Big Jack (16 page)

Rather than her usual snarling match with a doorman, this one trotted over in his sedate navy blue uniform and cap to greet her with a respectful nod.

“Welcome to the Rembrandt. Will you be checking in, madam?”

“No.” She flashed her badge, but his polite manner took some of the fun out of it. “I’m here to see a guest.”

“Shall I arrange parking for you during your visit?”

“No, you should leave this vehicle exactly where I’ve put it.”

“Of course,” he said without a wince or a gasp, and sucked the rest of the wind from her sails. “Enjoy your visit at the Rembrandt, Lieutenant. My name’s Malcolm if you need any assistance while you’re here.”

“Yeah. Well. Thanks.” His manner took her off-guard enough to have her break her own firm policy. She pulled out ten credits and handed it to him.

“Thank you very much.” He was at the door before her, sweeping it open.

The lobby was small and furnished like someone’s very tasteful parlor with deeply cushioned chairs and gleaming wood, glossy marble, paintings that might have been original work. There were flowers, but rather than the twenty-foot arrangements Eve often found a little scary, there were small, attractive bouquets arranged on various tables.

Instead of a check-in counter with a platoon of uniformed, toothy clerks, there was a woman at an antique desk.

With security in mind, Eve scanned the area and spotted four discreetly placed cameras. So that was something.

“Welcome to the Rembrandt.” The woman, slender, dressed in pale peach, with her short shock of hair streaked blond and black, rose. “How may I assist you?”

“I’m here to see Samantha Gannon. What room is she in?”

“One moment.” The woman sat back down, scanned the screen on her desk unit. She looked up at Eve with an apologetic smile. “I’m sorry. We have no guest by that name.”

The words were hardly out of her mouth when two men stepped out of a side door. Eve tagged them as security, and noted by stance that they were armed.

“Good. I’m on the job.” She directed this to the men as she held up her right hand. “Dallas, Lieutenant, Homicide. My partner. Peabody, Detective. IDs coming.”

She reached for her badge with two fingers and kept her eyes on the security team. “Your security’s better than it looks at first glance.”

“We’re very protective of our guests,” the woman answered, and took Eve’s badge to scan it, then Peabody’s. “These are in order,” she said, and nodded to the two men. “Ms. Gannon is expecting you. I’ll just ring her room and let her know you’re here.”

“Fine. What do they load you with?” Eve nodded toward security, and one of them flipped aside his jacket to reveal a multi-action, mid-range hand stunner in a quick-release side holster. “That oughta do it.”

“Ms. Gannon’s ready for you, Lieutenant. She’s on four. Your officer is in the alcove by the elevator. He’ll show you her room.”

“Appreciate it.” She walked to the two-bank elevator with Peabody. “She showed sense picking a place like this. Solid security, probably the kind of service that gives you everything you want five minutes before you ask for it.”

They stepped on, and Peabody ordered the fourth floor. “How much you think it costs for a night here?”

“I don’t know that stuff. I don’t know why people don’t just stay home in the first place. No matter how snazzy the joint, there’s always some stranger next door when you’re in a hotel. Probably another one over your head, the other under your feet. Then there’s bell service and housekeeping and other people coming in and out all the damn time.”

“You sure know how to take the romance out of it.”

The uniform was waiting when they stepped off. “Lieutenant.” He hesitated, looked pained.

“You’ve got a problem asking me for an ID check, Officer? How do you know I didn’t get on at two, blast Dallas and Peabody between the eyes, dump their lifeless bodies and ride the rest of the way up intending to blast you, then get to the subject?”

“Yes, sir.” He took their IDs, used his hand scanner. “She’s in four-oh-four, Lieutenant.”

“Anyone attempt entrance since your shift began?”

“Both housekeeping and room service, both ordered by subject, both checked before given access. And Roarke, who was cleared at lobby level, by subject and by myself.”

“Roarke.”

“Yes, sir. He’s been with subject for the past fifteen minutes.”

“Hmm. Stand down, Officer. Take ten.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

“Are you going to be pissed at him?” Peabody asked. “Roarke, I mean.”

“I don’t know yet.” Eve rang the bell and was satisfied by the slight wait that told her Samantha made use of the security peep.

There were circles under Samantha’s eyes, and a pallor that spoke of sleepless nights. She appeared to have dressed carefully though, in dark pants and a white tailored shirt. There were tiny square hoops at her ears and a thin matching bracelet on her wrist.

“Lieutenant. Detective. I think you know each other,” she added, gesturing to where Roarke sat, sipping what smelled like excellent coffee. “I didn’t put it together. You, my publisher. I knew the connection, of course, but with everything . . . with everything, it just didn’t input.”

“You get around,” Eve said to Roarke.

“As much as possible. I wanted to check on one of our valued authors, and convince her to accept security. I believe you recommended private security in this matter, Lieutenant.”

“I did.” Eve nodded. “It’s a good idea. If he’s providing it,” she told Samantha, “you’ll have the best.”

“I didn’t take any convincing. I want to live a long and happy life, and I’ll take whatever help I can get to make sure of it. Do you want coffee? Anything?”

“It’s real coffee?”

“She has a weakness.” Roarke smiled. “She married me for the coffee.”

Some of the bloom came back into Samantha’s cheeks. “I could write a hell of a book about the two of you. Glamour, sex, murder, the cop and the gazillionaire.”

“No,” they said together, and Roarke laughed.

“I don’t think so. I’ll deal with the coffee, Samantha. Why don’t you sit down? You’re tired.”

“And it shows.” Samantha sat, sighed and let Roarke go into the kitchen area for more coffee and cups. “I can’t sleep. I can work. I can put my head into the work, but when I stop, I can’t sleep. I want to be home, and I can’t stand the thought of being home. I’m tired of myself. I’m alive, I’m well and whole, and others aren’t, and I keep spiraling into self-pity anyway.”

“You should give yourself a break.”

“Dallas is right,” Peabody put in. “You were up and running a couple of weeks, come home to something that would put a lot of people under. You’ve been hit with everything all at once. A little self-pity doesn’t hurt. You should take a tranq and check out for eight or ten hours.”

“I hate tranqs.”

“There you take hands with the lieutenant.” Roarke came in with a tray. “She won’t take them voluntarily either.” He set the coffee down. “Do you want me out of your way?”

Eve studied him. “You’re not in it yet. I’ll let you know when you are.”

“You never fail.”

“Samantha, why did you leave out Alex Crew’s family connections in your book?”

“Connections?” Samantha leaned forward for her coffee and, Eve noted, avoided eye contact.

“Specifically Crew’s ex-wife and son. You give considerable details regarding Myers’s family and what they dealt with after his death. You speak at great length of William Young and your own family. And though you feature Crew prominently, there’s no mention of a wife or a child.”

“How do you know he had a wife and child?”

“I’m asking the questions. You didn’t miss those details in your research. Why aren’t they in the book?”

“You put me in a difficult position.” Samantha held the coffee, stirring, stirring, long after the minute sprinkle of sugar she’d added would have dissolved. “I made a promise. I couldn’t and wouldn’t have written the book without my family’s blessing. Most specifically without my grandparents’ permission. And I promised them I’d leave Crew’s son out of it.”

As if realizing what her hand was doing, she tapped the spoon on the rim of her cup, then set it aside. “He was only a little boy when this happened. My grandmother felt—still feels—that his mother was trying to protect him from Crew. Hide him from Crew.”

“Why did she think that?”

After setting her untasted coffee down, Samantha dragged her fingers through her hair. “I’m not free to talk about it. I swore I wouldn’t write about it, or talk about it in interviews. No.” She held up her hands before Eve could speak. “I know what you’re going to say, and you’re absolutely right. These are not ordinary circumstances. This is murder.”

“Then answer the question.”

“I need to make a call. I need to speak with my grandmother, which is going to start another round of demands, debates and worry with her and my grandfather. Another reason I’m not sleeping.”

She pressed her fingers to her eyes before dropping them into her lap. “They want me to come to Maryland, stay with them, or they threaten to descend on me here. It’s tough going to keep them from calling my parents and sibs. I’m holding them off, and I’m gratefully accepting Roarke’s offer for security on them until this is resolved. Until it is, I’m staying here. I think it’s important that I see this through, that I deal in my way with what’s happening now just as they did in theirs with what happened then.”

“Part of dealing is giving the primary any and all data that may pertain to this investigation.”

“Yes, you’re right again. Just let me call, speak to her first. We don’t break promises in my family. It’s like a religion to my grandmother. I’ll go in the bedroom, call her now, if you can just wait a few minutes.”

“Go ahead.”

“Admirable,” Roarke said when she’d gone. “To set such store by your word, particularly to family when for some reason the more intimate you are, the easier a promise is to break. Or at least bend to circumstance.”

“Her great-grandfather broke a lot of promises,” Eve reflected. “Jack O’Hara broke a lot of promises, to Laine and Laine’s mother. So Samantha’s grandmother wanted to end the cycle. You don’t intend to keep your word, even when it’s hard, you don’t give it. You have to respect that.”

She glanced toward the bedroom, back at him. “Offering to take care of her security, and the Maryland Gannons’, is classy. But you could’ve sent a lackey to handle it.”

“I wanted to meet her. She struck a chord with you, and I wanted to see why. I do.”

When Samantha came out of the bedroom a few minutes later, she was teary-eyed. “I’m sorry. I hate worrying her. Worrying them. I’m going to have to go down to Maryland and put their minds at ease very soon.”

She sat, took a bracing sip of coffee. “Judith and Westley Crew,” she began. She gave them the foundation data she had, and at one point went to get some of her own notes to refresh her memory.

“So you see, when my grandfather tracked her and found Crew had been there, he believed he might’ve given the child something that held the diamonds. A portion of them, in any case. It was a safe place to keep them while he went about his work.”

“He would’ve had half of them, or access to half of them, at that time?” Eve made her own notes.

“Yes. With what was recovered in the safe-deposit box, that left a quarter of the diamonds among the missing. Crew’s ex-wife and son were gone. Everything indicated, to my grandmother at least, that she’d been hiding from Crew. The change of names, the quiet job, the middle-class neighborhood. Then the way she packed up and left—sold everything she could or gave it away and just got out. It seemed she was running again because he’d found her. Or more, to my grandmother’s mind, the boy. Just a little boy, you see, and his mother was trying to protect him from a man she’d come to know was dangerous and obsessive. If you look at Crew’s background and criminal record, his pattern of behavior, she was right to be afraid.”

“She might have taken off because she had a few million in diamonds in her possession,” Eve pointed out.

“Yes. But my grandparents didn’t believe, and I don’t believe, that a man like Crew would have given them to her, would have told her. Used her, yes, and the boy, but not given her that kind of power.
He
needed to be in charge. He would’ve found them again when he wanted to. I’ve no doubt he threatened the woman and would have discarded or disposed of her when his son was older. Old enough to be of more interest and use to Crew. My grandfather let it go, let the remaining diamonds go, let them go. Because my grandmother asked it of him.”

“She’d once been a young child,” Roarke said with a nod, “who’d had to be uprooted or moved about, who’d never had a settled home or the security that comes with it. And like Crew’s ex, her mother had made a choice—to separate herself from the man and shield her child.”

“Yes. Yes. The bulk of the diamonds were back where they belonged. And they were, as my grandmother is fond of saying, only things, after all. The boy and his mother were finally safe. If they’d pursued it, and I have no doubt my grandfather could have tracked them down, they’d have been pulled into the mess. The young boy would have had everything his father had done pushed in his face, would very likely have ended up a national news story himself. His life might have been damaged or severely changed by this one thing. So they told no one.”

She leaned forward. “Lieutenant, they withheld information. It was probably illegal for them to withhold it. But they did it for the best possible reason. They would have gained more. Five percent more of over seven million, if they’d tracked her down. They didn’t, and the world’s managed to sputter along without those particular stones.”

Samantha wasn’t just defending herself and her grandparents, Eve noted. She was defending a woman and child she’d never met. “I’m not interested in dragging your grandparents into this. But I am interested in finding Judith and Westley Crew. The diamonds don’t mean squat to me, Samantha. I’m not Robbery, I’m Homicide. Two women are dead, you may very well be a target. The motive for this comes from the diamonds, and that’s my interest in them. Someone else can do the research and dig up the fact that Crew had a wife and child. This could make them targets.”