by J. D. Robb
“Drilling wouldn’t do it,” Roarke said. “She’s built to snap drill bits like dry twigs under a bootheel. If you’re crude enough to try explosives, she’ll laugh at you. You don’t force or bully a lady like this.” He trailed his fingers over the surface again. “You … convince her.”
“Do the three of you need a moment?” Eve asked. “Or can we open the damn door on that thing, and see what’s in it?”
“She’s all yours, Lieutenant.” Roarke gathered up his tools.
Pushing away from the desk, Eve walked over. She gripped the ship-wheel handle, pulled. Put her back into it, braced her feet, and pulled again.
“Hot, juicy wow!”
She couldn’t argue with McNab’s assessment. The vault wasn’t full—obviously Mars had planned for more—but there was plenty of wow.
Two shelves of neatly banded bills, rows of jewelry laid out on black velvet nestled in thin drawers. The glitter of gold and silver, the gleam of bronze, the shine of porcelain in objets d’art.
Eve scanned over it all, focused on the back shelf. “Her own ID kit.”
“You would latch onto that and overlook these rather exquisite emeralds.”
She saw the damn emeralds, and the other glitters, and stuck her hands on her hips. “We’re going to need an armored to transport all this. Which detectives are on the search team?”
McNab, eyes a bit glazed, blinked. “Ah, Jenkinson and Reineke.”
“Good. They can log it all.” She moved into the vault, poked into a box. “Full of bugs—the e-sort. That’s one way to get personal information. The list of people with motive is going to be ridiculous. Box of discs. At least they’re labeled. Names, dates. Likely copies of whatever the listening devices picked up. So.”
She set her hands on her hips again, turned around. “Give me an estimate.”
Roarke shook his head. “That’s a hard one.”
“Try anyway.”
“Well now, you’ve got different denominations in the paper money, and some of it’s foreign currency. I’d start at about sixty million.”
“Some start,” McNab noted.
“For the baubles, that’s even more plucking out of the air, but from the look of things, about triple that. And the rest … a hundred, a hundred and twenty.”
“Million again.”
“Of course.”
“Round it up,” she said, circling a finger.
“All in all, you’ve somewhere in the vicinity of three hundred and sixty. You might hit four hundred.”
As McNab would say, Eve thought, some vicinity.
“How about the building? All of it, both units.”
At this Roarke looked a little pained. “Well, I haven’t seen the second unit at all, have I? And haven’t done more than walk straight up here in this one.”
“Just basically.”
“The location, the space, not factoring how well or how poorly maintained, what might be needed to put it on the market? A very rough fifty, and it could be as much as twice that. And don’t be asking me about the contents, as I couldn’t begin.”
Close enough, she thought. Plenty close enough.
“What I’m seeing with what’s here, what was at her apartment, what’s in her accounts? She hit the billion mark. But instead of buying herself a damn country and spending her days sipping mai tais, she kept working, kept blackmailing, and kept hoarding. That tells me she couldn’t stop. It would never have been enough. It might be her killer figured out the same.”
She stepped out as Peabody came in. “Get Jenkinson and Reineke up here.”
“Okay, but…” Peabody looked in the vault. Her jaw dropped; her eyes went wide and dazed. She said, “Ooooh, shiny.”
“Never mind.” Eve pushed by to get her detectives herself. As she strode out, she heard McNab.
“He opened it in like eighteen minutes.”
She just shook her head and kept going.
Roarke wandered down with his coat and kit while she called in for additions to the search team, an armored vehicle, guards.
“The commander’s taking over the transfer details, thank God,” she told Roarke. “Thanks for the assist.”
“My very genuine pleasure.” He smiled at the steady look she aimed at him. “Should I turn out my pockets?”
“You’re too good to get caught that easy.” She shoved a hand through her hair as she looked around the cluttered foyer. “Plus, you stopped. Could stop. She couldn’t. Not the digging, the knowing, the taking, the using, and the acquiring. Not evil, but sick. Seriously sick. And still…”
“You’re pissed,” he said, shrugging into his coat.
“Yeah. She has books up there. Record books of marks and potentials. You and I are in there. I need to talk to you about that, but not here. Mavis and Leonardo and the baby, them, too.”
“You’re right to be pissed. They’re family.”
She nodded. “And Nadine. I talked to Mavis, just to check if she’d gotten pushed any.”
“She’d have told you if she had.”
“Yeah. Yeah. I’m circling. I’m pissed and I’m circling. And some stupid part of me feels sorry for Mars because it’s like she had a disease.”
“It’s not stupid.”
“It’s useless. The same as being pissed is useless. The useful is to stand for her, do the job.”
“You are.”
Since there was no one to see, she didn’t resist when he pressed his lips to her forehead.
“To keep doing it I need to get to DeWinter, see if there’s any progress on that facial reconstruction. Finding out who she was before she was Larinda Mars may help.”
“Good luck with it. I’ll see you at home. Unless you find another vault for me.”
She went back upstairs where her detectives photographed and recorded every item in the vault. She heard the commentary.
“Jesus, look at the size of this rock.”
“Is something this fugly actually worth money?”
She turned to where McNab loaded up the electronics. She started to ask about Peabody, then heard her partner’s voice. From inside the vault.
“Oh! A tiara!”
“You put that thing on your head,” Eve called out, “I’ll bury you with it. Today.”
“Might be worth it! Just kidding!”
Grinning, McNab finished loading up. “I sent copies of all content to your office and home comps, LT. I’ll get started on the data after I get back, log it all in.”
“Start at the end of alpha order, work up halfway. Feeney’s standing by to work with you.” She’d tagged him to make sure of it. “You know the parameters. Get me the list of most likely first.”
“Can and will. I’ve got the listening devices. I’ve got the discs here. Want me to take them in?”
“I’ll take those.”
He patted the evidence bag, sealed and marked, on the desk. “All yours. Hey, She-Body, I’m rolling.”
She poked her head out. Eve didn’t see anything glittering on her but her eyes. “See you later. This is fun!”
He grinned, hefted his evidence box. “Cha, all. Eighteen minutes,” he repeated as he pranced out. “It’s freaking magic.”
“Peabody, with me.”
“Aw.” But she came out, grabbed her coat. “I can’t get over it. She had her own jewelry store, and she kept it all locked up.”
“Because having was the thing.” She took the evidence bag; the boxes of books would go straight to Central. “We’re swinging by to see if DeWinter has any answers.”
“Maybe she grew up in poverty,” Peabody speculated as they walked down and out. “On the streets, maybe. You know how sidewalk sleepers can hoard things. It’s a kind of survival, and security. It could’ve grown out of that.”
“Maybe. Where’s my vehicle?”
“Oh. Two blocks down, around the corner.”
That being the case, Eve pulled her snowflake hat out of her pocket, dragged it on.
“You know,” Peabody sa
id conversationally, “it’s a real advantage that Roarke designs and manufactures security devices, safes, vaults, like that. The guys and I were saying how otherwise we’d have had to call in a specialist, and probably still be waiting. But we already had one.”
Eve flicked a glance at Peabody’s innocent smile. “You and the guys decided that?”
“Yeah. All of us agreed. A real advantage for the department, and how it fits with our squad slogan, how we protect and serve no matter, blah-blah—even our expert consultant, civilian—even when the one who got dead was an asshole. And she pretty much was.”
“Yeah, that works all around.” Touched, as she’d intended to write it up exactly that way—minus the slogan and the asshole—Eve kept walking.
In the lab, she headed straight up to DeWinter’s domain, prepared to execute a good, hard push if necessary. In fact, she looked forward to the execution.
But the only one in DeWinter’s domain was Mars—or her remains. Eve noted someone—likely DeWinter—had marked areas of the skull. The skull and the markings, along with numerous equations, covered the wall screen.
Eve turned on her heel, walked to the next area.
DeWinter, a bold blue lab coat over a bold green dress, worked off a tablet while the artist, snug black pants, her braid falling down the back of a hip-skimming white tunic, keyed data into her own tablet.
“I need the face,” Eve said, and had both women turning.
“We’re working on it. It requires considerable measuring, calculations.”
“We’re making progress,” Elsie told her.
“Show me.”
DeWinter looked annoyed. Elsie simply looked mildly distressed. “I could use a few more hours before—”
“Just let me see what you’ve got.”
At DeWinter’s nod, Elsie used the tablet to bring up a screen image.
“Wider face,” Eve noted. “Nose, too. Higher forehead, right? The eyes look rounder, the mouth thinner.”
“Using Dr. Morris’s measurements—that’s flesh and muscle—and Dr. DeWinter’s on bone, we’ve been able to estimate at—I’m confident—a ninety-five percent probability on this structure.
“Projecting…” And she did just that, bringing up a three-sixty holo. “Using the DNA results, and Harvo’s findings, I’m reasonably confident of this skin tone and coloring. I’ve gone the hair medium length just for the visual, as there’s no way to know.”
“How about sketches? Do you have any?”
“Those, right now? Guesswork. Not supposed to say guess,” Elsie added, with a quick grin at DeWinter. “Speculations based more on estimates, projections, and personal sensibilities than scientific fact.”
“Screw science and let’s see the sketches.”
“We live and die by science here,” DeWinter reminded her.
“Science got you this.” Eve gestured to the screen. “And it’s a good start, but it’s not enough to use for face recognition. So we guess and see what we have.”
“Go ahead.” DeWinter waved a hand. “It wouldn’t hold up under analysis, and certainly couldn’t be used in court.”
“We’re not in court.”
Eve studied the offered sketch pad. The face took on more life. In the sketch the hair formed curls, the eyebrows ran thick and nearly straight over the eyes. The jaw, more square than rounded, suited the wider face.
“This we could run, but … Can you do another, cut some years off? What would she look like at ten or twelve? She covered her tracks, but why would she delete or alter her ID from that far back?”
“Give me a second. If I program this sketch in, the computer will give us an image projection of that age range.”
“If you’d give us another day—” DeWinter began as Elsie went to work.
“We try this. If it doesn’t work, you take another day. I’ve got a list of her marks, and we’ve got another of people she was working to victimize. I’d like to know who she was.”
“If the sketch is anywhere close,” Elsie said, “she would have looked like this at the age of ten.”
A rounder face—that was youth. Softer, and more innocent.
“Calculate the date, and run it.”
“Then hydrate,” DeWinter ordered.
“Happy to. I could use a hit. Anybody else?”
“I could. How’s the coffee in Vending here?” Peabody asked.
“Bilge,” DeWinter said.
“Tube of Pepsi?”
Eve nodded, watching images flash by on screen.
“We’re working as diligently as you,” DeWinter began when the others left for Vending.
“Never thought or said otherwise. We just work differently.”
“I don’t gamble, but if I did, I’d say the odds of getting a hit on what we have now are a few hundred thousand to one.”
Eve smiled as the screen signaled, and the ID shot shared the screen with the sketch. “Pay up.”
“You can’t be sure that’s—”
“Lari Jane Mercury—Larinda Mars. She has a thing for planets. Lawrence, Kansas—that’s the Midwest and slides right in, too. Got her parents and a female sibling.”
“It’s still speculation.”
Eve pulled out her PPC, did a run on the name. “Nothing. Doesn’t exist as of now.” She took it back ten years. “Nothing ten years back. Let’s plug in age ten and take it forward. There she is again. Every other year for ID shots until the age of eighteen is standard, but … Got one at twelve. And … that’s it. Poof.”
DeWinter’s eyebrows beetled. “The child might have died.”
“Jesus, you’re stubborn, and that’s supposed to be my job. She had it erased, back to age twelve. It costs to have ID scrubbed,” Eve pointed out. “Twelve should have done it, would have done it. Who’s going to go back, especially after she changes her looks that dramatically, changes her background? Who’d know to look,” she added, “and for what reason?”
“I’ll point out we are.”
“We are because she’s dead, and even then no investigator would have looked except Morris knew she’d changed her face, her body, and that’s a flag.
“Larinda Mars was born Lari Jane Mercury.” Eve gestured at the screen. “You were wrong. You ought to admit when you’re wrong.”
“I hate to be wrong. And I wasn’t. You were just, in this case, more right.”
Eve let out a laugh. “That actually works.”
Peabody and Elsie came back with tubes of juice and soft drinks. Elsie gaped, then did a quick dance. “You hit.”
“You hit,” Eve corrected. “I’m impressed with your personal sensibilities.”
“Regardless of this result, we’ll continue the facial analysis and restructuring,” DeWinter insisted.
“Knock yourself out.” Eve shrugged.
“The investigation—and the family—deserve thoroughness and accuracy.”
This time Eve nodded. “Now you’re more right than wrong. I’ll update when you’re finished and satisfied. Smart work,” Eve commended, studying the images. “Slick, smart work.”
“Science,” DeWinter corrected, but smiled with it. “Slick, smart science.” Then surprised Eve by grinning at Elsie. “And superb sensibilities.”
“Sold. Can you get me a couple of hard copies and a disc copy?”
Elsie all but rubbed her hands together. “You bet.”
Eve cracked the tube, studied the face of the child. “Okay, Lari Jane, let’s find out what the fuck, and see if it helps tell us who killed Larinda. Thanks.” She took the hard copies and the disc. “Let’s go, Peabody. We have a really strange notification to deal with.”
She moved fast, down the steps, through the labyrinth of the lab. “Quick run on the parents’ current status.”
“Working it. It pretty much slaps down any theory about poverty or street time. James Mercury,” Peabody read off her PPC as they worked their way out. “Dr. Mercury—private practice pediatrician, still practicing after more than fi
fty years. Marilee Mercury, coowner of Kansas Gardens, a nursery and landscaping company—owns it with her sister, and has for thirty-seven years.”
When she settled in the car, Peabody took a large gulp from her cherry fizzy—diet—then continued, “They own their own home—outright now—and have lived in it for about forty-five years. The other daughter, Clara, age thirty-nine, owns a twenty-two-acre farm with her husband of eleven years. Two children, one of each kind. The family comes off solid upper middle class, financially solvent, community active, and rooted.”
“Look for smears. Idyllic often has a dark underbelly.”
“Poking there, but I’m not getting one. Both parents have received kudos and awards in their respective professions. Both volunteer time and services for a local kids’ camp.”
“Death notice or missing persons on Lari Jane Mercury.”
Eve pulled into Central’s garage.
“Did that. Zip.”
“Okay. I’ll talk to the parents. See if you can hook me up with Mira for a quick consult.” Eve sat a moment in her parking slot. “We know who and what she was when she died. We’ll fill in who she was before. Maybe the combo helps us work through what’s going to be a bitch of a suspect list.”
20
After considerable time spent on a ’link conference with the next of kin, Eve worked to organize her thoughts on the way to Mira.
At least Mira’s dragon of an admin gestured her straight in.
Mira sat at her desk, likely writing up some report, and held up a finger to signal she needed another moment.
She wore her rich brown hair soft around her pretty face. A suit with small gold buttons marching to the throat showed off her trim build while the strong blue brought out the softer blue of her eyes. High thin heels, watercolor swirls of blues, showed off excellent legs.
She looked female and as fashionable as any of the ladies who lunched in the most trendy bistros of Manhattan. And had the sharpest mind and steeliest spine of anyone Eve knew.
“Sorry.” Mira swiveled in her chair to face Eve. “Busy day.”
“I appreciate you fitting me in.”
“Never a problem. Tea?” she offered as she rose.
“No, really, I just had a hit. I won’t keep you long.”