by J. D. Robb
She stopped, shook her head. “No. I’ll let you make your own impressions.”
“All right. By the way, I’ve arranged to have my ride picked up. That way I can have my lovely wife drive me home.”
“We’re ten minutes from our own gate.”
“Every minute with you, Darling Eve, is a minute to treasure.”
She slid a glance toward him as she uncoded the seal. “You really do want sex.”
“I’m still breathing, so that would be yes.”
He stepped inside with her, scanning when she called for lights. “Homey,” he decided. “Tastefully so. Thoughtfully. Nice colors, nice space. Urban family style.”
“They came in this door.”
He nodded. “It’s a damn good system. Took some skill to bypass without tripping the backups and auto alarms.”
“Is it one of yours?”
“It is, yes. How long did it take them to get in?”
“Minutes. Feeney figures about four.”
“They knew the system, possibly the codes, but certainly the system. And what they were about,” he added, studying the alarm panel. “It’s a tricky one, and would take good, cool hands, and just the right equipment. You see, the backups are designed to engage almost instantly if there’s any sort of tampering. They had to know they were there, and deal with them simultaneously, even before they read or input the codes.”
“Pros then.”
“Well, it certainly wasn’t their first day on the job. Likely they had an identical system to work with. That would take time, money, planning.” He stepped back from the panel, trying to ignore the outrage he felt that one of his designs had failed to serve. “But you never supposed this was random.”
“No. What I put together from the scene and the witness report is that one went upstairs—or at least stayed back—while the other went through here.”
She led the way, moving directly to the kitchen. “It was dark—some glow from security and streetlights through the windows—but they had night vision. Had to. Plus the witness described blank, shiny eyes.”
“Which could be a child’s imagination. Monster eyes. But,” he said with another nod, “more likely night vision. Where was she?”
“Over there, lying on the bench.” Eve gestured. “If he’d looked, taken enough time to do a sweep through the kitchen, he’d have seen her. The way she tells it, he just walked straight to the domestic’s door.”
“So he knew where he was going. Knew the layout, or had been here at some time.”
“Checking on household repairs, deliveries, but that doesn’t feel like it. How do you get the layout of the whole house if you, what, install a new AutoChef or fix a toilet? How do you know the layout of the domestic’s quarters?”
“Someone involved with the domestic?”
“She wasn’t seeing anyone, hadn’t been for several months. A few friends outside the family, but they pan out. So far.”
“You don’t think she was the primary target.”
“Can’t rule it out, but no. He moved straight in,” she repeated, and did so. “Sealed all the way. Had to be. Sweepers didn’t find a fricking skin cell that wasn’t accounted for. Witness said he didn’t make any noise, so I’m thinking stealth shoes. Went directly to the bed, gave the head a quick yank up by the hair, sliced down, right-handed.”
Roarke watched her mime the moves, quick and sure, cop’s eyes flat.
“Combat knife from Morris’s report—lab should be able to reconstruct. Then he lets her drop, turns, walks out. Witness is there, just outside the doorway, down on the floor, back to the wall. If he looks, he sees. But he doesn’t.”
“Confident or careless?” Roarke asked.
“I’d go with the first. Added to it, he’s not looking because he doesn’t expect to see anything.” She paused a moment. “Why doesn’t he expect to see anything?”
“Why would he?”
“People don’t always stay tucked in through the night. They get up to whiz, or because they’re worried about their work and can’t sleep. Or because they want a damn Orange Fizzy. How come you’re this thorough, this much a pro, but you don’t sweep an area when you enter?”
Frowning, Roarke considered, studied the layout again. Yes, he thought as he pictured himself moving through the house in the dark. He would have. Yes, and he had on those occasions when he’d lifted locks and helped himself to what was behind them.
“Good question, now that you pose it. He—they—expect everything, everyone in their proper place because that’s how it works in their world?”
“It’s a theory. Goes out,” she continued, “goes back to the main stairs and up. Why? Why, when there are back stairs right over there.”
She gestured to a door. “That’s how the witness got up to the second floor. Back stairs. Peabody’s take was that the front steps were closer to the adults’ room, and it’s not implausible. But you know what, it’s a waste of time, steps, and effort.”
“And they wasted nothing. They didn’t know there was a second set of steps.”
“Yeah. But how did they miss that detail when they knew everything else?”
Roarke walked over to the door, ran a hand over the jamb, examined the steps. “Well, they’re not original.”
“How do you know?”
“The house is late nineteenth century, with considerable rehab work. But these are newer. This rail here, it’s manmade material. Twenty-first-century material.” He crouched down. “So are the treads. And the workmanship’s a bit shoddy. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was a home job—something they added themselves without all the permits and what have you. Without filing the work, so it wouldn’t show on any record, any blueprint your killers might have studied.”
“How smart are you? You’re right. They’re not on the on-file blueprints. I checked. Still, that doesn’t mean one or both of the killers wasn’t in the house, wasn’t even a friend or neighbor. This is the domestic’s room, and her stairs.”
“That would, however, go further to eliminating the housekeeper as primary target. And it would be less likely the killers were close acquaintances of hers, or privy to her quarters.”
“She was excess. It was the family that mattered.”
“Not one of them,” he put in, “but all.”
“If it wasn’t all, why kill all?”
She took him back through, following the assumed path of the known killer. “Blood trail from domestic’s, through here, up the right side of the steps. More concentrated blood pattern here, see?”
“And none coming back down the stairs. Removing protective gear here, before going down.”
“Another point for the civilian.”
“I think you should have another term for me. Civilian’s so ordinary, and just a bit snarky when you say it. Something like ‘nonpolice specialist on all things’.”
“Yeah, sure, my personal NPS. Focus in, ace. They’d done the adults before the witness got up to this level. She saw them walking away from this room, then split off. One in each of the other bedrooms. Two more rooms up here—one a home office, the other a playroom deal. Kids’ bathroom, end of hall. But they went straight for the bedrooms. You couldn’t be a hundred percent from a blueprint which room was which up here.”
“No.” To satisfy his curiosity, he walked over, glanced into one of the rooms. Home office—work station, minifriggie, shelves holding equipment, dust catchers, family photos. A small daybed, all coated now with the sweepers’ residue.
“This is certainly large enough to be used as a bedroom.”
She let him wander, watched him step to the doorway of the boy’s room and saw his face harden. Blood spatter on sports posters, she thought, blood staining the mattress.
“How old was the boy?” he asked.
“Twelve.”
“Where were we at that age, Eve? Not in a nice room, surrounded by our little treasures, that’s for bloody sure. But Christ Jesus, what does it take to walk int
o a room like this and end some sleeping boy?”
“I’m going to find out.”
“You will, yes. Well.” He stepped back. He’d seen blood before, had shed it. He’d stood and studied murder when it was chilled. But this, standing in this house where a family had lived their ordinary lives, seeing a young boy’s room where such a tender life had been taken, left him sickened and shaken.
So he turned away from it. “The office has as much space as this bedroom. The boy could easily have been across the hall.”
“So they had to surveil the house—or know it from the inside, enough to know who slept where. If they cased it from outside, they’d need to watch the patterns. Which lights went on, what time. Night vision and surveillance equipment, and they could see through the curtains easy enough.”
She moved to the master bedroom. “Morris tells me the same hand that did the domestic did both males. The other took the females. So they had their individual targets worked out in advance. No conversations, no chatter, no excess movements. Thought about droids, assassin droids.”
“Very costly,” Roarke told her. “And unreliable in a situation like this. And why have two—double the cost and detail of programming, when one could do it all? That’s if you had the wherewithal and the skill to access an illegal droid, and program it to bypass security and terminate multiple subjects.”
“I don’t think it was droids.” She walked out, into the little girl’s bedroom. “I think human hands did this. And no matter how it looks on the surface, no matter how cold and efficient, it was personal. It was fucking personal. You don’t slice a child’s throat without it being personal.”
“Very personal.” He put a hand on her back, rubbed it gently up and down. “Sleeping children were no threat to them.” There were demons in this house now, he thought. Brutal ghosts of them with children’s blood staining their hands. Lurking ones in him, and in her, that muttered, constantly muttered, of the horrors they’d survived.
“Maybe the kids were the targets. Or there’s the possibility one or more of the household had some information that was a threat, so they all had to go in case that information had been shared.”
“No.”
“No.” She sighed, shook her head. “If the killers were afraid of information or knowledge, they would need to ascertain, by intimidation, threat, or torture, that the information hadn’t been passed outside of the household. They would need to check the data centers, the whole fricking house, to be certain such information wasn’t logged somewhere. The tight timing—entrance, murders, exit, doesn’t leave room for them to have searched for anything. It’s made to look like business. But it’s personal.”
“Not as smart as they think,” Roarke commented.
“Because?”
“Smarter to have taken the valuables, to have torn the house up a bit. The entire horror would point more to burglary. Or to have hacked away at the victims, to make it seem like a psychopath, or a burglary gone very wrong.”
She let out a half laugh. “You know, you’re right. You’re damn right. And why didn’t they? Pride. Pride in the work. That’s good, that’s good, because it’s something, and I’ve got nothing. Fucking bupkus. I knew there was a reason I liked having you around.”
“Any little thing I can do.” He took her hand as they started downstairs. “And it’s not true you have nothing. You have your instincts, your skill, your determination. And a witness.”
“Yeah, yeah.” She didn’t want to think about her witness quite yet. “Why would you wipe out an entire family? Not you you, but hypothetically.”
“I appreciate the qualification. Because they’d messed with mine, had been or were a threat to what’s mine.”
“Swisher was a lawyer. Family law.”
Roarke tilted his head as they went out the front door. “That’s interesting, isn’t it?”
“And she was a nutritionist, did a lot of families, or had clients with families. So maybe Swisher lost a case—or won one—that pissed one of his clients or opposings off. Or she pushed the wrong buttons on somebody’s fat kid, or had a client die. And the kids went to private schools. Maybe one of the kids screwed with somebody else’s kid.”
“A lot of avenues.”
“Just have to find the right one.”
“One of the adults might have had an affair with someone else’s spouse. It’s been known to annoy.”
“Looking there.” She slid behind the wheel of her vehicle. “But it’s not solidifying. These two, they had what looks like a pretty solid marriage, and a lot of focus on family. Took trips together, went out together. Like a group. The picture I’m getting doesn’t leave much time for extramarital. And sex takes time.”
“Done well, certainly.”
“I haven’t found anything in their data, their possessions, their schedules that points to an affair. Not yet, anyway. Neighborhood canvass didn’t shake out anything,” she added as she pulled away from the curb. “Nobody saw anything. I figure one of them lives in the area, or they had a bogus permit, or—Jesus—they took the goddamn subway, hailed a cab a couple of blocks away. I can’t pin any of it down.”
“Eve, it’s been less than twenty-four hours.”
She glanced in the rearview, thought of the quiet house on the quiet street. “Feels longer.”
It was always weird, in Eve’s opinion, to have Summerset materialize in the foyer like a recurring nightmare the minute she walked in the door, but it was weirder yet to see him there, with a small blonde girl at his side.
The kid’s hair was shiny, wavy blonde, as if it had been freshly washed and brushed. Who did that? Eve wondered. Did the kid deal with her own hair, or had Summerset done it? And the thought of that gave her the heebies.
But the kid looked comfortable enough with him, even had her hand in his, and the cat at her feet.
“Isn’t this a fine welcome?” Roarke shrugged out of his coat. “How are you, Nixie?”
She looked at him—all blue eyes—and nearly smiled. “Okay. We made apple pie.”
“Did you now?” Roarke bent to pick up the cat when Galahad slithered over to rub against his legs. “That’s a favorite of mine.”
“You can make a little one with the leftovers. That’s what I did.” Then those eyes, big and blue, lasered into Eve’s. “Did you catch them yet?”
“No.” Eve tossed her jacket over the newel post, and for once Summerset didn’t snark or sneer at the habit. “Investigations like this take some time.”
“Why? Screen shows with cops don’t take very long.”
“This isn’t a vid.” She wanted to go upstairs, clear her mind for five minutes, then start back over the case, point by point. But those eyes stayed on her face, both accusing and pleading.
“I told you I’d get them, and I will.”
“When?”
She started to swear, might not have choked it back in time, but Roarke played a hand gently down her arm and spoke first. “Do you know, Nixie, that Lieutenant Dallas is the best cop in the city?”
Something, maybe it was speculation, passed over Nixie’s face. “Why?”
“Because she won’t stop. Because it matters so much to her that she takes care of people who’ve been hurt, she can’t stop. If someone of mine had been hurt, I’d want her to be the one in charge.”
“Baxter says she’s a major butt-kicker.”
“Well, then.” Now Roarke smiled fully. “He’d be right.”
“Where are they?” Eve asked. “Baxter and Trueheart?”
“In your office,” Summerset told her. “Dinner will be served in fifteen minutes. Nixie, we need to set the table.”
“I’m just going to—”
This time Roarke took Eve’s hand, squeezed. “We’ll be down.”
“I’ve got work,” Eve began as they went up the stairs. “I don’t have time to—”
“I think we need to make time. An hour won’t hurt, Eve, and I’d say that child needs as much normalcy
as we can manage. Dinner, at the table, is normal.”
“I don’t see what’s more normal about shoveling in food off a big flat surface than shoveling it in at your desk. It’s multitasking. It’s efficient.”
“She scares you.”
She stopped dead, and her eyes went to lethal slits. “Just where the hell do you come off saying that?”
“Because she scares me, too.”
Temper flickered over her face for a moment, then everything relaxed. “Really? Really? You’re not just saying that?”
“Those big eyes, full of courage and terror and grief. What could be more frightening? There she stands, such a little thing, all that pretty hair, tidy jeans and jumper—sweater,” he corrected. “And that need just radiating out of her. We’re supposed to have the answers, and we don’t.”
Eve let out a breath as she looked back toward the stairs. “I haven’t even figured out all the questions.”
“So we’ll have dinner with her, and do what we can to show her that there’s normalcy and decency left in the world.”
“Okay, okay, but I need to debrief my men.”
“I’ll meet you downstairs. Fifteen minutes.”
She found normal in her office, where a couple of cops—who’d obviously raided her AutoChef—were chowing down while they studied murder. On her wall screens, each Swisher bedroom, each victim, was displayed while Baxter and Trueheart chomped on cow meat.
“Steak.” Baxter forked up another bite. “Do you know the last time I had real cow? I’d kiss you, Dallas, but my mouth’s full.”
“Summerset said it was okay.” Trueheart, young and fresh in his uniform, offered her a hopeful grin.
She merely shrugged, then turned so that she, too, had full view of the screens. “What’s your take?”
“Big red check to everything in your report.” Baxter continued to eat, but his expression was sober now. “Slick job. And a mean one. Even without the eyewit, I’d have said two or more to pull it off, and even then it went down damn fast. The tox came in from the ME. No illegals, no drugs of any kind in any of them. No illegals on the premises. Even the pain remedies were herbal and holistic.”