Nora Roberts - Promises in Death

“If bumps are there, we’d find them with the unregistered.”

“Can’t do it. Before, that was for Morris.” She shook her head, knowing as logic it was again shaky. “I’m going after another cop. I have to do it straight. Every step I take has to be by and on the book for the investigation. And for me. She made a mistake somewhere, overlooked something, sometime. She made one by sending Coltraine’s weapon and badge back. By botching the ambush on me.”

“Assuming it’s Grady. This one.” Roarke tapped Clifton’s photo. “He’s trouble. I know his type.”

“Yeah, and I won’t be surprised to hear at some point he’s ordered to hand over his pieces and badge. And if Coltraine had been knocked around, he’d be top of my list. That was a mistake,” Eve considered. “Grady did it too clean. It just wasn’t physical enough, either of the hits. That’s pride. She’s proud of her work. She does well on the job, she gets kudos from her LT. She does well on her mission, she gets them from Ricker. She covers both.”

“ ‘Don’t disappoint me, dear,’ ” Roarke remembered. “It does strike as a warning to a female. One that puts her in a subordinate position, and one that implies a relationship.”

“Do you ever call your subordinates ‘dear?’ ”

“Good Christ, I hope not. It’s a kind of backhanded slap, isn’t it? If I need to slap an employee, I do it face-to-face.”

“Exactly. Ricker can’t, being all busy in a cage off-planet. The whole phrase is an insult, and a warning. His history with women, it just fits again. So where did she catch his eye? I figure I’ll start with that six months in Europe, the college stint. I might find some intersect with Sandy, then I can work back, and forward from there.”

She went to her desk to do just that. Roarke continued to stand, studying the board.

Attractive woman, he thought. Compact, athletic, a strong face, but very female in the shape of the mouth, the line of the jaw. Certainly one of Ricker’s type, he mused-as far as he could recall. And still, if that connection went back as far as Eve seemed to think, she’d have been eighteen, perhaps twenty. Ricker certainly hadn’t been above using youth for sex, but had he ever taken an actual interest in a girl of that age?

Not in Roarke’s memory of him.

No, that part didn’t fit, not with the man he’d known in his own youth. Women had been commodities, something to be used. Easily discarded. Paid off, discarded, disposed of. Or, as with Alex’s mother, eliminated.

“Look at her mother.”

“What?”

“Her mother,” Roarke repeated. “Run her mother, her parents. Indulge me,” he said when she frowned at him.

Eve ordered the run, and Lissa Grady’s data on-screen.

“Attractive woman,” Roarke commented. “Works part-time in an art gallery where she and her husband retired. Suburban Florida. Respectable salary.”

“No criminal. I ran everyone’s connections before. The father’s clean, too,” she pointed out. “Had his own accounting firm. Small company with two employees. Clean. Now he plays a lot of golf, and works freelance.”

“Hmm. They must have sacrificed considerably to give the daughter the kind of education she had. Where were they when she started college?”

Eve ordered the history. “Bloomfield, New Jersey.”

“No, the employment. She’s a clerk, and he’s working for an accounting firm. Go back on her. Where was she, let’s say nine months before she gave birth?”

“Chicago,” Eve announced. “Working her way through graduate school-art history major-as an assistant manager in a private art gallery. She moved to New Jersey, where her parents lived, during the pregnancy. She took maternity benefits, then the professional mother’s stipend.”

“And was single until, what would it be, she was about four months along.”

“Like that never happens. It’s… Wait.”

“Run the gallery, Eve. Where she worked when she became pregnant.”

She began, shook her head. “It doesn’t exist anymore and hasn’t for six years. It’s an antique store now. Oh, big, giant pop. I’m an idiot. Not a protegee, not exactly. Not an employee-not only. Not a lover. His freaking daughter.”

“Alex said he’d spent most of his life trying to please his father. Maybe she’s doing the same. Ricker owned several art galleries, an excellent front for smuggling and art forgery. Lissa Grady-or Lissa Neil at the time-could’ve caught his eye.”

“And if she turned up pregnant? He’d get rid of her?”

“Unless she was carrying a son, I imagine so. She’s tested, it’s a female. He might-if he was feeling generous-give the young woman some form of payment. If not, he’d issue a warning.”

“And Lissa took either the payment or the warning, moved back home to New Jersey. Gave up her chance at her graduate degree, her job, had the kid. Married some guy.”

“The some guy’s stuck, more than thirty years. So I’d say Lissa found someone and made something.”

“Would he have kept tabs on her?” Eve wondered. “Looked up the kid?”

“I wouldn’t think so, no. The woman and the child wouldn’t have existed for him.”

“Okay. Okay.” She pushed up to pace. “So, at some point, they tell her. Or maybe they’ve been up front about it all along. Maybe she always knew the guy raising her wasn’t her biological. She gets curious, she starts digging.”

“And finds Max Ricker.”

“Most people, they’re going to be sick if they’re looking for a biological and turn up a criminal kingpin, one suspected of being responsible for more deaths than a lot of small wars. If this is right, if this”-she pointed at Lissa’s image on the wall screen-“is the connection, Grady went to him. She made the contact. I’m your kid, asshole, what are you going to do about it? What would he have done?”

“Depends on his mood again,” Roarke said. “But he might have been entertained by a direct approach. And as he and Alex weren’t on the best of terms at that point, it might’ve intrigued him. The idea of having a chance to mold an offspring.”

“Educate her, train her. Use her.” She knew all about that, Eve thought, all about the methods a father might use to mold. She blocked it out, focused on Grady. “And God, wouldn’t it be sweet to use her to screw with the son who disappointed him?”

“And for her, wouldn’t you think?” Roarke walked back to the board. “For her, also sweet to have a part in undermining the son-the prince, as he’d appear to be from the outside. The one who had all she didn’t. The wealth, the advantages, the attention. The name. It all falls into place with this single element. But then you have to prove this single element is fact.”

“I can do that.” Eve grinned fiercely. “DNA doesn’t lie. I’m going to write this all up, toss it to Mira to add to the stew for the profile. I still need something that puts her and Sandy together, even just the same general place, same general time.”

“That would be my assignment.”

“It would, but you have to play it straight.”

“You’re always spoiling my fun.”

“You already had fun. I groveled.”

“True.” He walked over, laid his hands on her shoulders, laid his lips on hers. “I know you.” He rubbed her shoulders, lightly. “The part of you who isn’t working the case in your head is wondering if all this is true, is she what she is, did she do what she did because of that DNA.”

Yes, she thought, he knew her. “It’s a question.”

“And the mirror turns so you wonder next about your own blood. What passes from father to daughter.”

“I know I’m not like her. But it’s another question.”