Forgotten in Death

by J. D. Robb

  “I will. I like you’re letting me handle this part.”

  Eve glanced up. “You know what you’re doing.”

  “And I like handling it. I’ll go write this one up, take the next.”

  Eve nodded. Alone, she got more coffee. She put her feet on her desk, studied her board.

  Old injuries, a hard life. A believer in rules. Who broke what rule, Alva? Where’s your book?

  Where’s your place? Other books, others breaking rules.

  Inside job, she thought again. And a sloppy one. A goddamn unnecessary one. Panic or meanness?

  Or both?

  More than one killer, almost certainly. No drag marks. Bash her, wrap her up, carry her, dump her.

  “I’ll find them, Alva,” she murmured. “Then I’m going to go back and find who broke you.”

  Since Peabody had the interviews in hand for the moment, Eve dug into the Singer family. The connection between the two murders on her board ran through them.

  The company had its beginnings in the mid-twentieth century, when the current CEO’s great-grandfather, James Singer, leveraged a loan—from his father-in-law—to purchase his first rental property: a three-story, sixteen-unit walk-up on the Lower West Side.

  James Singer and his son, Robert James Singer, expanded, developed, and built. On his father’s death—heart attack—R. J. Singer and his wife, Elinor Bolton Singer, took over the business.

  And on R.J.’s death—lung cancer—Elinor Singer ran the company, until she retired and turned the reins over to her son, James Bolton Singer.

  Eve brushed through the history, as the founders had been long dead and buried before the Hudson Yards projects. But it gave her a sense. By the time J. B. Singer took over, his family had a solid and expanding business in place.

  Under Elinor Singer’s lead, and with her son as CFO, they bought the Hudson Yards properties—their biggest acquisition, biggest project not only to that date, she noted, but their biggest development still.

  Since construction also began on their watch—with an interruption for the Urban Wars—she took a closer look, beginning with Elinor Bolton Singer.

  The daughter of Henry Bolton and Gladys McCain Bolton, she’d grown up wealthy—Park Avenue mansion, and another country home in the Hudson Valley. One brother—and digging there, Eve concluded he’d been groomed for political office before his death in a plane crash. One sister—who’d developed a drug and alcohol habit and died of an overdose at twenty.

  Elinor attended Radcliffe, studied business management and finance. Which hadn’t helped save her family business, which floundered after her mother’s suicide.

  Eve made a note to dig into more details later when she could pull the unknown victim’s murder into her focus.

  Less than a year after her mother’s death, Elinor married R. J. Singer and gave birth to J. Bolton Singer, their only child, the following year.

  The Bolton financial business went under in the eighties, and Eve made more notes to look into—or hopefully have Roarke translate—what she saw were multiple legal issues.

  Upon her father’s death following a series of strokes, Elinor sold everything but the Hudson Valley estate. Though it looked to Eve like she’d juggled some of the acreage into Singer for development.

  Eve breezed through the society stuff—galas, politics, benefits, fashion—taking away the impression of a woman who’d enjoyed her position, her lifestyle, and knew how to use both.

  A widow at sixty, she stepped into the big chair, increased holdings, profits. Maybe a figurehead, Eve thought, maybe not, until she retired.

  Interesting.

  She lived in her longtime family estate, kept an apartment in the city, maintained a flat in Paris.

  Though fully retired for about twenty years, Eve noted she was still listed on the company letterhead as consultant.

  J. Bolton Singer was not.

  “Did you step aside, J.B., or get tossed?” Eve wondered.

  She started to shift to his background when she heard Peabody coming down the hall.

  “I think you’re going to want in on this interview. I’m getting a buzz—not from her, Chloe Enster, hard- and landscape—but what she’s telling me.”

  Eve programmed her search, rose.

  “What’s the buzz?” Eve demanded as they walked to Interview.

  “It may apply to Singer’s partners in the project. Enster says she and her brother saw a couple of people they think are questionable characters on the site.”

  “I’m always interested in questionable characters.”

  5

  Eve opened the door to Interview. She studied the petite woman in work pants, a scruffy T-shirt, and beat-up boots. She wore her midnight-blue hair in a short braid and studied Eve in turn out of emerald-green eyes that reflected nerves.

  Petite she might have been, but she had strong swimmer’s shoulders and diamond-cut arms.

  Strong enough, Eve thought, to have bashed in a skull with a crowbar.

  “Chloe, this is my partner, Lieutenant Dallas.”

  “Yeah, I got that.”

  “We appreciate you coming in, Ms. Enster,” Eve began. “I’m sure Detective Peabody explained this is routine.”

  “Easy for you to say.” She took a glug from her water bottle. “I know there’s somebody dead, and there’s a finite number of people who had access to the Singer site. Me and my brother are two of them.”

  She blew out a breath. “Deke’s covered, my brother’s covered because he wasn’t even in New York last night. But I was, and I got nothing. I busted up with my boyfriend a couple days ago—to be known forever as the Cheating Bastard—and I was home, alone, sulking. I didn’t talk to anybody. I didn’t want to talk to anybody, especially my friend Lorna, who’d I-told-you-so me to freaking death. Or my mother, because the same.”

  “All right. Did you know Alva Quirk?”

  “That’s the woman who’s dead, Detective Peabody said. I didn’t know her name. But when I saw the picture there”—she gestured to Peabody’s folder—“I recognized her. Deke and I saw her up at the site a few times. Early, before the crew. Before they broke ground the first time. Deke told her she wasn’t supposed to be up there, how it wasn’t really safe. But she said something like it was safe under the stars and gave him like this little origami dog.”

  Chloe drank again, sighed. “We spotted her little nest when we were doing the early site work, but we let it go. She wasn’t hurting anything. I guess if we’d made her leave, kept her out, she’d still be breathing.”

  “That’s not on you unless you killed her.”

  “I’ve never hurt anybody in my life. A lie,” she said immediately. “I lie. I kicked the Cheating Bastard in the balls when I found out. And once, I punched a drunk who grabbed my ass in a bar. But that’s it.”

  “Both of those sound justified.”

  Chloe managed a smile. “Felt good, too.”

  “Detective Peabody told me you saw someone else on the site.”

  “Yeah.” Now she rubbed the back of her neck. “We’ve done other jobs for Singer, and we did one for Bardov—that’s one of the partners on this. Deke and I, we’ve only been in business four and a half years. We’re still building a rep. We keep the overhead down, do the design and prep work ourselves. We’ve got a tight crew, and pay fair, and we don’t cut corners. Quality work for a fair price, that’s how you build your rep and your business.”

  “Okay,” Eve said when Chloe paused.

  “Okay, well. We did two other, smaller jobs for Singer, and we worked our asses off to get this one. We’d work for them anytime. They pay on time, listen if there’s an issue. But we wouldn’t do another job for Bardov.”

  “Because?”

  “In construction—like in anything, I guess—some cut those corners. Or know which palms to grease. We did good work for Bardov, but we saw some of that. So unless we’re squeezed, we won’t bid on their projects.

  “This job? It could mak
e us. We didn’t know about the partners until we bid, but we wouldn’t have backed out anyway. The way we heard it, Bardov’s sort of silent partners, and consultants. Singer’s in charge of the build. It takes a lot of scratch for a build like this. Most are going to need partners, for the scratch.”

  “All right.”

  Chloe shifted. “Okay, so we’re up there doing some survey work, and we see a couple of Bardov guys doing a walk-around. This is a few weeks ago, and we saw them by the buildings northwest of the tower. Demo’s going on, right, and me and Deke just came back on-site to check some measurements for our design. And the one guy—Tovinski—he’s an engineer. We don’t get why he’s there because we know the engineers on the job, and that’s really how we copped to Bardov being more in it than we thought. We dealt with this guy on the job we did for Bardov. He’s a corner cutter for sure.”

  “In what way?”

  “He knocks down the quality of the supplies and materials. Right on the edge of it, you know? You’re doing a quality job, and you bid fair, then he’s pulling down the quality to save more money. We argued it—’cause the cost was in the damn bid, right?—but he went over us. Didn’t show on the invoice, get it? But we know what we’re working with.”

  “You’re saying this Tovinski padded invoices.”

  “I’m saying Deke and I know what we’re working with, and on the Bardov job we did, what we were working with wasn’t what was on the order sheet. It was cheaper grade, down the line.”

  “Okay.”

  “And we saw him with a couple of inspectors. Maybe we didn’t see him grease the palms, but we sure didn’t have any trouble passing any site inspections. And we should have.”

  Now she shrugged. “It happens, right? The way it is sometimes, but it’s not how me and my brother work. And we saw a couple of the Bardov guys on the Singer job—I don’t know the names except Tovinski—get into it with a couple of the other subs. Not punch-outs, but it looked close.”

  “And you think Bardov’s company cuts and greases?”

  “Well, Lorna—the landscaper and the I-told-you-so pal—said that’s what she heard on the job. How they had ties to the Russian mob.”

  After blowing out a long breath, Chloe took a hit from her water bottle again.

  “I don’t know from that, but she said she heard it. It could be bullshit. It could all be bullshit, but that nice lady’s dead, and somebody did it.”

  “Do the Bardov people have access—codes and swipes?”

  “I don’t know. They shouldn’t, not at this point in the project anyway, but we’re just subcontractors. Just cogs in the wheel, right?”

  “Have you heard anything about substandard materials on this job?”

  “Not a peep on that. And not on the other two jobs we worked for Singer. But we haven’t started our work yet, other than prep, design, ordering. And I only saw Tovinski on-site those two times. We’re not on-site much right now, so maybe he’s there more.”

  “Got a first name on Tovinski?”

  “No, sorry. We just called him Ivan. He’s got the accent and everything.”

  “Have you worked with Bryce Babbott?”

  “Quality,” Chloe said instantly. “And…” She lifted those strong shoulders, gave them a wiggle. “Frosty supreme. And with Angelica Roost, solid, in my opinion. And Mr. Singer—he takes an interest, knows his ass from his elbow. Not J. B. Singer. We haven’t met the old man. We saw the grandmother—she came on-site on both our other jobs a couple of times. Got eyes like a hawk. A little bit scary, if I’m honest, but she gave the work a nod, so we got the second job. Now this one.”

  “Okay. This is good information. When’s your brother due back?”

  “A week from Monday. Well, Sunday night, but Monday morning at work.”

  “We’d like to talk to him. Just see if he remembers anything more than you have.”

  “Sure. I’ll make sure he tags you. I guess you don’t know how long we’ll be shut down.”

  “Not yet, no.”

  “I know you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do for the lady who got killed. It’s just we put almost all our eggs in this Hudson Yards basket. Biggest job we ever bid on. It’s dumping some stress right now.”

  “As soon as we clear it, we’ll let Mr. Singer know. Thanks for coming in.”

  “I’m all done? You said it wouldn’t be too bad,” she said to Peabody. “It wasn’t.” She rose. “Um, you bring murderers and like that in this room?”

  “It’s a room for interviewing, both suspects and witnesses.”

  “I can kind of feel them. The bad ones. I’m like half-assed a sensitive. I mostly block it because it creeps me out. But I can sorta feel them.”

  She shuddered once. “I sure wouldn’t want your job.”

  When Peabody led Chloe out, Eve sat a moment, considering.

  Corner cutting, palm greasing. Why not some high-dollar pilfering? She couldn’t see how anyone had legitimate business on the site in the middle of the damn night. And being there led to murder.

  Tovinski looked like a very good place to start.

  She rose when Peabody stepped back in. “Good call bringing me in. It gave me a better sense of her. I’d say a sharp eye and maybe tossing in the half-assed sensitive gives her a solid take on what’s going on.”

  “My father worked construction as a teenager—before he met my mother and started the farm.”

  “Pre–Free-Ager?”

  “I guess he was a half-assed Free-Ager before Mom, but he was always a full-on sensitive. Anyway, he says that some jobs, most jobs, ran clean, and with people having pride in the work. But some, you had that corner cutting, the palm greasing, material walking off the job. And greed ran the show.”

  “Sounds about right.”

  “The Bardov company. Do you think they still have ties with the Russian mob?”

  “Jesus, Peabody. Yuri Bardov is the Russian mob. He’s Bardov Construction.”

  “I’ve got to catch up.”

  So did she, Eve thought, because she’d never tangled with Bardov or his crew.

  “You hear he’s mostly retired. Has to be hitting toward ninety. But maybe he’s still got fingers in the pie. Alva sees a midnight bribe going on, or witnesses material walking away, something of the sort, alerts whoever’s doing it—because that was her pattern—starts writing in her book and, panicked or pissed off or both, they kill her, dump her.”

  “And take her book.”

  “And take her book,” Eve agreed. “Write up the interview. I’m going to look into this Tovinski, and take a harder look at Bardov. Didn’t have the feel of a mob hit,” she said half to herself. “Too damn sloppy.”

  “I bet Roarke knows the company.”

  “Yeah, I’m counting on it.”

  She didn’t want to tag him on it right then. She figured he was either catching up on his own work, dealing with the shutdown of his site, or having a little fun helping Feeney in Geek World.

  She went back to her office, hit the AC for more coffee, and found Tovinski by using his last name and his employer, the city.

  Not Ivan. Alexei.

  She studied his ID shot as she generated a hard copy for her board. A hard face, she mused. Sharp and lean, as if any excess had been meticulously whittled away. White-blond hair cut close to the scalp, pale skin, pale blue eyes.

  The nephew of Marta Bardova—Yuri Bardov’s wife—Tovinski immigrated to the United States in 2023 at the age of fifteen. Now just shy of his fifty-third birthday, he held the title of chief structural engineer for Bardov.

  One marriage in 2048—Nadia Bardova, daughter of his uncle-in-law’s cousin. Two offspring: son, Mikael, age twelve; daughter, Una, age eight.

  Numerous identifying marks in the form of tattoos. Prints and DNA on record.

  Juvenile record sealed in Kiev—which meant he had some early bumps.

  Adult bumps included three assault charges—and six months inside for the third one—at the age of
twenty-four.

  Carrying a blade over the legal limit, two counts, ages eighteen and twenty-two. Fines, community service for the second charge. No time served.

  Questioned and released over the beating death of a shopkeeper. Questioned and released over the drowning—in a toilet bowl—of a city inspector.

  No wits, no physical evidence, suspect alibied.

  Nothing since.

  Because you got better at it, Eve thought.

  If she had to conjure the face of a professional enforcer, it would look like Alexei Tovinski’s.

  “I’m going to enjoy chatting with you, Alexei. And soon.”

  She rose to add him to the board, then found herself circling around to the other side.

  She studied the remains, and the area—essentially a pit—walled off from the rest. Deliberately, she was certain. It occurred to her that if the dates on the plans and construction of that building, of the so-called wine cellar were accurate, Tovinski would have been in New York.

  Still a teenager, but old enough. She still needed DeWinter to verify the time of death on the Jane Doe, but speculating, if the victim had gone in at the right time, if Bardov had any part in the plans …

  She generated a second copy of Tovinski’s ID, studied it again.

  “Oh yeah, you were born to kill.”

  She pinned him up on the second side.

  And when she looked over, Roarke stood in her doorway.

  The man moved like a ghost.

  “Didn’t expect to see you.”

  “I’ve been in EDD for a bit. Some progress there, but then Feeney had already made inroads. I’ve just added some … alternative perspective.”

  “From a thief’s point of view.”

  He only smiled. “It’s all fascinating, and gave me a very nice distraction. Feeney’s had to shift to something else for now, and it occurred to me it’s very unlikely my cop has eaten anything since breakfast.

  “So.” He moved to the AutoChef.

  “I’m right in the middle of—”

  “Mmm-hmm. As I am myself. But let’s have a bite. Pasta salad sounds good enough.”

  He programmed two portions, then glanced at her board. “And who is this hard-bitten individual you’ve put on my murder?”