Brotherhood in Death

  “And we’ll release a statement to the media that reflects family unity. We’ll maintain the image for him, and for our mother.”

  “Let’s get this out of the way,” Eve began. “Where were you yesterday, four to six, then midnight to four.”

  “Four to six, in the shop, working. Well, until about five-thirty,” Ned corrected. “Then Grant—one of my partners—and I hung out, talking shop for a while while we closed up. I was probably home by six or a little after. We had dinner around seven. My wife, the kids, and I. By midnight? I was out for the count.”

  “In court until nearly five,” Gwen said. “Custody case, nasty. Trewald v. Fester, Judge Harris presiding. I had to check in at the office, but I was home by six. Chaos ensued. I have a thirteen-year-old girl in the crazed clutches of puberty who was going into the tenth round with her eleven-year-old brother, whose job it is to irritate her. About midnight my husband and I were having a second glass of wine, in bed, and trembling like earthquake survivors—and wondering where our sweet, loving, happy little girl had gone.”

  “You’ll get through it,” her brother told her.

  “As long as there’s wine at midnight.”

  “Mr. Mira—Dennis Mira—indicated the two of you will inherit your father’s interest in the Spring Street property. My information is it’s worth eight figures.”

  “Sure it is.” Ned nodded. “If it’s coming to us, that simplifies something at least. It stays in the family. We don’t need the money, Lieutenant. Both Gwen and I are solid there, and that place means a lot to Dennis.”

  “Let’s set that aside. Do you know any of the women your father was involved with?”

  “We made it a point not to,” Gwen began. “A few years ago I was facing off against Leanore Bastwick in court, and during a recess she made it a point to follow me into the ladies’ room and tell me she was sleeping with my father. She did it to throw me off my game.”

  “Yeah, I can see that.”

  “When I heard about what happened to her a few weeks ago, I was shocked. But—brutal honesty—I didn’t lose any sleep over it.”

  “Down, girl.” Ned squeezed her hand. “One of them came on to me.”

  “What!” Gwen goggled at him. “You never told me!”

  “It was twenty years ago, easy. I don’t even remember her name, but she came into the little storefront we had back then and cornered me. Said she wondered if I resembled my father in all ways. She grabbed my crotch—not something I wanted to tell my sister. Zoe saw it—my wife. Well, not my wife then, we weren’t even dating yet. She is—and was—a designer, interior. We were working with her on some projects. But she saw the whole thing, and while I was trying not to scream like a girl, she marched over, kicked the crotch-grabber out, and told her if she ever came back, she’d call the cops.”

  “I love Zoe,” Gwen said, with feeling.

  “Me, too. It took me over a month to get up the courage to ask her out after that. But it all worked out. Sorry, that doesn’t help you.”

  “You’d be surprised. You’ve told me that for most of your life, your parents had this sort of arrangement, but each of you only clearly remembers one incident where the woman involved at the time made herself known. That tells me as a rule, they were discreet, and not looking for trouble when the liaison ended. So, to the best of your knowledge, none of the women he had affairs with caused trouble for him, threatened him?”

  “He’d have crushed them. I don’t mean physically,” Ned said quickly. “But in every other way. If they’d even hinted at causing trouble, he’d have let them know how he could and would ruin them. Their lives, their business or career, their family. He was my father, and I want whoever killed him found and put away. But he was vindictive, and he was ruthless, and he never forgot anything he considered a betrayal.”

  “Is that enough? Can that be enough for now? It feels awful to talk about him this way.” Tears swirled into Gwen’s eyes again. “We want to help, but can this be enough?”

  “Sure. And you have helped.”

  “Then I want to go home. I want my family.”

  “I’ll take you home.” Ned got to his feet.

  “You don’t need to.”

  “How about if Zoe brings the kids, we just hold together at your house for a while?”

  Gwen closed her eyes. “That would be great. That would feel right. My aunt—our mother’s sister,” Gwen told Eve, “came in. That’s who our mother really wants now. The rest of us will hold together.”

  They’d do just that, Eve thought when they left. They’d hold together.

  “It had to be rough, growing up that way. Being ordered to toe a line, never seeing real love and loyalty between your parents.”

  “They got out of it,” Eve said. “They made their own.”

  She’d done the same.

  She went back to her office, added to her notes. Hesitated, then copied Mira. It might be hard to read what Ned and Gwen had said, but she imagined Mira already knew all of it.

  She wanted home, too, she realized. She’d find her focus again working at home.

  She gathered what she needed, grabbed her coat, then made the mistake of answering her ’link.

  The media liaison informed her she needed to give a statement on the Mira case.

  Resigned—she’d known it was coming—she went out to the bullpen and Peabody’s desk.

  “I have to go do the media statement, and I’m taking this home from there. I want reports on the spouses, and the verified alibis. You can do the rest here or at home, as long as I have everything tonight.”

  “I’ll stick with it here until McNab’s off.”

  “Copy Mira, but not through official channels. Got that?”

  “Got that.”

  She might hate this part of the job, but she would get it done. And she was grateful the liaison set a strict time of ten minutes, for statement and questions.

  The questions sent up an echoing bang in her head on the drive home.

  Is it true Senator Mira was found naked?

  Why was his abduction not reported?

  Is Dr. Charlotte Mira attached to this investigation?

  Is Professor Dennis Mira a suspect?

  How long was Senator Mira tortured before his death?

  Christ, she thought, Christ, what public had the right to know that? Which was exactly how she’d answered the question before she’d walked away.

  Home, she told herself. Maybe a workout or a swim before she dug back into it. Just something to take the edge off the ugliness of the day.

  A workout and a swim, she decided as she drove through the gates. Thirty minutes each. She could take an hour, then start back fresh.

  Just seeing the house made her feel more centered. She didn’t know why the conversation with Gwen and Ned had left her so unsettled.

  They hadn’t been beaten or brutalized. They’d grown up privileged. Nothing like her own experience. But she’d felt her own old dread rising up as she’d listened to them, greasy memories of fear, of helplessness.

  She needed it gone.

  She prepped herself as she parked. She could start getting it gone by exchanging swipes with Summerset. That should shove back the echoes.

  But Summerset wasn’t in the foyer, and that threw her balance off even more. He was supposed to be there, lurking, sneering, making some lame-ass comment.

  “Early,” she grumbled to herself as she went up the stairs. “Damn right I’m home early. I made a point of it so I could catch you crawling out of your coffin. That would’ve been a pretty good one. Now it’s wasted.”

  She started to head for the bedroom, changed her mind, aimed for her office. She’d dump everything there, take the time to update her board. Then she could let things simmer in the back of her brain while she pounded out a few miles, swam a few l
aps.

  She was still steps away from her office when she heard the humming. Female humming.

  What the hell? One of the house droids she rarely, if ever, saw? Did they hum happy tunes?

  She stepped into the doorway.

  Not a droid, but a glam-type redhead with a tablet, prowling around her personal space humming that fucking happy tune.

  And where was her board?

  Who the hell was the woman in crotch-high stiletto boots walking around . . . and sitting her skinny ass on HER desk.

  Eve flipped back her coat, laid her hand on the butt of her weapon.

  “Who the hell are you?”

  The redhead let out a quick squeal, bounced her skinny ass off the corner of the desk. She slapped a hand between her perky breasts and goggled at Eve.

  “Oh God! You scared me.”

  “Yeah?” Hand on her weapon, Eve stepped into the room. “Want to get really scared? You will be if I don’t have your name and how you got in here in ten seconds.”

  “I’m Charmaine. You must be Lieutenant Dallas. It’s just lovely to meet you. I was just finishing up the measurements.”

  “What measurements?”

  “For the . . . I’m so flustered. You really did give me a scare. I’m not really supposed to say. Roarke’s just—”

  And he walked in from his office. “Sorry about the interruption. If you’d . . . Eve.”

  He noted her stance, the position of her hand, the look in her eye. And sighed. “You’re home early.”

  “Yeah, how about that? Who’s this, what’s she doing in my office?”

  “Charmaine Delacroix, Lieutenant Dallas. Charmaine’s an interior designer I’ve worked with on a number of projects. Including the dojo.”

  “Wonderfully minimalistic,” Charmaine said, “yet far from rigid or Spartan.”

  Roarke subtly angled himself between her and Eve. “Do you have everything you need?”

  “Absolutely. I can’t wait to get started. I’ll have some options for you by next week. Wonderful to meet you,” she said to Eve. “I know the way out.”

  Eve gave her five seconds to beat feet, then rounded on Roarke. “You let somebody prowl around my office.”

  “I had a designer come in, get a feel for it, measure, and would have been in here with her the entire time—though she’s perfectly trustworthy—but there was a call I had to take.”

  “Why does some designer have to get a feel for my office? It’s my office, isn’t it? And where’s my goddamn murder board?”

  “I put it away, as you wouldn’t want anyone not involved to see it. And if you hadn’t come home unexpectedly, it would’ve been back in place.”

  Outrage wanted to blow the top of her skull through the ceiling. “So it’s okay if I don’t know the difference? It’s okay if I go into your office, take things and put them somewhere else, tell somebody to come right on in, as long as you don’t know about it?”

  “If you had a reason to, as I did.”

  “What possible reason did you have for moving my murder board, for letting some humming woman into my space?”

  “‘Humming’?”

  “She was humming. For Christ’s sake.”

  “I suppose she has a cheerful disposition. The reason was to surprise you with some ideas for redoing your space.”

  Another round of outrage wanted to blow flames out of her ears.

  “Why do I need ideas for redoing it? It’s fine. It was just fine for you, too, when you put it together so I’d move in here. What, now it’s not good enough? Not fancy enough?”

  His eyes chilled to blue ice. “If you’re going to deliberately be an ass, if you insist on raving over something this simple, we can talk about it when you’re not.”

  “I’m an ass? You start messing with my space, and I’m an ass?”

  “People change, Eve. They change their minds, their attitudes, their look, and often the look of their spaces. I thought, after this amount of time, you might be ready for a change here, in this space, to have it reflect what’s now rather than the past. Obviously, you’re not. But that’s not why you’re an ass. You’re an ass for being so pathetically insecure you’d react as if you’d walked in on the two of us naked and banging each other on your precious desk.

  “I still have work.”

  She set her teeth as he walked back toward his office. “If I’d walked in on that, you better believe I’d have used my weapon. On both of you.”

  “That’s something, I suppose,” he said, and shut his office door.

  9

  Oh, she hated when he did that. Hated when she was primed for a good, bloody fight and he just iced over and walked away from it.

  And he knew she hated it.

  Her instinct was to bang right through that door and battle on, but . . . He’d probably like that, wouldn’t he? She paced and prowled around her office. Her space! He’d just love it if she went barging in, raging on, while he sat there with his scary Roarke iced calm.

  She knew how to get through the ice, oh yeah, she did. She knew which buttons to push to bring on the heat. But he’d probably like that, too. He’d just love being able to think he’d been reasonable while she barged and raged and bitched.

  She wouldn’t give him the fucking satisfaction.

  Screw it. She’d come home to take an hour to clear her head, she’d take the damn hour.

  She stalked out of her office, snarled all the way to the bedroom, where the cat’s full, pudgy length was sprawled across the center of the bed.

  “Don’t even start on me,” she warned as he opened his bicolored eyes to stare at her. “How would he like it if I had somebody come in here?” She yanked off her coat, tossed it on the bed. “If I just decided, Hey, I’m going to change everything in the bedroom. Yeah, a decorating bug crawled up my ass, so I’m going to toss this all out and haul in something else.

  “How do you like that?”

  She dragged off her weapon harness, pulled out her ’link, her communicator, her badge, tossed them and the other pocket debris on the dresser.

  Galahad, who knew something about moods and timing, kept his own counsel while Eve stripped out of her street clothes, pulled on workout gear.

  “You could be next,” she warned Galahad as she strode onto the elevator. “He could get another bug up his ass and dye you pink and dress you in a tux.”

  She fumed all the way down to the gym. Definitely not the time for a holo-session with Master Wu. She considered beating the crap out of one of the sparring droids, but thought Roarke would probably enjoy that, so she opted for the tread, programmed it for a hard urban run, with obstacles.

  A beach run would have relaxed her, but she wasn’t ready to relax. Instead she pounded the city streets, kicked a little street-thief ass, climbed, leaped, rolled over barriers until she had a solid five miles in.

  She switched to weights, pumped until her muscles burned, then finished up with some ab-searing crunches before she stretched it out.

  Sweaty, winded, she headed to the tropical wonder of the pool house, stripped off. Dived into the cool, blue water.

  Five double laps later, her body begged for a break. And her thoughts snuck back.

  Her space. Hers. He didn’t have any business pushing her to change her space, bringing in some fancy redhead because it wasn’t all . . . fancy.

  Nothing wrong with her office, she thought as she let herself coast through the water. It was serviceable. It was good enough. Maybe it was a blight, a dumpy box in the grandeur of the house.

  But it was her blight, damn it.

  She got good work done in there, and he had never complained about it before. He’d made it like that in the first place, completely stunning her with the replica of her apartment, right down to the crappy desk.

  Damn it. Damn it. He?
??d turned her heart inside out with that gesture, and now he wanted to change it.

  Because she didn’t live in the old apartment with the crappy desk anymore, she thought.

  She hissed out a breath, muttered, “Hell,” and let herself sink under the water.

  She had herself under better control when she came back up. The mad simmered under it all, but the control skimmed a fine veneer over the rest. She changed into cotton pants, a sweatshirt, skids, then sat down, stroked the cat.

  “He wouldn’t dye you pink or dress you in a tux. He likes you fine just the way you are. Sometimes I wonder about me, but you’re good.”

  Galahad bumped his head against her arm, so she stroked him into ecstasy. It only took a couple of minutes, making her think cats were a hell of a lot easier to live with than people.

  He followed her out and to her office, where Roarke’s door remained shut.

  She curled her lip at it.

  “He could stay in there, iced over, for days. So let him. I’ve got work. See anything wrong in here?” she asked the cat.

  Galahad looked at her, then jogged over to leap onto her sleep chair.

  “See? Everything we need. Except my damn board.”

  She found it, neatly stowed in the storage area, hauled it back.

  She updated it, got coffee, studied it, circled it, made a couple changes, then went to her desk—suitably crappy for her—and reviewed her notes.

  She barely glanced up when Roarke walked in. He went to the wall panel, chose a bottle of wine.

  Uncorked it.

  “Wine?” he asked.

  “No, and I’m not going to apologize.”

  “What a coincidence. Neither am I.”

  “I’m not the one who had some redhead poking around, humming in those boots.”

  He cocked a brow. “You object to the boots?”

  “I object to any boots that have six-inch heels the width of my pinkie, but that’s not the point. And you can go all ice storm, but I have plenty of objections to coming home after a pissy day and finding out you’ve decided to make changes to where I work without saying a damn thing to me about it. Without seeing how I felt about it.”