by J. D. Robb
“She went out on her own the next day,” Eve prompted, and Bobby’s expression turned puzzled.
“That’s right. Did she come to see you again? I told her to leave it alone, at least for a while. She didn’t go to breakfast with us, said she was going to be lazy, then go out for some retail therapy. Shopping always made her happy. We were booked for dinner that night, but she said she didn’t feel like going out. Said she was feeling tired, and she’d have something in her room. She didn’t sound like herself.”
“How’d she look?”
“I don’t know. She was in her room. When she didn’t answer the room ’link, I called on hers, and she had the video blocked. Said she was in the tub. I didn’t see her. I didn’t see her again after Friday morning.”
“What about Saturday?”
“She called our room, about nine, I guess. Zana, you talked to her that time.”
“I did. She had the video blocked again, now that I think of it. She said we should go on with whatever we wanted to do. She wanted to be on her own. Truth is, I thought she was sulking a little, and I tried to talk her into coming out with us. We were going to take one of the sky trams, and we had a ticket already for her, but she said no. Maybe she’d go walking. She wasn’t feeling that well anyway. I could tell she was upset—didn’t I say, Bobby? ‘Your mama’s irritated, I can tell by her voice.’ But we let her be and went on. And that night . . . You tell it, Bobby.”
“She wouldn’t come to the door. I was getting a little irritated myself. She said she was fine, but still wanted to stay in, watch the screen. We went out to dinner, just the two of us.”
“We had a wonderful meal, and champagne. And we . . .” She slid her eyes toward Bobby in a way that told Eve they’d done some celebrating when they’d gotten back to their room. “We, ah, slept a little late this morning. We tried to call her room, and her ’link, but she didn’t answer. Finally, when Bobby was in the shower, I thought, ‘Well, I’m going down there and knocking ’til she lets me in. I’m just going to make her . . .’ ”
She trailed off, pressed her hand to her mouth.
“And all that time. All that time . . .”
“Did you hear or see anything last night, anything unusual?”
Bobby only sighed. “It’s loud here, even with the windows closed. And we’d had a bottle of champagne. We put on music when we got back, never turned it off. It was still playing when we got up this morning. And we . . . made love when we got back last night, and again this morning.”
His color came up as he spoke. “The fact is, I was annoyed with her, with my mother. She pushed to come here, and she wouldn’t contact you by ’link before we came, no matter how much I talked to her about it. Then she started holing up in her room—sulking, I figured, because you weren’t playing the role she wanted you to play, I guess. I didn’t want Zana’s trip spoiled because of that.”
“Oh, honey.”
“My feelings were, ‘Fine, she wants to pout in there, she can stay in until we leave on Monday. I’m going to do the town with my wife.’ Oh hell. Oh hell,” he repeated and wrapped his arm around Zana. “I don’t know why somebody’d hurt her like that. I don’t understand it. Did they . . . was she—”
Eve knew the tone, knew the look in the survivor’s eye. “She wasn’t raped. Did she have anything of value with her?”
“She didn’t bring much of her good jewelry.” Zana sniffled. “Said it was asking for trouble, though she loved wearing it.”
“I see you’ve got your window closed and locked.”
Bobby glanced over. “It’s noisy,” he said absently. “And there’s that emergency escape out there, so it’s best to . . . Is that how they got in? Through her window? I told her to keep that window shut, keep it locked. I told her.”
“We haven’t determined that yet. I’m going to take care of this, Bobby. I’m going to do everything I can. If you need to talk to me, either of you, you can contact me at Central.”
“What do we do now? What do we do?”
“Wait, and let me do my job. I’m going to need you to stay in New York, at least for the next few days.”
“Yeah, okay. I . . . I’ll get in touch with my partner, tell him—tell him what happened.”
“What do you do?”
“Real estate. I sell real estate. Eve? Should I go with her? Should I go with Mama now?”
He was no good to anyone now, Eve thought. He and his baffled grief would only be in the way. “Why don’t you give that some time? There’s nothing you can do. Other people are taking care of her now. I’ll let you know when there’s something more.”
He got to his feet. “Could I have done something? If I’d made the manager open the door last night, or this morning, could I have done something?”
And here, she thought, she could do the one thing, the single thing, that soothed. “It wouldn’t have mattered.”
When Eve and Peabody walked out, she drew a clear breath. “Take?”
“Comes off a decent guy. Shocky right now. So’s she. One holds up ’til the other goes down. Want me to run them?”
“Yeah.” Eve rubbed her hands over her face. “By the book.” She watched as the morgue unit rolled out the body bag. Morris came out behind them.
“One-twenty-eight A.M. on time of death,” he said. “On-scene examination indicates the fatal blow was a head wound inflicted with our old favorite—the blunt object. Nothing in the room, at my scan, matches. The other bodily injuries are older. Twenty-four hours or more. I’ll get you more exact once I’ve got her in my house.” His eyes stayed level on hers. “Is that what you wanted to hear?”
“Yeah, it is.”
“I’ll let you know what I know when I know it.”
“Thanks.” Eve walked back into the crime scene, signalled one of the sweepers. “I’m looking, particularly, for a pocket or hand ’link, her personal communication device.”
“Haven’t got one yet.”
“Let me know when and if.” She moved straight to the window, glanced back at Peabody. “We’ll go down this way.”
“Oh, man.”
Eve ducked through and out the window, dropped lightly on the narrow evac platform. She hated heights, freaking hated them, and had to wait a moment for her stomach to stop rolling. To give her system time to adjust, she concentrated on the platform itself.
“Got blood.” She hunkered down. “Nice little dribble of a trail. Over the platform.” She hit the release, watched the steps jut out. “And down.”
“Logical route out and away,” Peabody commented. “Sweepers will get samples, and we’ll know if it’s the vic’s.”
“Yeah.” Eve straightened, studied the access to other rooms on the floor.
Tricky, she decided, with the gaps, but not impossible if you were athletic or ballsy enough. A good strong jump would do it, which she’d have preferred over the tiptoe route along the skinny spit of ledge. Which meant the killer could have come from inside or outside the hotel.
But logic said in and out the emergency route. Down and away, to ditch the weapon just about any damn where.
She looked down, breathed through her teeth as her head went light. People crawled along the sidewalk below. Four floors, she thought. She probably wouldn’t pull a Tubbs if she fell, and kill some innocent pedestrian.
Then she crouched, examining a splat of pigeon dung. She cocked her head up as Peabody stepped out beside her. “See this flying rat shit.”
“What a lovely pattern, abstract yet compellingly urban.”
“Looks smeared to me, like somebody caught the side of it with a shoe.” She poked her head back in the window. “Yo! Got some blood and some pigeon crap out here. I want it scraped up and bagged.”
“We get all the class work,” one of the sweepers commented.
“Mark it, Peabody,” Eve ordered, then started down the zig-zagging stairs. “I want the hotel’s recyclers, and any recyclers in a four-block radius, searched. We got some luc
k there, it being Sunday.”
“Tell that to the team pawing through the garbage.”
“Emergency evac makes basically every room this side of the building accessible to the other. We’re going to want to take a look at the copy of the registration disc.”
“No security cams in the hallways, stairways,” Peabody added. “If it’s an inside job, why not just go out the door when you were finished?”
“Yeah, why not? Maybe you don’t know there aren’t any cams.” Her boots clanged on metal as she went down, and her stomach began to level out. “Maybe you’re really careful and don’t want to chance being seen by Mr. and Mrs. Tourist, who may be strolling in from a night on the town.”
At the last platform, she hit the second release, and the short ladder rattled out. Steady now, she swung out, used the rungs, then dropped to the sidewalk.
Peabody clambered down after her.
“Couple of things,” Eve began as they skirted around to the front of the building. “Lombard went to Roarke’s office on Friday to try to shake him down.”
“What? What?”
“It needs to go in the report. It needs to be out there, up front. He met her, booted her out. End of story, but it needs to be up front. Sometime after that and several hours before she got bashed, she ran into trouble. It’s easy for both Roarke and myself to account for our time and our whereabouts at the time of her death, and should be just as easy to account for the period between her leaving his office and TOD.”
“Nobody’s going to be looking at either of you.”
Eve stopped. “I’d be looking at me if I didn’t know I was alibied. I wouldn’t be above smacking her in the face.”
“Killing her?”
Eve shook her head. “Maybe whoever tuned her up wasn’t the same person who killed her. Maybe she was working with someone, hoping to fall into easy money through Roarke. When she didn’t pull it off, he or she tuned her. It’s something to look at.”
“All right.”
“Here’s the deal.” She turned to Peabody and gave what she considered a statement. “We had a houseful of caterers and decorators and God knows crawling all over the house all day Saturday. All day. When Roarke has outside contractors on the premises, he keeps cams on, full. You’re going to contact Feeney, request that he pick up those discs, examine the equipment, and verify we were both there, all day.”
“I’ll take care of it. I’m going to repeat: Nobody’s going to look at you.” She held up a hand before Eve could interrupt. “Neither would you, Dallas, after five minutes. A face punch, sure. You’re not above it. And so what? But that was more than a punch that left her face messed up. More than a fist, and you are above that. She tries to shake Roarke down? Shit, she had to be bird stupid. He’d scrape her off like, well, like you’d scrape flying rat shit off your shoe. It’s a nonissue. Trust me, I’m a detective.”
“Been a while since you’ve managed to work that into a conversation.”
“I’ve grown mature, and selective.” As they rounded the corner, Peabody dipped her hands into her pockets. “He’s going to have to be interviewed, you know.”
“Yeah.” She could see him leaning up against the side of her vehicle—where had that come from—and working on his PPC. “I know.”
He looked over, spotted her. His eyebrows lifted, and he tucked his PPC away. “Out for a stroll?”
“You never know where cop work’s going to take you.”
“Obviously. Hello, Peabody. Recovered this morning?”
“Barely. It was a hell of a party.”
“Give us a minute, will you?” Eve asked her.
“Sure. I’ll go talk to people, and get those discs.”
When they were alone, Eve gave her vehicle’s tire a little boot. “How did this get here?”
“A bit of sleight of hand. I assumed you’d want your own.”
“Yeah, you’re right.”
“I contacted Mira, let her know what was going on and that you’d be tied up for a while.”
“Mira? Oh, right, right.” She shoved a hand through her hair. “Forgot. Thanks. What do I owe you?”
“We’ll negotiate.”
“I’ve got to ask you for one more. I need you to come down, make an official statement regarding your conversation with the victim on Friday at your office.”
Something sizzled in his eyes. “Am I on your short list, Lieutenant?”
“Don’t pull that. Don’t.” She drew a breath in, slowly. Released it, slowly. “Another investigator catches this, we’re both on the short list until we clear it up. We both had motive to cause her pain, and someone caused her plenty. We’re out regarding the murder. Can’t kill someone in Midtown when you’re partying with the chief of police in another part of town. Still, we’ve both got connections, and the wherewithal to hire somebody to do it.”
“And we’re both smart enough to have hired someone who wouldn’t be quite so obvious and sloppy.”
“Maybe, but sometimes obvious and sloppy is purposeful. Added to it, somebody busted up her face earlier. We need to cover that, too.”
“So, you don’t think I murdered her, but as for beating her up—”
“Stop it.” She jabbed a finger into his chest. “Hitting me with this attitude isn’t helping.”
“Which attitude would you prefer I hit you with? I have several available.”
“Goddamn it, Roarke.”
“All right, all right.” He waved a hand in dismissal. “It just pisses me off, having my wife interview me over assault.”
“Well, cheer up, I won’t be. Peabody’ll handle it.”
“Won’t that be delightful?” He took her arms, turned her so they were toe-to-toe and eye-to-eye. “I want you to tell me—I want you to look at me and tell me, right now, if you believe I put hands on her.”
“No.” There was no hesitation. “It’s not your style, and if you’d lost it enough to jump out of character, you’d have told me already. The fact is, it’s my style, and I’ll be putting her visit to me in my report.”
He swore. “Bloody bitch is as much trouble dead as she was alive. Don’t give me that look. I won’t be lighting a candle for her. You would, in your way. Because for better or worse, she’s yours now, and you’ll stand for her because you can’t do otherwise.”
He continued to hold her arms, and now ran his hands lightly up and down. “I’ll come with you now, and have it done.”
“Crappy way to spend a Sunday.”
“Wouldn’t be the first,” he said and opened the car door.
At Central, Peabody set up in one of the interview rooms. Her movements were a little jerky, and her eyes stayed down.
“Relax,” Roarke advised. “I believe it’s traditional for the subject to be nervous rather than the investigator.”
“It’s awkward. It’s just a formality.” Peabody looked up. “It sucks. It’s a sucky formality.”
“Hopefully, it’ll be quick and painless for both of us.”
“You ready?”
“Go ahead.”
She had to clear her throat, but read the data into record. “Sir, we understand you’re here voluntarily, and we appreciate your cooperation with this investigation.”
“Whatever I can do . . .” He shifted his gaze to the long mirror, to indicate he knew very well Eve was observing from the other side. “For the department.”
“You were acquainted with Trudy Lombard.”
“Not really. I had the occasion to meet her once, when she requested a meeting with me, at my office, this past Friday.”
“Why did you agree to meet her?”
“Curiosity. I was aware that my wife was briefly in her charge many years ago.”
“Ms. Lombard was Lieutenant Dallas’s foster mother for a five-and-a-half-month period in 2036.”
“That was my understanding.”
“Were you aware that Ms. Lombard had made contact with the lieutenant at her office in this facility this pas
t Thursday?”
“I was.”
“And how would you describe the lieutenant’s reaction to that contact?”
“As her business.” When Peabody opened her mouth, shut it again, he shrugged. “My wife had no desire to renew the relationship. Her memory of that time was unhappy, and I believe she preferred to keep it in the past.”
“But you agreed to meet with Ms. Lombard, at your office in Midtown.”
“Yes, as I said, I was curious.” His gaze tracked to the mirror again, and, he was sure, met Eve’s. “I wondered what she wanted.”
“What was it she wanted?”
“Money, naturally. Her initial pitch was to play on my sympathy, to enlist me to help her soften the lieutenant. Her claim was that my wife was mistaken in her feelings toward her, and her memory of that portion of her life.”
He paused, looked at Peabody, and nearly smiled. “As the lieutenant is, as you know, rarely mistaken on such matters, I didn’t find the woman’s claims credible, and wasn’t sympathetic. I suggested that she leave things as they were.”
“But she wanted you to pay her?”
“Yes. Two million dollars was the suggestion. She would go back to Texas for that amount. She was unhappy when I informed her that I had no intention of paying her any amount, at any time.”
“Did she threaten you in some way?”
“She was no threat, to me or mine. She was an irritant at worst. A kind of leech, you could say, who’d hoped to suck a bit of blood out of what was a difficult time in my wife’s childhood.”
“Did you consider her request for money blackmail?”
Tricky area, Roarke thought. “She may have hoped I’d see it that way—I can’t say. For myself, I considered it ridiculous, and nothing that I, or the lieutenant, should concern ourselves with.”
“It didn’t make you angry? Somebody comes into your office, tries to hose you down? It’d tick me off.”
He smiled at her, wished he could tell her she was doing a good job of it. “To be frank, Detective, I’d expected her to try me. It seemed the most logical reason for her contacting the lieutenant after all these years.”
He leaned back in his chair. “Angry? No. On the contrary, I got some satisfaction out of the meeting, by letting her know, unmistakably, that there would be no payment. Now or ever.”