The In Death Collection, Books 21-25

by J. D. Robb

  But she could see she’d put worry in him as he turned to the stairs. “Dad? Hey, Dad. I’m coming up, and I’m bringing the law.” He tried a smile as he said it, but when there was no answer, it faded.

  Her senses caught something all too familiar. “You want to stay behind me?” she said it casually, and shifted in front to take the lead. “Which is his bedroom?”

  “Second on the right. Listen, Lieutenant—”

  Eve eased the bedroom door open with a knuckle.

  Randall Sloan wasn’t going to make Sunday brunch, she thought, restraining Jake as he tried to rush into the room.

  An elaborate chrome chandelier dripped from the vaulted ceiling. Randall Sloan hung from the rope that had been tightly looped around its gleaming post.

  17

  “HE’S GONE.” EVE HAD TO HOOK JAKE’S ARMS behind his back, hold him against the wall. “You can’t help him.”

  “Bullshit! Bullshit! That’s my father. It’s my father.”

  “I’m sorry.” He was young, strong, and desperate, so it took all of Eve’s muscle to keep him from shaking her off and running inside. And compromising the crime scene. “Listen to me. Listen, goddamn it! I’m the one who has to help him now, and I can’t do it if you go in there and screw up any evidence. I need you to go downstairs.”

  “I’m not leaving here. I’m not leaving him. Go to hell.” And Jake pressed his face to the wall and wept.

  “Give him to me.” Roarke stepped up beside her. “Downstairs,” he said before she could ask about Rochelle. “I convinced her to stay put when we heard the shouting. Let me take him.”

  “I need a field kit.”

  “Yes, I know. Here now, Jake, you have to leave him to the lieutenant now. This is what she does. You come with me. Rochelle’s frightened, and she’s alone. Come downstairs and stay with her.”

  “It’s my dad. My dad’s in there.”

  “I’m very sorry. I’ll get him settled,” Roarke told Eve, “best I can, then go get your kit out of the car.”

  “I don’t want him to contact anyone yet.”

  “I’ll see to it. Come on, Jake.”

  “I don’t understand. I don’t understand this.”

  “Of course not.”

  As Roarke pulled Jake away, Eve contacted Central for Crime Scene, then turned back to the room. “Victim is hanging from a rope attached to the master bedroom chandelier,” she began for the recorder. “Visual identification is of Sloan, Randall. There’s no apparent sign of struggle.”

  She scanned the room as she spoke. “The bed is made and appears undisturbed. The privacy screens are engaged, curtains open.”

  The bedside lamps were on, she noted, and a single wine glass with a bit of white left in it sat beside the one on the right. While Sloan was barefoot, there were slippers—leather from the look of them—under the body. He wore a tan sweater, brown pants. A chair was overturned. Behind him in a work area the minicomp was on. She could see its active light blinking.

  She brought the front entrance back into her mind. No sign of break-in.

  She nodded to Roarke as he came back with her kit. “Thanks.”

  “Do you want me to contact Peabody?”

  “Not yet. She’s got enough on her hands. Can you keep them under control down there? I don’t want them touching anything, talking to anyone.”

  “All right.” He set somber eyes on Randall. “I suppose he knew you’d follow the trail that led to him.”

  “Looks like that, doesn’t it?” she said as she sealed up.

  Roarke shifted his gaze to her, lifted his brows. “But?”

  “Doesn’t feel like it. He knows his son is coming today. Is this how he wants Jake to find him? He leaves his security off, door unlatched. Why not run instead?”

  “Guilt?”

  “He’s been dirty for a long time. Suddenly, he gets a conscience?”

  “Fraud and murder are far apart on the scale.”

  “Maybe, but he strikes me as a runner, not a suicide.”

  She stepped inside, got to work.

  She took the room first. Slick and stylish, like the man. Pricey clothes, pricey decor, high-end electronics. A man who liked his comforts, she thought, his conveniences, and his symbols of status.

  Lifting the wineglass, she sniffed. Left a marker in its place before she sealed the contents, then the glass itself.

  She tapped the comp unit with a gloved finger, and the screen engaged. She read the text written on it.

  I’m sorry. So sorry. I can’t live this way. I see their faces, Natalie and Bick. It was only money, just money. It got out of hand. I must have lost my mind to pay to have them killed. I lost my mind, and now I’ve lost my soul. Forgive me, because I can’t forgive myself. I take this terrible act with me to Hell, for eternity.

  She turned from the screen to the body. “Well, one thing on there’s pure truth: It got out of hand.”

  She identified the body for the record by the fingerprints, then examined the hands, bagged them. Her gauge put time of death at twenty-fifteen, Friday evening.

  Moving to the adjoining bath, she recorded while she studied. Clean, she noted, with a few men’s toiletries on the counter along with a big leafy plant in a glossy black pot. Separate steam shower, drying tube, glossy jet tub with a marble surround. An oversized black towel was draped over a chrome warmer.

  She opened the cabinet, scanned the contents.

  Lotions, potions—anti-age skin and hair products for the most part. Male birth control tabs, pain blockers, sleep aids. In the counter drawer were more grooming aids, dental hygiene products.

  She looked back up at the body.

  “You practice tying that noose, Randall?” she wondered. “It sure is perfect. Takes a steady hand and some skill to create a textbook hanging noose.”

  She stepped out of the room when she heard the buzzer and went down to meet the sweepers and give them the lay of the land.

  She found Roarke sitting with Jake and Rochelle in the living area. Jake sat hunched over, his arms dangling between his legs. His eyes were red and swollen as were Rochelle’s, who sat beside him in silence.

  “I need to see my father,” Jake said without looking up. “I need to see him. I need to talk to my grandparents.”

  “I’m going to arrange for that soon.” Since it was handy, Eve sat on the low table in front of him. “Jake, when’s the last time you saw or spoke to your father?”

  “Friday. We had a memorial service for Nat and Bick at the offices. Their families aren’t having one in the city. We wanted to do something. We were all there.”

  “What time was that?”

  “Toward the end of the day. About four. The partners let everyone who wanted to go home leave immediately after. We left together, my father and I, about five. He asked if I wanted to go have a drink, but I just went on home. I should’ve gone with him. I should’ve talked to him.”

  “Did he seem upset, depressed?”

  Jake’s head snapped up, and his eyes went hot. “It was a memorial service, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Jake,” Rochelle murmured, and rubbed a hand over his thigh. “She’s trying to help.”

  “He’s dead. How can she help? Why would he kill himself?” Jake demanded. “Why would he do that? He was young and healthy and successful. He—Oh, God, was he healthy? Did he have something wrong with him, and we didn’t know?”

  “I’m going to ask you again. Did he seem upset or depressed recently?”

  “I don’t know. Sad. We were all sad, and shocked. I guess he seemed edgy on Friday. Jumpy. He asked me if I wanted to go have a drink, but it was knee-jerk. He didn’t want to hang any more than I did.”

  “Do you know where he did his gambling?”

  “That was before. Jesus, that was years ago. He doesn’t do that anymore. He stopped.”

  “All right. Did he mention where he was going when you left him on Friday?”

  “No. I don’t know. I wasn’t
paying attention. I was upset. God, I have to tell my mother. They’ve been divorced forever, but she has to know. My grandparents.” He put his head in his hands again. “I don’t know how much more they can take.”

  “Would you say your father was a religious man?”

  “Dad. No, not at all. He says you have to get all you can out of life, because once it’s done, it’s done.” His voice cracked. “It’s done.”

  “He do any sailing, Jake?”

  “Sailing?” His head came up again, his eyes clouded with grief and confusion. “No, he didn’t like the water. Why?”

  “Just curious. Was he in a relationship?”

  “No. He liked women, but he just cruised.”

  “He takes care of his house? Cooking, cleaning.”

  “He’s got a droid.”

  “Okay. I’m going to have a uniform take you and Rochelle to your grandparents.”

  “I want to see my father. I need to see him.”

  “I’ll make arrangements for you and your family to see him as soon as I can. But not now, not here. Go, be with your family now.”

  Once she’d seen them off, she began to work her way through the first level of the house. “He left a note on the computer,” she said to Roarke.

  “Handy.”

  “Yeah. Actually, only a small percentage of self-terminations leave a note. Confessed to hiring the hit on Copperfield and Byson.”

  “Also handy.”

  “Yeah, you’re following me.” She moved through a small media room, a dining room. “They weren’t professional hits, number one. So sure, he could’ve hired some mope. But who’s he going to trust with the info that was tortured out of Copperfield?”

  “Only someone else directly involved.”

  “Bingo. He wrote about losing his soul and going to Hell. Upper case H on Hell. That says a religious bent to me, or some sort of belief in the big fire down there. Also, the noose looked like it was tied by a professional executioner. Or a very skilled sailor or Youth Scout. Someone very calm and precise.”

  She moved to the kitchen, opened the doors on the pantry—well stocked—the utility closet. “Where’s the droid?”

  “Not down here. Upstairs?”

  “I’m going to check. Why don’t you play e-man and check his security, the discs and so on?”

  “Is this a homicide, Lieutenant?”

  “Smells like one to me. We’ll see what the ME says. But fingers point. Why is the door open, the security off?”

  “Someone wanted the body found easily, and expeditiously.”

  “There you go. Why does a man contemplating offing himself ask his son out for a drink a couple hours before the act? He just doesn’t. Or if he does, he insists. ‘I’ve got to talk to you. I have to get something off my chest.’ But he doesn’t.

  “What you’ve got here is a man who liked to live well, by whatever means available. No steady relationships, no real vestige of interest in the family business. Hard-line father, up-and-coming son, and you’re the black sheep. But you know how to see to your own comfort. You’ve got a gambling problem.”

  “Had or have?”

  “Well, he’s dead as a doornail, whatever a doornail is, so it’s ‘had.’ But I’m betting he had one right up until the last hour. Great way to wash unexplained income is playing with it. I’m not seeing a man with a heavy conscious here. I’m seeing an opportunist, and one who’d have run like the freaking wind if he thought we were sniffing at him. And I’m seeing somebody’s patsy.”

  There was no droid on the premises, and according to her e-man the discs for Friday had been removed and replaced with blanks.

  “There’s going to be a tranq in his system,” Eve said. “Something that can be put down to calming himself before he put the noose over his head. We might find, since we’ll be looking, a stunner mark on him.”

  “Why kill him?”

  “Maybe he got greedy, wanted a bigger cut. Maybe he didn’t like having his son’s friends murdered, or got nervous. One way or the other, he was a liability—and a handy goat. I buy the note, the scene, I pack up my toys and walk away. Putting the finger on this guy also smears the accounting firm. Apologies, sorry about that, but the Bullock Foundation will require a new firm. Too much scandal, bad for the image. Their lawyers demand their files, and there’s no record at the firm of any fraud or whisper thereof. All parties involved in Sloan, etc.—as far as we know—are now dead.”

  “Clean and tidy.”

  “The killer likes it that way. Two strangulations, one hanging. Same basic method. He takes the droid in case there’s any record in the banks of his visiting this residence. Because he’s been here before. He knew his way around.”

  “And came prepared,” Roarke prompted.

  “Oh, yeah. Comes to the door. Let’s have a chat. How about a drink with that? Slips a tranq into the vic’s wine. Let me help you upstairs. Gets him up there, lays him on the floor. Stuns him if he has to. Writes the note on the computer. Mistake there, I figure, because he puts too much of himself into it. Lost my soul, going to the big H. Fixes the rope, hauls the woozy or stunned vic onto the chair, gives it a kick, and watches the show.

  “He’d watch,” she mused. “Like he watched Natalie and Bick. Watch the face, the eyes. Randall kicked, kicked off the slippers, grabbed at the rope. I’ve got what looks like rope fibers and tissue under the vic’s nails. Takes awhile. It’s not a quick death unless the neck breaks on the drop. He suffered, but I guess he earned it.”

  She frowned at the now empty bedroom. “Might’ve had his own transpo, but that’s not an absolute. He could’ve come on public—subway’d work best, and taken the droid away by the same method if he deactivated all but its mobility.”

  “So you’re looking for a man with a droid.”

  She smiled a little. “Maybe.” She pulled out her ’link when it beeped. “Dallas.”

  “It’s halftime, so I’m making this quick.”

  She frowned at Feeney. “If you were making it quick, you’d have gotten back to me two hours ago.”

  “Can’t do a locate if the ’link’s not in use, can I? I got the number.” And he read it off to her. “Put a tracer on that, but it wasn’t engaged until a few minutes ago, and then only for fifteen seconds.”

  “You got a location?”

  “Best I can give you is Upper East.”

  “New York? The ’link’s in New York?”

  “Yeah, where’d you expect it to be? Listen, Dallas, they got cheerleaders.”

  “Who has cheerleaders?”

  “The Liberties. I’m missing halftime.”

  “For God’s sake, they’re young enough to be your kids. Your kids’ kids.”

  “A man don’t watch a bunch of half-naked girls doing jumps and high kicks, he might as well be dead. You got what you need?”

  “Yeah, yeah, and thanks. Keep the trace on, will you? Cheerleaders,” she grumbled when Feeney clicked hurriedly off. “Men have simple minds.”

  “It’s not our minds that are simple,” Roarke corrected.

  She had to laugh. “New York. Son of a bitch. They probably never left the city. Upper East. Hotel maybe, or a private residence. I need to run a check, see if the foundation or either Bullock or her son own or have interest in any properties in that area.”

  “I can run that for you from home. Home’s where we’re going. You can write up your report on this just as easily from there,” he said, and took her arm before she could argue. “You need food, and so do I. You’re running on empty, Eve. I can see it in your eyes.”

  “However I’m running, I need to move. I’d moved faster on this, Randall Sloan would still be alive and I’d be closing this.”

  She started for the door with him, then stopped. “Wait. Wait. A guy like Randall. He’d have insurance.” She turned a circle. Three-story house, she mused. Twelve rooms, and the solarium. Lots of places to hide insurance.

  “He wasn’t stupid. The way he got Kraus to keep
his name as account exec, but did the work himself. Something goes wrong, he just palms off the trouble on Kraus. Insurance.”

  “The goat kept a backup goat in Kraus.”

  “You bet. Randall had trouble, needs to needle his client, he’s got a copy of those books somewhere. If he didn’t before, he sure as hell copied them when he doctored Natalie’s files.”

  “I imagine they thought of that as well, and got the location out of him.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. He wasn’t tortured, and the place wasn’t tossed. Could be they figure they have all the copies, or already got his. But suppose he was smarter than that, more careful than that. This place needs to be gone over, top to bottom.”

  “Which will take hours,” Roarke pointed out. “If you think you have hours left in you, you’re mistaken. Compromise,” he said, anticipating an argument. “Send Peabody and McNab back to do that. An e-man and a detective. If there’s something here, they’ll find it.”

  “I’ll let them take first swing at it.”

  She went out, sealed the door.

  “It’s possible, if you’re right about the copy, he kept it off-site. A bank box.”

  “Possible, but it seems to me he’d want it easily accessible, especially now. Shit’s flying, he needs his shield. What if he wants it after banking hours, or on Sunday? Traveled a lot,” she continued as she got into the car. “If he used a vault, it could be anywhere. Guy who travels that much would know how to run, know how to move fast and light if he had to.”

  And thinking that, she dropped into sleep.

  She woke, stretched nearly horizontal as Roarke stopped in front of the house. Rather than refreshing her, the mobile nap left her groggy and disoriented, and fumbling for the controls to bring her seat back up.

  Roarke lifted it, as he’d lowered it, from his side of the controls. “You need actual sleep.”

  “I need actual coffee.”

  She’d have food to go with it, Roarke determined as he walked with her into the house.

  “Red meat,” he said to Summerset. “Her office AC. If the others haven’t eaten, send up a bloody cow.”

  “Right away.” As they headed up, Summerset lifted the cat that ribboned between his legs. “We’ll just put some nice green beans along with that steak. She won’t like it, but he’ll make her eat them, won’t he?”