The In Death Collection, Books 11-15

by J. D. Robb

  “That’s right,” her husband confirmed. “The little redhead. I noticed her. She had rather stunning green eyes. I paint,” he explained. “Portraits primarily. I tend to notice faces and what makes them unique.”

  “What did she do after she gave him the drink?”

  “She, ah, let me think. Walt called for everyone’s attention. Most of the guests were in the living area at that time. Conversations quieted down while he began to speak. She stepped back. She was listening to him, just like the rest of us. Smiling, I think. Yes, I recall thinking she was very personable, and how she seemed to take an interest in what Walt was saying. I think I smiled at her when Walt finished his toast, but she was watching him. Then we all drank, and I didn’t notice her once Walt began to choke.”

  “I think I saw her.” Nadine lifted a hand to the long triple string of pearls she wore. “When I ran out to call for help, I saw her in the foyer.”

  “What was she doing?” Eve asked.

  “I think, well, she must have been leaving. She was walking away, toward the door.”

  “None of you had seen her before tonight?” When they all looked at each other, a sort of baffled head-shaking, Eve went on, “Does the name Julie Dockport mean anything? Maybe your father mentioned it.”

  “I never heard him mention that name.” Wally glanced around as the rest of his family shook their heads again.

  “Do you know if he was concerned about anyone, or anything? A business deal, a personal problem.”

  “He was happy,” Sherilyn said quietly. “He was a happy man.”

  “A happy man,” Eve stated after she released the family, “loved by one and all doesn’t get poisoned on his birthday. There’s something under this pretty picture, Peabody.”

  “Yes, sir. The officers who went to Dockport’s address report that she’s not there. Her across-the-hall neighbor told them she moved out that morning. Claimed she was moving to Philly.”

  “I want sweepers over there, now. I want that place combed. They won’t find anything, but I want it done.”

  “Sir?”

  “Looks like we’ve got ourselves a pro.”

  Chapter 4

  Though it was after one in the morning when she got home, Eve wasn’t surprised to find Roarke in his office. It was rare for him to sleep more than five hours a night. Rarer still for him not to wait up until she was home.

  The work fueled him, she knew. More than the obscene amounts of money he made every time he wheeled a deal, it was the deal itself—the planning, the strategizing, the negotiating, that engaged his interests and energies.

  He bought because things were there to be bought. Though she often thought of the companies, the real estate, the factories, the hotels he acquired as his toys, she knew he was a man who took his toys very, very seriously.

  He’d broadened her focus considerably since they’d been together. Travel, culture, society. Somehow he managed to carve out time for everything and more. The money was nothing to him, she thought, unless it was enjoyed.

  The man who ruled a business empire with a scope beyond reason sat at a desk at one-fifteen in the morning with a brandy at his elbow, a fat, purring cat on his lap, and his sleeves rolled up while he worked at his computer like any lowly office drone.

  And, she thought, he was enjoying it.

  “Are you in the middle of something or are you playing?”

  He glanced up. “A bit of both. Save data and file,” he ordered the computer, then sat back. “The media’s already got your homicide. I was sorry to hear about Walter Pettibone.”

  “You knew him?”

  “Not well. But enough to appreciate his business sense and to know he was a pleasant sort of man.”

  “Yeah, everybody loved good old Walt.”

  “The media report said he’d collapsed at his home during a party to celebrate his sixtieth birthday; one we were invited to,” he added. “But as I wasn’t sure precisely when we’d be back or what mood we’d be in, I declined. Murder wasn’t mentioned, just that the police were investigating.”

  “Media vultures wouldn’t have the official ME’s report yet. I just got it myself. It’s homicide. Somebody slipped some cyanide in his drink. What do you know about the ex-wife?”

  “Not a great deal. I believe they were married for a number of years, divorced without any scandal. He married some pretty young thing sometime after. There was some head shaking over that, but the gossip died down quickly enough. Walter wasn’t the sort of man who made a target for gossip. Just not enough juice.”

  Eve sat, stretched out her legs. When she reached down to pet Galahad, the cat growled low in his throat. With a feline glare for Eve, he flicked his tail, leaped down, and stalked away.

  “He’s annoyed we didn’t take him on vacation.” Roarke smothered a grin as Eve scowled after the cat. “He and I have made up, but it appears he’s still holding a grudge where you’re concerned.”

  “Little prick.”

  “Name calling is no way to mend fences. Try fresh tuna. It works wonders.”

  “I’m not bribing a damn cat.” She lifted her voice, certain the party in question was still within earshot. “He doesn’t want me touching him, fine and dandy. He wants to be pissed off because . . .” She trailed off as she heard herself. “Jesus. Where was I? Pettibone. Juice. Well, he had enough juice for somebody to want him dead. And the way it’s shaping up, to pay for a pro.”

  “A professional hit on Walter Pettibone?” Roarke lifted a brow. “That doesn’t feel like a good fit.”

  “Woman gets a job at the caterers just about the time the current Mrs. Pettibone is planning the big surprise party. The same woman works the Pettibone affair, and brings the birthday boy the fatal glass of champagne. Hands it to him personally, wishes him happy birthday. Hangs back, but stays in the room while he makes his mushy toast, and drinks. When he’s spazzing on the floor, she walks out of the apartment and poof! Vanishes.”

  She frowned a little as Roarke rose, poured her a glass of wine, then sat on the arm of her chair.

  “Thanks. I had sweepers go over her place—a place she rented two days before she took the catering job, and one she moved out of this morning. One, according to her neighbors, she spent little time in. No prints, no trace evidence. Not a fucking stray hair. She sanitized it. I went by there myself. Little one-room place, low rent, low security. But she had police locks installed to keep the riffraff out.”

  “Are you looking at—what is her name? Muffy? Twinkie?”

  “Bambi. Comes off like she’s got the mental capacity of broccoli, but we’ll run her. She seems sincerely a dink, but she’s now a really rich, widowed dink. Maybe the ex-wife bided her time,” Eve mused. “Played nice while she worked things out. You’re married to a guy thirty years, you’ve got a serious investment. Gonna irritate you when he trades you in.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  “Me, I don’t hire hits.” She looked up at his mouth-watering face. “I’d give you the basic courtesy of killing you myself.”

  “Thank you, darling.” He leaned over to kiss the top of her head. “It’s comforting to know you’d take a personal interest in such a matter.”

  “I’ll check out the first Mrs. Pettibone in the morning. If she did the hiring, she’d be my best link to this Julie Dockport.”

  “Interesting. A professional killer who selects the name of a prison as her surname.”

  She paused with the wineglass at her lips. “What?”

  “Dockport Rehabilitation Center. I believe I had an acquaintance who spent some time in that particular facility,” he replied as he toyed with the ends of her hair. “I think it’s in Illinois, or perhaps Indiana. One of those Midwest places.”

  “Wait a minute, wait a minute.” She pushed to her feet. “Dockport. Poison. Wait, wait.” She pressed her fingers to her temples, drilled them for the data.

  “Julie. No, not Julie. Julianna. Julianna Dunne. Eight, nine years back. Right
after I got my gold shield. Poisoned her husband. Big charity fund-raiser at the Met. I worked the case. She was slippery, she was slick. She’d done it before. Twice before. Once in East Washington, again in Chicago. That’s how we got her, the one in Chicago. I worked with the CPSD. She’d marry a rich guy, then she’d off him, take the money, and go reinvent herself for the next target.”

  “You sent her up?”

  Distracted, she shook her head and continued to pace. “I was part of it. I couldn’t break her in Interview, never got a confession out of her, but we got enough for an indictment, enough for a conviction. A lot of it weighed on the psych tests. She came up whacked. Seriously whacked. Hated men. And the jury didn’t like her. She was too fucking smug, too cold. They added up three dead husbands and close to a half a billion dollars and gave her ten to twenty. It was the best we could do, and we got lucky at that.”

  “Three murders, and she gets ten to twenty?”

  It was coming back, in a steady stream now. “East Washington couldn’t pin her. What we had there went to pattern. Lawyers pleaded the other counts down and with mostly circumstantial, we had to swallow it. She got reduced for diminished capacity. Childhood trauma, blah blah. She used most of the first husband’s money, the only scratch she could legally use, to wrangle that deal and pay for the trial and the appeals. Pissed her off. They held the trial in Chicago, and I was there for the verdict. I made sure I was there. Afterward, she asked to speak to me.”

  She leaned back on his desk, and though she looked at him Roarke knew she was ten years back, and looking at Julianna Dunne. “She said she knew I was the one responsible for her arrest, her conviction. The other cops . . . wait a minute,” she muttered as she pushed back in time to hear Julianna’s voice.

  “The other cops were just men, and she’d never lost a battle to a man. She respected me, woman to woman, and understood I felt I was just doing my job. Then again, so was she. She was certain I’d come to see that eventually. We’d talk again, when I did.”

  “What did you respond?”

  “That if it had been my call, she’d’ve gone down for all three murders and would never see the light of day again. That if I was responsible for putting her where she was going, good for me, but if I’d been the judge, she’d be serving three consecutive life terms. I hoped she’d come to see that eventually, because we had nothing to talk about.”

  “Clear, concise, and to the point, even with your shiny new gold badge.”

  “Yeah, I guess. She didn’t like it, not one bit, but laughed and said she was sure the next time we got together I’d see things more clearly. And that was that. The caterer’s going to transmit her employment records in the morning. I don’t want to wait that long. Can you get into them, pull up her ID photo and data?”

  “Who’s the caterer?”

  “Mr. Markie.”

  “Excellent choice.” He rose and walked behind the desk.

  “Can I use this other unit here?”

  “Be my guest.” He sat down and got to work.

  While he did, Eve ordered up the data on Julianna Dunne. She skimmed the text that popped up on the wall screen, listened with half an ear to the background information as she studied the most recent ID photo.

  At the time of the photo she’d still worn her hair long. Long and delicately blonde to go with her classic face and features. Wide blue eyes, thickly lashed, framed by slimly arched brown brows shades deeper than her hair. Her mouth was soft, a bit top heavy, her nose straight and perfect. Despite nearly a decade in prison, her skin looked smooth and creamy.

  She looked, Eve realized, like one of those glamour girls in the old videos Roarke enjoyed so much.

  RELEASED FROM DOCKPORT REHABILITATION CENTER, SEVENTEEN FEBRUARY, 2059. SERVED EIGHT YEARS, SEVEN MONTHS. SENTENCE REDUCED FOR GOOD BEHAVIOR. SUBJECT MET REHABILITATION REQUIREMENTS. FULFILLED MANDATORY SIXTY-DAY CHECKS, SIGNED OFF EIGHTEEN APRIL BY PAROLE OFFICER/REHABILITATION COUNSELOR OTTO SHULTZ, CHICAGO, WITH NO RESTRICTIONS. CURRENT RESIDENCE, 29 THIRD AVENUE, APARTMENT 605, NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK.

  “Not anymore,” Eve commented.

  “Your data, Lieutenant,” Roarke said as he ordered it onto the next wall screen.

  She studied Julianna’s side-by-side images. “She cut her hair, went red, changed her eye color. Didn’t bother with much else. That jibes with her old pattern. Logged her correct, if temporary address. Julianna dots her i’s and crosses her t’s. What does she have to do with Walter Pettibone?”

  “Do you think she went pro?”

  “She likes money,” Eve mused. “It, I don’t know, feeds some need. The same need killing men feeds. But it doesn’t fit her old pattern. Point is, she’s back, and she killed Pettibone. I have to update the all-points.”

  “Have you considered she came here, killed here, because of you?”

  Eve blew out a breath. “Maybe. That would mean I made a hell of an impression on her all those years ago.”

  “You tend to—make an impression.”

  Since she couldn’t think of a response, she pulled out her communicator and ordered the new all-points bulletin on Julianna Dunne.

  “If she follows her old pattern, she’s already out of the city. But we scooped her up once, we’ll scoop her up again. I’ll need to bring Feeney in on this. We were partners when Julianna went down.”

  “As I’m fond of him, I hope you don’t intend to do that until morning.”

  “Yeah.” She glanced at her wrist unit. “Nothing else to be done tonight.”

  “I don’t know.” He walked around the desk again, slid his arms around her. “I can think of one thing.”

  “You usually do.”

  “Why don’t we go to bed, and I’ll get you naked. Then we’ll see if you think of it, too.”

  “I guess that’s reasonable.” She started out with him. “I didn’t ask: Did the rest of the deal go okay with the Peabodys?”

  “Mmm. Fine.”

  “Figured. You play with strangers better than I do. Listen, I hear they’re going to stay in this camper thing they travel in, and that’s not a good idea. I thought since you have hotels and stuff you could get them a deal on a room.”

  “That’s not going to be necessary.”

  “Well yeah, because if they bunk in that thing on the street or in some lot, a beat cop’s going to cite them, maybe pull them in. They won’t flop at Peabody’s because her place is pretty tight. You’ve got to have an empty hotel room or apartment somewhere they can use.”

  “I imagine I do, yes, but. . .” At the door to their bedroom, he pulled her inside, toward the bed. “Eve.”

  She began to get a bad feeling. “What?”

  “Do you love me?”

  A very bad feeling. “Maybe.”

  He lowered his mouth to hers, kissed her soft and deep. “Just say yes.”

  “I’m not saying yes until I know why you’re asking the question.”

  “Perhaps I’m insecure, and needy, and want reassurance.”

  “My ass.”

  “Yes, I want your ass as well, but first there’s the matter of your great and generous and unconditional love for me.”

  She let him release her weapon harness, noticed he put it well out of reach before turning back and loosening the buttons of her shirt. “Who said anything about unconditional? I don’t remember signing that clause in the deal.”

  “What is it about your body that’s a constant fascination to me?” He feathered his fingers lightly over her breasts. “It’s all so firm and soft all at once.”

  “You’re stalling. And you never stall.” She grabbed his wrists before he could finish the job of distracting her. “You did something. What did you . . .” Realization struck, and her jaw dropped nearly to her toes. “Oh my God.”

  “I don’t know how it happened, precisely. I really can’t say how it came to be that Peabody’s parents are even now tucked away in a guest room on the third floor. East wing.”

  “Here? They
’re going to stay here? You asked them to stay here? With us?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “What do you mean you’re not sure? Did you ask them or not?”

  “There’s no point in getting into a snit.” One must, he knew very well, switch to offense when defense was running thin. “You’re the one who asked them to dinner, after all.”

  “To dinner,” she hissed, as if they might hear her in the east wing. “A meal doesn’t come with sleeping privileges. Roarke, they’re Peabody’s. What the hell are we going to do with them?”

  “I don’t know that either.” Humor danced back in his eyes, and he sat and laughed. “I’m no easy mark. You know that. And I swear to you even now I’m not sure how she managed it, though manage it, she did. I’m showing them around after dinner as Phoebe wanted a bit of a tour. She’s saying how nice it must be to have so many lovely rooms, and how comfortable and homey it all is despite all the size and space of it. And we’re in the east wing, and she’s wandering around one of the guest rooms and going to the window and saying what a wonderful view of the gardens. And look here, Sam, isn’t this a beautiful view and so on. She misses her flowers, she tells me. And I say something about her being welcome to roam the garden here if she likes.”

  “How did you get from walking around the gardens to sleeping in the guest room?”

  “She looked at me.”

  “And?”

  “She looked at me,” he repeated with a kind of baffled fascination, “and from there it’s difficult to explain. She was saying how comforting it was to her and Sam to know their Delia had such good friends, generous souls and something of the like. And how much it meant to them to have this time to get to know those friends. Before I knew it I was arranging for their things to be fetched, and she was kissing me good night.”

  “Peabody said she has the power.”

  “I’m here to tell you, the woman has something. It’s not that I mind. It’s a big house, and I like both of them quite a lot. But, for Christ’s sake, I usually know what I’m going to say before it comes spurting out of my mouth.”