by J. D. Robb
She’d never been inside Summerset’s private domain. It was just one more surprise. Where she’d expected the stark and utilitarian, straight edges and minimal style, was a lovely living area with soft, blending tones of blue and green, pretty trinkets on tables of honey-hued wood, generous, giving cushions, and an air of welcome.
“Who’d have figured it?” Eve shook her head. “You look at this and picture a guy who enjoys life, even has friends. Feeney, take the communications center, will you. Peabody—That’ll be McNab,” she said when the buzz sounded from the recessed house monitor on the south wall. “Clear him through, Peabody, then I want you to start in here. I’ll take the bedroom.”
Four rooms spread out from the living area like ribs of a fan. The first was an efficient office and control center where Feeney rubbed his hands together and dived into the equipment. Opposite that was an equally efficient kitchen that Eve ignored for now.
Two bedrooms faced each other, but one was doubling now as an artist’s studio. Eve pursed her lips, studied the watercolor still life in progress on the easel. She knew it was fruit because she saw the huge bowl with overflowing grapes and glossy apples on the table under the window. On the canvas, however, the fruit was having a very bad season.
“Don’t quit your day job,” she murmured and turned in to his bedroom.
The bed was big, with an elaborate pewter headboard that twisted into vines and silvery leaves. The duvet was thick and spread neatly over the mattress without a wrinkle. The closet held two dozen suits, all black, all so similar in style they might have been cloned. Shoes, again black, were housed in clear protective boxes and ruthlessly polished.
That’s where she started, checking pockets, searching for anything that would signal a false wall.
When she came out fifteen minutes later, she could hear Feeney and McNab happily chirping about mainframes and signal capacitors. She went through the bureau drawer by drawer and shut down any threatening shudder that she was pawing through Summerset’s underwear.
She’d been at it an hour, and was just about to call Peabody in to help her flip the mattress when she looked at the single watercolor over a table decked with hothouse roses.
Odd, she thought, all the other paintings—and the man had an art house supply of them—were in groupings on the walls. This one stood alone. It was a good piece of work, she supposed, moving closer to study the soft strokes, the dreamy colors. A young boy was the centerpiece, his face angelic and wreathed with smiles, his arms loaded with flowers. Wild flowers that spilled over and onto the ground.
Why should the kid in the painting look familiar? she wondered. Something about the eyes. She moved closer yet, peering into that softly painted face. Who the hell are you? she asked silently. And what are you doing on Summerset’s wall?
It couldn’t be Summerset’s work, not after the canvas she’d seen in his studio. This artist had talent and style. And knew the child. Eve was almost certain of that.
For a better look, she lifted it from the wall and carried it to the window. Down in the corner she could see a sweep of writing. Audrey.
The girlfriend, she mused. She supposed that’s why he’d hung it separately, underplanting it with fresh roses. Christ, the man was actually love struck.
She nearly rehung the painting, then laid it on the bed instead. Something about the boy, she thought again, and her heart picked up in pace. Where have I seen him? Why would I have seen him? The eyes. Damn it.
Frustrated, she turned the painting over and began to pry it from its gilded frame.
“Find something, Dallas?” Peabody asked from the doorway.
“No—I don’t know. Something about this painting. This kid. Audrey. I want to see if there’s a title—a name on the back of the canvas. Hell with it.” Annoyed, she reached up to tear off the backing.
“Wait. I’ve got a penknife.” Peabody hurried over. “If you just slit the backing up here, you can reseal it. This is a nice, professional job.” She slipped the tip of her knife under the thin white paper, lifted it gently. “I used to do the backings for my cousin. She could paint, but she couldn’t turn a screw with a laser drill. I can fix this when—”
“Stop.” Eve clamped a hand on Peabody’s wrist when she spotted the tiny silver disc under the backing. “Get Feeney and McNab. The fucking painting’s bugged.”
Alone, Eve lifted the painting out of its frame and, turning it, looked down in the signature corner. Below Audrey’s name, deep in the corner that had been covered by the frame, was a green shamrock.
chapter twenty
“They could keep an eye on him during his personal time,” Eve said as she drove hard to the Luxury Towers. “Odds are Feeney and McNab will find another couple paintings of hers through his quarters, wired.”
“Shouldn’t Roarke’s bug eaters have tapped them?”
“Feeney’ll find out why they went undetected. You got anything on her yet?”
“No, sir. All I get from the run is that she’s forty-seven, born in Connecticut. She studied at Julliard, did three years at the Sorbonne in Paris, another two at the art colony on Rembrandt Station. She teaches privately and donates instruction time at Culture Exchange. She’s lived in New York for four years.”
“She’s connected. He’s diddled with her records. I’ll eat Feeney’s ugly new hat if she’s from Connecticut. Run the females on the Irish link. All female relatives on the six men who did Marlena. Put it on the monitor so I can see.”
“Take a minute.” Peabody opened Eve’s file, found the labeled disc, and inserted it. “Display females only, with full data.”
Eve pulled over a block from the Luxury Towers as the faces began to run. “No.” She shook her head, signaling Peabody to go on to the next, and the next. She cursed under her breath, snarled at a glide-cart operator who slid up to try to hawk his wares. “No, damn it. She’s in here, I know it. Wait, hold on, go back one.”
“Mary Patricia Calhoun,” Peabody read off. “Née McNally, widow of Liam Calhoun. Resides Doolin, Ireland. Artist. Her tax-exempt number’s up to date. Age forty-six, one son, also Liam, student.”
“It’s the eyes, just like the kid in the painting. She’s changed her hair, brown from blond, had some face work done. Longer, thinner nose now, more cheekbone, less chin, but that’s her. Split screen, display image of Liam Calhoun, son.”
The picture popped, joining mother and son. “That’s him, from the painting.” She stared hard into the older and no less angelic face, the bright and brilliant green eyes. “Got you, bastard,” she murmured, then shot back into traffic.
The doorman from their first visit paled when he saw them. It only took a jerk of Eve’s thumb to have him moving aside.
“They must have planned this for years, starting with her.” Eve stepped to the center of the glass elevator. “He’d have been about five when his father died.”
“Before the age of reason,” Peabody commented.
“Right. And she’d have given him the reason. She gave him the mission, the motive. She turned him into a killer. Her only son. Maybe the tendencies were there, heredity and genetics, but she exploited them, used them. Dominated him. That’s what Mira said. A dominating female authority figure. Toss in religion and lean it toward vengeance, add in a good brain for electronics, and the training, you can make yourself a monster.”
Eve rang the bell, then laid a hand on the butt of her weapon. Audrey opened the door, offered a hesitant smile. “Lieutenant. I thought we’d agreed on tomorrow morning. Have I mixed up times again?”
“No, change of plan.” She stepped in, careful to block the door as she scanned the living area. “We have some questions for you, Widow Calhoun.”
Audrey’s eyes flickered, then went dead cold, but her voice remained smooth. “I beg your pardon?”
“This round’s mine. We made you, and your only begotten son.”
“What have you done to Liam?” Audrey curled her hands into claws and leaped forwar
d, aiming for the eyes. Eve dipped under the swipe, pivoted, and wrapped an arm tight around Audrey’s neck. She was half Eve’s size and no match for a choke hold.
“Her Irish is up, Peabody? Did you hear it? Connecticut, my butt.” With her free hand, Eve reached into her back pocket for her restraints. “It’s a musical accent, isn’t it?”
“My personal favorite.” She took Audrey’s arm once Eve had clapped on the cuffs.
“We’re going to have a nice long chat, Mary Pat, about murder, about mutilation, about motherhood. The three M’s, you know?”
“If you’ve harmed a hair on my boy’s head, I’ll pull out your heart and eat it.”
“If I’ve harmed him.” Eve lifted her brows, and beneath them her eyes were iced. “You doomed him the first time you tucked him in with a bedtime story of revenge.”
Disgusted, she turned away, pulled out her communicator. “Commander, there’s been a break in the case. I require a search and seizure warrant for the premises and personal effects of Audrey Morrell.” She paused. “Also known as Mary Patricia Calhoun.”
They found Liam’s hole behind a false wall in a converted pantry. Along with the equipment was a small table covered with a cloth of white Irish lace. Candles sat on it, surrounding a beautifully sculpted marble statue of the Mother of God. Above her, her Son hung from the golden cross.
Is that how she’d wanted Liam to see themselves? Eve wondered. As saints and sufferers? As divine mother and sanctified child? And Audrey herself as the untouched, the wise, the chosen.
“I bet she’d bring him a nice cup of tea and a sandwich with the crusts cut off while he was baiting traps in here. Then pray with him before she sent him off to kill.”
Feeney barely heard Eve’s comment as he ran reverent hands over the equipment. “Have you ever seen the like of this, Ian McNab? This oscillator? What a beauty. And the cross-transmitter with multitask options. Nothing like this on the market.”
“There will be, by next spring,” McNab told him. “I saw this unit down at Roarke’s R and D division. More than half of these components are his, and nearly half of them aren’t on the market yet.”
Eve grabbed his arm. “Who’d you talk to down at Roarke’s? Who’d you work with. Every name, McNab.”
“Only three techs. Roarke kept it low-key, didn’t want the whole department to know there was a cop sniffing around. Suwan-Lee, Billings Nibb, and A. A. Dillard.”
“Suwan, female?”
“Yeah, tidy little Oriental dish. She was—”
“Nibb?”
“E-lifer. Knows everything. The teams joke that he was around when Bell called Watson.”
“Dillard?”
“Smart. I told you about him. Got great hands.”
“Fair, green eyes, about twenty, five-ten, a hundred sixty?”
“Yeah, how did you—”
“Christ, Roarke’s been paying the son of a bitch. Feeney can you get this equipment up and running, fully analyzed?”
“You bet.”
“Let’s go, Peabody.”
“Are we going to interview Mary Calhoun?”
“Soon enough. Right now we’re going to give A. A. Dillard his fucking pink slip.”
A. A. had missed his shift. It was the first such incident, she was told by Nibb, the department manager. A. A. was a model employee, prompt, efficient, cooperative, and creative.
“I need to see all his files, personnel, works completed, works in progress, status reports, the whole shot.”
Nibb—who wasn’t quite old enough to have known A. G. Bell, but who had celebrated his centennial the past summer, crossed his arms. Behind a thick white moustache, his mouth went hard.
“A great deal of those records include confidential material. Research and development in the electronics field is highly competitive. Cutthroat. One leak and—”
“This is a murder investigation, Nibb. And I’m hardly going to sell data to my husband’s competitors.”
“Nonetheless, Lieutenant, I can’t give you files on works in progress without the boss’s personal consent.”
“You have it,” Roarke said as he walked up.
“What are you doing here?” Eve demanded.
“Following my nose—correctly, I see. Nibb, get the lieutenant everything she requested,” he added, then drew Eve aside. “I reviewed the recording of the dustup in the lobby of the Arms again, then ran it through an analysis procedure we’re working on here. Not to be technical, it assessed angles, distances, and so forth. The probability quotient that the killer was focused on McNab rather than the cop outside was very high.”
“So you asked yourself who might be connected to you, on some level, who would make McNab as a cop.”
“And the answer was someone in this department. I’ve just run a personnel scan. A. A. most closely fits the physical description.”
“You’d make a halfway decent cop.”
“I see no reason to insult me. I’d just accessed A. A.’s home address when the word came through we had cops sniffing. I assume our noses had caught the same scent.”
“What’s the address? I want some uniforms to pick him up.”
“Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. I doubt you’ll find him nibbling his lunch there.”
“That’s sloppy of your personnel department, Roarke.”
His smile was not amused. “Believe me, they’ll be so informed. What have you got?”
“He’s Liam Calhoun, the son. And I’ve got his queen, Roarke. I’ve got his mama.” She filled him in, watching as his eyes grew darker, colder. “Feeney and McNab are working on the equipment we found in Audrey’s apartment. And they’ll analyze the bugs we took from Summerset’s quarters. Where is he now? Summerset.”
“Home. Bail was set and paid.” His jaw set. “They put a bracelet on him.”
“The charges will be dropped—and it’ll come off. I’ll take care of it as soon as I get to Central. Whitney’s meeting me to observe the interview with the mother.”
“I believe you’ll find we manufacture the bugs here, and we’re testing a new shield coat that protects them from detection from currently marketed scanners. I’ve been bankrolling his game all along. Wonderfully ironic.”
“We’ve got him pinned, Roarke. Even if he’s been tipped somehow and he’s running, we’ll have him. We’ve got his mother. Every indication is he can’t and won’t function without her. He’ll stay close. I’ll take the data from here back to Central and key it in under my name and Feeney’s only. You have a right to that protection under the law.” She blew out a breath. “I’m going straight into Interview, and odds are it’s going to be a long haul. I’ll be home late.”
“Obviously I have quite a bit of work to do here. I’ll probably be later. I spoke to the head of Pat Murray’s medical team. He’s regained consciousness. At this point he isn’t able to speak or move his legs, but they believe with proper treatment, he’ll make a full recovery.”
She knew Roarke would be paying for that proper treatment, and touched his arm briefly. “I’ve got two uniforms on his room. I’ll get over there myself tomorrow.”
“We’ll go.” He spotted Nibb bringing a box of disc files. “Good hunting, Lieutenant.”
In hour five of the interview with Audrey, Eve switched from coffee to water. The simulated caffeine the station house offered its weary cops tended to eat stomach lining on continued use.
Audrey insisted on tea by the gallon, and though she sipped it hour after hour with delicacy, her polish was wearing thin. Her hair was losing its shape and starting to straggle. It was damp and sticky at the temples from sweat. Cosmetics were fading, leaving her skin overly pale, her mouth thin and hard without the softening color. The whites of her eyes were beginning to streak with red.
“Why don’t I encapsulate for this session? When your husband was killed—”
“Was murdered,” Audrey interrupted. “Murdered in cold blood by that street-rat bastard Roarke, murdered over a little
harlot so that I lived a widow and my son lived without a father all his life.”
“So you wanted your son to believe. You fed him that, day after day, year after year, twisting his mind, darkening his heart. He was to be your tool for vengeance.”
“I told him nothing but God’s truth from the day he was born. I was to be a nun, to go through my life without knowing a man. But Liam Calhoun was sent to me. An angel called me to him, and so I laid with him and conceived a son.”
“An angel,” Eve repeated and leaned back.
“A bright light,” she said her eyes gleaming. “A golden light. So I married the man who was only an instrument to create the boy. Then he was murdered, his life taken, and I understood the purpose of his son. He wasn’t born to die for sins, but to avenge them.”
“You taught him that. That his purpose in life was to kill.”
“To take what had been taken. To balance the scales. He was a sickly boy. He suffered to purify himself for his mission. I dedicated my life to him, to teaching him.” Her lips curved. “And I taught him well. You’ll never find him. He’s too smart. A fine mind has my boy. A genius, he is. And a soul as white as new snow. We are,” she said with a chilling smile, “beyond you.”
“Your son’s a killer, a sociopath with a god-complex. And you made sure he got a good education, in the area you’d decided would be most useful.”
“His mind was his sword.”
And what of his soul? Eve wondered. If there were such things, what had she done to his soul? “You took nearly fifteen years to train him, to mold him, before you set him loose. You’re a clever woman yourself, Mary Pat.”
“Audrey, my name is Audrey now. It says so on all my records.”
“He fixed that for you, too. Created Audrey for you. You had money, plenty of it to pour into your project. And you had patience, patience enough to wait, to plan, to fine down the details. He doesn’t have as much patience as you, Audrey. What do you suppose he’ll do now, without you to guide him?”