The Collector

by Nora Roberts

  As she spoke, cop-cool, Ash imagined her as a Valkyrie—dispassionate in her power. He’d paint her astride a horse, her wings folded, overlooking a battlefield, face carved like stone as she decided who lived, who died.

  “We’re still waiting on the tox screens, but there were pills and a half-empty bottle of Maker’s Mark, a glass still holding a finger of it, on the table beside your brother’s body.”

  Drugs, alcohol, murder, suicide. The family, he thought, would suffer. He had to pull this knife out of his gut, had to make them see they were wrong.

  “Drugs, bourbon, no argument. Oliver was no Boy Scout, but the rest? I don’t believe it. The witness is either lying or mistaken.”

  “The witness has no reason to lie.” Even as she said it, Fine spotted Lila, visitor’s badge clipped to the strap of her dress, walking into the squad room. “Excuse me a minute.”

  She rose, headed Lila off. “Ms. Emerson. Did you remember something else?”

  “No, sorry. I can’t get it out of my head. I keep seeing her falling. Keep seeing her begging before he— Sorry. I needed to get out, and I thought I’d come in just to see if you’ve finished . . . closed it. If you know for certain what happened.”

  “It’s still an open investigation. We’re waiting on some reports, conducting other interviews. It takes a little time.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. Will you tell me when it’s done?”

  “I’ll take care of that. You’ve been helpful.”

  “And now I’m in the way. I should go, get back. You’re busy.” She scanned the room. Desks, phones, computers, stacks of files and a handful of men and women working.

  And a man in a black T-shirt and jeans carefully sliding a watch into a padded bag.

  “Everyone’s busy.”

  “We appreciate the help.” Fine waited until Lila started out, then walked back to her desk and Ash.

  “Look, I’ve told you everything I can think of,” he began, and got to his feet. “Gone over it a couple times now. I need to contact his mother, my family. I need a little time to deal with this.”

  “I understand. We may need to talk to you again, and we’ll contact you when it’s clear for you to enter the apartment. I am sorry for your loss, Mr. Archer.”

  He only nodded, walked out.

  And immediately scanned for the brunette in the thin summer dress. He caught a glimpse—grass green skirt, long, straight tail of hair the color of a strong mocha—as she took the stairs down.

  He hadn’t caught much of her conversation with the girl cop, but enough to be fairly certain she’d seen something that had to do with Oliver’s death.

  Though the stairs were nearly as busy as the hallways, the squad room, he caught up with her, touched her arm.

  “Excuse me, Miss . . . Sorry, I didn’t quite catch your name up there.”

  “Oh. Lila. Lila Emerson.”

  “Right. I’d like to talk to you if you’ve got a few minutes.”

  “Okay. You’re working with Detectives Fine and Waterstone?”

  “In a way.”

  On the main level, with cops coming and going, with visitors working their way through security, she unpinned her badge, set it on the sergeant’s counter. After the briefest hesitation, he took his own out of his pocket, did the same.

  “I’m Oliver’s brother.”

  “Oliver?” It took her a moment, which told him she hadn’t known Oliver personally. Then her eyes widened. “Oh. Oh, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  “Thanks. If you’d talk to me about this, it might—”

  “I’m not sure I should, that I’m supposed to.” She looked around, gauged her ground. Then looked back into his face, into the grief. “I don’t know.”

  “A cup of coffee. Let me buy you a cup of coffee. Public place. There’s got to be a coffee shop around here, and it’s probably full of cops. Please.”

  He had eyes like Thomas’s—sharp and green—but she could see sadness in them. Sharp features, too, she thought, as if someone had carved them out with a keen and clever blade. The stubble gave him an intriguingly dangerous look, but the eyes . . .

  He’d just lost his brother, and more, his brother had taken two lives. Death alone was hard enough, but murder, and suicide, had to be brutal on the family left behind.

  “Sure. There’s a place just across the street.”

  “Thanks. Ash,” he said, holding out his hand. “Ashton Archer.”

  Something tickled the back of her brain at the name, but she offered her hand in turn. “Lila.”

  He led her out, nodded when she gestured to the coffee shop across the street.

  “I really am sorry,” she said as they waited for the light beside a woman who was arguing bitterly on her cell phone. “I can’t imagine losing a brother. I don’t have one, but I can’t imagine losing him if I did. Do you have other family?”

  “Other siblings?”

  “Yes.”

  He glanced down at her as they started across the street, washing along in the surge of pedestrian traffic. “There are fourteen of us. Thirteen,” he corrected. “Thirteen now. Unlucky number,” he said half to himself.

  The woman on the phone marched beside Lila, her voice pitched high and shrill. A couple of teenage girls pranced just ahead, chirping and giggling over someone named Brad. A couple of horns blasted as the light changed.

  Surely she’d misheard him. “I’m sorry, what?”

  “Thirteen’s unlucky.”

  “No, I meant . . . Did you say you have thirteen brothers and sisters?”

  “Twelve. I make thirteen.” When he pulled open the door to the coffee shop, the smell of coffee, sugary baked goods and a wall of noise greeted them.

  “Your mother must be . . .” “Insane” crossed her mind. “Amazing.”

  “I like to think so. That’s step-sibs, half sibs,” he added, grabbing an empty two-top booth. “My father’s been married five times. My mother’s on her third.”

  “That’s—wow.”

  “Yeah, modern American family.”

  “Christmas must be a madhouse. Do they all live in New York?”

  “Not exactly. Coffee?” he asked her as a waitress stepped up.

  “Actually, can I get a lemonade? I’m coffee’d out.”

  “Coffee for me. Just black.”

  He sat back a moment, studied her. A good face, he decided, something fresh and open about it, though he could see signs of stress and fatigue, especially in her eyes—deep, dark brown as rich as her hair with a thin line of gold around the iris. Gypsy eyes, he thought, and though there was nothing exotic about her, he immediately saw her in red—red bodice with a full skirt, and many colorful flounces. In a dance, mid spin, hair flying. Laughing while the campfire blazed behind her.

  “Are you all right? Stupid question,” she said immediately. “Of course you’re not.”

  “No. Sorry.” Not the time, not the place, not the woman, he told himself, and leaned forward again. “You didn’t know Oliver?”

  “No.”

  “The woman, then. What was it? Rosemary?”

  “Sage. Wrong herb. No, I didn’t know either of them. I’m staying in the same complex, and I was looking out the window. I saw . . .”

  “What did you see?” He closed his hand over hers, removed it quickly when he felt her stiffen. “Will you tell me what you saw?”

  “I saw her. Upset, crying, and someone hit her.”

  “Someone?”

  “I couldn’t see him. But I’d seen your brother before. I’d seen them in the apartment together, several times. Arguing, talking, making up. You know.”

  “I’m not sure I do. Your apartment looks right out into hers? Theirs,” he corrected. “The police said he was living there.”

  “Not exactly. It’s not my apartment. I’m staying there.” She took a moment when the waitress brought the lemonade and coffee. “Thanks,” she said, offering the waitress a quick smile. “I’m staying there for a few weeks w
hile the tenants are on vacation, and I . . . I know it sounds nosy and invasive, but I like to watch people. I stay in a lot of interesting places, and I take binoculars, so I was . . .”

  “Doing a Jimmy Stewart.”

  “Yes!” Relief and laughter mixed in the word. “Yes, like Rear Window. Only you don’t expect to see Raymond Burr loading up the pieces of his dead wife into a big chest and hauling it out. Or was it suitcases? Anyway. I don’t think of it as spying, or didn’t until this happened. It’s like theater. All the world really is a stage, and I like being in the audience.”

  He waded his way through that to the key. “But you didn’t see Oliver. You didn’t see him hit her? Push her?”

  “No. I told the police. I saw someone hit her, but it was the wrong angle to see him. She was crying and scared and pleading—I could see all that on her face. I got my phone to call nine-one-one, and then . . . She came flying out the window. The glass shattered, and she just flew through it and fell.”

  This time he put his hand over hers, left it there because it trembled. “Take it easy.”

  “I keep seeing it. Keep seeing the glass breaking, and her flying out, the way her arms went wide, and her feet kicked at the air. I hear her scream, but that’s in my head. I didn’t hear her. I’m sorry about your brother, but—”

  “He didn’t do this.”

  For a moment she said nothing, just lifted her glass, sipped quietly at the lemonade.

  “He wasn’t capable of doing this,” Ash said.

  When she lifted her gaze to his, sympathy and compassion radiated.

  She was no Valkyrie, he thought. She felt too much.

  “It’s terrible what happened.”

  “You think I can’t accept my brother could kill, then kill himself. It’s not that. It’s that I know he couldn’t. We weren’t close. I hadn’t seen him in months, and then only briefly. He was tighter with Giselle, they’re closer in age. But she’s in . . .”

  Sorrow fell into him again like stones. “I’m not entirely sure. Maybe Paris. I need to find out. He was a pain in the ass,” Ash continued. “An operator without the killer instinct it takes to be an operator. A lot of charm, a lot of bullshit, and a lot of big ideas without any practical sense of how to bring them around. But he wouldn’t hit a woman.”

  She’d watched them, he remembered. “You said they argued a lot. Did you ever see him hit her, push her?”

  “No, but . . .”

  “I don’t care if he was stoned or drunk or both, he wouldn’t hit a woman. He wouldn’t kill a woman. He’d never kill himself. He’d believe whatever he’d gotten sucked into, someone would pull him out again. An eternal optimist, that was Oliver.”

  She wanted to be careful; she wanted to be kind. “Sometimes we don’t know people as well as we think.”

  “You’re right. He was in love. Oliver was either in love or looking for it. He was in it. Whenever he’s ready to be out of it, he wiggles out, takes off awhile, sends the woman an expensive gift and a note of regret. ‘It’s not you, it’s me,’ that kind of thing. Too many drama-filled divorces, so he went for the clean, callous break. And I know he was too damn vain to stick a gun in his mouth and pull the trigger. If he was going to kill himself—and he’d never hit that much despair—he’d’ve gone for pills.”

  “I think it was an accident—her fall. I mean all in the heat of the moment. He must’ve been out of his mind in those moments after.”

  Ash shook his head. “He’d have called me, or come running. He’s his mother’s youngest and her only son, so he was indulged. When there was trouble, he’d call somebody to help him get out of it. That’s his knee-jerk. ‘Ash, I’m in some trouble here. You have to fix things.’”

  “He usually called you.”

  “For big trouble, it would’ve been me. And he’d never mix pills with his bourbon,” Ash added. “He had an ex who went that way, and it scared him. One or the other, not that he wouldn’t go too far with either, but one at a time.

  “It doesn’t hold. It doesn’t,” he insisted. “You said you’d seen them together over there, watched them.”

  Uncomfortable with the truth of that, she shifted. “I did. It’s a terrible habit. I need to stop.”

  “You saw them fight, but he never got physical with her.”

  “No . . . No, she was more physical. Threw things, mostly breakables. She threw her shoe at him once.”

  “What did he do?”

  “Ducked.” Lila smiled a little, and he caught the tiny dimple—a happy little wink—at the right corner of her mouth. “Good reflexes. My take was she yelled—and she shoved him once. He did a lot of fast talking, gestures, smooth. That’s why I called him Mr. Slick.”

  The big, dark eyes widened in distress. “Oh God, I’m sorry.”

  “No, that’s accurate. He was slick. He didn’t get mad, threaten her, get violent? Shove her back?”

  “No. He said something that made her laugh. I could see, sense, she didn’t want to, but she turned away, tossed her hair. And he came over and . . . they got physical together. People should close the curtains if they don’t want an audience.”

  “She threw something at him, yelled at him, pushed him. And he talked his way out of it, talked his way into sex. That’s Oliver.”

  He never responded with violence, Lila considered. They’d had some sort of argument or fight every day, some disagreement every day, but he never struck her. Never touched her unless it was a prelude to sex.

  And yet. “But the fact is she was pushed out the window, and he shot himself.”

  “She was pushed out the window, but he didn’t push her—and he didn’t shoot himself. So, someone else was in the apartment. Someone else was there,” he said again, “and killed both of them. The questions are who, and why.”

  It sounded plausible when he said it, just that way. It seemed . . . logical, and the logic of it made her doubt. “But isn’t there another question? How?”

  “You’re right. Three questions. Answer one, maybe answer all.”

  He kept his eyes on hers. He saw more than sympathy now. He saw the beginning of interest. “Can I see your apartment?”

  “What?”

  “The cops aren’t going to let me into Oliver’s place yet. I want to see it from the perspective you had that night. And you don’t know me,” he said before she could speak. “Have you got somebody who could be there with you so you wouldn’t be alone with me?”

  “Maybe. I can see if I can work that out.”

  “Great. Let me give you my number. Work it out, call me. I just need to see . . . I need to be able to see.”

  She took out her phone, keyed in the number he gave her. “I have to get back. I’ve been gone longer than I meant to be.”

  “I appreciate you talking to me. Listening.”

  “I’m sorry about what happened.” She slid out of the booth, touched a hand to his shoulder. “For you, his mom, your family. I hope whatever the answers are, you get them. If I can work things out, I’ll call you.”

  “Thanks.”

  She left him sitting in the narrow booth, staring into the coffee he’d never touched.

  Three

  She called Julie, and dumped the entire story while she tended the plants, harvested tomatoes, entertained the cat.

  Julie’s gasps, amazement and sympathy would’ve been enough, but there was more.

  “I heard about this when I was getting ready for work this morning, and it was the Big Talk at the gallery today. We knew her a little.”

  “You knew Blondie?” Wincing—the nickname seemed so wrong now. “I mean Sage Kendall.”

  “A little. She came into the gallery a few times. Actually bought a couple of very nice pieces. Not my sale—I didn’t work with her, but I was introduced. I didn’t put it together. Even when they