by J. D. Robb
“She had these hidden—underwear drawer, and inside an evening bag. It’s quite a collection. New York, New Orleans, Arizona, Europe—Western and Eastern. I’m going to say she contacted at least some of these, paid visits. And the fact she hid it means she wanted to keep it to herself, and/or friends and family disapproved.”
“She suffered a great loss, and looked for comfort.”
Eve plucked up a brochure. “Nutritional Psychic. A grand buys you an hour consult where Doctor—and I bet that’s a loose one—Hester will recommend which herbs and berries you should consume in order to open yourself up to messages from the dead.”
She tossed it down, picked up another. “Now this one’s a bargain. Initial fifteen-minute consult’s free. During that consult Lady Katrina and her spirit guide, Ki, will determine if you have what it takes to pass through the portal.”
She tossed that down as well.
“I’m also betting when I check her financials I’m going to find big gobs of money pissed away on this crap.”
“I tend to agree with you regarding Doctor Hester, Lady Katrina and Ki, but we both know there are legitimate sensitives.”
“Who talk to dead people.”
He flicked a finger down the dent in her chin. “You do.”
She rolled her eyes. “I dream about them—small wonder.”
“Agree there as well. And no, I wouldn’t put my money on any of these holding conversations with the dead. I’d say the dead speak if and when the spirit, we’ll say, moves them.”
“Don’t go all Irish on me.”
“In the blood and bone. Still.” He laid his hands on her shoulders, sensing her frustration. “I see where you’re going, and it makes perfect sense. She got herself overly involved here, and it maybe fell under the influence of someone not just illegitimate but dangerous. But how could that influence be so strong, Eve, to have her kill the brother she loved, and herself?”
“I don’t know yet. But it’s an angle. She had a good life here. You can feel it.” She poked at him when he lifted his eyebrows. “That’s not psychic mumbo. You just have to look around, and you get it. She had a good life here, a man she loved, work she loved, family, a place. She took a kick to the gut, I get that, too. Either grief twisted her up to the point she had a psychotic break, or someone twisted her up in it.”
“You’ll find out which.”
“Yeah. Either way, she won’t be crossing the bridge and coming through the portal to tell me. We work it.”
She rebagged her evidence.
“Got another hour in you?” she asked with a glance up.
“What did you have in mind?”
“I want to go through the rest of it before Henry comes back. Plus, I didn’t find any snazzy jewelry, and she’s bound to have it, which means a safe. You find the safe, and I’ll go through the rest of the place.”
“And finding it, do I open it?”
“Yeah, you open it.”
He flashed a grin. “This is much more fun than sleeping alone.”
CHAPTER FIVE
She dropped into bed at two a.m., with the muttered request that Roarke wake her at six if she slept through. He was better than any alarm.
With a low fire simmering, the cat curled into the small of her back, and Roarke’s arm wrapped around her, she tumbled straight into sleep.
The dead had a lot to say. In dreams, she thought, dreaming. And that was different from believing you could walk over some magic golden bridge into the afterlife and have conversations with vics.
No golden bridge for her. She sat in Interview A, with Marcus and Darlene Fitzwilliams seated on the other side of the scarred table.
“What gives?” she asked.
“I love my brother. I’d never hurt him.”
“It’s pretty clear you did.”
“I’ve never hurt anyone in my life, not on purpose. You were in my house. What did you see?”
“It’s all right, Darli.” Marcus draped an arm around her shoulders, pressed his lips to her temple.
She’d seen that, Eve remembered. A photograph of just that, in a frame. Another when they’d been teenagers—Darlene riding on Marcus’s shoulders as he hammed it up. Her in a bikini, Eve remembered, him in swim trunks, up to his waist in a blue sea.
Other photos, many photos. The siblings, the parents, Darlene and Henry, Marcus and Henry. Holiday photos, casual photos, formal photos.
A life in frames.
“You had secrets,” Eve said.
“Everyone has secrets.”
“And some people kill to protect them.”
“Do I look like a killer?”
“Mostly killers look like everybody else. You jammed scissors in your brother’s heart.”
“I couldn’t.” Darlene gripped the handle of the shears now buried deep in her brother’s chest. Yanked them free. “I’d kill myself first.”
“You killed yourself second,” Eve pointed out. “Grief can mess you up.”
“How do you know? You’ve never lost anyone. You don’t know my grief, you don’t know my sorrow. My parents were angels. Yours were monsters.”
Darlene drove the bloody points into the table. “You’re surrounded by evil. How can you see through it to what’s good?”
“You just have to look hard enough.”
“Then look! I was going to have what you have. I just wanted answers. That’s no different than you. I wanted what you want.”
Eve opened her eyes and looked into Roarke’s. “This. She wanted this.”
“You’ve a few minutes left to sleep, but you dream so hard.”
“She wanted this, and she had the person who wanted to give it to her. Why end everything? Gotta look deeper.”
“All right.” He kissed the brow she’d furrowed.
She laid her hand on his cheek. “Sometimes you don’t have to look very hard.”
“For what?”
“For what’s good. You’re right here.” She tipped her face up, touched her mouth gently to his. “And when things aren’t so good, you’re still right here.”
“Always.”
She eased over so her heart lay on his, so her mouth lay on his. The only bridge she needed, she thought, was the one that led to him.
Her body, warm, smooth, fit so perfectly with his. His lanky, leggy cop. They could fill each other with love, with light, a kind of awakening after the long, dark night.
It touched him, the tenderness of her hand on his cheek, the sweetness of her fingers sliding through his hair. As much a lifting of the heart as arousal. He gave her the same; soft and easy, slow, dreamy kisses as desire roused.
He shifted. When he covered her she opened. She welcomed. She enfolded.
With their mouths meeting again, again, their bodies moved together, a rise and fall, rise and fall until that final peak.
And the quiet, sighing slide that followed.
* * *
She thought of it later when she stood in her home office, studying the murder board she’d set up.
Darlene had wanted that—not just the sex; the connection, the continuity. And Eve had seen that connection in photographs in the townhouse.
Eve glanced over to a photograph of her and Roarke, taken by some enterprising paparazzo. They’d taken down the bad guy, and were both a bit bruised and bloody—a contrast to the glittery evening clothes. And they grinned at each other.
The connection was there, clear to see.
Who’d give that up and jump off a building? You’d have to be crazy—and that might be the answer. If she was sane, the logical answer was Darlene had been pushed. One way or the other.
She texted Peabody with a change of plans and told her partner to meet her at the morgue at oh-nine-hundred. Meanwhile she split the list of reputed psychics, gave Peabody ha
lf to run.
She’d start on the others, but first she wanted a look at Darlene’s financials. That might tell its own tale.
* * *
Ten minutes later she was up and crossing to Roarke’s adjoining office.
“I know you’re busy.”
He glanced over from his wall screen and the schematics on it. “I’ve been busier.”
“It’s a money question.”
“I’m never too busy for that.”
“I’m looking into Darlene’s financials. For the past eighteen weeks—including the morning she died—she withdrew nine thousand, nine hundred and nine-nine dollars from her personal account. I’m reading it as cash.”
Roarke sat back. “Isn’t that interesting.”
“There’s other activity. Deposits, transfers, other withdrawals—one every month for five or six thousand. But eighteen weekly for that amount’s a flag for me.”
“One dollar more, you hit ten thousand and the IRS might do a sniff. Blackmail springs to mind, but with what you found last night, another idea leapfrogs over it.”
“Somebody’s been taking her for a ride for four and a half months. Parents died seven months ago. I need to find out when she started hunting for psychics, but that’s what rings. She has another personal account—years old. This one? She opened it about five months ago, and not at her usual bank. I think she was hiding this, just like she was hiding the business cards and pamphlets.”
“I’d agree, but if you’re angling from that to whoever she was paying somehow pushing her to murder/suicide, why? Forget the how for a moment. Why? A dollar shy of ten large a week is a very nice income from one source.”
“Maybe she’d decided that was it.” Demonstrating, Eve swiped a finger through the air. “Maybe she’d figured out whoever she was paying was full of bullshit, maybe argued, threatened. Could be this bullshit shucker figured out a way to get more if he eliminated her, and her brother. A lot of ropes to tug there.” She jammed her hands into her pockets. “I need her tox.” She hadn’t given Morris enough time, and found that frustrating. “I need how. She was high, and everyone says she didn’t use, but damn it, she was high. So maybe she didn’t know she was using. Still doesn’t tell me why she’d kill her brother. If we stretch it to mind manipulation—not a big stretch since we’ve dealt with it before—it still doesn’t explain the why.” She’d taken a turn around his office before she caught herself. “Sorry.”
“I never tire of watching you work.”
“I’m working these angles because two people who loved her insist she couldn’t do what she did.”
“Not just because of that.”
She blew out a breath. It could be disconcerting to have someone who knew her inside and out.
“No, not just,” she admitted. “My sense of her, too. Money’s part of it. Gia Gregg—lawyer. Do you know her?”
“Not personally, but she has an excellent reputation. Specializes in estate law, high-end clients.”
“Too early for her, too. I’m going to get out of your hair, go on in. I can start running the list on the way, and maybe get lucky and push Morris on the autopsy.”
“Would you like me to look for more?”
“More what?”
“Money, darling.”
“You can give it a glance if you have time. Thanks. I’ll be . . . communing with the dead for a while, one way or the other.”
“Give them my best or my worst, depending. And take care of my cop.”
“I can do all that. See you later.”
She started her run on the psychics at the top of the list as she drove downtown, letting the in-dash do the work. She eliminated one straight off, as he was doing time for fraud.
Two others had done time. Eve bumped them down, figuring Darlene had enough brains and certainly enough resources to have gotten the same information. And while she might have been gullible, she didn’t strike Eve as brick-stupid.
She toggled that with Darlene’s travel. Though she had flown to Europe twice in the last six months, there was nothing for the last eighteen weeks.
Eve bumped down anyone on the list out of the country. But she’d check with Henry Boyle, and with Darlene’s office, just to be sure she hadn’t snuck any travel in that didn’t show.
She continued the runs as she walked through the white tunnel of the morgue—and tried to resign herself to spending a good chunk of her day talking to woo-woo shovelers.
She found Morris with Darlene’s shattered body, and with the brother laid out on a second table.
“Jumpers or floaters,” she began, “which is worse?”
“Floaters go on a sliding scale. The longer they’re in the water, the higher they rate.”
He wore a steel gray suit today, paired with an electric blue tie. He’d gone silver with the cord that twined through his single thick braid of black hair.
And he looked, she thought, both rested and alert.
“Jumpers,” he continued. “We can judge them on a sliding scale as well. The higher they go, the higher they rate.”
“Fifty-two floors. She rates pretty high.”
“She does. Years ago I had a jumper—literally. A skydiver.”
“Why do people do that?” It absolutely baffled her. “People actually pay to do that.”
“It’s exhilarating.”
“You?” Surprised, she frowned at him. “You’ve jumped out of a plane? On purpose?”
“An amazing sensation. I’m quite a fan of sensations.”
“Jumping out of a plane would give me a sensation of insanity.”
“Only if you did it without a chute. My skydiver, however, ran afoul of his business partner, who’d sabotaged his chute. His fall of thirteen thousand feet puts him at the top of my scale. Not as far for her, but the results . . .” He glanced down, quiet pity in his eyes. “She was a lovely young woman before that last step.”
“Yeah, and lovely young women are more inclined to pills for self-termination. What can you tell me about her?”
“At this point I haven’t found any injuries prior to that last step, but it’s going to take more time to be certain, given the state of her.”
“It’s the tox I’m most interested in right now. She and the brother? Friends of Louise’s.”
“Ah, I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Louise, Charles, and the woman’s fiancé—who looks to be in the clear on first pass—are all adamant she didn’t use. But the security feed on the brother’s door and two wits who saw her get out of the elevator all say she looked high on something.”
“I can tell you that before that last step, her liver, kidneys, lungs, heart showed no signs of abuse or disease. She wasn’t a habitual user. Her stomach contents? Tea, sugar cookies—real sugar—and about two ounces of white wine.”
She caught the inflection. “And?”
“The blend of tea to start.” He gestured to his comp screen, brought up some sort of colored chart with a lot of words she didn’t understand. “It was a chamomile base—harmless enough—but laced with other elements. Valerian, for one.”
It rang a bell. “A sedative, right?”
“Yes, it can be used as one. Peyote.”
“Hallucinogen. Shit. Is this like the Red Horse?”
“No. I remember that too well, and this wasn’t the same. Nothing in this would trigger violence. But there are elements here and in the other stomach contents I can’t identify. I’ve flagged it top priority for the lab, as requested. They’re minute traces, nothing debilitating. It may be that the combination of them caused such violent effects.”
“If we weigh in the insistence she didn’t use, it leans toward her being dosed.” Eve circled the body. Had she known she was falling? Eve wondered. Had she seen the ground rushing up?
“Where’d she get the
scissors? That’s a question. Not the sort of thing you carry around in a purse—they were huge.”
“Shears, actually,” he corrected. “Nine-inch blades. I did a quick exam of his wounds. And I’d agree, it’s not the sort of thing most women carry.”
“And no reason I can see why her brother had them sitting out where she could grab them,” Eve said. “He had kitchen scissors—in a knife block—and a pair in his office, desk drawer. Which makes it lean premeditated. For somebody.”
Eve turned from Darlene, stepped over to Marcus.
“She was smiling,” Morris said.
“I’m sorry?”
“When she rang his buzzer. She was smiling—glassy-eyed, yeah, but smiling the way people do when they’re ready to say, hey, sorry about that. And nothing I get in my read of her says she had that kind of chill. That she could stand there, smiling, with a pair of nine-inch blades in her purse she intended to jab into her brother’s heart.”
She shook her head. “There wasn’t enough time for them to have a serious argument. Five, six minutes after she went in, he’s bleeding. Then she went straight out to the terrace and off. She was dosed, that’s my read on this. Who wanted her dead? Her and her brother.”
“She can’t tell me that.”
Eve let out a half laugh. “She believed she could. She was seeing psychics, mediums, all that crapola. Parents killed in an accident last June, and she’s got a secret stash of business cards and info on talking to dead people.”
Now Morris smiled. “I talk to them all the time. So do you.”
“Ever have them talk back?”
“In their way.” He touched a hand, gently, to Darlene’s shattered shoulder. “I talk to Ammarylis often.”
Eve slid her hands in her pockets. Morris had lost the love of his life the previous spring. “I’m sorry, Morris.”
“No, it’s a comfort. I hear her voice quite clearly at times. She picked out this tie, just this morning.”
Not sure how to respond, Eve said, “Okay,” and made him laugh.
“I reached for a gray one, as it matched my morning mood. I heard her tell me to wear the blue—the bold blue. So I did, and it lifted away the gray. Young Darlene was looking for answers, and comfort, I suspect. There are those who can give both—and those who exploit grief and naivety.”