Haunted in Death (In Death #22.5)(16)

Working… Display complete.

Parents and older brother deceased, Eve noted. A younger sister, age eighty-eight, living in Scottsdale Care Center, Arizona. Young for a care center, Eve mused, and made a note to find out what the sister’s medical condition was.

Bobbie would have had a niece and nephew had she lived, and a couple of grandnieces and nephews.

Worth checking into, Eve decided, and began a standard run on all living relations.

While the computer worked, she set up a secondary task and took a closer look at Hopkins.

“Big starter,“ she said aloud. “Little finisher.“

There were dozens of projects begun, abandoned. Failed. Now and then he’d hit, at least enough to keep the wolves from the door, set up the next project.

Failed marriages, ignored offspring. No criminal on any former spouse or offspring.

But you had to start somewhere, she figured.

She went back to the board. Diamond hair clips. Bray had worn them for her first album cover – possibly a gift from Hop. Most likely. The scene told Eve it was likely Bray had been wearing them when she’d been killed, or at least when she’d been bricked up.

But the killer hadn’t taken them as a souvenir. Not a fan, just didn’t play. The killer had shined them up and left them behind.

“She was a diamond,“ Eve murmured. “She shined. Is that what you’re telling me? Here’s the gun he used to kill her, and here’s where I found it. He never paid and payment needed to be made. Is that the message?“

She circled the boards, studied the runs when the computer displayed them. There were a couple of decent possibilities among Bobbie’s descendents.

They’d all have to be interviewed, she decided.

One of them contacts Hopkins,she speculated. Maybe even tries to buy the building but can’t come up with the scratch. Has to get access though, to uncover the body. How was access gained?

Money. Hopkins needed backers. Maybe charged his murderer a fee to tour Number Twelve. Get in once, you can get in again.

How’d you find the body? How did you know?

What did she have here? she asked herself. Younger sister in a care facility.Niece a data drone.Nephew deceased – Urban War fatality. Grandniece middle-management in sales, grandnephew an insurance salesman. Rank and file, no big successes, no big failures.

Ordinary.

Nothing flashy. Nobody managed to cash in on Bobbie’s fame and fortune, or her untimely death.

Nobody, she mused, except Hopkins. That would be a pisser, wouldn’t it? Your daughter, sister, aunt is a dead cult figure, but you’ve got to do the thirty-five hours a week to get by. And the grandson of the bastard who killed her is trying to rake it in. You’re scraping by, getting old and…

“Wait a minute, wait a minute. Serenity Bray, age eighty-eight. Twenty-two years younger than Bobbie. Not a sister. A daughter.“

She swung to the adjoining door, shoved it open. “Bobbie had a kid. Not a sister. The timing’s right. She had a kid.“

Roarke merely lifted an eyebrow. “Yes. Serenity Bray Massey, currently in Scottsdale in a full-care nursing facility. I’ve got that.“

“Showoff. She had a kid, and the timing makes it most likely Hop’s. There’s no record of a child. No reports from that time of her pregnancy. But she separated from him for several months, which would coincide with the last few months of her pregnancy and the birth.“

“After which, it would seem, she gave the child to her own mother. Who then moved her family to a ranch outside Scottsdale, and Bobbie went back to Hop, and her previous lifestyle. I’ve found some speculation that during her period of estrangement from Hop she went into rehab and seclusion. Interviews and articles from the time have her clean and sober when she returned to the scene, then backsliding, I suppose you could say, within weeks.“

He angled his head. “I thought you were leaving Bobbie to me.“

“The ghost part’s yours. The dead part’s mine.“

Seven

They were into their second year of marriage, and being a trained observer, Eve knew when he was irritated with her. It seemed stupid, just stupid to have a fight or the undercurrent of one over something as ridiculous as ghosts.

Still, she brooded over it another moment, on the verge of stupidity. Then she huffed out a breath.

“Look,“ she began.

After a pause, he sat back. “I’m looking.“

“What I’m getting at is… shit. Shit.“ She paced to his window, to the doorway, turned around again.

Rules of marriage – and hell, one of the benefits of it, she admitted – were that she could say to him what she might even find hard to say to herself.

“I have to live with so many of them.“ There was anger in her over it, and a kind of grief she could never fully explain. “They don’t always go away when you close the case, never go away if you leave a crack in it. I got a freaking army of dead in my head.“

“Whom you’ve defended,“ he reminded her. “Stood over, stood for.“

“Yeah, well, that doesn’t mean they’re going to say Thanks, pal,’ then shuffle off the mortal whatever.“

“That would be coil – and they’ve already done the shuffle before you get there.“

“Exactly. Dead. But they still have faces and voices and pain, at least in my head. I don’t need to think about one wifting around sending me messages from beyond. It’s too much, that’s all. It’s too much if I have to start wondering if there’s some spirit hovering over my shoulder to make sure I do the job.“