Naked in Death (In Death, #1)(30)

The mother, she imagined. Why hadn't she sent in a request for the return of her daughter's things?

Something to think about.

She went through the closet, again going through skirts, dresses, trousers, the trendy capes and caftans, jackets and blouses, checking pockets, linings. She moved onto shoes, all kept neatly in acrylic boxes.

The woman had only had two feet, she thought with some annoyance. No one needed sixty pairs of shoes. With a little snort, she reached into toes, deep inside the tunnel of boots, into the springy softness of inflatable platforms.

Lola hadn't had so much, she thought now. Two pairs of ridiculously high heels, a pair of girlish vinyl straps, and a simple pair of air pump sneakers, all jumbled in her narrow closet.

But Sharon had been an organized as well as a vain soul. Her shoes were carefully stacked in rows of -

Wrong. Skin prickling, Eve stepped back. It was wrong. The closet was as big as a room, and every inch of space had been ruthlessly utilized. Now, there was a full foot empty on the shelves. Because the shoes were stacked six high in a row of eight.

It wasn't the way Eve had found them or the way she'd left them. They'd been organized according to color and style. In stacks, she remembered perfectly, of four, a row of twelve.

Such a little mistake, she thought with a small smile. But a man who made one was bound to make another.

"Would you repeat that, lieutenant?"

"He restacked the shoe boxes wrong, commander." Negotiating traffic, shivering as her car heater offered a tepid puff of air around her toes, Eve checked in. A tourist blimp crept by at low altitude, the guide's voice booming out tips on sky walk shopping as they crossed toward Fifth. Some idiotic road crew with a special daylight license power drilled a tunnel access on the corner of Sixth and Seventy-eighth. Eve pitched her voice above the din.

"You can review the discs of the scene. I know how the closet was arranged. It made an impression on me that any one person should have so many clothes, and keep them so organized. He went back."

"Returned to the scene of the crime?" Whitney's voice was dry as dust.

"Clichés have a basis in fact." Hoping for relative quiet, she jogged west down a cross street and ended up fuming behind a clicking microbus. Didn't anyone stay home in New York? "Or they wouldn't be clichés," she finished and switched to automatic drive so that she could warm her hands in her pockets. "There were other things. She kept her costume jewelry in a partitioned drawer. Rings in one section, bracelets in another, and so on. Some of the chains were tangled when I looked again."

"The sweepers – "

"Sir, I went through the place again after the sweepers. I know he's been there." Eve bit back on frustration and reminded herself that Whitney was a cautious man. Administrators had to be. "He got through the security, and he went in. He was looking for something – something he forgot. Something she had. Something we missed."

"You want the place swept again?"

"I do. And I want Feeney to go back over Sharon 's files. Something's there, somewhere. And it concerns him enough to risk going back for it."

"I'll signature the authorization. The chief isn't going to like it." The commander was silent for a moment. Then, as if he'd just remembered it was a fully secured line, he snorted. "Fuck the chief. Good eye, Dallas."

"Thank you – " But he'd cut her off before she could finish being grateful.

Two of six, she thought, and in the privacy of her car, she shuddered from more than the cold. There were four more people out there whose lives were in her hands.

After pulling into her garage, she swore she'd call the damn mechanic the next day. If history ran true, it meant he'd have her vehicle in for a week, diddling with some idiotic chip in the heater control. The idea of the paperwork in accessing a replacement vehicle through the department was too daunting to consider.

Besides, she was used to the one she had, with all its little quirks. Everyone knew the uniforms copped the best air-to-land vehicles. Detectives had to make do with clinkers.

She'd have to rely on public transportation or just hook a car from the police garage and pay the bureaucratic price later.

Still frowning over the hassle to come and reminding herself to contact Feeney personally to have him go through a week's worth of security discs on the Gorham, she rode the elevator to her floor. Eve had no more than unkeyed her locks when her hand was on her weapon, drawing it.

The silence of her apartment was wrong. She knew instantly she wasn't alone. The prickle along her skin had her doing a quick sweep, arms and eyes, shifting fluidly left then right.

In the dim light of the room, the shadows hung and the silence remained. Then she caught a movement that had her tensed muscles rippling, her trigger finger poised.

"Excellent reflexes, lieutenant." Roarke rose from the chair where he'd been lounging. Where he'd been watching her. "So excellent," he continued in that same mild tone as he touched on a lamp, "that I have every faith you won't use that on me."

She might have. She very well might have given him one good jolt. That would have wiped that complacent smile off his face. But any discharge of a weapon meant paperwork she wasn't prepared to face for simple revenge.

"What the f*ck are you doing here?"