Portrait in Death (In Death #16)(83)

"I'll do what I can. It's going to be very little. Now I've got to get back to my own front lines. By the way, I'm thinking of having a little dinner party. Just friends. Both of you, Roarke and McNab, me and Charles."

"Um," Eve managed.

"Sounds great. Just let us know when. How's Charles?" Peabody added. "I haven't had a chance to talk to him in a while."

"He's great. Busy, but who isn't. I'll be in touch."

"Hey. Give me a damn sucker."

With a laugh, Louise tossed Eve one, then bolted out of the room.

Outside, Eve walked around her vehicle. Crouched as if to examine the tires. Then sent the two men still in the doorway a big, toothy smile before popping the lollipop into her mouth. She didn't speak until she and Peabody were pulling away.

"Okay, none of my business, but why aren't you weirded out by the idea of a cozy little dinner party with Louise and Charles?"

"Why should I be?"

"Oh, I don't know, let me think." As if contemplating, Eve rolled the round of candy in her mouth. Grape, she thought. Not bad. "Could it be that at one time you were dating Charles, and the fact that you were hanging around with our favorite licensed companion made your current bedmate swing so far out of orbit he knocked Charles on his undeniably adorable ass?"

"Kind of spices up the stew, doesn't it. Anyway, Charles, of the undeniably adorable ass, is a friend. He loves Louise. I like Louise. I wasn't sleeping with Charles, and even if I had been, it shouldn't matter."

Playing mattress tag always mattered, no matter what anyone said. But Eve kept that opinion to herself. "Okay. If it shouldn't matter, why haven't you told McNab that you and Charles never did the mattress mambo?"

Peabody hunched her shoulders. "He acted like such a moron."

"Peabody, McNab is a moron."

"Yeah, but he's my moron now. I guess I should tell him. I hate to give him the satisfaction though. It gives him the hand."

"What hand?"

"The upper hand. See, now I have the hand because he thinks I was sleeping with Charles and I stopped sleeping with Charles because of him. McNab. But if I tell him I never did the deed with Charles anyway, I lose the hand."

"Now my head hurts. I should never have asked."

***

She went back to the beginning. Rachel Howard.

Carpet fibers. They'd identified the make and models of the vehicles that came standard with the type found on both victims, and the list of registered owners. Diego Feliciano's uncle's work van didn't match, nor did Hastings's.

So far, this had been a dead end, but she'd push harder against the wall.

There was the tranq. A prescription opiate, not street buzz. If her theory about the killer held, odds are it was his prescription. Something recommended to help him sleep, calm his nerves, block whatever pain he might have due to his condition.

She'd cross-check the vehicle owners with local pharmacies. Cross-check both against imaging equipment purchases over the last twelve months.

A tedious proposition, and time consuming. More so as she had to wait for the authorization to do some of the searches.

Would she have cut through that if Roarke had been around? she wondered. Would she have used him, let him talk her into involving himself in the case, let him man his far superior equipment with his far superior skill, and his habit of bypassing the standard security and privacy codes?

Probably.

But he wasn't around, so it wasn't an option. Time was weighing on her. The killer had taken two lives within a week, and he wasn't finished.

He wouldn't wait much longer to seek out the next light.

Eve began her first level of cross-checks while she waited for the authorization to go deeper. And she worried about some faceless college kid already caught in the crosshairs of a camera lens.

And she worried about Roarke, trapped in the cage of his own past.

***

He hadn't traveled often to the west of the country where he'd been born. Most of his business was centered in Dublin, or south in Cork, north in Belfast.

He had some property in Galway, but he'd never stepped foot on it, and had spent only a handful of days in the castle hotel he'd bought in Kerry.

Though he didn't share his wife's ingrained suspicion of the countryside, he usually preferred the city. He doubted he'd know what do to with himself for long in this place of rolling green hills and flower-strewn yards.

The pace would be too slow to suit him for more than a short holiday, but there was a piece of him that was glad it had been left much as it had been, century by century.

Green, velvet green, and quiet.

His Ireland, the one he'd fled from, had been gray, dank, mean, and bitter. This curve of Clare wasn't simply another part of the country, but a world away from what he'd known.

Farmers still farmed here, men still walked with their dogs across a field, and ruins of what had been castles and forts and towers in another age stood gray and indomitable in those fields.

Tourists, he supposed, would take pictures of those ruins, and scramble around in them-then drive for miles on the twisting roads to find more. And the locals would glance at them now and again.

There, you see, they might say, they tried to beat us down. Vikings and Brits. But they never could. They never will.