion. It made her feel odd, so she stayed back with Roarke.
López turned, and aimed those sad, serious eyes on her. “Thank you. For all you’ve done.”
“I did my job.”
“We all have them. Thank you both. I’ve kept you out in the sun long enough.”
They walked to the small, sleek plane waiting on the plate of the sand.
“A drink, Father?” Roarke asked when they took their seats.
“I should ask for water, but I wonder, would you have any tequila?”
“I would, yes.” Roarke fetched the bottle and glasses himself.
“Lieutenant,” López began. “May I call you your name?”
“Mostly people call me Dallas.”
“Your name’s Eve. The first woman God created.”
“Yeah, she doesn’t have a real good rep.”
A smile ghosted around his mouth, around those sad eyes. “She shoulders blame, I think, not entirely her own. Eve, I’ve put in a request to hold Father Flores’s funeral mass at St. Cristóbal’s, and to bury him in the place our priests are buried. If I’m allowed to do this, would you attend?”
“I can try.”
“You found him. Not everyone would have looked. It wasn’t your job to find him.”
“Yes, it was.”
He smiled, sipped the first of his tequila.
“I’ve got a question,” Eve said. “I’m not Catholic or anything—he sort of is.”
Roarke shifted, drank. “Not precisely.”
“What I mean is I’m not, so it’s not like I’ll—how is it put—take it as gospel, but I’d like an opinion from, you know, a rep of the church.”
“What’s the question?”
“It’s something Juanita Turner said in the box, in interview. It bugs me. Do you believe that someone who self-terminates can’t go to heaven, on the supposition there is one?”
López sipped again. “The Church has a firm policy regarding suicide, even as suicide has become legal in most places, most parts of the world, with proper authorization.”
“So that’s a yes.”
“The Church ruling is very clear. And rules often ignore the human and the individual factor. I think God ignores nothing. I think His compassion for His children is infinite. I can’t believe, in my heart, God closes his door to those in pain, to those in desperation. Does that answer your question?”
“Yeah. You don’t always follow the rules.” She glanced at Roarke. “I know somebody else like that.”
Roarke slid a hand over hers, laced fingers. “And I know someone who thinks about them entirely too much. Lines can blur, wouldn’t you agree, Father?”
“Chale. And yes, lines can, and sometimes should, blur.”
She smiled, listened to two men she found fascinating and intriguing debate, discuss over glasses of tequ
ila.
And she watched out the window as the dry gold of the desert receded. As the plane banked east, to take them home.
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Robb J. D., date.
Promises in death / J. D. Robb.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-101-01611-4
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Love itself draws on a woman nearly all the bad luck in the world.
—WILLA CATHER
A little more than kin, and less than kind.
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Table of Contents
PROLOGUE
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
EPILOGUE
PROLOGUE
SHE WAS DEAD THE MINUTE SHE ANSWERED THE ’LINK. SHE didn’t question the caller or the urgency of the request. In fact, pleasure and excitement rushed through her as she put aside her plans for an early night. Her movements both graceful and efficient, she dressed quickly, gathering what she needed.
She strode through her pretty apartment, ordering the lights to dim, and remembered to switch to sleep the little droid kitten her lover had given her as a companion.
She’d named it Sachmo.
It mewed, blinked its bright green eyes and curled into a ball. She gave its sleek white fur an affectionate stroke.
“Be back soon,” she murmured, making a promise she couldn’t know would be broken.
She glanced around the apartment as she opened the door, smiled at the bouquet of red roses in full and dramatic bloom on the table near the street window. And thought of Li.
She locked her door for the last time.
Following ingrained habit, she took the stairs. She was a slim, athletically built woman with eyes of deep blue. Her blond hair swung past her shoulders, a parted curtain for a lovely face. She was thirty-three, happy in her life, flirting around the soft edges of love with a man who gave her kittens and roses.
She thought of New York, this life, this man as a new chapter, one she was content to walk through, page by page, and discover.
She tucked that away to turn her mind to where she needed to go, what she needed to do. Less than ten minutes after the call, she jogged down the second flight of steps, turned for the next.
She had an instant to register the movement when her killer stepped out. Another for surprise when she recognized the face. But not enough, not quite enough to speak before the stunner struck her mid-body and took her down.
She came to with a shocking jolt, a burn of skin and blood. A rush from dark to light. The stunner blast had left her body numb, useless, even as her mind flashed clear. Inside the paralyzed shell, she struggled, she strained. She looked up into the eyes of her killer. Into the eyes of a friend.
“Why?” The question was weak, but had to be asked. There had to be an answer. There was always an answer.
She had the answer when she died, in the basement five floors below her pretty apartment where roses bloomed red and a kitten purred in sleep.
1
EVE STEPPED OUT OF THE SHOWER AND INTO the drying tube. While the warm air swirled around her, she shut her eyes and wallowed. She’d snagged a solid eight hours’ sleep and had woken early enough to indulge in what she thought of as water therapy.
Thirty laps in the pool, a spin in the whirlpool, followed by a twenty-minute hot shower. It made a hell of a nice way to start the day.
She’d had a productive one the day before, closing a case within two hours. If a guy was going to kill his best friend and try to pass it off as a mugging, he really shouldn’t get caught wearing the dead friend’s inscribed wrist unit.
She’d testified in court on a previous case, and the defense counsel’s posturing, posing, and pontificating hadn’t so much as cracked a hairline in her testimony.
Topping off the day, she’d had dinner at home with her husband, watched a vid. And had some very excellent sex before shutting down for that eight straight.
Life, at the moment, absolutely did not suck.
All but humming, she grabbed the robe on the back of the door—then paused, frowned, and studied it. It was short and silky and the color of black cherries.
She was dead certain she’d never seen it before.
With a shrug, she put it on, and walked into the bedroom.
There were ways for a good morning to get better, she thought, and here was top of the list. Roarke sipping coffee in the sitting area while he scanned the morning stock reports on-screen.
There were those hands that had worked their magic the night before, one holding a coffee mug, the other absently stroking their fat slug of a cat. Galahad’s dual-colored eyes were slits of ecstasy—she could relate.
That beautifully sculpted mouth had turned her system inside out, twisted it into knots of screaming pleasure, then left it limp and satisfied.
Just shy of two years of marriage now, she mused, and the heat between them showed no signs of banking down. As if to prove it, her heart gave a leap and tumble in her chest when he turned his head, and his bold blue eyes met hers.
Did he feel that? she wondered. Could he possibly feel that every time? All the time?
He smiled, so both knowledge and pleasure spread over a face, she thought foolishly, must make the gods weep with joy over their work.
He ros
e, moved to her—all long and lean—to take her face in his hands. Just a flutter of those clever fingers over her skin before his mouth found hers and made a better morning brilliant.
“Coffee?” he asked.
“Yeah. Thanks.” She was a veteran cop, a homicide boss, a tough bitch by her own definition. And her knees were jelly. “I think we should take a few days.” He programmed the AutoChef for coffee and—if she knew her man—for the breakfast he intended her to eat. “I mean maybe in July. Like for our anniversary. If you can work it in between world domination and planetary acquisitions.”
“Funny you should bring it up.” He set her coffee on the table, then two plates. It seemed bacon and eggs was on the menu this morning. On the sofa Galahad twitched and opened his eyes.
Roarke merely pointed a finger, said, firmly, “No.” And the cat flopped the pudge of himself over. “I was thinking a few weeks.”
“What? Us? Away? Weeks? I can’t—”
“Yes, yes, crime would overtake the city in July 2060, raze it to smoldering ash if Lieutenant Dallas wasn’t here to serve and protect.” Ireland wove misty magic through his voice as he picked up the inert cat and set him on the floor to make room on the couch for Eve.
“Maybe,” she muttered. “Besides, I don’t see how you can take off for weeks when you’ve got ninety percent of the businesses in the known universe to run.”
“It’s no more than fifty.” He picked up his coffee again, waiting for her to join him. “In any case, what would be the point of having all that, and you, darling Eve, if I can’t have time with you, away from your work and mine?”
“I could probably take a week.”
“I was thinking four.”
“Four? Four weeks? That’s a month.”
His eyes laughed over the rim of his cup. “Is it now? I believe you’re right.”
“I can’t take a month off. A month is like . . . a month.”
“As opposed to what? A chicken?”