Golden in Death

by J. D. Robb

  “I didn’t care. She wanted the position in East Washington, and a cushy landing. She pointed out that I had had affairs, and our agreement wasn’t in writing. She’d take me to court, play the injured wife, and see to it my family name carried the scar. And she would have. It was worth a few million to end it, and be rid of her.”

  “What about the two instructors?”

  “As I said, she wanted that position. Little stopped her when she set her sights. She told them both she’d go to the police, and go to the board, file sexual assault charges. So they should keep their mouths shut, and she’d be gone in a matter of weeks.”

  He shrugged, drank. “As far as I know they did, as she moved to East Washington just before the first of the year. I filed for divorce, as we agreed, included a settlement. She came back to finalize it, and I haven’t seen or spoken to her since.”

  “Do you still have the photographs?”

  He looked both surprised by the question and amused. “Why would I? I kept them, in case, until the divorce finalized. Then I destroyed them. A blip,” he reminded her with another half toast. “And as we had a very satisfying private life during that blip, worth the cost.”

  He drank. “Added to it, the priceless lesson she taught me. Marriage is for fools. Why legalize and complicate what you can simply enjoy?”

  Turning, he kissed Iryna’s cheek. “Isn’t that right, my sweet?”

  “Yes, Mr. Greenwald.”

  He laughed, gave her thigh a quick squeeze. “Isn’t she adorable?”

  “Just precious. Iryna, where were you last night?”

  She folded her lips, looked at Greenwald.

  “Go ahead.”

  “We have—had—a dinner party. Cocktails and hors d’oeuvres from seven to eight. At eight there was dinner and more conversation. At ten coffee and brandy.”

  “Okay.” Eve pushed to her feet. “Thanks for your time.”

  “I will escort you to the door.”

  As they approached it, Eve murmured to Iryna, “If you’re not happy here, I can help you.”

  Iryna sent her a look of genuine surprise. “No, I am very happy. Mr. Greenwald is very kind, and very generous.” She opened the door for Eve. “He does not hurt me. I know what it is like when men do. He does not, and would not, as he has no violence, so I am happy.”

  “All right. If anything changes, you can contact me.”

  Eve walked to the elevator and wondered what Iryna had experienced to be happy with a man old enough to be her grandfather simply because he didn’t hurt her.

  13

  She drove through the gates after dark, and there they were. All those welcoming lights.

  She had to stop, just lower her head to the steering wheel. Until that moment, she hadn’t realized how much the day had dragged at her. All the death, all the grief, all the ugliness.

  So she pushed it back, swallowed it down, and drove the rest of the way home.

  She got her file bag—her day wasn’t nearly over. She’d reached the names on her list, issued the warnings, struck fear into more than one person, more than one family.

  But better fear than death.

  She walked inside, where Summerset waited. He took a look at her.

  “I’d say look what the cat dragged in, but he’s been here all day.”

  Rather than punching back, she tossed her jacket over the newel post. “Don’t open any packages. Even if you’re expecting them.”

  He stepped forward as she started up the stairs. “All deliveries are scanned.”

  “Don’t open any, scanned or not. Just don’t.”

  “Very well.” He frowned after her as she continued up with the cat on her heels.

  She went straight to her office, got coffee, checked first to make sure all the names from Gold had been notified.

  Didn’t mean someone might not ignore the warning, or just forget, but at least they had notification.

  She updated her board, then sat down with her notes.

  * * *

  Roarke walked in the house mildly annoyed by a delay—another delay—on a project in Maine. Five straight days of rain might be good for the flowers, but it meant the exterior work on a rehab in progress shut down.

  He couldn’t control the bloody weather, but at times like this he yearned to find a way.

  When he came in, he told himself to put it aside and focus on what he could control. But it burned a bit.

  “As the cat’s not with you,” he said to Summerset, “the lieutenant must be home.”

  “She is, and something’s troubling her. She looked tired, and … sad. You should deal with it. And she told me, very specifically, not to open any deliveries.”

  “There was another murder this morning.” Roarke glanced up the stairs as he spoke.

  “Yes, I heard. I can’t see how it would apply to deliveries here.”

  “If she’s worried about it, she has a reason. I’ll find out what it is.”

  “You look a bit tired yourself,” Summerset added as Roarke started up the stairs.

  “Bloody rain.”

  “It hasn’t rained today.”

  “In Maine it has.”

  He continued up, and because he couldn’t quite shake off the irritation, detoured to the bedroom to strip off the suit—and the workday—changed into a light sweater and jeans.

  When he went into her office, she sat at her command center. Rather than his usual spot on her sleep chair, the cat sat on a leg of her workstation, staring at her.

  “You’re starting to wig me, pal. Go take a nap or something.”

  She continued to work; Galahad didn’t budge.

  And Roarke could see the headache behind her eyes as clearly as a flashing sign. Likely the result of fatigue and skipping any resemblance to an actual meal through her day.

  Annoyed all over again, he pulled a case out of his pocket as he strode to her command center. Both she and the cat turned heads to look at him.

  The cat’s look said, as clearly as Summerset’s words: Deal with this.

  “Take the blocker. You won’t work well with that headache.”

  She started to refuse—he saw that—just as he saw her change her mind. When she took it without protest or excuse, he decided he did, indeed, have something to deal with.

  At least it got his mind off his stalled project.

  He glanced at her board, saw the stills of the second victim, the crime scene.

  “The report said she had two teenage sons.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You don’t suspect the husband.”

  She shook her head. “He teaches at Columbia. Dennis Mira knows him. He helped with the notification. The guy was shattered, just broken to pieces. Mr. Mira helped.”

  “Dennis is made of kindness and compassion.”

  She often thought if everybody in New York had just a little bit of Dennis Mira in them, she’d be out of a job.

  “Before Duran—the spouse—taught at Columbia, he taught at Gold.”

  “Ah. You have your link.”

  “Yeah. A woman had to die to give it to me, but I’ve got the link.”

  “Eve.”

  She shook her head again, more vigorously. “It’s not on me, I know it’s not on me. But she’s still dead. Jesus, Roarke, her mother found her.”

  Saying nothing, he stepped behind her, laid his hands on her shoulders, brushed a kiss over the top of her head. “What can I do?”

  She spun in the chair, wrapped her arms around him, pressed her face against him.

  “There now.” It broke his heart. “Come away from this for a while.”

  “I need to—” She paused, gathered herself. “I need to say something about this morning.”

  Set to comfort, he went momentarily blank. “This morning?”

  “You’ve already let it go. You were pissed, but you’ve already let it go. I was pissed, too.”

  Remembering, he shrugged. “Hardly the first or the last time for either of us
.”

  “No, but—” She let him go, stood to face him. “I know people get pissed over money. Hell, they bash brains in over it.”

  “I don’t see either of us going that far.”

  “I know it’s stupid for us to get pissed over it. It’s supposed to be the lack of it, or the carelessness with it, the greed for it, whatever. Not the fact that there’s so damn much of it.”

  He traced a fingertip down the dent in her chin. “I don’t plan for that to change.”

  “Oh, I got that. The thing is, I don’t want to get used to you peeling off a bunch of money for me whenever I’m running a little short. I wouldn’t have run short if I’d gotten by a machine. And goddamn it, I forgot to hit one today, which makes your stupid point.”

  “I still have your IOU.”

  “I don’t want to get used to it,” she repeated. “Start depending on it. I’ve gotten used to so much, depend on so much. You, this place, the life we have. The clothes in my closet, the damn coffee I drink.”

  “Why should that worry you?”

  “It doesn’t—or only a little sometimes—which is my point. It was stupid to get pissed because you lent me some money, but I don’t want to start thinking, hey, no problem. Roarke’ll cover it. I don’t want that for either of us. It’s important to me.”

  “I’ll understand that if you understand it’s important to me you don’t walk out of the house with empty pockets.”

  “They weren’t all the way empty. Anyway, that’s just part of what I need to say. Duran, he’s shattered, and he’s trying to remember if he kissed her goodbye that morning. Did he say he loved her, did he kiss her goodbye, because she’s gone. And I thought, I was pissed, and I walked out. I didn’t kiss you goodbye. I didn’t tell you I love you. And damn it, who knows better than I do that everything can change, can break, and you never get that chance again?”

  “My darling Eve.” He kissed her forehead, her cheeks, her lips.

  “It’ll happen again. It may be you who’s pissed and walks out. So I want to say when it does happen, either way, to remember this right here.” She cupped his face in her hands, kissed him. “Just remember.”

  “And you.” He kissed her back. Then held her. “How do you feel about spaghetti and meatballs?”

  Everything in her drained, then filled again as she rested her forehead to his. “Man, you know what button to push.”

  “I do, yes. So we’ll sit, have some pasta, some wine, and you’ll tell me about this link, and what it means.”

  “I’ll get the food, you get the wine.”

  So they sat and ate while she took him through her day.

  “There’s a calculated cruelty, isn’t there, to murdering the spouse of someone you have a grudge against.” He broke some bread, handed her a share. “How does that apply to you telling Summerset not to open deliveries?”

  “I not only spent time at the school, asking questions, having EDD access records, I made it clear to anyone paying attention—and if he’s not, he’s an idiot—we’ve made the connection. What better way to take a slap at the primary than to try for her spouse?”

  She rolled some pasta. “It’s low odds, but why risk it?”

  “Understood. So you’ll look hard at Grange, and the transition period, the change of headmasters.”

  “If the school’s the connection, and it is, she’s the strongest link. From everything I’ve looked at, she didn’t give a rat’s ass about the students or the instructors. It was all about prestige, about the big donations.” She forked up a bite of meatball, gestured with it. “So two for you. What do you know about Grange’s ex, Reginald Greenwald of All Fresh?”

  “Ah. I believe I’ve met him a time or two. Considering that, I may have met Grange as well. The business is more than solid, and the family has a reputation for running it well. I don’t recall hearing anything particular or peculiar. Do you think he’s involved?”

  “They have a lot of labs, a lot of chemists and chemicals. He’s not only CEO, but the grandson of the founder, so who’d question him if he spent time in the labs?” She shrugged, ate some more. “But I don’t see it, at least not with what I have. No love lost between him and Grange. They had an arrangement.”

  “Did they?”

  “So he says. They married mostly for sex and because they suited each other’s ambitions and images. If either of them wanted sex outside the marriage, all good, as long as they kept it private. She didn’t. Not only did somebody send him photos of her, with her sex buddy’s face obscured, but she dipped into the staff pool, and got caught.”

  “Careless of her.”

  “There’s speculation she diddled a student.”

  “More than careless there. But … She and Greenwald are, as I recall, contemporaries. Wouldn’t that make her roughly a half century older than the students?”

  “Greenwald had a twenty-four-year-old live-in Ukrainian tootsie pretending to be his personal assistant. And you want to be careful there, ace, as the age difference falls in the same range.”

  “But she would be an adult, not a student,” Roarke pointed out, “and there the difference widens a great deal.”

  “Won’t argue with true.”

  “You ran her?”

  “I did. He sponsored her, brought her over three years ago, so well after the divorce. I gave her an out, told her I could help her. She said she was very content—and she meant it. That he was kind to her, didn’t hurt her. And she knew what it was like to be hurt by someone in power. So … their business.”

  “An unsavory gray area, but—not a minor, not a student. If Grange did indeed go there, she’d not only lose her position, and any remote chance of landing another, but face criminal charges.”

  “Yeah, she would. I’m thinking of mentioning that to her when I take a trip down to East Washington.”

  “You’d go to her?”

  “I could start the process of having her come here for interview, but she could stall, and the first two kills were within two days. I’d rather not risk it.”

  “I’ll arrange a shuttle. And if that’s something you get used to,” he said before she spoke, “it’s to save time and frustration—potentially lives—in the work. So it’s all to the good.”

  “The public shuttle’s not that bad,” she began, and tolerated his bland stare. “But yeah, it would save time. I’m figuring to go down after Kent Abner’s memorial in the morning.

  “Second question. What do you know about Miguel Rodriges?”

  “I’m not entirely sure I know anything. Who is he?”

  “I’ll make it easier, since you basically employ the population of Uruguay. It happens he’s an old pal of Callendar’s, so she gave me the first tip. When I got the second from a teacher at Gold, I got his name from her to take a look.

  “He went to Gold on scholarship,” she continued as she wound more pasta around her fork, “got a full ride to MIT, and now works as a game programmer in one of your R&D departments.”

  “What is the population of Uruguay?”

  “I don’t know, but you probably employ it, so you don’t know everyone who draws a paycheck.”

  “Not offhand, but everyone who does is thoroughly screened. Is he a suspect?”

  “No. Callendar said how Rodriges got bullied, and beat up on when at Gold. I had a talk with the head chemistry teacher—who’s worked at Gold for decades, so through Grange. Among other things he told me this Rodriges was a target of some of the troublemaking rich kids, got beat up when he couldn’t avoid them—and wouldn’t cheat so they could get decent grades. His parents met with Grange, who fluffed them off.”

  She ate, grabbed her water glass. “But then they came back when Rufty took over, and he not only didn’t fluff, suspensions happened.”

  “A different kettle,” Roarke commented.

  “Opposites, really, so whatever the opposite of a kettle is. The chem teacher gave me a name, and I’ve got more from Rufty’s notes. I’m going to check th
em out. I want to talk to Rodriges, too, get a picture.”

  “Easy enough to arrange. I’d like to refresh myself on him.”

  “The chem teacher, who struck me as solid, liked him. That came across. A serious brain, apparently, and since he got tuned up rather than cheat, I’d say that adds ethics and guts. Figures you’d snap him up.”

  “Only the best,” he said as he reached across for her hand. “I’ll look him up, talk to his supervisor. I can have him come to you whenever you like.”

  “Save me time. The memorial’s at eight. They wanted to have it on his favorite running route. I can grab the shuttle by nine. Why don’t I tag you when we’re heading back? It might take a push to box Grange into an interview.”

  “I’d say having Whitney contact the board of trustees or the school’s president—however it works—would cement that very well.”

  “Huh. I bet it would. Kind of a hard-ass way in, but…”

  “Play to your strengths, darling.”

  “I’m going to take that as a compliment.” She studied the very last bite of the very last meatball. “I wonder what genius came up with the concept of a ball of meat. There should be statues honoring him.”

  “I think there’s likely more than meat in the ball.”

  “Don’t tell me that.” She ate the last bite. “I don’t want to know that. Besides, you don’t know any more about what goes into cooking stuff than I do. So we’re sticking with a ball of meat.”

  “Probably best all around. And since you got dinner, I suppose I deal with the dishes.”

  As she went back to her command center, with coffee, it occurred to her that nobody who didn’t actually know Roarke—who cut paychecks to the population of Uruguay—would ever imagine him hauling dishes into the kitchen.

  You didn’t know somebody until you knew them, she thought. Which made her consider Lotte Grange. Her impressions included cold, sexual, ambitious, possibly greedy. But there had to be a solid brain and some definite skills in there, too. Nobody got to the headmaster position in tony schools by sexing their way up the chain. At least not for long.

  Since Roarke’s idea—he usually had good ones—of using Whitney’s clout to secure the interview made sense, she sent him a request.