Big Jack

by J. D. Robb

  A rehab with some fancy touches. A place he knew he wouldn’t be disturbed. Where he wouldn’t be questioned if caught on the premises. Where he could, again, deal with any security features.

  She sent the data to her home unit, printed out her lists, then went into the bull pen to get Peabody. “With me.”

  “I’m running down the sealant.”

  “Run it down in transit.”

  “Where are we going?” Peabody demanded as she scrambled to gather her work disk, files, jacket.

  “To look at buildings. To talk to guys with power tools.”

  “Hot damn!”

  The first stop was a small theater originally constructed in the early twentieth century. Her badge got them through to the foreman. Though he bitched about workload and schedule, he took them through. The lobby floors were the original marble, and apparently a point of pride for the foreman. The theater section was bare particleboard on the floor and as yet unsealed. The walls were old plaster.

  Still, she went through the entire building, using her scope to look for blood traces.

  They suffered through late-afternoon traffic en route to the next stop.

  “The sealant, professional-grade, can be purchased wholesale or retail in five-, ten- and twenty-five-gallon tubs.” Peabody read the data off her PPC. “Or you can, with a contractor’s license, purchase it in powder form and mix it yourself. Residential-grade comes in one- or five-gallon tubs. No powder available. I’ve got the suppliers.”

  “You’ll need to hit those. We’ll want a list of individuals and companies who’ve bought the sealant so we can cross-check them with the construction crews on these sites.”

  “Going to take a while.”

  “He’s not going anywhere. He’s right here.” She scanned the street. “Thinking of his next move.”

  He let himself into his apartment and immediately ordered the house droid to bring him a gin and tonic. It was so annoying to have to spend half the damn day in an office doing absolutely nothing that could possibly interest him.

  But the old man was tying up the purse strings, demanding he show more interest in the company.

  Your legacy, son. What bullshit! His legacy was several million in Russian whites.

  He couldn’t care less about the company. As soon as he was able, as soon as he had what was his, by right, he’d tell the old man to fuck himself.

  It would be a fine day.

  But meanwhile he had to placate and coddle and pretend to be the good son.

  He stripped down, letting his clothes fall as he went, and lowered himself into the one-man lap pool built into the penthouse’s recreation area.

  The fact that the company he despised and deplored paid for the penthouse, the clothes, the droid, never made a scratch on the surface of his ego.

  He reached up a hand for the g and t, then simply sprawled in the cool water.

  He had to get to Gannon now. He’d considered and rejected the idea of going to Maryland and just beating the information he needed out of the old couple. It could come back on him in too many ways.

  As it stood now, they could have no clue. He could be an obsessed fan, or a lover of the maid’s who’d been in league with her to burgle the Gannon residence. He could be anyone at all.

  But if he went to Maryland he might be seen, or traced. He would hardly blend well in some silly small town. If he killed Samantha Gannon’s grandparents, even the most dim-witted of cops might work their way back to the diamonds as the cause.

  If he could get to Gannon herself . . . It was so damn frustrating to discover she’d vanished. None of the careful probes he’d sent out had netted him a single clue to her whereabouts.

  But she had to surface sometime. She had to come home sooner or later.

  If he had all the time in the world, he could wait her out. But he couldn’t tolerate dragging himself into that stupid office much longer, dealing with the idiotic working class or paying lip service to his pathetic parents. All the while knowing everything he wanted, everything he deserved, was just beyond his reach.

  He sipped the drink with one arm braced on the pool’s edge to anchor him. “Screen on,” he said idly, then scanned the news channels for any updates.

  Nothing new, he saw with satisfaction. He couldn’t understand the mind-set of those who fed on media, on what they perceived as the glory. A true criminal gained all the satisfaction necessary by succeeding at his work, in secret.

  He liked being a true criminal, and liked—very much—raising the bar on his own exploits.

  He smiled to himself as he looked around the room at the shelves and displays of antique toys and games. The cars, the trucks, the figures. He’d stolen some of them, simply for the buzz. The same way he sometimes stole a tie or a shirt.

  Just to see if he could.

  He’d stolen from friends and relatives for the same reason, and long before he’d known he came by the habit . . . honestly. That thievery was in his blood. Who’d have believed it looking at his parents?

  But then, he’d gotten his interest in the toy collection from his father, and it had served him well. If his fellow collector and acquaintance Chad Dix hadn’t bitched to him about his girlfriend, about the book she was writing that was taking all her time and attention, he wouldn’t have known about the diamonds, the connection, as soon as he had.

  He might never have read the book. It wasn’t the sort of thing he did with his time, after all. But it had been a simple matter to pry Dix for more details, then to wheedle the advance copy from him.

  He finished off the drink, and though he wanted another, denied himself. A clear head was important.

  He set the glass aside, did a few laps. When he pulled himself out of the pool, the empty glass was gone and a towel and robe were laid out. He had a party to attend that evening. He had a party of some sort to attend every evening. And he found it ironic that he’d actually met Samantha Gannon a few times at various affairs. How odd he’d had no interest in her, had assumed they had nothing in common.

  He’d never had more in common with a woman.

  He might have to take the time and the trouble to pursue her romantically, which would certainly be considerably less lowering than his brief association with Tina Cobb. No more his type, when it came to that. Not from what he’d observed of her, in any case.

  Full of herself, he thought as he began to dress. Attractive enough, certainly, but one of those brainy, single-minded females who either irritated or bored him so quickly.

  From what he’d been told of her by Chad, she was good in bed, but entirely too absorbed with her own needs and wants outside the sheets.

  Still, unless he could figure out a more efficient, more direct way to the diamonds, he would have to spend some quality time with Jack O’Hara’s great-granddaughter.

  In the meantime, he thought as he flicked a finger over the scoop of a clever scale-model backhoe, he thought it might be time for a heart-to-heart with dear old dad.

  Chapter 10

  There was a headache simmering like a hot stew behind her eyes by the time Eve got home. She’d only managed to hit three sites. Construction workers, she learned, called it a day long before cops did. She’d gotten nothing from the ones she’d managed to survey but the headache from the clatter of tools, the blasts of music, the calls of workers all echoing in empty or near-empty buildings.

  Added to that was the hassle of cajoling, browbeating or begging suppliers for their customer lists. If she never visited another building-supply warehouse or outlet in this lifetime, she would die a happy woman.

  She wanted a shower, a ten-minute nap and a gallon of ice water.

  Since she’d pulled up behind Feeney’s vehicle, she didn’t bother to check the in-house. Roarke would be upstairs with him, in the office or the computer lab, playing their e-geek games. Since the cat didn’t come out to greet her, she assumed he was with them.

  She scotched the idea of ten minutes with her eyes shut. She coul
dn’t quite bring herself to get horizontal with another cop in the house, especially if the cop was on the clock. It would be too embarrassing if she got caught. She compromised with an extra ten minutes in the shower and felt justified when the headache backed off to threatening.

  She traded in the day’s separates—she was going to remember that one—for a T-shirt and jeans. She thought about going barefoot, but there was that cop-in-the-house factor, and bare feet always made her feel partially naked.

  She went for tennis shoes.

  Since she felt nearly human again, she stopped by the computer lab on her way to her office.

  Roarke and Feeney were manning individual stations. Roarke had his sleeves rolled up and his hair tied back, as was his habit when he settled into serious work. Feeney’s short-sleeved shirt looked as if he’d mashed it into a ball and bounced it a few times before putting it on that morning. It also showed off his bony elbows. She wondered why she found them endearing.

  She must be seriously tired.

  There were screens up with data zipping across them too quickly for her eye to read. The men tossed comments or questions at each other in the geek language she’d never been able to decipher.

  “You guys got anything for me in regular English?”

  They both looked over their shoulders in her direction, and she was struck how two men who couldn’t have been more different in appearance could have identical looks in their eyes.

  A kind of nerdy distraction.

  “Making some headway.” Feeney reached into the bag of sugared nuts on his work counter. “Going back a ways.”

  “You look . . . fresh, Lieutenant,” Roarke commented.

  “I didn’t a few minutes ago. Grabbed a shower.” She moved into the room as she studied the screens. “What’s running?”

  Roarke’s smile spread slowly. “If we tried to explain, your eyes would glaze over. This one here might be a little more straightforward.” He gestured her closer so she could see the split screen working with a photo of Judith Crew on one side and a blur of images running on the other.

  “Trying for a face match?”

  “We dug up her driver’s license from before the divorce,” Feeney explained. “Got another run going over there from the license she used when the insurance guy located her. Different name, and she’d changed her hair, lost weight. Computer’s kicking out possible matches. We’re moving from those dates forward.”

  “Then we’re using a morph program on yet another unit,” Roarke continued. “Searching for a match on what the computer thinks she looks like now.”

  “The civilian thinks if the image was close, we’d have matched by now.”

  “I do, yes.”

  Feeney shrugged, nibbled nuts. “Lot of people in the world. Lots of women in that age group. And she could be living off-planet.”

  “She could be dead,” Eve added. “Or she could have evaded standard IDing. She could be, shit, living in a grass shack on some uncharted island, weaving mats.”

  “Or had facial restructuring.”

  “Kids today.” Feeney blew out an aggrieved breath. “No faith.”

  “What about the son?”

  “Working a morph on that, too. We’ve hit some possibles. Doing a secondary on them. And our boy here’s looking for the money.”

  Eve looked away from the screens. The rapid movements were bringing back the headache. “What money?”

  “She sold the house in Ohio,” Roarke reminded her. “It takes a bit of time for the settlement, the payoff. The bank or the realtor would have had to send the check to her, or make an e-transfer per instructions. In the name she was using at the time, unless she authorized it to be paid to another party.”

  “You can find out stuff like that? From that long ago?”

  “If you’re persistent. She was a careful woman. She authorized the settlement check to be transferred electronically to her lawyer, at that time, then sent to another law firm in Tucson.”

  “Tucson?”

  “Arizona, darling.”

  “I know where Tucson is.” More or less. “How do you know this?”

  “I have my ways.”

  She narrowed her eyes when Feeney looked up at the ceiling. “You lied, you bribed and you broke any number of privacy laws.”

  “And this is the thanks I get. She was in Tucson, from what I can find, less than a month in early 2004. Long enough to pick up the check, deposit it in a local bank. My educated guess would be, she used that point and those funds to change identities once again, then moved to another location.”

  “We’re narrowing it down. Once the matches are complete, we’ll take a hard look at the hits.” Feeney rubbed his temple. “I need a break.”

  “Why don’t you go down, have a swim, a beer?” Roarke suggested. “We’ll see what we’ve got in another half hour.”

  “That’s a plan I can get behind. You got anything for us, kid?”

  Nobody but Feeney ever called her “kid.” “I’ll bring you up to date after you take a thirty,” Eve told him. “I need to set a few things up in my office.”

  “Meet you there then.”

  “I could use a beer myself,” Eve commented when Feeney walked out.

  “A break seems to be in order.” Roarke ran a finger down the back of her hand, then tugged it closer to nibble.

  She knew that move.

  “Don’t even start sniffing at me.”

  “Too late. What is this scent? All over your skin?”

  “I don’t know.” Warily, she lifted her shoulder, sniffed at it herself. Smelled like soap to her. “Whatever was in the shower.” She gave her hand a little yank, but made the mistake of glancing around in case Feeney was still nearby. The instant of distraction gave him the opening to hook a foot around hers, tip her off balance and into his lap.

  “Jesus, cut it out!” Her voice was a fierce and frantic whisper. On the mortification scale, getting caught snuggled in Roarke’s lap hit the top three, even above getting caught napping or barefoot by another cop. “I’m on the clock. Feeney’s right here.”

  “I don’t see Feeney.” He was already nuzzling his way along her neck toward her ear. “And as an expert consultant, civilian, I’m entitled to a recreational break. I’ve decided I prefer adult activity to adult beverage.”

  Little demons of lust began to dance along her skin. “You can’t even think I’m going to mess around with you in the computer lab. Feeney could come back in here.”

  “Adds to the excitement. Yes, yes.” He chuckled as he nipped at a spot—his personal favorite—just under her jaw. “Sick and perverted. And though I’d wager Feeney suspects we have occasional sex, we’ll take our recreational break elsewhere.”

  “I’ve got work to do, Roarke, and . . . Hey! Hands!”

  “Why, yes, those are indeed my hands.” Laughing now, he cupped them under her and levered out of the chair. “I want my thirty,” he said, and carted her toward the elevator.

  “The way you’re going, you’ll be done in five.”

  “Bet.”

  She struggled against a laugh of her own and put up a token struggle by clamping a hand on the opening of the elevator. “I can’t just go off and get naked with Feeney in the house. It’s too weird. And if he comes back and—”

  “You know, I suspect Feeney gets naked with Mrs. Feeney, and this is probably how they had their little Feeneys.”

  “Oh my God!” Her hand trembled, went limp, and her face paled considerably. “That’s just despicable, the dirtiest of dirty fighting to shove that one into my head.”

  Because he wanted to keep her unbalanced, he reached behind her and keyed in the bedroom rather than using audio command. “Whatever works. Now you’re too weak to hold me off.”

  “Don’t count on it.”

  “Do you remember the first time we made love?” He touched his lips to hers as he said it, changing tactics with a gentle brush.

  “I have a vague recollection.”
/>   “We rode up in the elevator like this and couldn’t keep our hands off each other, couldn’t get to each other quick enough. I was mad for you. I wanted you more than I wanted to keep breathing. I still do.” He deepened the kiss as the elevator doors opened. “It’s never going to change.”

  “I don’t want it to change.” She combed her fingers through his hair, shoving the band away so all that thick, soft black slid through her fingers. “You’re so damn good at this.” She pressed her lips to his throat. “But not quite good enough to have me doing this with the door open. Feeney could, you know, wander in. I can’t focus.”

  “We’ll fix that.” With her legs hooked around his waist, her arms around his neck and her lips beginning to lay a hot line over his skin, he went to the door. He closed it. Locked it. “Better?”

  “I’m not sure. Maybe you should remind me how we did this the first time again.”

  “I believe, if memory serves, it went something like this.” He spun her around, trapping her between the wall and his body. And his mouth was fever hot on hers.

  She felt the need, instant and primal, slice through her. It was like being cleaved in two—the woman she’d been before him, the woman she’d discovered with him.

  She could be what she was, and he understood her. She could be what she’d become, and he cherished her. And the wanting each other, through all the changes, all the discoveries, never abated.

  She let him ravish her, and felt the power in surrender. It pumped and swelled inside her as she slid down his body. Her hands were as busy as his, her mouth as impatient as they dragged each other toward the bed.

  They stumbled up the platform, and remembering, she laughed. “We were in a hurry then, too.”

  They fell on the bed in a tangle of limbs, then rolled as they struggled to strip away clothes, to take and devour. Before, that first time, it had been in the dark. Groping and grasping and desperation in the dark. Now they were in the light that spilled through the windows, through the sky window over the bed, but the desperation was the same.

  It ached in her like a wound that would never quite heal.