Secrets in Death (In Death #45)(94)

“What is all that?”

He turned, glanced meaningfully at her recorder.

She put it on pause.

“Mementos, you could say, from a past life,” he said, getting down to it again. “I cracked my first Podark in a lovely and graceful Tuscan villa. And a lovely night it was—I can still smell the lemon blossoms. I believe I was about twenty. I had my last…” He glanced back. “Before I had you.”

“How long before?”

“Long enough.”

“Hmm. Resume record.”

He chose a device about as long and wide as his hand, attached it to the sheer front of the vault. He played his fingers over it, hummed in his throat.

She watched him work for a few minutes as, apparently satisfied with whatever the first device told him, he attached a smaller one to it, slipped a comm unit over his ear.

She spotted a flash of codes, as incomprehensible to her as his morning stock reports, then left him to it to go back to her own work.

He muttered to himself now and then, sometimes in Irish, as she worked through the B’s and into the C’s. She heard McNab bounce back in, then stop.

She looked up to see his attention riveted on Roarke.

McNab whispered, “Search team’s here. She-Body’s getting them started. How long’s he been at it?”

“I don’t know. Fifteen, twenty minutes.”

“Is it okay if I watch until … No way!” McNab exclaimed, and bounced forward. “No way you can open a Podark—that’s a TXR-2000. I looked it up. No way you can open it in twenty freaking minutes!”

“Eighteen and thirty-two seconds.” Roarke slid off his earpiece. “She’s a shy one.”

“It has twenty-eight locking bolts, up to six passcodes and two fail-safes. Kick my ass and call me Sally, you’ve gotta show me how you did that. It would’ve taken freaking hours to drill through.”

“Drilling wouldn’t do it,” Roarke said. “She’s built to snap drill bits like dry twigs under a bootheel. If you’re crude enough to try explosives, she’ll laugh at you. You don’t force or bully a lady like this.” He trailed his fingers over the surface again. “You … convince her.”

“Do the three of you need a moment?” Eve asked. “Or can we open the damn door on that thing, and see what’s in it?”

“She’s all yours, Lieutenant.” Roarke gathered up his tools.

Pushing away from the desk, Eve walked over. She gripped the ship-wheel handle, pulled. Put her back into it, braced her feet, and pulled again.

“Hot, juicy wow!”

She couldn’t argue with McNab’s assessment. The vault wasn’t full—obviously Mars had planned for more—but there was plenty of wow.

Two shelves of neatly banded bills, rows of jewelry laid out on black velvet nestled in thin drawers. The glitter of gold and silver, the gleam of bronze, the shine of porcelain in objets d’art.

Eve scanned over it all, focused on the back shelf. “Her own ID kit.”

“You would latch onto that and overlook these rather exquisite emeralds.”

She saw the damn emeralds, and the other glitters, and stuck her hands on her hips. “We’re going to need an armored to transport all this. Which detectives are on the search team?”

McNab, eyes a bit glazed, blinked. “Ah, Jenkinson and Reineke.”

“Good. They can log it all.” She moved into the vault, poked into a box. “Full of bugs—the e-sort. That’s one way to get personal information. The list of people with motive is going to be ridiculous. Box of discs. At least they’re labeled. Names, dates. Likely copies of whatever the listening devices picked up. So.”

She set her hands on her hips again, turned around. “Give me an estimate.”

Roarke shook his head. “That’s a hard one.”

“Try anyway.”

“Well now, you’ve got different denominations in the paper money, and some of it’s foreign currency. I’d start at about sixty million.”

“Some start,” McNab noted.

“For the baubles, that’s even more plucking out of the air, but from the look of things, about triple that. And the rest … a hundred, a hundred and twenty.”

“Million again.”

“Of course.”

“Round it up,” she said, circling a finger.

“All in all, you’ve somewhere in the vicinity of three hundred and sixty. You might hit four hundred.”

As McNab would say, Eve thought, some vicinity.

“How about the building? All of it, both units.”

At this Roarke looked a little pained. “Well, I haven’t seen the second unit at all, have I? And haven’t done more than walk straight up here in this one.”

“Just basically.”

“The location, the space, not factoring how well or how poorly maintained, what might be needed to put it on the market? A very rough fifty, and it could be as much as twice that. And don’t be asking me about the contents, as I couldn’t begin.”

Close enough, she thought. Plenty close enough.

“What I’m seeing with what’s here, what was at her apartment, what’s in her accounts? She hit the billion mark. But instead of buying herself a damn country and spending her days sipping mai tais, she kept working, kept blackmailing, and kept hoarding. That tells me she couldn’t stop. It would never have been enough. It might be her killer figured out the same.”