Nora Roberts - Promises in Death

“Good as new.” She held up her finger with the clear strip on the tip. “Where’s the cat?”

“I turned it to sleep mode.” He gestured absently toward the ball of white on its pillow. “Cleo, I want to thank you again for all you’ve done today. It’s been more help than you know. But I have to stop, for now. I think I’ve done all I can do in one day.”

“It’s a lot.” She walked over, laid a hand on his shoulder.

He wanted to surge out of the chair, close his own hands around her throat and ask his single question. What did you feel when you killed her?

“Do you want me to come back tomorrow, help you with the rest?”

“Can I contact you? I’m just not sure.”

“Absolutely. Anytime, Morris. I mean it. Anything you need.”

He waited until she’d gone before he balled his hands into fists, kept them balled and tried to envision all his rage inside them. When his communicator beeped twice-McNab’s all-clear-he rose. He walked over to pick up the sleeping kitten, its pillow, its toys.

He took them and nothing else from the home of the woman he loved. But the blood of her murderer.

In the interview room, Eve faced Alex across the table. “You want me to believe your father never told you that you have a half sib?”

“I want to know why you seem to believe I have one.”

“Did you ever see Sandy with this woman?”

“No.”

“You answered awfully quick, Alex. You’ve known Sandy since college, but you’re absolutely sure you’ve never seen him with this woman.”

“I don’t recognize her. If you’re trying to tell me she and Rod had a relationship, I didn’t know about it. I haven’t met every woman he’s ever been with. Why do you think she’s my sister?”

“Her mother was involved with your father.”

“For Christ’s sake-”

“Your father sent this woman to college. Paid the whole shot,” she continued as she saw annoyance turn to bafflement. “She did six months at University of Stuttgart. Big rival of your alma mater’s, right? Football rivals. Take another look.”

“I tell you I’ve never seen this woman before in my life.”

“Maybe you ought to think back to college. Sophomore year, and the big game. You made the varsity. Your pal was still a benchwarmer.”

“We weren’t…”

“Pals yet.” Eve smiled.

“We knew each other. Of course. We were friendly enough.”

Eve took out another photo, one of Cleo when she’d been eighteen. “Try this one, taken back in the day.”

“I don’t…” But he trailed off.

“Yeah, she looks different there. Younger, but that’s not all. Lots of long blond hair. The face is fuller. She looks girlier, fresher. Ring any bells?”

“You’re talking about more than ten years ago. I can’t remember every woman I’ve met or seen.”

“Now you’re lying to me. Fine, we’ll just move on.”

He slapped his hand on the photo before Eve could pick it up. “Who is she?”

“I ask the questions, you answer them. Now do you remember her?”

“I’m not sure I do. She looks like someone I saw around, during that time. With Rod. We were becoming friends, real friends. I saw him with her a few times, or someone who reminds me of her. I asked him about her, since we were starting to hang quite a bit-and, frankly, I liked the look of her. He was cagey, wouldn’t say more than she went to Stuttgart. I only remember because I called her Miss Mystery. Just a lame joke between us that lasted for months. Long enough that I remember it, and her. She’s not my sister.”

“Because?”

“Because I don’t have a sister. Do you think I wouldn’t find out? That he-my father-wouldn’t use it against me in some way? He’d-”

He broke off, and again Eve waited while he thought it through.

“You think my father sent her to Rod. To recruit him, to enlist him as a spy. To get close to me. That all this time, right from the beginning, Rod was my father’s dog?”

He pushed up from the table, walked to the two-way glass, and stared through his own image. “Yes, I see. I see how that could be, how he could and would orchestrate that. It doesn’t make this woman my blood. My sister. It just makes her another of Max Ricker’s tools.”

Peabody’s communicator signaled. She glanced at the text, nodded to Eve.

“We’ll be able to verify that shortly. If you’re being square with me on this, and if you were being square with me on wanting to know who killed Coltraine and why, you’ll do what I tell you now.”

“What are you telling me?”

“To stay here. It’s going to take some time to wrap this, and I want you inside.”

Alex continued to stare through the glass. “I’ve nowhere I have to be.”

Eve stepped out to the corridor to confer with Peabody. “Morris pulled it off.”

“McNab signals a go there. She left Coltraine’s. We’re on her, and she’s heading back to work. That’s a big plus as they’re not done at her apartment. I’m getting like a zillion signals during the Ricker interview. Her comp’s passcoded and it’s got a fail-safe. They’re bringing it in to Feeney. They haven’t found, as yet, a toss-away ’link.”

“She’d keep it with her. That’s what I’d do.”

“If she kept Coltraine’s ring, it’s not with her other jewelry. They haven’t found it yet. Callendar’s shuttle’s on schedule. Morris is taking the sample to the lab, personally.”

“Dickhead won’t mess with him,” Eve muttered, thinking of the chief lab tech. “Not with Morris. I want to pick her up, but we don’t have it. Not yet. Need the DNA, need the ring, the ’link. Any one of them would do it.”

“We could get her down here. Use the Sandy homicide with the Alex Ricker connection. We believe he’s responsible for both murders. We want to pick her brain, anything she might know, any take she might have. How we’re trying to put him away, but we’re hitting walls.”

“Not bad, Peabody. Make it happen. Set up a conference room away from Interview. I don’t want her running into Rouche when Callendar delivers him.”

She turned away to contact Baxter herself. “Why haven’t you found what I need?” she demanded.

“Working on it. We found a passcode. False bottom of her weapon’s lockbox. It’s a bank box. And before you tell me to contact Reo, I already did. We can’t stretch the warrant to the bank box. We need a separate warrant, and we don’t have enough for that.”

“Damn it.”

“Second that. There’s nothing here so far that doesn’t jibe with a cop’s life, a cop’s salary. No high-end electronics, jewelry, art. She’s got some pretty serious weaponry though. Six pieces over and above her departmental issue. A freaking army of knives. Not all under the legal limit either, but she’s got a collector’s license. We checked for prints, for blood. They’re showroom clean. She takes care of her tools.”

“Is there a stiletto?”

“Several. We culled them out for forensics.”

“Keep digging.”

She clicked off as Peabody came back. “Grady’s clearing it with her lieutenant. She’s juiced, I could see it. The idea of coming in and bailing us out, of finding a way to put the screws to Alex. She’s pumped.”

“Good. Keep on Dickhead, will you? But not enough to put his back up. I’m going to move Alex to one of the visitor rooms, put a babysitter with him. We’ll be working Grady, Rouche, and Zeban simultaneously, the way it’s panning. You take Zeban. He’s low rung, but that means he’s going to flip. He just helped out his drinking buddy, and now he’s in the soup. Work him quick and hard, Peabody. Scare the shit out of him.”