by J. D. Robb
Six
When she’d showered and pulled on warm, comfortable sweats, Eve gave another thought to pizza. She figured she could down a slice or two at her desk while she worked.
She was headed toward the office she kept at home when she heard Bobbie Bray’s voice, gritting out her signature song.
Broken, battered, bleeding, and still I’m begging, pleading
Come back. Come back and heal my heart
Come back. Come back and heal my heart
With her own heart thudding, Eve covered the rest of the distance at a dash. Except for the fat cat, Galahad, snoring in her sleep chair, her office was empty.
Then she narrowed her eyes at the open door that joined her office to Roarke’s. She found him at his desk, with the title track beginning its play again through the speakers of his entertainment unit.
“You trying to wig me out?”
“No.” He smiled a little. “Did I?” When she gave him a stony stare, he shrugged. “I wanted to get better acquainted with our ghost. She was born in Louisville, Kentucky, and according to this biography, left home at sixteen to migrate to Haight-Ashbury, as many of her generation did. She sang in some clubs, primarily for food or a place to sleep, drifted around, joined a band called Luv—that’s L-U-V—where she stood out like a rose among weeds, apparently. Did some backup singing for one or two important artists of the time, then met Hopkins in Los Angeles.”
“Bad luck for her. Can you turn that off?”
“Music off,” he ordered, and Bobbie’s voice stopped. “She bothers you,” Roarke realized. “Why is that?”
“She doesn’t bother me.” The correct term, Eve thought, would be she creeps me. But damned if she was going to fall into the accepted pattern on Number Twelve, or Bobbie Bray.
“She’s part of my investigation—and a secondary vic, even though she was killed a half century before I was born. She’s mine now, like Hopkins is mine. But she’s always part of the motive.”
“And as such, I’d think you’d want to know all you could about her.”
“I do, and I will. But I don’t have to hear her singing.” It was too sad, Eve admitted to herself. And too spooky. “I’m going to order up some pizza. You want in on that?”
“All right.” Roarke rose to follow her into the kitchen attached to her office. “She was twenty when Hop scooped her up. He was forty-three. Still, it was two years before her album came out—which he produced, allegedly handpicking every song. She did perform during that period, exclusively in Hopkins’s venues.”
“So he ran her.”
“All but owned her, from the sound of it. Young, naive girl—at least from a business standpoint, and from a generation and culture that prided itself on not being bound by property and possessions. Older, canny, experienced man, who discovered her, romanced her, and most certainly fed any appetite she might have had for illegal substances.”
“She’d been on her own for five years.” Eve debated for about five seconds on pepperoni and went for it. “Naive doesn’t wash for me.”
“But then you’re not a sentimental fan or biographer. Still, I’d lean toward the naivete when it came to contracts, royalties, business and finance. And Hopkins was a pro. He stood as her agent, her manager, her producer.”
“But she’s the talent,” Eve reasoned and snagged some napkins. “She’s got the youth, the looks. Maybe her culture or whatever said pooh-pooh to big piles of money, but if she’s bringing it in, getting the shine from it, she’s going to start to want more.”
“Agreed. She left him for a few months in 1972, just dropped off the radar. Which is one of the reasons, I’d assume, he got away with her murder three years later. She’d taken off once, why not again?”
He stepped out to choose a wine from the rack behind a wall panel. “When she came back, it was full-court press professionally, with a continual round of parties, clubs, drugs, sex. Her album hit, and big, with her touring internationally for six months. More sex, more drugs, and three Grammys. Her next album was in the works when she disappeared.”
“Hop must’ve gotten a percentage of her earnings.” Eve brought the pizza in, dumped it and plates on her desk.
“As her manager and producer, he’d have gotten a hefty one.”
“Stupid to kill the goose.”
“Passion plus drugs can equal extreme stupidity.”
“Smart enough to cover it up, and keep it covered for eighty-five years. So his grandson ends up paying for it. Why? My vic wasn’t even born when this went down. If it’s revenge . . .”
“Served very cold,” Roarke said as he poured wine.
“The killer has a connection with the older crime, the older players. Financial, emotional, physical. Maybe all three.”
She lifted up a slice, tugged at the strings of cheese, expertly looping them up and over the triangle.
“If it’s financial,” she continued, “who stands to gain? The son inherits, but he’s alibied and there isn’t a hell of a lot to scoop once the debts are offset. So maybe something of value, something the killer wanted Hopkins to bring to Number Twelve. But if it’s a straight give-me-what-I-want/deserve, why set the scene? Why put on that show for us tonight?”
When Roarke said nothing, Even chewed contemplatively on her slice. “You don’t seriously believe that was some ghostly visitation? Grab a little corner of reality.”
“Do you seriously believe your killer has been dogging that building, it’s owners, for eight and a half decades? What makes that more logical than a restless, angry spirit?”
“Because dead people don’t get angry. They’re dead.” She picked up her wine. “It’s my job to get pissed for them.”
Roarke studied her over his own glass, his gaze thoughtful, seeking. “Then there’s nothing after? As close as you’ve been to the dead, you don’t see something after?”
“I don’t know what I see.” This sort of conversation always made her uncomfortable, somehow sticky along the skin. “Because you don’t see it—if it’s there to see—until you’re dead. But I don’t believe the dead go all whoooo, or start singing. The original Hopkins paid an investigation off, this killer wants to weird one off. It’s not going to work.”
“Consider the possibility,” he suggested. “Bobbie Bray’s spirit wants her revenge as much as you want justice. It’s a powerful desire, on both parts.”
“That’s not a possible possibility.”
“Closed-minded.”
“Rational,” she corrected, with some heat now. “Jesus, Roarke, she’s bones. Why now then? Why here and now? How’d she manage to get someone—flesh and blood—to do the descendent of her killer? If Hop Hopkins was her killer—which hasn’t yet been proven.”
“Maybe she was waiting for you to prove it.”
“Oh yeah, that’s rational. She’s been hanging around, waiting for the right murder cop to come along. Listen, I’ve got the reality of a dead body, an antique and banned weapon used in a previous crime. I’ve got no discernible motive and a media circus waiting to happen. I can’t take the time to wonder and worry about the disposition of a woman who’s been dead eighty-five years. You want to waste your time playing with ghosts, be my guest. But I’ve got serious work on my plate.”
“Fine then, since it pisses you off, I’ll just leave you to your serious work while I go waste my time.”
She scowled at him when he got up and carried his glass of wine with him to his office. And she cursed under her breath when he closed the door behind him.
“Great, fine, fabulous. Now I’ve got a ghost causing marital discord. Just makes it all perfect.”
She shoved away from her desk to set up the case board she used at home. Logic was what was needed here, she told herself. Logic, cop sense, facts and evidence.
Must be that Irish in Roarke’s blood that tugged him into the fanciful. Who knew he’d head that way?
But her way was straight, narrow and rational.
Two murde
rs, one weapon. Connection. Two murders, one location, second connection. Second vic, blood descendent of suspected killer in first murder. Connect those dots, too, she thought as she worked.
So, okay, she couldn’t set the first murder aside. She’d use it.
Logic and evidence dictated that both victims knew their killer. The first appeared to be a crime of passion, likely enhanced by illegal substances. Maybe Bray cheated on Hop. Or wanted to break things off professionally and/or personally. She could have had something on him, threatened exposure.
Had to be an act of passion, heat of the moment. Hop had the money, the means. If he’d planned to kill Bray, why would he have done it in his own apartment?
But the second murder was a deliberate act. The killer lured the victim to the scene, had the weapon. Had, in all likelihood discovered the previous body. The killing had been an act of rage as well as deliberation.
“Always meant to kill him, didn’t you?” she murmured as she studied the crime scene photos on her board. “Wanted whatever you wanted first—but whether or not you got it, he was a dead man. What did she mean to you?”
She studied the photos of Bobbie Bray.
Obsessed fan? Not out of the realm, she thought, but low on her list.
“Computer, run probability with evidence currently on active file. What is probability that the killers of Bray, Bobbie and Hopkins, Radcliff C. are linked?”
Working . . .
Absently, Eve picked up her wine, sipping as she worked various scenarios through her head.
Task complete. Probability is eighty-two-point-three . . .
Reasonably strong, Eve mused, and decided to take it one step further. “What is the probability that the killer of Hopkins, Radcliff C. is linked with the first victim, Bray, Bobbie?”
Working . . .
Family member, Eve thought. Close friend, lover. Bray would be, what . . . Damn math, she cursed as she calculated. Bray would be around about one-oh-nine if she’d lived. People lived longer now than they did in the mid-twentieth. So a lover or tight friend isn’t out of the realm either.
But she couldn’t see a centenarian, even a spry one, cutting through that brick.
Task complete. Probability is ninety-four-point-one that there is a connection between the first victim and the second killer . . .
“Yeah, that’s what I think. And you know what else? Blood’s the closest connection. So who did Bobbie leave behind? Computer, list all family members of first victim. Display on wall screen one.”
Working . . . Display complete.
Parents and older brother deceased, Eve noted. A younger sister, age eighty-eight, living in Scottsdale Care Center, Arizona. Young for a care center, Eve mused, and made a note to find out what the sister’s medical condition was.
Bobbie would have had a niece and nephew had she lived, and a couple of grandnieces and nephews.
Worth checking into, Eve decided, and began a standard run on all living relations.
While the computer worked, she set up a secondary task and took a closer look at Hopkins.
“Big starter,” she said aloud. “Little finisher.”
There were dozens of projects begun, abandoned. Failed. Now and then he’d hit, at least enough to keep the wolves from the door, set up the next project.
Failed marriages, ignored offspring. No criminal on any former spouse or offspring.
But you had to start somewhere, she figured.
She went back to the board. Diamond hair clips. Bray had worn them for her first album cover—possibly a gift from Hop. Most likely. The scene told Eve it was likely Bray had been wearing them when she’d been killed, or at least when she’d been bricked up.
But the killer hadn’t taken them as a souvenir. Not a fan, just didn’t play. The killer had shined them up and left them behind.
“She was a diamond,” Eve murmured. “She shined. Is that what you’re telling me? Here’s the gun he used to kill her, and here’s where I found it. He never paid and payment needed to be made. Is that the message?”
She circled the boards, studied the runs when the computer displayed them. There were a couple of decent possibilities among Bobbie’s descendents.
They’d all have to be interviewed, she decided.
One of them contacts Hopkins, she speculated. Maybe even tries to buy the building but can’t come up with the scratch. Has to get access though, to uncover the body. How was access gained?
Money. Hopkins needed backers. Maybe charged his murderer a fee to tour Number Twelve. Get in once, you can get in again.
How’d you find the body? How did you know?
What did she have here? she asked herself. Younger sister in a care facility. Niece a data drone. Nephew deceased—Urban War fatality. Grandniece middle-management in sales, grandnephew an insurance salesman. Rank and file, no big successes, no big failures.
Ordinary.
Nothing flashy. Nobody managed to cash in on Bobbie’s fame and fortune, or her untimely death.
Nobody, she mused, except Hopkins. That would be a pisser, wouldn’t it? Your daughter, sister, aunt is a dead cult figure, but you’ve got to do the thirty-five hours a week to get by. And the grandson of the bastard who killed her is trying to rake it in. You’re scraping by, getting old and. . .
“Wait a minute, wait a minute. Serenity Bray, age eighty-eight. Twenty-two years younger than Bobbie. Not a sister. A daughter.”
She swung to the adjoining door, shoved it open. “Bobbie had a kid. Not a sister. The timing’s right. She had a kid.”
Roarke merely lifted an eyebrow. “Yes. Serenity Bray Massey, currently in Scottsdale in a full-care nursing facility. I’ve got that.”
“Showoff. She had a kid, and the timing makes it most likely Hop’s. There’s no record of a child. No reports from that time of her pregnancy. But she separated from him for several months, which would coincide with the last few months of her pregnancy and the birth.”
“After which, it would seem, she gave the child to her own mother. Who then moved her family to a ranch outside Scottsdale, and Bobbie went back to Hop, and her previous lifestyle. I’ve found some speculation that during her period of estrangement from Hop she went into rehab and seclusion. Interviews and articles from the time have her clean and sober when she returned to the scene, then backsliding, I suppose you could say, within weeks.”
He angled his head. “I thought you were leaving Bobbie to me.”
“The ghost part’s yours. The dead part’s mine.”
Seven
They were into their second year of marriage, and being a trained observer, Eve knew when he was irritated with her. It seemed stupid, just stupid to have a fight or the undercurrent of one over something as ridiculous as ghosts.
Still, she brooded over it another moment, on the verge of stupidity. Then she huffed out a breath.
“Look,” she began.
After a pause, he sat back. “I’m looking.”
“What I’m getting at is . . . shit. Shit.” She paced to his window, to the doorway, turned around again.
Rules of marriage—and hell, one of the benefits of it, she admitted—were that she could say to him what she might even find hard to say to herself.
“I have to live with so many of them.” There was anger in her over it, and a kind of grief she could never fully explain. “They don’t always go away when you close the case, never go away if you leave a crack in it. I got a freaking army of dead in my head.”
“Whom you’ve defended,” he reminded her. “Stood over, stood for.”
“Yeah, well, that doesn’t mean they’re going to say ‘Thanks, pal,’ then shuffle off the mortal whatever.”
“That would be coil—and they’ve already done the shuffle before you get there.”
“Exactly. Dead. But they still have faces and voices and pain, at least in my head. I don’t need to think about one wifting around sending me messages from beyond. It’s too much, that’s all. It’s too
much if I have to start wondering if there’s some spirit hovering over my shoulder to make sure I do the job.”
“All right.”
“That’s it?”
“Darling Eve,” he said with the easy patience he could pull out and baffle her with at the oddest times. “Haven’t we already proven that you and I don’t have to stand on exactly the same spot on every issue? And wouldn’t it be boring if we did?”
“Maybe.” Tension oozed back out of her. “I guess. I just never expected you’d take something like this and run with it.”
“Then perhaps I shouldn’t tell you that if I die first, I’m planning to come back to see you naked as often as possible.”
Her lips twitched, as he’d intended them to. “I’ll be old, with my tits hanging to my waist.”
“You don’t have enough tit to hang that low.”
She pursed her lips, looked down as if to check. “Gotta point. So are we good now?”
“We may be, if you come over here and kiss me. In payment for the insult.”
She rolled her eyes. “Nothing’s free around here.” But she skirted the desk, leaned down to touch her lips to his.
The moment she did, he yanked her down into his lap. She’d seen it coming—she knew him too well not to—but was in the mood to indulge him.
“If you think I’m playing bimbo secretary and horny exec—”
“There were actually a few insults,” he interrupted. “And you’ve reminded me that you’re going to get old eventually. I should take advantage of your youth and vitality, and see you naked now.”
“I’m not getting naked. Hey! Hey!”
“Feel you naked then,” he amended, as his hands were already under her sweatshirt and on her breasts. “Good things, small packages.”
“Oh yeah? Is that what I should say about your equipment?”
“Insult upon insult.” Laughing, he slid his hand around to her back to hold her more firmly in place. “You have a lot of apologizing to do.”
“Then I guess I’d better get started.”
