Ceremony in Death (In Death #5)(37)

The figure was moving slowly, in a crouch. As the distance between them melted away, Roarke could hear the puff of nervous breathing. Though he couldn’t make out features, he judged male, perhaps five-ten, and on the lean side. He could see no weapon, and thinking of the difficulty Eve might have explaining why her husband had held off an intruder with a banned handgun, tucked the Glock into the back of his slacks.

He braced, looking forward to a little hand-to-hand, then lunged when the figure slunk by. Roarke had an arm around a throat, a fist clenched and raised in anticipation of quiet, perhaps petty revenge, when he realized it wasn’t a man, but a boy.

“Hey, you son of a bitch, let go. I’ll kill you.”

A very rude and very frightened boy, Roarke decided. The struggle was short and all one-sided. It took seconds only for Roarke to pin the boy against the trunk of a tree. “How the hell did you get inside?” Roarke demanded.

The kid’s breath was coming in whistles, and his face was pale as a ghost. Roarke could hear the audible click in his throat as he swallowed. “You’re Roarke.” He stopped struggling and tried to smirk. “You’ve got pretty good security.”

“I like to think so.” Not a thief, Roarke decided, but ballsy, certainly. “How did you get past it?”

“I — ” He broke off, eyes going huge as they shot over Roarke’s shoulder. “Behind you!”

With a smoothness the boy would later appreciate, Roarke pivoted, keeping his grip unbreakable. “We have our intruder, Lieutenant.”

“So I see.” She lowered her weapon, ordered her heart to slow to normal. “Jesus, Roarke, it’s just a kid. It’s — ” She stopped, narrowed her eyes. “I know this kid.”

“Then perhaps you’d introduce us.”

“It’s Jamie, right? Jamie Lingstrom. Alice’s brother.”

“Good eye, Lieutenant. Now, you want to tell him to stop choking me?”

“I don’t think so.” She holstered her weapon, stepped up. “What the hell are you doing, breaking into private property in the middle of the night? You’re a cop’s grandson, for Christ’s sake. You want to end up in juvie?”

“I’m not your big problem right now, Lieutenant Dallas.” He made a valiant attempt to sound tough, but his voice wavered. “You’ve got a dead body outside the wall. Really dead,” he added and began to shake.

“Did you kill someone, Jamie?” Roarke asked mildly.

“No, man. No way. He was there when I came by.” Terrified his stomach would revolt and humiliate him, Jamie swallowed hard again. “I’ll show you.”

If it was a trick, Eve considered it a fine one. She couldn’t take a chance. “All right. Let’s go. And if you try to run, pal, I’ll zap you.”

“Wouldn’t make any sense to run, would it, when I went to all this trouble to get in? This way.” His legs were rubber, and he sincerely hoped neither of them noticed that his knees kept knocking together.

“I’d like to know how you got in,” Roarke said as they headed for the main gate. “How you bypassed security.”

“I fool around with electronics. A hobby. You’ve got a really high-grade system. The best.”

“So I thought.”

“I guess I didn’t disengage all the alarms.” Jamie turned his head, tried another weak smile. “You knew I was here.”

“You got in,” Roarke repeated. “How?”

“This.” Jamie pulled a small palm-sized unit out of his pocket. “It’s a jammer I’ve been working on for a couple of years. It’ll read most systems,” he began, frowning when Roarke plucked it out of his hand. “When you engage this,” he continued, leaning over to point, “it’ll scan the chips, run a cloning program. Then it’s just a matter of backing out the program step by step. Takes some time, but it’s pretty efficient.”

Roarke stared at the mechanism. It was no bigger than one of the E-games one of his companies manufactured. Indeed, the casing looked distressingly familiar. “You adapted a game unit into a jammer. Yourself. One that read and cloned and breached my security.”

“Well, most of it.” Jamie’s eyes clouded in annoyance. “I must have missed something, one of the backups maybe. Your system must be ultra mag. I’d like to see it.”

“Not in this lifetime,” Roarke muttered and shoved the unit into his pocket.

When they reached the gates, he disengaged and opened them manually, sliding a narrow look at Jamie as the boy craned over his shoulder to see.

“Way impressive,” Jamie commented. “I didn’t figure I could get through this way. That’s why I had to come over the wall. Needed a ladder.”

Roarke simply closed his eyes. “A ladder,” he said to no one in particular. “He climbed up a ladder. Lovely. And the cameras?”

“Oh, I blanked them from across the street. The unit’s got a range of ten yards.”

“Lieutenant.” Roarke snagged Jamie by the collar. “I want him punished.”

“Later. Now, where’s this body you’re supposed to have seen?”

The cocky smile fell away from his face. “To the left,” he told her, paling again.