by J. D. Robb
Along the north and south walls, banks of computers were set up. Workstations, she assumed, cluttered with all manner of electronic boards, microchips, and tools.
She saw clothes heaped on the sofa, VR goggles lying on the coffee table with three tubes of Asian beer - two of them flattened and already rolled for the recycler - and a bowl of spiced pretzels.
And she saw Drew Mathias’s naked body swaying gently from a makeshift noose of sheets hitched to the glittering tier of a blue glass chandelier.
‘Ah, hell.’ She sighed it out. ‘What is he, Roarke, twenty?’
‘Not much more than.’ Roarke’s mouth thinned as he studied Mathias’s boyish face. It was purple now, the eyes bulging, the mouth frozen into a hideous, gaping grin. Some vicious whim of death had left him smiling.
‘All right, let’s do what we can. Dallas, Lieutenant Eve, NYPSD, standing in until proper interspace authorities can be contacted and transported. Suspicious, unattended death. Mathias, Drew, Olympus Grand Hotel, Room ten thirty-six, August 1, 2058, one hundred hours.’
‘I want to take him down,’ Roarke said. It shouldn’t have surprised him how quickly, how seamlessly she’d shifted from woman to cop.
‘Not yet. It doesn’t make any difference to him now, and I need the scene recorded before anything’s moved.’ She turned in the doorway. ‘Did you touch anything, Carter?’
‘No.’ He scrubbed the back of his hand over his mouth. ‘I opened the door, just like now, and walked in. I saw him right you see him right away. I guess I stood there a minute. Just stood there. I knew he was dead. I saw his face.’
‘Why don’t you go through the other door into the bedroom.’ She gestured to the left. ‘You can lie down for a while. I’ll need to talk to you.’
‘Okay.’
‘Don’t call anyone,’ she ordered.
‘No. No, I won’t call anyone.’
She turned away again and secured the door. Her gaze shifted to Roarke’s, and their eyes held. She knew he was thinking, as she was, that there were some - like her - who had no escape from death.
‘Let’s get started,’ she told him.
