Conspiracy in Death

Eve choked on the cookie. If Karen had whipped out a laser on full and blasted it in her direction, she'd have felt less panic. "Today? Like now?"

"Well, not this minute, apparently." Laughing, Karen sent Roarke an adoring look as he served her tea. Quite obviously, they'd bonded between cookies and kittens. "But I don't think she's going to wait much longer."

"I guess you'll be glad to – you know – get it out of there."

"I can't wait to meet her – hold her. But I love being pregnant."

"Why?"

She laughed again at Eve's obvious puzzlement, then shared a tender look with her husband. "Making a miracle."

"Well." Since that dried up her pregnancy conversation, Eve turned back to Will. "We don't want to take up any more of your time. I appreciate the help. If you could get me any of your old notes on Drury, I'd be grateful."

"I can dig them out." He rose, paused by his wife to lay a hand over hers, linking them over their child.

At Eve's request, Roarke drove aimlessly while she filled him in on her conversation with Wilson McRae.

"Do you blame him?"

She shook her head. "Everyone has their own, what do you call it, Achilles' heel. They found his and put the pressure on. Guy's got a kid, another on the way, a pretty little wife in a pretty little house. They knew just where to jam him."

"She's a teacher." Roarke cruised the freeway under the flood of safety lights and kept the speed steady. "She's been working on-screen for the last six months and plans to continue that way for at least another year or two. But she misses the personal contact with her students. She's a very sweet woman who's worried about her husband."

"How much does she know?"

"Not all, but more, I believe, than he thinks. Will he go back when you close the case?"

Not if, she noted, but when. It bolstered the heart to have someone with so much faith in her. More faith, she realized, than she had in herself just now. "No. He'll never get past giving it up. They stole that from him. And sometimes you never get back everything."

She closed her eyes a moment. "Will you drive downtown? I need to look. I need to see if I remember."

"There's no need to take on more now, Eve."

"Sometimes you never get rid of everything, either. I need to look."

Another city, she thought, with some of its old stone and brick desperately preserved, and so much of it crumbled to dust to make room for sleek steel and quick prefab.

There would be snazzy restaurants and clubs, slick hotels and glittering shops in the areas where the power board wanted the tourists, and their I'm-on-vacation money, to congregate. And there would be sex joints, dives, scarred units, and alley filth in others where only the doomed and the foolish gathered.

It was there Roarke drove the gleaming silver car through the narrow streets, where the lights pumped in hard colors and promised all the darker delights. Street LCs shivered on corners and hoped for a trick to take them out of the wind. Dealers prowled, angling for a mark, ready to do business at discounted rates because the cold kept all but the desperately addicted inside.

Sidewalk sleepers huddled inside their cribs, drank their brew, and waited for morning.

"Stop here," she murmured it, squinting at a corner building with bricks pitted and laced with graffiti.- The lower windows were barred and blocked with wood. It called itself Hotel South Side in a sign that blinked jerkily in watery blue.

She got out, staring up at the windows. Some were cracked, all were blackened with cheap privacy screens. "Too much the same," she said quietly. "All these places are too much the same. I don't know."

"Do you want to go in?"

"I don't know." As she dragged a hand over her face, through her hair, a lanky man with icy eyes moved out of the shadows.

"Looking for action? Need a boost? You got some jingles, I got what you need. Prime Zeus, Ecstasy, Zoner. Mix or match."

Eve flicked him a glance. "Back off, creep, or I'll pop your eyes out of your head and make you eat them."

"Hey, bitch, you're on my turf, you get some ma

She took a second to debate whether to kick his teeth in or restrain him for the beat cop. A second was all Roarke needed. With her mouth pursed, Eve watched his fist flash out, a fast flurry of movement that had the knife skittering down the sidewalk. She didn't have time to blink before he had the dealer by the throat two inches off the ground.

"I believe you called my wife a bitch."

The only response was a wheezing gag as the man struggled like a landed trout. Merely shaking her head, Eve strolled over, scooped up the knife, folded the blade back in place.

"Now," Roarke continued in a mild, amazingly pleasant voice, "if I pop your eyes out, I get to eat them. If I still see you, say, five seconds after I toss your pitiful ass aside, I'm going to have a hell of an appetite."

He bared his teeth in a grin, heaved. The dealer hit the sidewalk with a rattle of bones, scrambled up, and took off in a limping sprint.

"Now." Fastidiously, Roarke dusted off his hands. "Where were we?"

"I liked the part about you eating his eyes. I'll have to use that one." She slipped the knife into her pocket, kept her hand over it. "Let's go in."

There was a single yellow light in the lobby, and a single burly droid behind the smeared security glass. He eyed them balefully, jerked a thumb at the rate sign.

For a dollar a minute, you got a room with a bed. For two, you got the additional amenity of a toilet.

"Third floor," Eve said briefly. "East corner."

"You get the room I give you."

"Third floor," she said again. "East corner."

His gaze lowered to the hundred dollar credit Roarke flipped into the tray. "Don't mean a shit to me." He reached behind, took a key code from a rack. His fingers snagged the credit, then tossed down the key. "Fifty minutes. You go over, you pay double."

Eve took the key for 3C, relieved to see her hand was still steady. They took the stairs.

It wasn't familiar, yet it was painfully familiar. Narrow steps, dirty walls, thin sounds of sex and misery seeping through them. Cold, from the wind battering the brick and glass, reached down and froze the bones.

She said nothing as she slipped the key into the slot, pushed the door open.

The air was bitter and stale, with echoes of sweat and sex. The sheets on the bed shoved into the corner were stained with both and the rusty shadows of old blood.

With the breath strangling in her throat, she stepped inside. Roarke closed the door behind them, waited.

A single window, cracked. But so many were. The old floor, slanted and scarred. But she'd seen hundreds like it. Her legs trembled as she made herself walk across it, stand at that window and stare out.

How many times, she wondered, had she stood at windows in filthy little rooms and imagined herself leaping out, letting her body fall, feeling it smash and break on the street below? What had held her back, time after time, made her face the next day and the next?

How many times had she heard the door open and prayed to a God she didn't understand to help her. To spare her. To save her.

"I don't know if this is the room. There were so many rooms. But it was one like it. It's not so different from the last room, in Dallas. Where I killed him. But I was younger here. That's all I know for sure. I get a faded image of myself in my head. And of him. His hands around my throat."