Leverage in Death: An Eve Dallas Novel (In Death #47)(54)

“Dallas—Hey, Roarke.” Peabody stepped in. “Nothing in the guest room or home office. Not even a used memo cube.”

“Fast, sloppy, and so far thorough. Take the master bath.”

She dug into a ski jacket. “He left the building about nine, had them order a cab, a Rapid. From the contents of his stomach, he went to a high-end cocktail-type party. Had sex with a redhead.”

“That’s specific.”

“Stray pubic hair. We have him picked up by another Rapid—we’ve got the address and time—and dropped off near the JKO. TOD just after three, so he met his killer or more likely killers there. One of them has the skill to snap his neck, they team up haul him over the fence into the reservoir where he’s spotted about two hours later by a couple of underage drinking buddies who jump in to pull him out.”

She moved on to a wet suit.

“Meanwhile, they stripped anything valuable from the body, including his pocket e’s, so we have no way to trace who he talked with or when. They’re not stupid.”

“Got something!” Peabody walked back in with a memo book in a waterproof bag. “Inside the toilet tank—classic.”

“And for a reason,” Roarke agreed when Eve took it, opened the bag.

“Passcoded.”

Roarke held out a hand.

“Seal up first.”

He sighed, but obeyed. Then fiddled with the book for about twenty seconds. “Rudimentary block. Open now, and . . . ah. What you have here is an on-the-go sort of bookkeeping. The books for the laundering service is how it looks.”

“Any names?” Eve demanded.

“It doesn’t look like it. Numbers. What went in, and when, what came out and when. His fee, profit. It’s more a little pocket guide than actual accounting.”

“If he kept those books here, they’re gone now,” Eve concluded. “Maybe the art gallery has records. And names.” She took the device back, resealed it, dropped it in an evidence bag, sealed and labeled.

“If they missed this, maybe they missed something else. Peabody, while we finish here, have Baxter and Trueheart hit the art gallery. Get the warrant, have them transfer the electronics to Central, and take a good look around the gallery. Interview any staff, and get the names and contact info for other employees.”

“I’ll be down with Rhoda and our security,” Roarke told her.

On their arrival, Eve sent the sweepers to the second level while she and Peabody went through the main.

She yanked out her comm when it signaled. “Dallas.”

“Baxter. Here at the Banks Gallery now. Banks had a run of bad luck, Loo. He got himself dead, had his apartment broken into. And it turns out, his art gallery, too.”

“Ah, fuck!”

“Yeah, I hear you. Cleared the d and c unit out of the office here, and all the other electronics. The hot artist chick in charge today says they don’t open until one on Tuesday, but when she heard about Banks being dead, she thought she should come in, check on things, maybe notify the other artists and all that. She’d just called in the break-in when we got here.”

“And the art?”

“She doesn’t think anything’s missing, but she’s doing an inventory. They’ve got stuff in what she calls a holding room. She says she has to go by memory mostly as the records were on the comp that’s gone. And that’s a little problem as Banks had a habit of rotating.”

“The art?”

“He’d see something he liked, take it for his place, keep it awhile, rotate it back. He’d get bored, is what she told us. Have a couple of the artists hang stuff in his place, bring stuff he had in here, hang it, like that. He never bought anything—she tells us—for his personal collection. He called it marketing. How he’d hang it in his home for friends to admire. Still, she says, not everything came back, and as she’s done some of the hanging over there, not everything stayed in his place, either.

“She tried to keep her own list on her PPC, but she says it was hard to keep up.”

“Okay, get what you can, have the sweepers send in a team. Get contacts for the artists and anybody else who worked there. I want EDD checking the security.”

“Feed’s gone.”

“I figured. Have them nail down what time the security was compromised. And . . . when you’re done, bring her over here, to his apartment. I want her to look at the art, see if she can pin down anything that she thinks should be here and isn’t.”

When she clicked off, she circled the living area, studied the walls. The empty walls.

“Peabody!”

With rapid clumps, Peabody hurried in.

“What did they do in the turnover here they didn’t do on the bedroom level?”

“Ah . . .”

“They didn’t pull the art off the walls upstairs like they did down here. You look down here, you might think they were looking for a safe or hidey-hole behind a painting. But if they did the same upstairs, they didn’t take the paintings down. Why is that?”

She wandered. “Why is that?” she repeated. “No holes or hooks in the walls, but lots of paintings.”

“You hang them from that fancy trim. It’s called a picture rail so you can hang art—either with invisible wire or decorative chains. Change it out when you want, shift it around without damaging the walls.”