Born in Death (In Death #23)(67)

14

SHE WENT OVER THE DATA PEABODY SENT TO her computer on like crimes. IRCCA had popped a few for her. Abductions, abduction/murders, rapes, rape/ murders. Abductions where the baby had been delivered then stolen, and the mother left behind.

Alive or dead.

In the majority of the abductions, the woman had known her kidnapper, or had had previous contact.

Eve separated them into known or unknown, into family strife, cases where the abductor had been mentally ill, and those done for profit.

She culled out the rapes into a separate file.

Then she worked them geographically.

There had been cases in New York with similar elements, and those involving family members of the victim she separated out again. She set aside those cases where the perpetrator was doing time, earmarking those to check other family members, and any possible contact with Tandy.

She outlined Missing Person cases where the investigator found the woman had gone into a shelter to escape an abusive relationship, or simply walked out. And others where neither mother nor child had ever been found.

Because Tandy had come from London, Eve moved there next. A smattering of like cases again, but none that had any outward link to hers.

So she branched out to Europe.

The most interesting was a case, still open, in Rome where the missing woman had walked out of her regular OB exam in her thirty-sixth week, and poofed. Like Tandy, earlier in the pregnancy she had relocated to another city, moving from Florence three months before she went missing. She was single, had no family in that area. She’d been healthy, and lived alone. Unlike Tandy, this woman had applied for and received paid maternity leave during her second trimester.

A struggling artist, she had been in the process of finishing a mural of a fairyland on the walls of the nursery she’d outfitted in her apartment.

Or was it ‘flat’ in Italy, too? Eve wondered.

Sophia Belego had been missing for nearly two years. Gone without a trace.

After making a note of the investigator’s name, Eve stewed over the time difference. Italy was another place she couldn’t contact yet.

“Lieutenant.”

“What? Huh?”

“It’s now after two in the morning. New York time.”

“What is it in London?”

“Too early.” Roarke laid his hands on his wife’s shoulders, dug at the rocks that had taken up residence there. “And time for both of us to recharge.”

“I’ve got more in me.”

“You’ll have more yet after a few hours of sleep.”

“I’m working something from the data Peabody got from IRCCA.”

“And how much further can you take it tonight?”

Nowhere really, she thought. But still. “I haven’t written it all down. I need to put it into a report for the file, and copy MPU.”

“Which can wait until morning.”

“If she got snatched, she’s going on better than fifty hours missing. I need the damn data from the parking lot. And I’m not going to get that until morning,” she argued when he only looked at her. “Okay, a couple hours down.”

Because she was looking glassy-eyed, he moved to the elevator with her.

“You got anything for me?” she asked him.

“Nothing concrete. It’s going to take longer without names. With them, I could do more thorough excavating.” And, he thought, make use of his unregistered equipment and avoid CompuGuard’s beady eye if he went down a bit deeper than was technically allowed. “I’ve left a couple of programs running. We’ll see what we get in the morning.”

“I have to do some digging myself on that.” She pushed her tired brain from possible abduction into murder. “Cavendish to Bullock to Robert Kraus to Jacob Sloan—maybe three generations of Sloans—and from there to my vics. Something there. I think if I squeeze Cavendish right, he’ll spurt.”

As her mind shifted between two investigations, she undressed. “Why does a firm with that kind of—what is it—panache—use a guy like Cavendish to head up its New York branch? Nepotism, maybe, because he’s not as smart as he could be. Bruberry, his admin, she’s smart. But she’s not blood, so you put his name on the letterhead, and let her run it behind the scenes? That’s how it feels.”

Eve slid into bed. “Copperfield said she was offered a bribe. If I can show contact around the time of the murder between her and Cavendish’s office, I could squeeze from that angle. Or—”

“Too much coffee for you.” He drew her close. “Turn off that head of yours and go to sleep.”

And how the hell was she supposed to do that? Because he was right, as usual. She’d poured too much coffee into her system. Her brain was running sloppy loops inside her head, from Copperfield to Byson to Tandy and back again.

“Might have to go to London,” she murmured. “Huh. Wouldn’t it be a kick in the head if I really did have to be out of the country hunting a criminal mastermind when Mavis goes into labor?”

“I, my ass. That goes towe or I’ll hurt you.”

“Yeah, big talk.”

Since her brain was up, and her body insisted on following suit, she didn’t see why she shouldn’t put both to good use.

She trailed her fingers up his spine, then down while she angled her head and found his lips with hers in the dark.