J. Robb - Born In Death

“Never mind.” Reo sighed, long and deep. “It’s been a day, that’s the best I can say about it. I’ve got a judge reviewing their last block right now. If he’s not too big on having, say, an actual meal or a life, he may rule on it within a couple hours. I hear, you hear.”

“The minute,” Eve said, then cut off.

Too much time, she thought. Too much time screwing around the system. Whoever killed Natalie and Bick – or ordered them killed – had probably started deleting or adjusting the files immediately.

She hoped McNab was right about the EDD hounds digging up the scent she had a feeling was being covered up even as the lawyers dug through their haystack.

But if EDD let her down, she had a very sleek, very smart hound of her own.

So thinking, she drove through the gates of home.

BECAUSE HER MIND WAS ON OTHER THINGS, Summerset caught Eve off guard as she came in the door.

“Do you require change-of-address forms?”

“Huh? What?” She yanked herself back to the moment, then immediately regretted it. He was in her moment, the bony, black-suited pain in her ass. “Can’t you find another place to haunt? I hear there’s one available down on East Twelfth.”

His lips thinned – if, she thought, it was possible for what passed as his lips to compress in an even tighter line. “I assumed as you no longer appear to live here, you’d need the proper forms.”

She pulled off her coat, tossed it on the newel post. “Yeah, get those forms, I’ll fill them out.” She started up the stairs. “How many M’s in Summerset anyway?”

She left him behind in the grand foyer. Roarke was probably home, she decided, but she’d wait until she was out of the hearing of those demon ears before she checked on one of the house scanners. She was tempted to go straight into the bedroom, fall flat on the bed for twenty minutes. But with the case weighing on her, she continued up to her office.

He was there, pouring wine.

“Long day for you, Lieutenant. Thought you could use this.”

“Couldn’t hurt.” Either the man was psychic or she was pretty damn predictable. “Been home long?”

“A couple of hours.”

She frowned, checked the time. “It’s later than I thought. Sorry. I should have done the call home thing, probably.”

“Couldn’t have hurt.” But he moved to her, handed her the glass. Then he took her chin in his free hand, studied her face before he touched his lips to hers. “Long, hard day.”

“I’ve had shorter and easier.”

“And from the look of you, you’re going to make it longer. Red meat?”

“Why is everyone speaking in code around here?”

He smiled, ran his fingertip along the dent in her chin. “You could use a steak. Yes, pizza would be easier to eat at your desk,” he continued, anticipating her. “Consider having a meal that requires utensils payment for not checking in.”

“I guess that’s fair.”

“We’ll have it up in the conservatory.” To avoid protest, he simply took her arm and led her to the elevator. “It’ll clear your head.”

He was probably right, and in Roarke’s world it was a simple matter to order real meat and all the trimmings, have a meal with wine, even candles, in a lush setting where the lights of the city twinkled and gleamed beyond black glass, and a cheerful fire crackled away.

There were times she wondered that she didn’t get whiplash from the culture shock.

“Nice,” she said and tried to adjust her mind, her mood.

“Tell me about the victim.”

“Victims. It can wait.”

“They’re in your head. We’ll both do better if you talk it through.”

“So, you don’t want to chat about politics, the weather, the latest celebrity gossip over dinner?”

He smiled, sat back, gestured with his glass.

She told him, going step by step through both murders, the timing, the method, the background.

“Listening to them talk to each other? It just hit. They had something. It went beyond the surface, you get me? Beyond that gooey first stage of attraction.”

“The potential they had…It’s not just one or even two people being snuffed out, but the potential of what they might have made together.”

“Yeah, I guess that’s it.” She stared through that black glass to the lights of a city that offered the very best, and the very worst. “Pisses me off.”

“You’re rarely anything but pissed at murderers.”

“That’s a given. I mean they piss me off, the vics. What the hell were they thinking?” Frustration rippled through her, into her eyes, her voice. “Why didn’t they go to the cops? They’re dead not only because somebody wanted them dead, but because they were playing at something they couldn’t possibly win.”

“Many of us don’t automatically run to the police.”

“Some of you run from them,” she said dryly. “She had that new lock installed just two days before. Tells me she’s got some concerns. She takes a knife into the bedroom with her – or I have to assume she did from my read of the scene. Tells me she was scared. But…” She stabbed viciously at a bite of steak. “At the same time she says nothing to her defenseless sister who’s coming to spend the night. She doesn’t, at the very least, hole up with her boyfriend.”

And you’re suffering some, Roarke thought, because it could have been prevented if she’d come to someone like you. “She had a sense of independence, then, and an underlying certainty she was handling and could handle the situation.”

Eve shook her head. “It’s that ‘It can’t really happen to me’ attitude. The same one that gets people to stroll around in bad neighborhoods or flip off the expense of decent security. Violence happens to the other guy. And you know what else?” she added, waving her fork. “They were into it. Wow, look what we’ve uncovered. We’re going to blow it open – and do interviews, be important.”

“Ordinary people, ordinary lives, and then something that pulls them out of that. The accounting firm has an excellent reputation.”

“But you don’t use them. I checked. Mostly because I thought what a big, complicated mess if you did.”

“I considered them once upon a time. I found Sloan too stuffy and rigid.”

“Isn’t that the definition of accountants?”

“Shame on you,” he said with a laugh. “Such a cliché. There are people, darling Eve, who enjoy and are skilled with numbers and finance who are neither stuffy nor rigid.”

“And here I figured you were the exception to the rule. No, I’m just being pissy,” she admitted. “Feel pissy. The firm’s had their lawyers tangling up the warrant all damn day. They’ve got two employees murdered and they’re blocking me from doing my job.”

“By doing theirs,” he pointed out. “Sorry, Lieutenant, but if they didn’t use their muscle, and the law, to do whatever possible to protect their clients’ privacy, they wouldn’t have the reputation they hold.”

“Somebody in there knows what Copperfield and Byson knew. They were cogs, moving into the center of the wheel, but still cogs. Somebody closer in knows.”

He cut another slice of steak. “It wouldn’t be impossible for someone with superior hacking skills to access the files on Copperfield’s office unit.”

She said nothing for a moment because she’d thought the same. She’d considered this streamlined approach. “Can’t do it.”

“Didn’t think you could. And the why is the same as why the firm is paying their lawyers to paper the PA. It’s the job. At this point, you aren’t aware of other lives on the line. You can’t justify the shortcut.”

“No, I can’t.”

“You would be, I imagine, working your way into the wheel. Copperfield’s immediate supervisor.”