Origin in Death (In Death #21)(2)

Broken nose, shattered cheekbone, broken jaw, detached retina. Eve ran through the list in her head. She wasn't looking to hang a homicide on the woman, for God's sake. She'd interviewed the medical tech who'd treated Ten on-scene, and she'd investigated and documented the scene itself.

But if she didn't close this case down today, she was going to be dealing with the drooling hounds of the media yet again.

If it came to that, she'd be tempted to play a tune on Ten's face herself.

"She talks to us today, and we shut this down. Or I'm slapping her bevy of attorneys and reps with obstruction of justice."

"When's Roarke due home?"

With a frown, Eve stopped pacing long enough to look at her partner. "Why?"

"Because you're getting a little edgy ... edgier than usual. I think you have Roarke-withdrawal." Peabody let out a wistful sigh. "Who could blame you?"

"I'm not having anything-withdrawal." She muttered it, and began pacing again. She had long legs on a long body, and felt a little confined in the overly decorated space. Her hair was shorter than her partner's, a deer-hide brown worn carelessly choppy around a lean face with large brown eyes.

Unlike many of the patients and clients of the Wilfred B. Icove Center, physical beauty wasn't one of her priorities

Death was.

Maybe she missed her husband, she admitted. It wasn't a crime. In fact, it was probably one of those marriage rules she was still trying to learn after more than a year in the game.

It was rare for Roarke to take a business trip that lasted more than a day or two now, and this one had stretched to a week.

She'd pushed for it, hadn't she? she reminded herself. She was very aware he'd set a lot of his work aside in the past months to help with hers, or just to be there when she needed him.

And when a man owned or had interest in nearly every area of business, art, entertainment, and development in the known universe, he had to keep a lot of balls in the air.

She could handle not being juggled in for a week. She wasn't a moron.

But neither was she sleeping very well.

She started to sit, but the chair was so big, and so pink. It gave her an image of being swallowed whole by a big, shiny mouth.

"What's Lee-Lee Ten doing in the kitchen of her three-level penthouse at two in the morning?"

"Late-night snack?"

"AutoChef in her bedroom, another in the living area, one in each guest room, one in her home office, one in her home gym."

Eve wandered to one of the banks of windows. She preferred the dull, rainy day outside to the perky pink of the waiting area. Fall of 2059 had, so far, proved cold and mean.

"Everyone we've managed to interview stated that Ten had dumped Bryhern Speegal."

"They were completely the couple over the summer," Peabody put in. "You couldn't watch a celeb report on-screen or pick up a gossip mag without... not that I spend all my time on celebrity watch or anything."

"Right. She dumps Speegal last week, according to informed sources. But she's entertaining him in her kitchen at two in the morning. Both of them are wearing robes, and there is evidence of intimate behavior in the bedroom."

"Reconciliation that didn't work?"

"According to the doorman, her security discs, and her domestic droid, Speegal arrived at twenty-three fourteen. He was admitted, and the household droid was dismissed to its quarters-but left on-call."

Wineglasses in the living area, she thought. Shoes-his, hers. Shirt, hers. His was on the wide curve of the stairs leading to the second level. Her bra had been draped over the rail at the top.

It hadn't taken a bloodhound to follow the trail, or to sniff out the activity.

"He comes over, he comes in, they have a couple of drinks downstairs, sex comes into it. No evidence it wasn't consensual. No signs of struggle, and if the guy was going to rape her, he wouldn't bother to drag her up a flight of steps and take off her clothes."

She forgot her image of the chair long enough to sit, "So they go up, slap the mattress. They end up downstairs, bloody in the kitchen. Droid hears a disturbance, comes out, finds her unconscious, him dead, calls for medical and police assistance."

The kitchen had looked like a war zone. Everything white and silver, acres of room, and most of it splashed and splattered with blood. Speegal, the hunk of the year, had been facedown, swimming in it.

Maybe it had reminded her, just a little too horribly, of the way her father had looked. Of course, the room in Dallas hadn't been so shiny, but the blood, the rivers of blood, had been just as thick, just as wet after she'd finished hacking the little knife into him.

"Sometimes there's no other way," Peabody said quietly. "There's no other way to stay alive."

"No." Edgy? Eve thought. More like losing her edge if her partner could see into her head that easily. "Sometimes there's not."

She rose, relieved when the doctor stepped into the room.

She'd done her homework on Wilfred B. Icove, Jr. He'd stepped competently into his father's footsteps, oversaw the myriad arms of the Icove Center. And was known as the sculptor to the stars.

He was reputed to be discreet as a priest, skilled as a magician, and rich as Roarke-or nearly. At forty-four, he was handsome as a vid star with eyes of light, crystalline blue in a face of high, slashing cheekbones, square jaw, carved lips, narrow nose. His hair was full, swept back from his forehead in gilded wings.