Brotherhood in Death (12 page)

“Is that enough? Can that be enough for now? It feels awful to talk about him this way.” Tears swirled into Gwen’s eyes again. “We want to help, but can this be enough?”

“Sure. And you have helped.”

“Then I want to go home. I want my family.”

“I’ll take you home.” Ned got to his feet.

“You don’t need to.”

“How about if Zoe brings the kids, we just hold together at your house for a while?”

Gwen closed her eyes. “That would be great. That would feel right. My aunt—our mother’s sister,” Gwen told Eve, “came in. That’s who our mother really wants now. The rest of us will hold together.”

They’d do just that, Eve thought when they left. They’d hold together.

“It had to be rough, growing up that way. Being ordered to toe a line, never seeing real love and loyalty between your parents.”

“They got out of it,” Eve said. “They made their own.”

She’d done the same.

She went back to her office, added to her notes. Hesitated, then copied Mira. It might be hard to read what Ned and Gwen had said, but she imagined Mira already knew all of it.

She wanted home, too, she realized. She’d find her focus again working at home.

She gathered what she needed, grabbed her coat, then made the mistake of answering her ’link.

The media liaison informed her she needed to give a statement on the Mira case.

Resigned—she’d known it was coming—she went out to the bullpen and Peabody’s desk.

“I have to go do the media statement, and I’m taking this home from there. I want reports on the spouses, and the verified alibis. You can do the rest here or at home, as long as I have everything tonight.”

“I’ll stick with it here until McNab’s off.”

“Copy Mira, but not through official channels. Got that?”

“Got that.”

She might hate this part of the job, but she would get it done. And she was grateful the liaison set a strict time of ten minutes, for statement and questions.

The questions sent up an echoing bang in her head on the drive home.

Is it true Senator Mira was found naked?

Why was his abduction not reported?

Is Dr. Charlotte Mira attached to this investigation?

Is Professor Dennis Mira a suspect?

How long was Senator Mira tortured before his death?

Christ, she thought, Christ, what public had the right to know that? Which was exactly how she’d answered the question before she’d walked away.

Home, she told herself. Maybe a workout or a swim before she dug back into it. Just something to take the edge off the ugliness of the day.

A workout and a swim, she decided as she drove through the gates. Thirty minutes each. She could take an hour, then start back fresh.

Just seeing the house made her feel more centered. She didn’t know why the conversation with Gwen and Ned had left her so unsettled.

They hadn’t been beaten or brutalized. They’d grown up privileged. Nothing like her own experience. But she’d felt her own old dread rising up as she’d listened to them, greasy memories of fear, of helplessness.

She needed it gone.

She prepped herself as she parked. She could start getting it gone by exchanging swipes with Summerset. That should shove back the echoes.

But Summerset wasn’t in the foyer, and that threw her balance off even more. He was
supposed
to be there, lurking, sneering, making some lame-ass comment.

“Early,” she grumbled to herself as she went up the stairs. “Damn right I’m home early. I made a point of it so I could catch you crawling out of your coffin. That would’ve been a pretty good one. Now it’s wasted.”

She started to head for the bedroom, changed her mind, aimed for her office. She’d dump everything there, take the time to update her board. Then she could let things simmer in the back of her brain while she pounded out a few miles, swam a few laps.

She was still steps away from her office when she heard the humming. Female humming.

What the hell? One of the house droids she rarely, if ever, saw? Did they hum happy tunes?

She stepped into the doorway.

Not a droid, but a glam-type redhead with a tablet, prowling around
her
personal space humming that fucking happy tune.

And where was her board?

Who the hell was the woman in crotch-high stiletto boots walking around . . . and sitting her skinny ass on
HER
desk.

Eve flipped back her coat, laid her hand on the butt of her weapon.

“Who the hell are you?”

The redhead let out a quick squeal, bounced her skinny ass off the corner of the desk. She slapped a hand between her perky breasts and goggled at Eve.

“Oh God! You scared me.”

“Yeah?” Hand on her weapon, Eve stepped into the room. “Want to get really scared? You will be if I don’t have your name and how you got in here in ten seconds.”

“I’m Charmaine. You must be Lieutenant Dallas. It’s just lovely to meet you. I was just finishing up the measurements.”

“What measurements?”

“For the . . . I’m so flustered. You really did give me a scare. I’m not really supposed to say. Roarke’s just—”

And he walked in from his office. “Sorry about the interruption. If you’d . . . Eve.”

He noted her stance, the position of her hand, the look in her eye. And sighed. “You’re home early.”

“Yeah, how about that? Who’s this, what’s she doing in my office?”

“Charmaine Delacroix, Lieutenant Dallas. Charmaine’s an interior designer I’ve worked with on a number of projects. Including the dojo.”

“Wonderfully minimalistic,” Charmaine said, “yet far from rigid or Spartan.”

Roarke subtly angled himself between her and Eve. “Do you have everything you need?”

“Absolutely. I can’t wait to get started. I’ll have some options for you
by next week. Wonderful to meet you,” she said to Eve. “I know the way out.”

Eve gave her five seconds to beat feet, then rounded on Roarke. “You let somebody prowl around my office.”

“I had a designer come in, get a feel for it, measure, and would have been in here with her the entire time—though she’s perfectly trustworthy—but there was a call I had to take.”

“Why does some designer have to get a
feel
for my office? It’s
my
office, isn’t it? And where’s my goddamn murder board?”

“I put it away, as you wouldn’t want anyone not involved to see it. And if you hadn’t come home unexpectedly, it would’ve been back in place.”

Outrage wanted to blow the top of her skull through the ceiling. “So it’s okay if I don’t know the difference? It’s okay if I go into your office, take things and put them somewhere else, tell somebody to come right on in, as long as you don’t know about it?”

“If you had a reason to, as I did.”

“What possible reason did you have for moving my murder board, for letting some humming woman into my space?”

“‘Humming’?”

“She was
humming
. For Christ’s sake.”

“I suppose she has a cheerful disposition. The reason was to surprise you with some ideas for redoing your space.”

Another round of outrage wanted to blow flames out of her ears.

“Why do I need ideas for redoing it? It’s fine. It was just fine for you, too, when you put it together so I’d move in here. What, now it’s not good enough? Not fancy enough?”

His eyes chilled to blue ice. “If you’re going to deliberately be an ass, if you insist on raving over something this simple, we can talk about it when you’re not.”

“I’m an ass? You start messing with my space, and I’m an ass?”

“People change, Eve. They change their minds, their attitudes, their
look, and often the look of their spaces. I thought, after this amount of time, you might be ready for a change here, in this space, to have it reflect what’s now rather than the past. Obviously, you’re not. But that’s not why you’re an ass. You’re an ass for being so pathetically insecure you’d react as if you’d walked in on the two of us naked and banging each other on your precious desk.

“I still have work.”

She set her teeth as he walked back toward his office. “If I’d walked in on that, you better believe I’d have used my weapon. On both of you.”

“That’s something, I suppose,” he said, and shut his office door.

Oh, she hated when he did that. Hated when she was primed for a good, bloody fight and he just iced over and walked away from it.

And he
knew
she hated it.

Her instinct was to bang right through that door and battle on, but . . . He’d probably like that, wouldn’t he? She paced and prowled around her office.
Her
space! He’d just love it if she went barging in, raging on, while he sat there with his scary Roarke iced calm.

She knew how to get through the ice, oh yeah, she did. She knew which buttons to push to bring on the heat. But he’d probably like that, too. He’d just
love
being able to think he’d been
reasonable
while she barged and raged and bitched.

She wouldn’t give him the fucking satisfaction.

Screw it. She’d come home to take an hour to clear her head, she’d take the damn hour.

She stalked out of her office, snarled all the way to the bedroom,
where the cat’s full, pudgy length was sprawled across the center of the bed.

“Don’t even start on me,” she warned as he opened his bicolored eyes to stare at her. “How would he like it if I had somebody come in here?” She yanked off her coat, tossed it on the bed. “If I just decided, Hey, I’m going to change everything in the bedroom. Yeah, a decorating bug crawled up my ass, so I’m going to toss this all out and haul in something else.

“How do you like
that
?”

She dragged off her weapon harness, pulled out her ’link, her communicator, her badge, tossed them and the other pocket debris on the dresser.

Galahad, who knew something about moods and timing, kept his own counsel while Eve stripped out of her street clothes, pulled on workout gear.

“You could be next,” she warned Galahad as she strode onto the elevator. “He could get another bug up his ass and dye you pink and dress you in a tux.”

She fumed all the way down to the gym. Definitely not the time for a holo-session with Master Wu. She considered beating the crap out of one of the sparring droids, but thought Roarke would probably enjoy
that
, so she opted for the tread, programmed it for a hard urban run, with obstacles.

A beach run would have relaxed her, but she wasn’t ready to relax. Instead she pounded the city streets, kicked a little street-thief ass, climbed, leaped, rolled over barriers until she had a solid five miles in.

She switched to weights, pumped until her muscles burned, then finished up with some ab-searing crunches before she stretched it out.

Sweaty, winded, she headed to the tropical wonder of the pool house, stripped off. Dived into the cool, blue water.

Five double laps later, her body begged for a break. And her thoughts snuck back.

Her space. Hers. He didn’t have any business pushing her to change her space, bringing in some fancy redhead because it wasn’t all . . . fancy.

Nothing wrong with her office, she thought as she let herself coast through the water. It was serviceable. It was good enough. Maybe it was a blight, a dumpy box in the grandeur of the house.

But it was her blight, damn it.

She got good work done in there, and he had never complained about it before. He’d made it like that in the first place, completely stunning her with the replica of her apartment, right down to the crappy desk.

Damn it. Damn it. He’d turned her heart inside out with that gesture, and now he wanted to change it.

Because she didn’t live in the old apartment with the crappy desk anymore, she thought.

She hissed out a breath, muttered, “Hell,” and let herself sink under the water.

She had herself under better control when she came back up. The mad simmered under it all, but the control skimmed a fine veneer over the rest. She changed into cotton pants, a sweatshirt, skids, then sat down, stroked the cat.

“He wouldn’t dye you pink or dress you in a tux. He likes you fine just the way you are. Sometimes I wonder about me, but you’re good.”

Galahad bumped his head against her arm, so she stroked him into ecstasy. It only took a couple of minutes, making her think cats were a hell of a lot easier to live with than people.

He followed her out and to her office, where Roarke’s door remained shut.

She curled her lip at it.

“He could stay in there, iced over, for days. So let him. I’ve got work. See anything wrong in here?” she asked the cat.

Galahad looked at her, then jogged over to leap onto her sleep chair.

“See? Everything we need. Except my damn board.”

She found it, neatly stowed in the storage area, hauled it back.

She updated it, got coffee, studied it, circled it, made a couple changes, then went to her desk—suitably crappy for her—and reviewed her notes.

She barely glanced up when Roarke walked in. He went to the wall panel, chose a bottle of wine.

Uncorked it.

“Wine?” he asked.

“No, and I’m not going to apologize.”

“What a coincidence. Neither am I.”

“I’m not the one who had some redhead poking around, humming in those boots.”

He cocked a brow. “You object to the boots?”

“I object to any boots that have six-inch heels the width of my pinkie, but that’s not the point. And you can go all ice storm, but I have plenty of objections to coming home after a pissy day and finding out you’ve decided to make changes to where I work without saying a damn thing to me about it. Without seeing how I felt about it.”

“You’re wrong.”

“The hell I am.”

“You’re wrong,” he repeated, “that you wouldn’t have been consulted, that I would have changed a single square inch without consulting you or seeing how you felt, what you wanted. That’s bollocks, Eve, and I don’t deserve it.”

“You’re the one who had her in here. I didn’t get the memo.”

He looked down at his wine, drank. “I had her come in to revisit the space, to take a fresh look at it with some ideas I’d given her.”

“You’d given her.”

“Yes. As I’m intimate with where and how you work.”

“This is where I work when I’m here. This is how. You’re the one who put it together like this in the first place. Goddamn it.” She shoved
up from her desk, yanked out the tear-shaped diamond she wore on a chain under her sweatshirt.

“When you gave me this fat-assed diamond and said you loved me, I just thought you were crazy.”

“I recall.” Eyeing her over it, he took another sip of wine. “Clearly.”

“But when you showed me this, what you’d done for me here, in your home. How you’d made this space for me, just like my apartment, because you understood I needed my own, I needed what I knew. You
got
that, so I started to believe you did. You loved me. Now it’s not good enough.”

“It’s not good enough, no,” he said, striking her to the core. “It’s not good enough for you—for who you are and what you do every bloody day. But that’s only part of it. Once, you needed that familiarity, that security, to leave your apartment and come here. I needed you. So I gave you what you needed to be here, to have your own here. I thought three years was enough time for you to let it go, really leave it behind, and to make something new, for yourself. Not in my home. In ours.”

His eyes remained cool on hers, but she thought she caught something behind that blue frost. And that something was hurt.

“It’s . . . troubling to realize you still need to hold on to what was before. Before us.”

“That’s not it.” No, no, she wouldn’t swallow that. “That’s not fair. That’s bullshit wrong. I’m not holding on to anything. Much,” she amended. “I’m not insecure. Exactly.”

Shit, shit,
shit
.

“I’m used to the space. It works fine. How can I have cops come up here, work here, if you go all fancy with it? It’s a work space, for solving murders, closing cases, not for showing off.”

Frustration eked through the ice—which was better to her mind than hurt.

“Updating and creating an efficient work area isn’t showing off.
Christ Jesus, for a woman with such professional arrogance, you’re forever worried about your idea of showing off otherwise.”

“You want to talk arrogance, pal.”

“No. I want to talk about that desk.”

“The—what?”

“Are you attached to that desk?”

“I . . .” Thrown off, she shoved at her hair, frowned at the desk. “There’s nothing wrong with it.”

“I can’t count the manner of things wrong with it. But if you’re attached, it stays. It’s that simple. If you’re not, you might consider one of the options you’d have, such as the command center I have in mind.”

“I don’t . . . ‘command center’?”

“A wide-curved U, controls and swipe screens built in, the main D&C at the top of the curve, auxiliary on one side, disc storage, holo controls on the other. I’ll be updating some of my own in my office, and in my office with the unregistered. Technology makes leaps almost daily, and it pays to keep up with it.”

“I don’t get along very well with technology, so—”

“That would be taken into account.”

He rolled right over her. Not so icily now, she noted. He’d heated up all on his own. Maybe there was some hurt, definitely some frustration. But mostly he was deeply pissed.

“You prefer a physical board, so that remains. You’d have the option for the screen, and the screens here, as elsewhere, would be updated. We’re hardly talking about fussy window treatments and bloody divans.”

“Yeah, but—”

“We have dinner in here more often than not.” He rolled right over her again. “So it’s time we had a more pleasant area for it—likely over there. Table, chairs, part of the space, but in a more defined area. With a table that would expand when we’re invaded by half your department. Which takes us to the secondary workstations and the seating area.”

“‘Seating’?”

He gestured with his wine. “You can go on about not liking visitors in your work space, but the fact is, you often have people in here. Cops, in any case.”

“They’ll never leave if you make it all comfortable.” She rubbed at the back of her neck because, damn it, she could see some of it. And she was still hung up on the idea of a command center. “I’m used to it, that’s all, and then I come in and some redhead in boots is in here humming. And you’re: Here’s what’s going to happen.”

“I say again, nothing would have been changed, been touched without your approval. It’s not just your office, Eve, bloody hell, it’s your
house
.”

“That’s why I was pissed!” At wit’s end, she yanked at her hair. “It’s my house, too, and it felt like you were just taking over without telling me.”

He paused a moment, poured more wine. “There’s a point. I’ll give you that. And it’s lowered the troubling quite a bit to have you say it. I wasn’t taking over, but laying the groundwork for something you could choose. Or not. Would you like to work with Charmaine?”

“Have you lost your mind?”

“I haven’t. I brought her in, and would have presented you with some completed options I felt would appeal to you. If none did, she could come up with more, or, again, not. If you liked any, but wanted changes, there’d be changes. Just as we handled the dojo. I strongly suspect if I’d said to you I wanted to have a dojo designed, particularly for you, you’d have said . . .

“Who the hell has a dojo in their house?” he demanded in a snarky American accent that surprised a laugh out of her.

“I don’t sound like that.”

“Close enough. And you should know now she’ll be working up some fresh looks for the bedroom.”

“What? What? Why? It’s nice. It’s—”

“It was designed for me, before I ever set eyes on you. Well before, come to that. Now it’ll be designed for us.”

“I’m fine with it.”

“You’ll have to be fine with any new design before anything’s done. So if you come home unexpectedly, and there’s a redhead humming in the bedroom, you’ll know why, and not react as if I’m about to shag her on our bed.”

Insulted, she jabbed a finger at him. “I didn’t react like that. If I had, there’d be a droid wearing your skin suit. Just ask Peabody because I explained it to her just today.”

“And why is that?”

“Because I spent most of today talking to adulterers. And I do want wine,” she decided, taking his. “And it put me in a mood I came home early to ditch, before I dug back into the work. And Summerset wasn’t even where he’s supposed to be so I could insult him and start the ditching.”

“I was home even earlier, and told him to go out with some of his friends.”

“Corpses don’t have friends, they have other corpses.”

His eyebrows lifted; his head angled. “Feel better?”

“Not really.”

He went to get himself a new glass of wine. “I wanted to do something for you, for the cop, and I’ll circle back here and say again, this isn’t good enough for you. Don’t argue with me on that,” he said before she could. “You’re your own cop, and as brilliant a one as I’ve ever known. You’re also mine, and this isn’t what you deserve.”

It touched her because she knew he meant it, just exactly that. “You’re trying to seduce me with command centers.”

“I am. And the other part of why is purely selfish in that I need you to let this go. I want to know you can.”

“This?” She gestured. “It’s not that. It’s not. Mavis, Leonardo, the kid, the apartment’s theirs. They’ve made it so theirs, there’s nothing of what was mine. I don’t need that—not there, not here. I swear I’m not clinging to that. I’m used to this, that’s pretty big. But bigger, it’s that you gave it to me. You knew me, even then, and gave it to me. That’s what I don’t want to let go.”

She swallowed more wine, muttered, “Dumb-ass.”

He came back to her, trailed a fingertip down the shallow dent in her chin. “I’ll always have done that, when we both needed it. Dumb-ass. Let’s try this, for both of us. And if what you need is to keep this as it is, then it stays.”

“If I say okay, let’s try it, the redhead’s not going toward fancy.”

“Not within miles of fancy, my word on that.”

“Okay. But I’m not apologizing.”

“Neither am I.”

“I guess that works.”

He leaned down, touched his lips to hers. “Did you murder a droid?”