His talents, she’d discovered, weren’t limited to deciphering the dead.
Now he was in casual pants and a sweatshirt, and his hair was scooped back in a long, shiny tail. His eyes, slanted and oddly sexy, skimmed down the hallway and found her.
“Have you ever considered, just for the hell of it, taking a Sunday off?”
“Thought I was.” She drew him aside. “I’m sorry to call you in, especially since I know you were up late.”
“Very. In fact, I’d just gotten home when you tagged me. I have been to bed,” he added with his slow smile. “Just not my own.”
“Oh. Well. Here’s the thing. I knew her.”
“I’m sorry.” He sobered. “Dallas, I’m very sorry.”
“I said I knew her, not that I liked her. In fact, it’s the opposite. I need you to verify time of death. I want to be sure your gauge matches mine. And I want to know, as close as you can get it, when she obtained the other injuries you’re going to find.”
“Of course. Can I ask—”
“Lieutenant, sorry to interrupt.” Bilkey stepped beside her. “Vic’s son’s getting antsy.”
“Tell him I’ll be there in five.”
“No problem. Nothing on the canvass so far. Just fyi, two rooms this floor had check-outs this morning. Got you the data on that. Room next to the scene was a no-show. Contacted the desk last night about eighteen hundred to cancel. Got the name in case you need it. You want I should get the lobby security discs?”
“Do that. Good work, Bilkey.”
“All in a day’s.”
She turned back to Morris. “I don’t want to get into it here and now. Just want to emphasize your confirmation of my time of death. I’ve got next of kin down the hall, and I have to deal with them. I’ll fill you in on whatever’s salient once you’ve filed your report. I’d appreciate if you’d handle all of it personally.”
“Then I will.”
With a nod, she signalled to Peabody. “This is bound to be messy,” she began as they started down the hall.
“You want to separate them?”
“No. Not yet, anyway. Let’s see how it goes.”
She braced herself, and knocked on the door.
* * *
Chapter 7
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ODD, EVE THOUGHT, HOW LITTLE SHE remembered him. He was, essentially, the first child near her own age she’d ever known.
They’d lived in the same house for months, and it had been a series of firsts for her. The first time she’d ever lived in a house, or stayed in one place night after night with a bed of her own. The first time she’d been around another kid.
The first time she hadn’t been beaten or raped.
But she could only see him vaguely the way he’d been—the pale blond hair cut short over a wide, almost chubby face.
He’d been shy, and she’d been terrified. She supposed it wasn’t that odd that they hadn’t bonded.
Now, here they were, in a bland hotel room with grief and death fouling the air.
“I’m sorry, Bobby. I’m very sorry about what’s happened.”
“I don’t know what happened.” His eyes were ravaged, and he clung to Zana’s hand as they sat together on the side of the bed. “No one will tell us anything. My mother… my mother.”
“Do you know why she came to New York?”
“Of course.” When Zana made a little whimpering sound, Bobby took his hand from hers so he could wrap his arm tight around her shoulders. “She wanted to see you. And we haven’t had a vacation in a while. She was excited about coming to New York. We’ve never been. And seeing you, and shopping for Christmas. Oh, God.” He dropped his head onto his wife’s shoulder, then just dropped it into his hands. “How could this have happened to her? Who could’ve done it?”
“Do you know anyone who was bothering her? Who had threatened her?”
“No. No. No.”
“Well…” Zana bit her lip, then pressed them tight together.
“You thought of someone?” Eve asked her.
“I, well, it’s just that she’s got that feud going with Mrs. Dillman next door?” She knuckled tears away. “Mrs. Dillman’s grandson’s over there and out in the backyard all the time with that little dog he brings over, and they do carry on. Mama Tru and Mrs. Dillman had more than a few words over it. And Mrs. Dillman said she’d like to slap Mama Tru silly.”
“Zana.” Bobby rubbed and rubbed at his eyes. “That isn’t what Eve meant.”
“No, I guess not. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m just trying to help.”
“What have you been doing in New York?” Eve asked. “What sort of things?”
Zana looked at Bobby, obviously expecting him to take the lead, but he just kept his head in his hands. “Um, well, we got in. It was Wednesday, and we walked around, shopped a little bit, and we went to see the show at Radio City. Bobby got tickets from a man right out on the street. They were awfully expensive.”
Scalped tickets generally were, Eve thought.
“It was wonderful. I’ve never seen anything like it. Mama Tru said we didn’t have very good seats, but I thought they were just fine. And we went and had an Italian dinner after. It was awfully nice. We came back sort of early, because it’d been a long day with all the traveling.”
She began to rub a hand up and down Bobby’s back as she spoke. The gold band of her wedding ring glinted dully in the poor light. “Next morning, we had breakfast in a cafe, and Mama Tru said how she was going to see you, and she wanted to go by herself this first time. So Bobby and I went to the Empire State Building, ‘cause Mama Tru said she didn’t want to stand in those lines anyway, and—”
“You’ve been doing the tourist thing,” Eve interrupted, before she got more play-by-play. “Did you see anyone you knew?”
“No. You’d almost think you would, because it doesn’t feel like there could be anyone left out in the rest of the world with all these people.”
“How long was she gone, out on her own?”
“That day? Um.” Zana went back to biting her lip, creasing her forehead as she thought. “I guess I don’t know for sure, because Bobby and me didn’t get back until almost four, and she was here already. She was a little upset.”
Zana glanced at Bobby again, took one of his hands and squeezed it. “I guess things didn’t go as well with you as she’d hoped, and she was a little upset and irritated that we weren’t here when she got back.”
“She was spitting mad.” Bobby finally lifted his head. “It’s all right to say so, Zana. She was hopping because you’d brushed her off, Eve, and she felt put upon because we weren’t waiting for her. Mama could be difficult.”
“Just got her feelings hurt, that’s all,” Zana soothed, brushing her hand over his thigh. “And you fixed it all up, like always. Bobby took her right back out, bought her a real nice pair of earrings, and we went all the way downtown for a fancy dinner. She was feeling just fine after that.”
“She went out on her own the next day,” Eve prompted, and Bobby’s expression turned puzzled.
“That’s right. Did she come to see you again? I told her to leave it alone, at least for a while. She didn’t go to breakfast with us, said she was going to be lazy, then go out for some retail therapy. Shopping always made her happy. We were booked for dinner that night, but she said she didn’t feel like going out. Said she was feeling tired, and she’d have something in her room. She didn’t sound like herself.”
“How’d she look?”
“I don’t know. She was in her room. When she didn’t answer the room ‘link, I called on hers, and she had the video blocked. Said she was in the tub. I didn’t see her. I didn’t see her again after Friday morning.”
“What about Saturday?”
“She called our room, about nine, I guess. Zana, you talked to her that time.”
“I did. She had the video blocked again, now that I think of it. She said we should go on with whatever we wanted
to do. She wanted to be on her own. Truth is, I thought she was sulking a little, and I tried to talk her into coming out with us. We were going to take one of the sky trams, and we had a ticket already for her, but she said no. Maybe she’d go walking. She wasn’t feeling that well anyway. I could tell she was upset— didn’t I say, Bobby? ‘Your mama’s irritated, I can tell by her voice.’‘ But we let her be and went on. And that night… You tell it, Bobby.”
“She wouldn’t come to the door. I was getting a little irritated myself. She said she was fine, but still wanted to stay in, watch the screen. We went out to dinner, just the two of us.”
“We had a wonderful meal, and champagne. And we…” She slid her eyes toward Bobby in a way that told Eve they’d done some celebrating when they’d gotten back to their room. “We, ah, slept a little late this morning. We tried to call her room, and her ‘link, but she didn’t answer. Finally, when Bobby was in the shower, I thought, ’Well, I’m going down there and knocking ‘til she lets me in. I’m just going to make her…”
She trailed off, pressed her hand to her mouth.
“And all that time. All that time…”
“Did you hear or see anything last night, anything unusual?”
Bobby only sighed. “It’s loud here, even with the windows closed. And we’d had a bottle of champagne. We put on music when we got back, never turned it off. It was still playing when we got up this morning. And we… made love when we got back last night, and again this morning.”
His color came up as he spoke. “The fact is, I was annoyed with her, with my mother. She pushed to come here, and she wouldn’t contact you by ‘link before we came, no matter how much I talked to her about it. Then she started holing up in her room—sulking, I figured, because you weren’t playing the role she wanted you to play, I guess. I didn’t want Zana’s trip spoiled because of that.”
“Oh, honey.”
“My feelings were, ‘Fine, she wants to pout in there, she can stay in until we leave on Monday. I’m going to do the town with my wife.’ Oh hell. Oh hell,” he repeated and wrapped his arm around Zana. “I don’t know why somebody’d hurt her like that. I don’t understand it. Did they… was she—”
Eve knew the tone, knew the look in the survivor’s eye. “She wasn’t raped. Did she have anything of value with her?”
“She didn’t bring much of her good jewelry.” Zana sniffled. “Said it was asking for trouble, though she loved wearing it.”
“I see you’ve got your window closed and locked.”
Bobby glanced over. “It’s noisy,” he said absently. “And there’s that emergency escape out there, so it’s best to… Is that how they got in? Through her window? I told her to keep that window shut, keep it locked. I told her.”
“We haven’t determined that yet. I’m going to take care of this, Bobby. I’m going to do everything I can. If you need to talk to me, either of you, you can contact me at Central.”
“What do we do now? What do we do?”
“Wait, and let me do my job. I’m going to need you to stay in New York, at least for the next few days.”
“Yeah, okay. I… I’ll get in touch with my partner, tell him—tell him what happened.”
“What do you do?”
“Real estate. I sell real estate. Eve? Should I go with her? Should I go with Mama now?”
He was no good to anyone now, Eve thought. He and his baffled grief would only be in the way. “Why don’t you give that some time? There’s nothing you can do. Other people are taking care of her now. I’ll let you know when there’s something more.”
He got to his feet. “Could I have done something? If I’d made the manager open the door last night, or this morning, could I have done something?”
And here, she thought, she could do the one thing, the single thing, that soothed. “It wouldn’t have mattered.”
When Eve and Peabody walked out, she drew a clear breath. “Take?”
“Comes off a decent guy. Shocky right now. So’s she. One holds up ‘til the other goes down. Want me to run them?”
“Yeah.” Eve rubbed her hands over her face. “By the book.” She watched as the morgue unit rolled out the body bag. Morris came out behind them.
“One-twenty-eight a.m. on time of death,” he said. “On-scene examination indicates the fatal blow was a head wound inflicted with our old favorite—the blunt object. Nothing in the room, at my scan, matches. The other bodily injuries are older. Twenty-four hours or more. I’ll get you more exact once I’ve got her in my house.” His eyes stayed level on hers. “Is that what you wanted to hear?”
“Yeah, it is.”
“I’ll let you know what I know when I know it.”
“Thanks.” Eve walked back into the crime scene, signalled one of the sweepers. “I’m looking, particularly, for a pocket or hand ‘link, her personal communication device.”
“Haven’t got one yet.”
“Let me know when and if.” She moved straight to the window, glanced back at Peabody. “We’ll go down this way.”
“Oh, man.”
Eve ducked through and out the window, dropped lightly on the narrow evac platform. She hated heights, freaking hated them, and had to wait a moment for her stomach to stop rolling. To give her system time to adjust, she concentrated on the platform itself.
“Got blood.” She hunkered down. “Nice little dribble of a trail. Over the platform.” She hit the release, watched the steps jut out. “And down.”
“Logical route out and away,” Peabody commented. “Sweepers will get samples, and we’ll know if it’s the vic’s.”
“Yeah.” Eve straightened, studied the access to other rooms on the floor.
Tricky, she decided, with the gaps, but not impossible if you were athletic or ballsy enough. A good strong jump would do it, which she’d have preferred over the tiptoe route along the skinny spit of ledge. Which meant the killer could have come from inside or outside the hotel.
But logic said in and out the emergency route. Down and away, to ditch the weapon just about any damn where.
She looked down, breathed through her teeth as her head went light. People crawled along the sidewalk below. Four floors, she thought. She probably wouldn’t pull a Tubbs if she fell, and kill some innocent pedestrian.
Then she crouched, examining a splat of pigeon dung. She cocked her head up as Peabody stepped out beside her. “See this flying rat shit.”
“What a lovely pattern, abstract yet compellingly urban.”
“Looks smeared to me, like somebody caught the side of it with a shoe.” She poked her head back in the window. “Yo! Got some blood and some pigeon crap out here. I want it scraped up and bagged.”
“We get all the class work,” one of the sweepers commented.
“Mark it, Peabody,” Eve ordered, then started down the zig-zagging stairs. “I want the hotel’s recyclers, and any recyclers in a four-block radius, searched. We got some luck there, it being Sunday.”
“Tell that to the team pawing through the garbage.”
“Emergency evac makes basically every room this side of the building accessible to the other. We’re going to want to take a look at the copy of the registration disc.”
“No security cams in the hallways, stairways,” Peabody added. “If it’s an inside job, why not just go out the door when you were finished?”
“Yeah, why not? Maybe you don’t know there aren’t any cams.” Her boots clanged on metal as she went down, and her stomach began to level out. “Maybe you’re really careful and don’t want to chance being seen by Mr. and Mrs. Tourist, who may be strolling in from a night on the town.”
At the last platform, she hit the second release, and the short ladder rattled out. Steady now, she swung out, used the rungs, then dropped to the sidewalk.
Peabody clambered down after her.
“Couple of things,” Eve began as they skirted around to the front of the building. “Lombard went to Roarke’s office on Frid
ay to try to shake him down.”
“What? What?”
“It needs to go in the report. It needs to be out there, up front. He met her, booted her out. End of story, but it needs to be up front. Sometime after that and several hours before she got bashed, she ran into trouble. It’s easy for both Roarke and myself to account for our time and our whereabouts at the time of her death, and should be just as easy to account for the period between her leaving his office and TOD.”
“Nobody’s going to be looking at either of you.”
Eve stopped. “I’d be looking at me if I didn’t know I was alibied. I wouldn’t be above smacking her in the face.”
“Killing her?”
Eve shook her head. “Maybe whoever tuned her up wasn’t the same person who killed her. Maybe she was working with someone, hoping to fall into easy money through Roarke. When she didn’t pull it off, he or she tuned her. It’s something to look at.”
“All right.”
“Here’s the deal.” She turned to Peabody and gave what she considered a statement. “We had a houseful of caterers and decorators and God knows crawling all over the house all day Saturday. All day. When Roarke has outside contractors on the premises, he keeps cams on, full. You’re going to contact Feeney, request that he pick up those discs, examine the equipment, and verify we were both there, all day.”
“I’ll take care of it. I’m going to repeat: Nobody’s going to look at you.” She held up a hand before Eve could interrupt. “Neither would you, Dallas, after five minutes. A face punch, sure. You’re not above it. And so what? But that was more than a punch that left her face messed up. More than a fist, and you are above that. She tries to shake Roarke down? Shit, she had to be bird stupid. He’d scrape her off like, well, like you’d scrape flying rat shit off your shoe. It’s a nonissue. Trust me, I’m a detective.”
“Been a while since you’ve managed to work that into a conversation.”
“I’ve grown mature, and selective.” As they rounded the corner, Peabody dipped her hands into her pockets. “He’s going to have to be interviewed, you know.”