by J. D. Robb
“How old are you?”
“I’m twenty-one, but age means nothing.” She closed her hand over a heart-shaped pendant around her throat. “I’m as old as time now, as old as grief.”
“When’s the last time you saw Blair?”
“Yesterday morning. We met here.” She brushed her free hand over her brow while she stroked the little gold heart. “To say a sweet good-bye before he had to go on his trip.”
“That would be his trip uptown where he snuggled in with Felicity Kade for a couple days?”
“That isn’t true.” Her puffy eyes took on a mutinous expression. “I don’t know what happened, what that horrible woman made it appear, but Blair certainly wasn’t involved that way with Ms. Kade. She was a client, and no more.”
“Uh-huh” was the kindest response Eve could think of. “How long have you worked here?”
“Eight months. The most vital eight months of my life. I only started to live when—”
“Did his wife come here?”
“Rarely.” Chloe pressed her lips together. “She pretended an interest in his work, in public. But in private she was critical, and was draining his energies. Of course, she had no problem spending the money he made from the sweat of his soul.”
“Is that so? He tell you that?”
“He told me everything.” She beat her breast, her hand fisted around the locket. Heart tapped against heart. “There were no secrets between us.”
“So you have the passcode into his studio.”
She opened her mouth, firmed it again before speaking. “No. An artist such as Blair needs his privacy. I would never intrude. Naturally, he would open the door when he wanted to share something with me.”
“Right. So you wouldn’t know if he ever had visitors in there.”
“He worked alone. It was necessary for his creativity.”
Dupe, Eve thought. Foolish, gullible, and probably no more than a casual toy for Bissel. She started to turn as the elevator opened again, and Chloe flung her arms around Eve’s legs.
“Please, please! You must let me see him. You must let me say good-bye to my heart. Let me go to him. Let me touch his face one last time! You must. You must give me that much.”
Eve saw Roarke quirk a brow in a kind of amused horror. Bending, Eve peeled Chloe off her shins.
“Peabody, deal with this.”
“Sure. Come on, Chloe.” Putting her back into it, Peabody hefted the weeping girl. “Let’s go splash some water on your face. Blair would want you to be strong. I’ve got some questions I need to ask you. He’d want you to help us, so we can see justice is done.”
“I will! I will be strong, for Blair. No matter how hard it is.”
“I know you will,” Peabody replied and led Chloe through an archway.
“Second, much younger side dish,” Eve said before Roarke could ask.
“Ah.”
“Yeah. Ah. I don’t think she knows anything, but Peabody’ll coax it out of her if she does.”
“I wonder if it’ll be easier on Reva, knowing what a complete bastard the man was. Her lawyer got her out on bail. She has to wear a bracelet, but she’s out. She’ll stay with Caro until this is cleared up.”
He studied the wide double doorway taking up most of a wall, and strolling over gave it a light tap. “Steel, reinforced, I’d wager. Odd to go to all that for a space such as this.”
“So I’m thinking.”
“Hmm.” He wandered to the security panel. “Feeney contacted me shortly before you did. In fact, I was on the point of heading down to Central when you gave me this interesting assignment.”
Taking a case of slim tools from his pocket, Roarke selected one, removed the plate. “He appears to have had a very fine time with his family in Bimini.”
“He has a tan. He smiles all the time. I’m not entirely sure they didn’t replace him with a droid.”
Roarke made not entirely sympathetic mouth noises before taking a small electronic unit out of another pocket.
“What’s that?”
“Oh, just a little something I’ve been toying with. A good time to try it out, in the field so to speak.” He interfaced it with the pad, waited through a series of beeps, and brushed Eve gently back when she tried to stare at it over his shoulder.
“Don’t crowd me, Lieutenant.”
“What’s it doing?”
“All manner of things you wouldn’t understand, and you’d just get testy if I tried to explain. Simplest to say it’s mating—as machines do. And seducing Bissel’s unit into revealing all sorts of secrets. And isn’t this interesting?”
“What? Damn it. Can you get in or not?”
“I don’t know why I tolerate the insults.” He glanced over his shoulder, directly into her annoyed eyes. “Maybe it’s the sex. How lowering that would be. Then again, I’m as weak and vulnerable as the next man.”
“Are you trying to piss me off?”
“Darling, it’s no effort at all. Now what I’ve learned here, through my delightful new toy, is exactly when this passcode was changed. And I think you’ll find it as interesting as I do that it was done at nearly the same time someone was jamming a kitchen knife in Blair Bissel’s ribs.”
Her eyes flickered, narrowed. “No mistake?”
“None. He could hardly have done this himself.”
“Hardly.”
“Nor could his equally dead mistress, or his wife. Or, for that matter, his killer.”
“But I’ll bet you whoever locked this up knew he was dead, or dying. Knew his wife was in the frame. This has to be another stage of the whole bloody mess. Get me inside.”
4 IT DIDN’T TAKE him long. Such things Rarely did. He had thief’s hands—quick, agile, and sneaky—but since he used them for her, and on her, with cheerful regularity, it was tough to criticize.
And when he was done, the heavy doors slid back with barely a sound into wall pockets to reveal Blair Bissel’s studio.
He’d given himself a lot of space here, too. And it looked like he needed it. There was metal everywhere, in long beams, short stacks, in piles of cubes and balls. The floor and the walls were covered in some sort of fireproof, reflective material that did double duty and mirrored back vague ghosts of the equipment and works-in-progress.
Tools that made Eve think of medieval torture devices lay on a long metal table. Tools that cut and snipped and bent, she assumed. And three large tanks fixed into rolling stands were in various positions around the room. From the attachments and hoses on each, she deduced they were filled with some sort of flammable gas and provided the heat used to weld or melt or whatever the hell people who made weird things out of metal did with fire.
Another wall was covered with sketches. Some looked to have been done by hand, others computer generated. Since one matched the strange twists and spikes of a piece in the center of the room, she decided they were ideas or blueprints for his art.
He may have spent his off time diddling anything female, but it appeared he took his vocation seriously.
She skirted around the centered sculpture, and only then noted that there was a form of a hand, fingers spread as if desperately reaching, plunged out of the twist of metal.
She glanced back at the sketch, read the notation at the bottom.
ESCAPE FROM HELL
“Who buys this shit?” she wondered.
“Collectors,” Roarke supplied, eyeing a tall, obviously female form that was, apparently, giving birth to something not completely human. “Corporations and businesses that want to be seen as patrons of the arts.”
“Don’t tell me you have some of this?”
“Actually, I don’t. His work doesn’t . . . speak to me.”
“That’s something, anyway.” Turning her back on the sculpture, she walked to the data station set up at the far end of the room.
She glanced at the stack of beams. “How does he get the stuff in and out? No way some of this fits on the elevator.”
“There’s another lift to the roof. There.” He gestured to the east wall. “Installed at his own expense. “It’s triple the size of the standard freight elevator. There’s a copter pad on the roof, and he has pieces and equipment airlifted.”
She just looked at him. “Don’t tell me you own this place.”
“Partially.” He spoke absently as he wandered, studying metal forms. “It’s a conglomerate sort of thing.”
“You know, it gets embarrassing after a point.”
He lifted his eyebrows, all innocence. “Really? I can’t imagine why.”
“You wouldn’t. Which reminds me.” She shoved back her jacket sleeve and held out her arm so the bracelet glittered. “Take this thing, will you? I forgot I was wearing it when we headed out to the scene. Peabody keeps staring at it, and pretends she’s not staring at it. It’s freaking me out, and if I stuff it in my pocket or something, I’ll probably lose it.”
“You know,” he began as she unclasped it, “people tend to wear jewelry so other people will notice it. Admire it, even covet it.”
“Which is why people who hang baubles all over themselves end up getting mugged.”
“That’s a downside,” he agreed and slipped the bracelet into his pocket. “But life’s full of risks. I’ll consider holding this for you my little way of saving some poor, foolish street thief from ending up with your boot stomped on his throat.”
“Birds of a feather,” she murmured and made him grin.
She went to work on the computer, with the same results she’d gotten from Bissel’s home unit. “Why is an artist so damn careful and paranoid about his data?”
“Let me have a go at it, and let’s find out.”
She stepped back, did a walk through the studio to get a sense of Bissel’s style, and to give those magic hands of Roarke’s time to work.
There was a red-and-white bath off the main floor, complete with jet tub, drying tube, and the same sort of fancy towels Roarke favored. A bedroom had been set up as well. Small, she noted, but with all the comforts. Bissel had liked his comforts.
The gel mattress was thick and cushy, the cover slick and black and sexy. One wall was mirrored, and she thought of the entrance to his house, the master bed and bath.
Liked to look at himself, and to watch himself with women. Egoist, narcissist. Pampered and confident. There was a mini data and communication center near the bed, as blocked as the others.
Chewing it over, she moved to a narrow three-drawer chest and began riffling. Spare underwear, extra work clothes.
And ah, a locked bottom drawer. Roarke wasn’t the only one who could handle such things, she thought as she pulled out a pocketknife.
She attacked the old-fashioned lock, hacking happily away, and gave a grunt of satisfaction as it gave. She jerked open the drawer. And even her cynical, seen-it-all-and-then-some eyes popped wide.
“Holy jumping Jesus.”
She pawed through satin restraints, velvet whips, leather strap-ons, the connoisseur’s collection of dildos. There were vials of the illegal substance known as Rabbit, a bag she identified as Zeus, another of Erotica. There were gel balls, butt plugs, blindfolds, numerous battery-operated toys and devices, cock and nipple rings of all description.
And more. A great deal more she wasn’t entirely sure she could identify.
It appeared Bissel not only took his work seriously, but his games as well.
“The unit’s not blocked, Lieutenant. It’s . . .” Roarke trailed off as he stepped in and saw what Eve was examining. “Well, well, well, what have we here?”
“The goodie drawer of all goodie drawers. This dildo not only throbs, vibrates, expands, and comes equipped with hands-free feature, it sings a choice of five popular tunes.”
He crouched beside her. “You couldn’t have tried it out that quickly.”
“Pervert. I turned it on to see. He’s got some illegals sprinkled through here, too.”
“So I see. Oh, look, what fun. His and her VR. Maybe we could—” He started to reach for the matching goggles, and had his hand slapped away.
“No.”
“You’re so strict.” He walked his fingers along her knee. “Maybe you could be strict with me later.” Wiggling those eyebrows, he held up a pair of restraints. “We already have these.”
A quick check proved the restraints were indeed her own, lifted right off her person without her feeling a thing. She snatched them back. “Cut that out. And don’t touch anything in there. I mean it. I have to log this crap. Even the mother of all goodie drawers is no reason for a guy to passcode his computers, lock the drawer in an already secured area. He—”
“I said the unit wasn’t blocked.” He patted her knee and rose, resisting—though it was difficult—palming a couple of the goodies just for the fun of it. “It’s fried.”
“What the hell do you mean ‘fried’?”
“Fried, toasted, whacked, zapped, dead.”
“I know what fried means, I meant—damn it.” She sprang up, kicked the drawer closed. “When? Can you tell when? When and how?”
“I imagine so, given the right tools and a bit of time, but I can tell you this much just from this cursory exam: It was professionally and expertly fried.”
“What does that mean?”
“Simply, the main board was destroyed so that all data was corrupted. My first guess would be a very insidious worm, with specificity for this purpose. Likely contained on a disc, inserted into the drive, used to infect, then removed when the task was complete.”
“Can you tell if data was removed first?”
“Trickier, but we can certainly try.”
“How about retrieving anything? Digging in and finding what data was on there, uncorrupting?”
“Trickier yet.”
“It’s there. It’s always there, no matter what. I know that from Feeney.”
“Well, that may not be quite true. Eve, there’s a group of techno-terrorists. They call themselves the Doomsday Group.”
“I know who they are. Glorified hackers, like to infiltrate systems, upload what they can, screw with the data. They’ve got some good, twisted brains and plenty of financial backing.”
“A bit more than glorified,” he corrected. “They’re responsible for downing a number of private shuttles by skewing data in air traffic control. They helped themselves to several works of art, and deliberately damaged others at the Louvre by shutting down their security. They killed twenty-six employees of a research lab in Prague by sabotaging their system, shutting down the air supply, and sealing all doors.”
“I said they were twisted. I know they’re dangerous. What does it have to do with a fried unit in a dead man’s art studio?”
“They’ve been working on a worm of just this nature for the past few years. Potent, portable. Its design is not simply to corrupt data or hijack it, but to eliminate it, and on a large scale. To network, to proliferate.”
“How large a scale?”
“Theoretically, a disc could be slipped into a drive on a networking unit—even a network with fail-safes and blocks, with virus detectors and bug zappers—and download the entire data bank from that network, then corrupt the units. An office, a building, a corporation. A country.”
“Not possible. Even midlevel security detects intrusive viruses and bugs and shuts down before infection. You can’t download without detection from CompuGuard. Home units like this, okay, you might get it off and down before the security dropped on you. Small operations networks, maybe. Maybe even with the CompuGuard shields in place. But nothing over that.”
“Theoretically,” he repeated. “And this faction is reputed to have some particularly brilliant minds on board this project. The intel indicates the worm is near completion, and could work.”
“How do you know about this?”
“I have connections.” He gave an easy shrug. “And it happens Roarke Industries is under government contract, a Code Red contract, to develop and create an
exterminator program and shield against this potential threat.”
She sat on the side of the bed. “You’re working for the government. Ours?”
“Well, if by that you mean the U.S., yes. Actually, it’s also a conglomeration sort of thing. The U.S., the Euro Community, Russia, a few other concerned areas. Roarke Industries Securecomp arm has the contract, and R and D is working on it.”
“And Reva Ewing works in R and D, for Roarke Industries Securecomp arm.”
“She does. Eve, I said Code Red, that’s highest clearance. This isn’t something she’d have chatted about with her husband over dinner, I can promise you.”
“Because you didn’t chat with me about it over dinner?”
Irritation sparked, then was controlled. “Because she’s a pro, Eve. She wouldn’t hold the position she does if there was any doubt of that. She doesn’t leak data.”
“Maybe not.” Coincidence, to her mind, was just a link between points. “But it’s certainly possible someone else doesn’t have the same confidence in her that you do. It sure adds an interesting angle.”
She pushed off the bed, circled the room. “Check this out, will you?” she said absently with a gesture toward the mini data center. “Techno-terrorists. What does a philandering metal sculptor have in common with techno-terrorists besides his wife’s position? Why, if they found some use for him, do they kill him, his mistress, and frame his wife? Of course, with the wife in a cage on two counts in the first, this could put a crimp into the research and development of the extermination program and shields.”
She looked toward Roarke for confirmation.
“Somewhat. But not an insurmountable crimp. She’s heading this, and a couple of other sensitive projects, but there’s a very competent team as well. All data on the project would remain locked in-house. None of it is taken outside.”
“Are you sure of that? Dead sure?”
“I would have been. This is fried as well, same method.” Because he had the same cynical take on coincidence as Eve, anger began to rise through his concern. “Do you speculate that Bissel somehow got his hands on data pertaining to the programs, and was killed for it?”