by J. D. Robb
Once they managed to pull themselves up, she headed for the drying tube. Roarke grabbed a towel.
“Really, where is everybody?”
“Last I checked, Phoebe was having a fine time playing in the greenhouse. Sam and Summerset had their heads together in the kitchen over some recipe. They’ve bonded like glue over herbs and sauces and whatever. I’m told they’re going out with Peabody for the evening, so you don’t have to worry about entertaining them.”
She stepped out of the tube, took the robe he offered, then watched him hook a towel loosely at his hips. “Feeney and I are flying to Chicago tomorrow, taking a shot at Dockport. And no,” she said before he could speak, “we’re not taking one of your fancy transpos. We’ll use the shuttle, like regular people.”
“Up to you. Any new leads?”
“Nothing that’s firming up for us yet.” She followed him into the bedroom, hunted up a pair of jeans. “Found out that Pettibone’s first wife and the commander’s wife are tight. Makes it a little tricky, even though she’s not high on my list. I’ve got to do a second-level search on the financials of the main players.”
He glanced up as he hooked fresh trousers, met her scowl. “I didn’t say a thing.”
“I can hear you thinking, pal, and no. I’ve got authorization for second level, and that’s as deep as I’m going right now. I don’t need you using your unregistered equipment or dipping any deeper. We’re moving along well enough playing this by the book.”
“Do you ever ask yourself who wrote that book?”
“The long arm of the law. If you’ve got any free time, I wouldn’t mind your take on the financials. You see numbers differently than I do.”
“Lieutenant, I always have time for you.”
He gave her two hours, even settled for eating pizza in her office as they studied the financial affairs of Pettibone’s family and the top execs and accounts in his business. Deposits, withdrawals, transfers, bills, and bonuses.
“Nothing sends up any flags for me,” Roarke said at length. “You’ve got a couple of business associates who could use better advice on their portfolios, and that account in Tribeca should be doing a bit more per annum, so I wouldn’t be surprised if a bit is going in someone’s pocket here and there. Nothing major, but if it were mine, we’d be plugging the holes.”
“How much do you think is being skimmed?”
“Eight, nine thousand maybe, and that’s only this year. Petty ante. Not enough to kill for.”
“People kill for pocket change, Roarke.”
“Not enough, I should say, to hire a professional. You might want to chat with the manager there, but I’d say you’d be doing it more for form. He hasn’t enough to afford a pro’s fee, barely enough for an amateur, and he hasn’t shifted any real money out of his personals, or the flower shop to manage it. He’ll have a minor gambling problem, or a fancy piece on the side.”
“A fancy piece.”
He glanced over. “Well now, side pieces tend to be fancy as a rule, don’t they? Still, I’d opt for the gambling as I don’t see any purchases that indicate he’s got a woman. No hotel bills or out-of-the-way restaurant charges for dinner for two, no out-of-town trips where a man might sneak off with a woman not his wife.”
“Seems to me you know an awful lot about how a man keeps that fancy sidepiece.”
“Does it really? I’d say no more than your average man, and of course in a purely intellectual, even academic sense.”
She picked up another slice of pizza. “Isn’t it a good thing I agree with you, all around?”
“It’s a great relief to me.”
“I’ll have a talk with the guy with sticky fingers.” She rose, eating pizza as she paced. “It should be about money. It’s the logical motive. But it doesn’t feel like it’s about money. Why does she come back to New York and target a man she’s never met?”
“Maybe she had met him, or at least was planning to before she was interrupted nearly ten years ago.”
“He was married ten years ago,” Eve began, then paused to let it all sink in. “But maybe he was restless about the marriage even then. Maybe there are signs of that kind of dissatisfaction that a wife, a family, close friends don’t see. But an outsider, one who looks for discord might spot it. He could have been on her list as a possible, someone she was researching with the idea of luring him away from his wife and into a relationship, then marriage. He’d have been a real challenge to her because he’s basically a very decent, very honest man. Could she corrupt him?”
Considering, Eve turned back. “That would have appealed to her. We never pinned down how long she kept each of her targets in her sights. She may very well have been keeping Pettibone for a future mark, then she’s caught, tried, imprisoned. While she’s out of the picture, he divorces his wife, ends up with a fresh new wife. Maybe she killed him just because she never got the chance to play out her hand before.”
“If that theory holds, you’d have no link.”
“No, but I’d have a fucking motive. If she’s not killing for money, then she’s already got money, because she needs the lavish life. And maybe she killed just because she missed the rush. She had the money from the East Washington victim, but she hasn’t touched it. I checked on that. So she’s got other income and it’s been sitting waiting for a decade. I find it, I find her.”
“If I were stashing money away for a rainy day, it would be in numbered accounts, various institutions, various locations.” He washed down pizza with some excellent cabernet Sauvignon. “Both in and out of the country, both on and off planet. Not too much in any one pot,” he added when Eve frowned at him. “In that way, if you can’t easily or safely get to that particular pot, there’s always another.”
“It wouldn’t just be money. She liked stocks, bonds, that kind of thing. If you earmarked goodly chunks for the market, you couldn’t just sit back and let it ride for almost a decade. Could you?”
“Not if you had a brain cell still working. You’d need to keep an eye on things, shift funds, sell, buy, and so on. Or have someone you trusted to handle it.”
“She didn’t trust anyone. That tells me she found a way from prison to deal with it personally. That means transmissions, to and from, and they’re supposed to be monitored.”
“A bribe in the right hand would take care of that. Conservative investments, blue chip and so on, and she wouldn’t need much time to supervise her accounts. A few hours a week at most.”
“Feeney and I will have to find the hand she greased.”
“Do you plan to come home again in this century?” He angled his head. “Looking for a prison guard or inmate who’d be open to bribes shouldn’t take more than twenty, thirty years to pin down.”
“Have a little faith.” She licked pizza sauce from her thumb. “I’ll be home by dinnertime.”
“Two nights running? I’m going to mark my calendar.” When she only continued to frown, he shook his head. “What?”
“Nothing. I was just thinking.” She wandered back, pushed at another slice of pizza, decided against it.
Because he knew his woman, Roarke said nothing and waited her out.
“When I was interviewing Shelly Pettibone today, she was talking about her marriage. It came off like she still had a lot of feelings for him, even though he dumped her and married someone half her age, and with big tits. But it was more as if she were talking about a brother than a husband at this point. She said. . . Anyway, do you think the passion, the sex, the way it is with us is just going to mellow out and fade off after a while?”
“Bite your tongue.”
“I mean, people don’t end up on the floor of the shower all the time. And when that sort of thing stops happening, will you have anything left that keeps you together? Needing to be together, or do you end up being two people living in the same house?”
“Come here.”
“I don’t need reassurances, Roarke.” And she was already wishing she’d kept her
mouth shut. “It just struck me, that’s all. It was sort of sad, but understandable.”
“Come here anyway.” He reached out a hand for hers, and when she took it, drew her into his lap. “I can’t imagine not wanting you so that it puts an ache inside me. Seeing you, smelling you, touching you so everything in me needs. But, if when we’re a hundred and twenty and that’s more memory than reality, I’ll still need you, Eve, a thousand ways.”
“Okay.” She brushed the hair away from his face.
“Wait. Do you remember when first I saw you. In the winter, with death between us?”
“Yeah, I remember.”
“I didn’t make you for a cop. That disturbed me for some time later as I prided myself for spotting a cop at half a mile in the dark. But when I turned and looked at you, I didn’t see cop. I saw a woman. I saw the woman, though I hadn’t figured that out. I only knew that I looked, and I saw, and everything shifted. Nothing would be the same for me after that instant.”
She remembered how he had turned, looked back over the sea of mourners at a funeral, how his eyes had locked with hers as if they’d been the only ones there. And the power of that look had shaken her to her toes.
“You bothered me,” she murmured.
“I meant to. I looked, darling Eve, and saw the woman I would love, and trust, and need as I’d never expected to love or trust or need another living soul. The only woman I wanted to be with, to live with, to sleep and wake with. And a ghra, to grow old with.”
“How do you do it?” She lowered her forehead to his. “How do you always manage to say what I need to hear?”
“There are people who live out their lives together, and not just from habit or convenience or a fear of change. But from love. Maybe love has cycles. We haven’t been in it long enough to know, have we? But I know one thing utterly. I’ll love you till I die.”
“I know.” Tears brushed her cheek. “I know it because it’s the same for me. I felt sorry for that woman today because she’d lost that. She’d lost it, and didn’t even know where or when. God.” She had to take two long breaths because her throat was tight. “I was thinking about it later, thinking about what she’d said, how she’d said it. It just seemed to me that things were too easy between them, too smooth.”
“Well then.” He gave her a quick, hard squeeze. “Easy and smooth? Those are marital problems we’ll never have to worry about.”
Chapter 7
With slack jaws and shuffling feet, hundreds of commuters loaded on shuttles. Or were loaded on, Eve thought, like cargo and corpses, by the red uniformed drones and droids of Manhattan Commuter Transport Service.
The terminal was a hive of noise, a great cacophony of sound that had an insectile hum as an undertone. Over it, the incomprehensible voices of flight announcers buzzed, babies wailed, pocket-links pinged.
She wondered whose idea it was to design places like this with soaring ceilings and white walls so those who had the misfortune to use the services were like ants trapped inside a drum.
She smelled bad coffee, sweat, overpowering colognes, and what she assumed was a diaper in desperate need of changing.
“Like old times,” Feeney said after they’d managed to muscle their way on and snag two of the seats designed for the narrow asses of twelve-year-old anorexics. “Guess it’s been awhile since you used a public shuttle.”
“I thought I missed it.” She did her best to pull her face back from the parade of crotches and butts that pressed in to make the forced shuffle down the crammed aisle. “How wrong can you get?”
“Not so bad. Be there inside a half hour if they don’t screw something up.” He jiggled the sugared almonds in the bag he pulled out of his pocket. “We’d’ve shaved time off that with one of Roarke’s transpos.”
She dipped into the bag, munched, considered. “You figure I’m stupid for not using his stuff?”
“Nah. You’re just you, kid. And being smothered in here helps keep us in touch with the common man.”
When the third briefcase cracked her in the shin, and a guy corkscrewed himself into the seat beside her, plastering her against Feeney so they had less personal space than a pair of Siamese twins, Eve decided keeping in touch with the common man was overrated.
They took off with the kind of mechanical shudder that always pitched her stomach to her knees. She kept her teeth gritted and her eyes shut until landing. Passengers vomited off the shuttle, scattered. Eve and Feeney joined the herd heading for the east-bound train.
“Wasn’t so bad,” he commented.
“Not if you like to start your day with carnival rides. This dumps us out about a half block from the facility. Warden’s name is Miller. We’ll have to dance with him first.”
“You want to go down the list together, or split off?”
“I’m thinking we split off, save time, but let’s get the lay of the land first. Guess we need to play politics, stop in on the Chicago cops.”
“Could be Julianna’s backtracking from her past. If she is, Chicago’d be her next stop.”
Eve opted to stand on the train, and grabbed a hook. “Yeah. I can’t get inside her head. What’s her purpose this time around? There’s a logic to what she does. It’s screwed-up, but it’s a logic. I’m wondering if she came back to New York because that’s where things went to hell for her. She’s got something to prove, to us, Feeney. If that’s it, then the targets are secondary. It’s about beating us, beating the system, this time out.” She shook her head. “Anyway you play it, she’s already got her next mark.”
Dockport resembled a small, self-contained, and tidy city with guard towers, bars, and shock-walls. She doubted the residents fully appreciated the well-maintained roads, the patches of green, or the suburban architecture. Not when an overwhelming urge for a stroll outside the boundaries would result in a sensor alert and a zapping shock that would knock you back a good ten feet on your ass.
Droid dogs patrolled the perimeter. The woman’s recreation yard was vast and equipped with basketball court, running track, and scrubbed-down picnic tables painted a cheerful blue.
The walls around it were twelve-feet high and three-feet thick.
Inside, the floors were as clean and sparkling as a grandmother’s kitchen. Walkways were wide and roomy. Areas were sectioned off with doors of riot glass designed to withstand the blast of homemade boomers or a laser shot.
Guards wore dark blue, other staff street clothes topped with chef-white coats. Inmates wore neon-orange jumpsuits emblazoned on the back with the black block initials DRC.
They were run through security at the main entrance, politely tagged with both ID shield and bracelets, and requested to surrender any and all weapons.
Miller, dapper and distinguished despite the silly coat, was all smiles as he greeted them. He gripped Eve’s then Feeney’s hand in both of his, spewing welcomes like the owner of some fashionable resort.
“We appreciate you taking the time to see us, Warden Miller,” Eve began.
“Supervisor.” He gave a quick, hearty chuckle. “We no longer use antiquated terms such as warden. Dockport Rehabilitation Center is a completely modern facility. We were built just twenty-five years ago, and began accepting residents in ’34. Here at the Women’s Center of DRC, we house a maximum of fifteen hundred, and maintain a staff of six hundred and thirty full-time, fifty-eight part-time, and twenty outside consultants. We’re fully self-contained with health facilities, banking, shops, and dining facilities. We do hope you’ll join us for lunch in the staff eatery. Overnight accommodations for visitors and consultants, physical therapy and exercise, mental and emotional fitness centers, training facilities that offer classes in a variety of career choices and skills geared toward resocialization are all available on the premises. The Men’s Center is similarly equipped.”
They passed through an office area where people went busily about their business, clipping along the corridors, manning desks, answering ’links. A number of them wore the brigh
t orange jumpsuits.
“Prisoners are allowed in this area?” Eve asked.
“Residents,” Miller corrected mildly, “are allowed—encouraged—to apply for suitable jobs after they’ve completed half their rehabilitation training. It aids in their adjustment to the outside world when they leave us, so they may re-enter society with self-esteem and a meaningful purpose.”
“Uh-huh. Well, one of your former residents has re-entered society with a meaningful purpose. She likes killing men. We need to talk about Julianna Dunne, Supervisor Miller.”
“Yes.” He pressed his palms together like a preacher about to call the congregation to prayer. “I was very distressed to learn you believe she’s involved in a homicide.”
“I don’t believe she’s involved. I know she’s a murderer. Just as she was when she came here.”
He paused. “I beg your pardon, Lieutenant, but from your tone I get the impression you don’t believe in the basic tenets of rehabilitation.”
“I believe in crime and punishment, and that some learn from it. Learn it well enough to change how they live in the real world. I also believe that there are some who can’t change, or just don’t want to.”
Through the glass door at Miller’s back, she watched two inmates make a quick, slick exchange of envelopes. Credits for illegals was Eve’s guess.
“They like what they do,” she added, “and can’t wait for the chance to get back to it. Julianna likes what she does.”
“She was a model resident,” he said stiffly.
“I bet. And I bet she applied for a job position when half her time was up. Where’d she work?”
He drew air through his nose. Most of the warm bonhomie chilled under insult and disapproval. “She was employed at the Visitor’s Coordination Center.”
“Access to computers?” Feeney asked.
“Of course. Our units are secured and passcoded. Residents are not permitted unsupervised transmissions. Her immediate superior, Georgia Foster, gave Julianna the highest evaluations.”
