Treachery in Death (In Death #32)(14)

“You’re right.” She buried impatience as she’d buried the raging fury during Peabody’s report. “We’ll get some fuel, then we’ll lay it all out.”

“I got the shakes,” Peabody confessed. “After. They keep wanting to come back, but it’s better. I have to tag my mom, thank her.”

“For what?”

“I dropped my sweaty crap on the locker room floor, and I would’ve left it there if I hadn’t heard her voice in my head telling me to respect what belongs to me. If I’d left that ugly sports bra on the floor, they’d have seen it. They’d have found me. And I wouldn’t be here telling you Saint Oberman’s daughter’s a wrong cop.”

“Thank her in the morning,” Eve ordered. “Let’s get to work.”

Now Roarke draped his arm over Peabody’s shoulders when she rose. “How about a steak?”

“Really?”

He kissed the top of her head, made her flush. “Leave the menu to me. You’re a brave soul, Peabody.”

“My soul was scared shitless.”

He kissed her again. “You don’t want to argue with a man who’s about to fix you a steak.”

In her home office Eve set up a case board while Peabody and McNab ate. Roarke had been right about the food, the wine, the shoulder rub—all of it. He was usually on target about those things.

And it was better to give Peabody a little breathing room before opening the door to what would be an ugly and difficult process.

“She’s attractive,” Roarke commented, studying the ID shot of Oberman on the board.

“Yeah, and she has a rep for using it—and using her father’s rep. Just whispers—nothing said too loud. I ...”

Eve shook her head, then stepped out of the room.

“What?” Roarke asked when he followed her.

She kept her voice down. “If they’d found her, they’d have killed her. No way around it. She was right about that.”

“It must have been brutal, being trapped as she was.”

“We had this scuffle with these three ass**les today, and one of them gives her a couple pretty good knocks. I told her she had heavy feet, needed to work on her technique, so what does she do? She goes down to that empty shithole of a gym. If it had tipped the other way, that’s where they’d have found her body. She takes a punch in the ear, and I can’t just say everybody takes a knock? I’ve got to tell her to work on it, to do better.”

“Because the next time she might take a knife in the ear. You’re not just her partner, Eve, you’re still training her. And you’ve done a damn brilliant job of it so far, in my opinion. She went down because she wants to improve, and yes, because she wants to meet your standards. It didn’t tip the other way,” he reminded her. “And if it had, though it makes me just as sick as you to think that, it would be on the heads of those bollocks excuse for cops. You know that.”

She sucked in a breath. “You’re still mad at me.”

“I am, and you’re still mad at me. But we both understand there are more important things just at the moment.”

They could count on each other for that, she thought. Count on each other to hold the line when it needed to be held. “So, truce.”

“Agreed. She’s precious to me, too.”

Because her eyes stung, Eve pressed her fingers to them. “Don’t pet me,” she said, anticipating him. “I need to hold it together.” Eve dropped her hands. “She’s counting on me to hold it together.”

“So you will.” He petted her anyway, just sleeking a hand down her hair. Then he gripped one of the short strands, gave it a hard tug.

“Hey. Truce.”

“See, you’re a little pissed again. You’ll work better.” He strolled back into the office.

She held it together, and in short order it took no effort. She simply fell into the rhythm of the work.

“We can’t look at their financials, even first-level, without sending up a flag. Much less go digging around for buried accounts and real estate.”

She caught Roarke’s glance, knew he was considering his illegal and unregistered equipment. No flags there. But she sent him a subtle shake of the head. She had to toe every inch of the line on this.

“If we go to IAB with this,” Peabody began, “with what we have, which when I look at it all laid out, isn’t really that much, it could bust open. It could give Renee—I can’t call her Oberman because it makes me think of her father. It could give her and the others time to rabbit, or cover, or ditch. They must have contingency plans, escape routes.”

“I can work that. I’m going to reach out to Webster.” Again she caught Roarke’s glance, the c**k of his eyebrow. She supposed it was impossible for Webster’s name to come up in this particular room without both of them seeing Roarke beat the hell out of him.

“I’ll feed this to him, but with conditions,” she continued. “I can work that, especially if Whitney adds his weight. We want to keep this narrow for as long as we can.”

“Keener!” McNab punched a fist in the air, did a little spin in Eve’s chair that had his long, blond ponytail flying. Then he pointed the index fingers of both hands at her computer. “Found him. I did some crosses on some of her closed cases, mixed in others from here and there for cover, skimming wit lists and suspects like a standard search for—”