by J. D. Robb
Eve let Anna chatter as they walked into the formal living area with its stiff-backed chairs and straight-edged sofa.
The lemonade was fine, and Eve said so after the first sip.
“You know the memorial service is at ten tomorrow.”
“Yes, ma’am. I’ll be there.”
“There are so many flowers already. We’ve made arrangements to have them distributed after . . . but that’s not why you’re here.”
“Prosecutor Towers was a good friend to you.”
“She was a very good friend to me and my husband.”
“Her children are staying with you?”
“Yes, they’re . . . they’ve gone with Marco just now to speak with the archbishop about the service.”
“They’re close to their father.”
“Yes.”
“Mrs. Whitney, why are they staying here, rather than with their father?”
“We all thought it best. The house—Marco’s house—holds so many memories. Cicely lived there when the children were young. Then there’s the media. They don’t have our address, and we wanted to keep the children from dealing with reporters. They’ve swamped poor Marco. It’ll be different tomorrow, of course.”
Her pretty hands plucked at the knee of her suit, then calmed and lay still again. “They’ll have to face it. They’re still in shock. Even Randall. Randall Slade, Mirina’s fiancé. He’d gotten very close to Cicely.”
“He’s here as well.”
“He’d never leave Mirina alone at such a time. She’s a strong young woman, Lieutenant, but even strong women need an arm to lean on now and then.”
Eve blocked out the quick image of Roarke that popped into her brain. As a result of the effort, her voice was a bit more formal than usual as she led Anna through the routine questions.
“I’ve asked myself over and over what could have possessed her to go to that neighborhood,” Anna concluded. “Cicely could be stubborn, and certainly strong willed, but she was rarely impulsive and never foolish.”
“She talked to you, confided in you.”
“We were like sisters.”
“Would she have told you if she was in trouble of some kind? If someone close to her was in trouble?”
“I would have thought so. She would have handled it herself, or tried to first.” Her eyes swam, but the tears didn’t fall. “But sooner or later she would have blown off steam with me.”
If she’d had time, Eve thought. “You can think of nothing she was concerned about before her death?”
“Nothing major. Her daughter’s wedding—getting older. We joked about her becoming a grandmother. No,” Anna said with a laugh as she recognized Eve’s look. “Mirina isn’t pregnant, though that would have only pleased her mother. She was always concerned for David as well: Would he settle down? Was he happy?”
“And is he?”
Another cloud came into her eyes before she lowered them. “David is a great deal like his father. He likes to wheel and deal. He does a great deal of traveling for the business, always looking for new arenas, new opportunities. There’s no doubt he’ll take the helm if and when Marco decided to turn it over.”
She hesitated, as if about to add something, then smoothly switched gears. “Mirina, on the other hand, prefers to live in one spot. She manages a boutique in Rome. That’s where she met Randall. He’s a designer. Her shop handles his line exclusively now. He’s quite talented. This is his,” she said, indicating the slim suit she wore.
“It’s lovely. So as far as you know, Prosecutor Towers had no reason to be concerned for her children. Nothing she would have felt obliged to smooth out or cover over?”
“Cover over? No, of course not. They’re both bright, successful people.”
“And her ex-husband. He’s having some business difficulties?”
“Marco? Is he?” Anna shrugged that off. “I’m sure he’ll straighten them out. I never shared Cicely’s interest in business.”
“She was involved then, in business. Directly?”
“Of course. Cicely insisted on knowing exactly what was going on and having a say in it. I never knew how she could keep so many things in her head. If Marco was having difficulties, she’d have known, and probably have suggested a half dozen ways to right things. She was quite brilliant.” When her voice broke, Anna pressed a hand to her lips.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Whitney.”
“No, it’s all right. I’m better. Having her children with me helped so much. I feel I can stand for her with them. I can’t do what you do, and look for her killer. But I can stand for her with her children.”
“They’re very lucky to have you,” Eve murmured, surprised to hear herself say it and mean it. Odd, she’d always considered Anna Whitney a mild pain in the ass. “Mrs. Whitney, can you tell me about Prosecutor Towers’s relationship with George Hammett?”
Anna pokered up. “They were dear, good friends.”
“Mr. Hammett has told me they were lovers.”
Anna huffed out a breath. She was a traditionalist, and unashamed of it. “Very well, that’s true. But he wasn’t the right man for her.”
“Why?”
“Set in his ways. I’m very fond of George, and he made an excellent escort for Cicely. But a woman can hardly be completely happy when she goes home to an empty apartment most nights, to an empty bed. She needed a mate. George wanted it both ways, and Cicely deluded herself into thinking she wanted that, too.”
“And she didn’t.”
“She shouldn’t have,” Anna snapped, obviously going over an old argument. “Work isn’t enough, as I pointed out to her many times. She simply wasn’t serious enough about George to risk.”
“Risk?”
“I’m speaking of emotional risk,” Anna said impatiently. “You cops are so literal-minded. She wanted her life tidy more than she wanted the mess of a full-time relationship.”
“I had the impression that Mr. Hammett regretted that, that he loved her very much.”
“If he did, why didn’t he push?” Anna demanded, and tears threatened. “She wouldn’t have died alone then, would she? She wouldn’t have been alone.”
Eve drove out of the quiet suburbs, and on impulse she pulled her car over to the curb and slumped down in the seat. She needed to think. Not about Roarke, she assured herself. There was nothing to think about there. That was settled.
On a hunch, she called up her computer at her office and had it get to work on David Angelini. If he was like his father, maybe he had also made a few poor investments. While she was at it, she ordered a run on Randall Slade and the boutique in Rome.
If anything popped up, she would have a scan on the flights from Europe to New York.
Damn it, a woman who had nothing to worry about didn’t leave her warm, dry apartment in the middle of the night.
Stubbornly, Eve retraced all the steps in her head. As she thought it through, she studied the neighborhood. Nice old trees spreading shade, neat postcard-sized yards with one-and two-story fully detached houses.
What would it have been like to have been raised in a pretty, settled community? Would it make you secure, confident, the way being dragged from filthy room to filthy room, from stinking street to stinking street made her jittery, moody?
Maybe there were fathers here who snuck into their little girls’ bedrooms, too. But it was hard to believe it. The fathers here couldn’t smell of bad liquor and sour sweat and have thick fingers that pushed themselves into innocent flesh.
Eve caught herself rocking in the seat and choked back a sob.
She wouldn’t do it. She wouldn’t remember. She wouldn’t let herself conjure up that face looming over her in the dark, or the taste of that hand clamping over her mouth to smother her screams.
She wouldn’t do it. It had all happened to someone else, some little girl whose name she couldn’t even remember. If she tried to, if she let herself remember it all, she would become that helpless child again and lose Eve.
She laid her head back on the seat and concentrated on calming herself. If she hadn’t been wallowing in self-pity, she would have seen the woman breaking the window at the side of the modified rancher across the street before the first shard fell.
As it was, Eve scowled, asked herself why she’d had to pull over at just this spot. And did she really want the hassle of dealing with intra-jurisdiction paperwork?
Then she thought about the nice family who would come home that night and find their valuables gone.
With a long-suffering sigh, she got out of the car.
The woman was half in and half out of the window when Eve reached her. The security shield had been deactivated by a cheap jammer, available at any electronic outlet. With a shake of her head for the naïveté of suburbanites, Eve tapped the thief smartly on the butt that was struggling to wiggle through the opening.
“Forget your code, ma’am?”
Her answer was a hard donkey-style kick to the left shoulder. Eve considered herself lucky it had missed her face. Still, she went down, crushing some early tulips. The perp popped out of the window like a cork and bolted across the lawn.
If her shoulder hadn’t been aching, Eve might have let her go. She caught her quarry in a flying tackle that sent them both sprawling into a bed of sunny-faced pansies.
“Get your fucking hands off me, or I’ll kill you.”
Eve thought briefly that it was a possibility. The woman outweighed her by a good twenty pounds. To ensure it didn’t happen, she jammed an elbow against the woman’s windpipe and dug for her badge.
“You’re busted.”
The woman’s dark eyes rolled in disgust. “What the hell’s a city cop doing here? Don’t you know where Manhattan is, asshole?”
“Looks like I’m lost.” Eve kept her elbow in place, adding just a little more pressure for her own satisfaction while she pulled out her communicator and requested the closest ’burb cruiser.
chapter six
By the next morning, her shoulder was singing as fiercely as Mavis on a final set. Eve admitted the extra hours she’d put in with Feeney and a night tossing alone in bed hadn’t helped it any. She was leery of anything but the mildest painkillers, and took a single stingy dose before she dressed for the memorial service.
She and Feeney had come across one tasty little tidbit. David Angelini had withdrawn three large payments from his accounts over the last six months, to a grand total of one million six hundred and thirty-two dollars, American.
That was more than three-quarters of his personal savings, and he’d drawn it in anonymous credit tokens and cash.
They were still digging on Randall Slade and Mirina, but so far, they were both clean. Just a happy young couple on the brink of matrimony.
God knew how anybody could be happy on the brink, Eve thought as she located her gray suit.
The damn button on the jacket was still missing, she realized as she started to fasten it. And she remembered Roarke had it, carried it like some sort of superstitious talisman. She’d been wearing the suit the first time she’d seen him—at a memorial for the dead.
She ran a hasty comb through her hair and escaped the apartment and the memories.
St. Patrick’s was bulging by the time she arrived. Uniforms in the best dress blues flanked the perimeter for a full three blocks on Fifth. A kind of honor guard, Eve mused, for a lawyer who cops had respected. Both street and air traffic had been diverted from the usually choked avenue, and the media was thronged like a busy parade across the wide street.
After the third uniform stopped her, Eve attached her badge to her jacket and moved unhampered into the ancient cathedral and the sounds of the dirge.
She didn’t care for churches much. They made her feel guilty for reasons she didn’t care to explore. The scent of candle wax and incense was ripe. Some rituals, she thought as she slipped into a side pew, were as timeless as the moon. She gave up any hope of speaking directly with Cicely Towers’s family that morning and settled down to watch the show.
Catholic rites had gone back to Latin some time in the last decade. Eve supposed it added a kind of mysticism and a unity. The ancient language certainly seemed appropriate to her in the Mass for the Dead.
The priest’s voice boomed out, reaching to the lofty ceilings, and the congregation’s responses echoed after. Silent and watchful, Eve scanned the crowd. Dignitaries and politicians sat with bowed heads. She’d positioned herself just close enough to catch glimpses of the family. When Feeney slipped in beside her, she inclined her head.
“Angelini,” she murmured. “That would be the daughter beside him.”
“With her fiancé on her right.”
“Um-hmm.” Eve studied the couple: young, attractive. The woman was of slight build with golden hair, like her mother. The unrelieved black she wore swept down from a high neck, covered her arms to the wrists, and skimmed her ankles. She wore no veil or shaded glasses to shield her red-rimmed, puffy eyes. Grief, simple, basic, and undiluted, seemed to shimmer around her.
Beside her, Randall Slade stood tall, one long arm supporting her shoulders. He had a striking, almost brutally handsome face, which Eve remembered well from the image she’d generated on her computer screen: large jaw, long nose, hooded eyes. He looked big and tough, but the arm around the woman lay gently.
Flanking Angelini’s other side was his son. David stood just a space apart. That sort of body language hinted at friction. He stared straight ahead, his face a blank. He stood slightly shorter than his father, as dark as his sister was fair. And he was alone, Eve thought. Very much alone.
The family pew was completed by George Hammett.
Directly behind were the commander, his wife, and his family.
She knew Roarke was there. She had already glimpsed him once at the end of an aisle beside a teary-eyed blond. Now, when Eve skimmed a glance his way, she saw him lean down to the woman and murmur something that had her turning her face into his shoulder.
Furious at the quick pang of jealousy, Eve scanned the crowd again. Her eyes met C. J. Morse’s.
“How’d that little bastard manage to get in?”
Feeney, a good Catholic, winced at the use of profanity in church. “Who?”
“Morse—at eight o’clock.”
Shifting his eyes, Feeney spotted the reporter. “A crowd like this, I guess some of the slippery ones could slide through security.”
Eve debated hauling him out just for the satisfaction of it, then decided the scuffle would give him just the kind of attention he craved.
“Fuck him.”
Feeney made a sound like a man who’d been pinched. “Christ Jesus, Dallas, you’re in St. Pat’s.”
“If God’s going to make little weasels like him, she’s going to have to listen to complaints.”
“Have some respect.”
Eve looked back to Mirina, who lifted a hand to her face. “I’ve got plenty of respect,” she murmured. “Plenty.” With this she stepped around Feeney and strode down the side to the exit.
By the time he caught up with her, she was just finishing issuing instructions to one of the uniforms.
“What’s the problem?”
“I needed some air.” Churches always smelled like the dying or the dead to her. “And I wanted to get a jump on the weasel.” Smiling now, she turned to Feeney. “I’ve got the uniforms looking out for him. They’ll confiscate any communication or recording devices he’s got on him. Privacy law.”
“You’re just going to steam him.”
“Good. He steams me.” She let out a long breath, studying the media horde across the avenue. “I’ll be damned if the public has a right to know everything. But at least those reporters are playing by the rules and showing some of that respect you were talking about for the family.”
“I take it you’re done in there.”
“There’s nothing I can do in there.”
“I figured you’d be sitting with Roarke.”
&
nbsp; “No.”
Feeney nodded slowly and nearly dug into his pocket for his bag of nuts before he remembered the occasion. “Is that the burr up your butt, kid?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She started to walk without any destination in mind, stopped, and turned around. “Who the hell was that blonde he was wrapped around?”
“I couldn’t say.” He sucked air through his teeth. “She was a looker though. Want me to rough him up for you?”
“Just shut up.” She jammed her hands in her pockets. “The commander’s wife said they were having a small, private memorial at their home. How long do you figure this sideshow will take?”
“Another hour, minimum.”
“I’m heading back to Cop Central. I’ll meet you at the commander’s in two hours.”
“You’re the boss.”
Small and private meant there were more than a hundred people packed into the commander’s suburban home. There was food to comfort the living, liquor to dull the grieving. The perfect hostess, Anna Whitney hurried over the moment she spotted Eve. She kept her voice down and a carefully pleasant expression on her face.
“Lieutenant, must you do this now, here and now?”
“Mrs. Whitney, I’ll be as discreet as I possibly can. The sooner I complete the interview stage, the sooner we’ll find Prosecutor Towers’s killer.”
“Her children are devastated. Poor Mirina can barely function. It would be more appropriate if you’d—”
“Anna.” Commander Whitney laid a hand on his wife’s shoulder. “Let Lieutenant Dallas do her job.”
Anna said nothing, merely turned and walked stiffly away.
“We said good-bye to a very dear friend today.”
“I understand, Commander. I’ll finish here as quickly as I can.”
“Be careful with Mirina, Dallas. She’s very fragile at the moment.”
“Yes, sir. Perhaps I could speak to her first, privately.”
“I’ll see to it.”
When he left her alone, Eve backed up toward the foyer and turned directly into Roarke.