by J. D. Robb
Insults exchanged, she thought as she headed upstairs with the cat padding after her. Now she was officially home.
She went to the bedroom first to strip off her jacket, change her boots for skids. Galahad wound in and out, in and out of her legs like an engorged ribbon.
“I think you gained weight.” She sat on the floor, hauled the bulk of him into her lap. “You’re a disgrace. You’re like a cat and a half in a one-cat package.” She gave him a good scratch while he stared at her with his bicolored eyes. “No point giving me the look, pal. You are officially on a diet. Maybe we’ll get you one of those pet workout things.”
“He’d just sleep on it,” Roarke said as he came in.
“We could hang food at the end, rig it so he can’t get it until he puts in the time.”
“He’s always been . . . big boned,” Roarke said with a smile.
“He’s got more pudge than he had when we left.” She poked the cat’s belly to demonstrate. “Summerset spoiled him.”
“Probably.” Still in his business suit, Roarke joined her on the floor. Galahad immediately switched laps. “But then, so do we.”
“Look how he’s cozying up to you because I was talking about diet and exercise, and he doesn’t want to hear it.”
Stroking the cat into locomotive purrs, he leaned in, kissed his wife. “I missed you today. I’ve gotten used to having you all to myself.”
“You missed all the sex.”
“Absolutely, but I missed that face of yours as well. And how was your day?”
“Limo driver meets crossbow bolt. Bolt wins.”
“And here I thought my day was interesting.”
“What planet did you buy?”
“Which would you like?”
“I’ll take Saturn,” she decided. “It’s got pizzazz.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
She gave his tie a tug. “I thought you were going to stop wearing so many clothes.”
“They frown on less at global business meetings.”
“What do they know?” She unknotted his tie. “I think you should be naked.”
“Oddly, I was just thinking the same about you.” Reaching out, he hit the release on her weapon harness. The cat gave him a head butt, obviously annoyed the stroking had stopped. “I’ll get back to you,” Roarke promised, and nudged Galahad aside.
Eve took Galahad’s place, wrapped her legs around Roarke’s waist, her arms around his neck. “Maybe I missed your face.”
“Maybe you missed the sex.”
“I guess it can be both.” She laid her lips on his, sank in. “Yeah,” she murmured. “It can definitely be both.”
While the cat stalked away in disgust, she shoved the jacket off Roarke’s shoulders, tugged it off. He simply pulled the sleeveless tank she wore over her head.
“See how much easier mine are? You’ve got all these buttons.” She attacked them while he let his hands roam.
He loved the feel of her, long and lean with that supple core of muscle. Hers was a warrior’s body, agile and strong, and she gave it to him without reservation.
Her fingers, impatient and quick, dealt with buttons, pulled open his shirt. Their eyes met, hers that gilded brown, and aware. Watching her, he cupped her breasts, slid his thumbs back and forth over her until that awareness deepened.
When he took her mouth again, she pressed against him, center to center.
The beat of his blood quickened to a fierce and primal rhythm, driving, driving the need to possess. But when he would have pushed her back to the floor, she shifted her weight, and took him down.
Her breath, already unsteady, feathered over his lips. “Sometimes you’ve just gotta take it.” She caught his bottom lip in her teeth, tugged.
She used her teeth again, on his throat, on his shoulder while her hand snaked between them to open his trousers.
She felt his muscles coil and release. All the power, she thought, under her. All that he was, hers for the taking. The thrill of that rode inside her while she helped herself, stirred him as she wanted him stirred until that power quivered for her.
He was hard and smooth, and she used her hands, her mouth to pleasure and to torment. Used her body to tease and arouse until her own needs nearly swallowed her.
He rolled, pinned her, his eyes fiercely blue.
“Now you’ll take it,” he said, and proceeded to destroy her.
She cried out once as those hands that had so coolly stroked the cat now used her, ruthlessly. He drenched her, saturated her with sensations that robbed her breath, shuddered through her body in choppy, drowning waves.
When she trembled, he hiked up her hips and plunged into her.
Filled and surrounded, caught and found. Craved. Power merged with power now as they drove each other.
Once again their eyes met, and he saw that deep and gilded brown. And now let himself fall into them.
A damn good welcome home, Eve decided as she dressed. She glanced over at Roarke. “I’ve got some work to get to.”
“Limo driver, crossbow. I figured as much. This would be the driver from Gold Star.”
She frowned a little, knowing he often checked the crime reports. “How much does the media have? I didn’t have time to monitor.”
“That’s about it. You’ve been stingy with the details.”
“They probably have the rest by now. Driver and co-owner, husband, father of two. Not a lot there to make too many ripples media-wise, until they get the crossbow angle. That’ll ripple some.”
“I expect it will.” She left off weapon and jacket, he noted, and slipped her feet back into her skids. Her comfortable work mode.
The murder might not ripple overmuch in the media, he thought, but for Eve it would be a drowning pool until she closed the case.
He had a bit more work to catch up on, but nothing, he decided, that couldn’t wait.
“Why don’t we have a meal in here and you can fill me in before you get to it?”
“That’ll work. I don’t want much. I took pity on Peabody and sprang for dogs and fries this afternoon.”
“Some cold pasta?”
“As long as it doesn’t come with a light white sauce. Vic’s last meal.”
“We’ll go for a light white wine instead.”
They ate in the sitting area of the bedroom while she relayed the basics.
“Are you convinced the killer didn’t know who’d be at the wheel?”
“It plays,” she said. “We’ll still look at the vic, the company, the employees, but it feels like the partner, the wife are telling it straight. The vic took the ride on a coin toss. When you listen to the transmissions during the ride, it’s easy, business as usual with casual personal stuff mixed in. I don’t, at this point, see Houston as a specific target. The company, maybe, but not him.”
“Add in the security expert. It’s interesting.” As he tore a hunk of olive bread, handed her a share, Roarke considered it. “Dudley and Son is an old company, with a long reach and very deep pockets. I’d expect a man in Sweet’s position to have been well vetted.”
“He was pissed. It felt real. Then again.” She shrugged and stabbed some curly pasta. “If he’d set it up, he’d be ready to make it feel real.”
“The question would be why.”
“Why Houston, why Sweet, why that company, why that method. Sweet’s PA’s off a little. Something off there,” she considered. “I want a closer look at that little bastard. Thinks a lot of himself. Whoever did this thinks a lot of himself. The method matters, the whole, elaborate setup. If you don’t know who you’re going to kill, then it’s about the killing, not the victim. When you go to this much fuss, it’s about how a lot more than who.”
“You’ve looked into who bought that particular make of bolt?”
“Yeah. I interviewed one of them on my way home. Iris Quill.”
“I know of her.” Roarke lifted his wineglass. “She’s got quite a reputation. A very serious hunter, a
nd one of the founders of Hunters Against Hunger.”
“HAH.”
“An unfortunate acronym from the animal’s viewpoint, I imagine. Still, they do good work.”
“She struck me as solid. Gave me all her records on that weapon, even let me do a count of the bolts she has. And they add up. She also gave me a list of people she knows who use the same type. You don’t hunt.”
“No. It doesn’t appeal to me.”
“Mostly I don’t get why people want to tramp around the jungle or the woods, or wherever in the stone bitch of nature just to kill some stupid animal who’s just hanging around where it lives. You want meat, you can buy a dog on the street.”
“That’s not meat.”
“Not technically.”
“Not in any reasonable sense. I expect it’s the primal charge with hunting, the pitting yourself against the stone bitch of nature and so on.”
“Yeah, but you’d be the one with the weapon.” She frowned a moment. “Maybe this is kind of the same deal. Houston—or whoever might’ve been driving—is in his natural habitat, so to speak. You’re sitting in his space, maybe it’s the back of a fancy limo, but you’re hunting. Primal charge, maybe.”
“But hardly sporting,” Roarke pointed out. “He shot an unarmed man from behind. Most animals have what you could term a weapon at least. Tooth and fang—and the advantage, to some extent, of instinct and speed.”
“I don’t think he’s worried about being fair. Maybe a hunter, maybe, and maybe a little bored with shooting four-legged mammals. Trying for bigger game? Something to think about.”
She thought about it in her home office while she set up a second murder board. She programmed coffee, glanced at the door that joined her office with Roarke’s. He had work to catch up on, she knew, and it felt homey in their own strange way to be working in connecting rooms.
She set up her computer to start runs, and while it worked began to add to her case notes.
Hunter. Bigger game. Thrill kill. Unusual weapon, elaborate setup = attention. Attention = trophy? Who has access to Sweet’s data and hunts? Motive for involving Sweet?
She paused, glancing over at an incoming transmission. “Reo comes through,” she murmured, and called the incoming file, now unsealed, on-screen.
Vandalism, shoplifting, illegals possession, truancy, she read. Two stints in juvie, with another illegals pop for dealing and destruction of private property in between. Mandatory counseling, all before Houston hit sixteen.
Tipping back in her chair, she read social workers’ reports, counselors’ reports, judges’ opinions. Basically they’d labeled him a wild child, a troublemaker, a chronic offender with a taste for street drugs.
Until somebody’d bothered to dig a little deeper, somebody’d bothered to take a good look at his medicals.
Broken bones, blackened eyes, bruised kidneys—all attributed to accidents or fighting. Until just before his seventeenth birthday he’d beaten his father unconscious and taken off.
Her stomach shuddered with memory, with sympathy. She knew what it was to be broken and battered, knew what it was to finally fight back.
“They went after you, didn’t they? Yeah, hunted you down, tossed you in a cage for a while. But somebody finally took a good, hard look.”
She read his mother’s statement, read the fear and the shame in it, but felt no sympathy there. A mother was meant to protect the child, wasn’t she? No matter what. This one had hidden all those breaks and bruises out of that shame and fear, until the right cop, the right moment, and they’d pulled it out of her.
Supervised halfway house, more counseling—that, she thought, and maybe the power of finally fighting back had turned a teenage boy around, and helped build him into a man.
And last night, someone had taken that from him.
“His juvenile record,” Roarke said from the doorway.
“Yeah.”
“The system worked for him, maybe not as soon as it should have, but it worked for him.” He came to her, kissed the top of her head. “And so will you. How can I help?”
“You said you had work.”
“I’ve caught up with some, and have a few things running that can go on their own for a bit.”
He thought of her, she understood, when he read the file. And he thought of himself, too—of being kicked and punched, broken and battered by his father.
It connected him—she understood that as well—to a man he’d never met.
“It’s grunt work now, mostly. I’m doing runs on a portion of the staff at Dudley, and the transpo company’s employees. I’m going to cross-reference those with any membership in hunting clubs or that kind of travel, licenses and permits for crossbows. And I want to dig on Sweet’s PA’s financials, just because the little bastard is off somewhere.”
“Why don’t I take the financials? I can do them faster.”
“Show-off.”
“But I do it so well.” He pulled her in for a moment. “Take that down now.” He studied the data on-screen as she did. “It reminds you, and that upsets and distracts you.”
She shook her head. “Not until I do a search for the father. Maybe he wanted payback after all these years. Maybe he got enough money for some sort of hit, or . . . I have to cross it off.”
“All right. I’ll look into the money on the little bastard.”
It made her laugh. “Thanks.”
She did the grunt work, sorted through runs, sieved the data, ran probabilities until a low-grade headache brewed behind her eyes.
“I can’t find one person in the mix with a hunting connection, at least not that shows. No permits, no licenses, no purchases of that nature. I tried crossing with sporting—people do the damnedest things, and there’s competitions for archery and shit. Legal ones. Nothing there, either.”
“Well, I had better luck.”
“I knew it.” Eve slapped a fist on her desk. “I knew that little bastard was wrong. What did you find?”
“An account he’d buried under a few layers. Not a bad job of it, really, and it would likely have remained buried if no one had a reason to dig. You’ll note, as I did,” Roarke continued, “he’s been careful not to give anyone a reason to dig. Clean record, bills paid in a timely fashion, taxes all right and tight. I transferred the account data to your machine. Computer,” he ordered, “display Mitchell Sykes’s financials on screen two.”
Acknowledged . . .
When the data flashed on, Eve picked up her coffee, narrowed her eyes. “That’s a nice chunk. Heading toward half a million.” But she frowned. “Am I reading this right? Deposits in increments over—what?—a two-year period.”
“Nearly three, actually.”
“Doesn’t smell like payoff for a murder, unfortunately. The last deposit was a little over a week ago, in the amount of twenty-three-thousand dollars and fifty-three cents. That’s a weird number.”
“All the deposits are uneven amounts, and all under twenty-five thousand.”
“Blackmail, maybe, and he deposits odd amounts to try to stay under the radar, which he has.”
“Possibly.”
“Or some corporate espionage, selling Dudley data to competitors. He’s PA for one of the top security guys, so he’d have some access there.”
“Another possibility.”
“They’re pretty regular, aren’t they?” Hands in pockets, eyes narrowed, she studied the figures. “Every four or six weeks, another little bump in the nest egg. Withdrawals are few and far between, and pretty light. Living within his means, using a little extra here and there no one would blink at. Still, the amounts are . . . Wait, he’s got a cohab, double the amount of deposits and it makes more sense.” She glanced over. “And you’ve already gone there.”
“As it happens. Computer, secondary financials, split screen.”
“Karolea Prinz, nearly the same amounts, nearly the same dates. Now we’ve got something. She works for Dudley,” Eve added. “I ran her. Pharmaceuti
cal rep.” She sipped her coffee. “So, I’ll tell you what you’ve already figured out. They’re skimming drug supplies, which she’d have access to, and selling them on the street or to a supplier. Every month or so.”
“It reads that way to me.”
“Nothing to do with Houston. In fact, this bumps them down below bottom, unless I find out Houston or someone connected was a customer. But the fact is, using his boss’s data would bring just this sort of attention. Why go there when you’ve got such a nice sideline? You don’t want to shine any lights.”
“They’ve been successful, so I’d agree, bringing the cops to their own doorstep would be monumentally stupid.”
“Too bad, but it’ll be fun to get him in the box and sweat the snot out of him.” In fact, remembering his curled lip and down-the-nose smirk, it gave her a warm little thrill.
“Between this and the use of Sweet’s data, it doesn’t look like that arm of Dudley’s is as secure as it should be.” And that, she thought, was interesting, too. “Where there’s one hole, there’s probably another. Houston’s killer’s in one of those holes.”
“Nothing on the victim’s family connections?” Roarke asked her.
“The father’s dead. Beat some neighbor kid, got a stretch in the Tombs. Picked the wrong con to mess with inside, and ended up bleeding out in the showers, thanks to the shiv in his gut. The mother moved back to Tennessee where her family’s from. There’s nothing there.”
She puffed out her cheeks, blew out the breath. “I’ve run the partner, the partner’s wife, the vic’s wife, even the vic’s kids back, forth, sideways. There’s no buzz, no pop. The wife gets Houston’s share of the business, but essentially she already had it. This killing just wasn’t about Houston particularly. And nothing about the company, so far, brings up any questions. If there’s a connection, Dudley’s the most likely source. Even then . . .”
She shook her head.
“Even then?”
“It’s playing more and more like it was for the thrill. Just for the rush. And if that’s the way it is, he’s already looking for the next thrill.”
The scream ripped out of the shadows, high and wild. Behind it chased a gurgle of maniacal laughter. For a moment, Ava Crampton caught a glimpse of her reflection in a smoky mirror before the ghoul burst out of the false glass, claws dripping blood.