The In Death Collection 06-10 (153 page)

Roarke had two holo-conferences, an interspace transmission, and a head-of-departments meeting, all scheduled for the afternoon and all dealing with his Olympus Resort project. It was over a year in the works, and he intended for it to be open for business by summer.

Not all of the enormous planetwide pleasure resort would be complete, but the main core, with its luxury hotels and villas, its plush gambling and entertainment complexes, was good to go. He had taken Eve there on part of their honeymoon. It had been her first off-planet trip.

He intended to take her back, kicking and screaming no doubt, as interplanetary travel was not on her list of favorite delights.

He wanted time away with her, away from work. His and hers. Not just one of the quick forty-eight-hour jaunts he managed to push her into, but real time, intimate time.

As he pushed away from his in-home control center, he rotated his shoulder. It was nearly healed and didn’t trouble him overmuch. But now and again, a faint twinge reminded him of how close both of them had
come to dying. Only weeks before, he’d looked at death, then into Eve’s eyes.

They’d both faced bloody and violent ends before. But there was more at stake now. That moment of connection, the sheer will in her eyes, the grip of her hand on his, had pulled him back.

They needed each other.

Two lost souls,
he thought, taking a moment to walk to the tall windows that looked out on part of the world he’d built for himself out of will, desire, sweat, and dubiously accumulated funds. Two lost souls whose miserable beginnings had forged them into what appeared to be polar opposites.

Love had narrowed the distance, then had all but eradicated it.

She’d saved him. The night his life had hung in her furious and unbreakable grip. She’d saved him, he mused, the first moment he’d locked eyes with her. As impossible as it should have been, she was his answer. He was hers.

He had a need to give her things. The tangible things wealth could command. Though he knew the gifts most often puzzled and flustered her. Maybe because they did, he corrected with a grin. But underlying that overt giving was the fierce foundation to give her comfort, security, trust, love. All the things they’d both lived without most of their lives.

He wondered that a woman who was so skilled in observation, in studying the human condition, couldn’t see that what he felt for her was often as baffling and as frightening to him as it was to her.

Nothing had been the same for him since she’d walked into his life wearing an ugly suit and cool-eyed suspicion. He thanked God for it.

Feeling sentimental, he realized. He supposed it was the Irish that popped out of him at unexpected moments. More, he kept replaying the nightmare she’d suffered through a few nights before.

They came more rarely now, but still they came, torturing her sleep, sucking her back into a past she couldn’t quite remember. He wanted to erase them from her mind, eradicate them. And knew he never would. Never could.

For months, he’d been tempted to do a full search and scan, to dig out the data on that tragic child found broken and battered in a Dallas alley. He had the skill, and he had the technology to find everything there was to find: details the social workers, the police, the child authorities couldn’t.

He could fill in the blanks for her, and, he admitted, for himself.

But it wasn’t the way. He understood her well enough to know that if he took on the task, gave her the answers to questions she wasn’t ready to ask, it would hurt more than heal.

Wasn’t it the same for him? When he’d returned to Dublin after so many years, he’d needed to study some of the shattered pieces of his childhood. Alone. Even then, he’d only glanced at the surface of them. What was left of them were buried. At least for now, he intended to leave them buried.

The now was what required his attention, he reminded himself. And brooding over the past—there was the Irish again—solved nothing. Whether the past was his or Eve’s, it solved nothing.

He gathered up the discs and hard copies he’d need for his afternoon meetings. Then hesitated. He wanted another look at her before he left for the day.

But when he opened the connecting doors, he saw only McNab, stuffing what appeared to be an entire burger in his mouth while the computer droned through a background search.

“Solo today, Ian?”

McNab jerked from a lounging to a sitting position, swallowed too fast, choked. Amused, Roarke strolled over and slapped him smartly on the back.

“It helps to chew first.”

“Yeah. Thanks. Ah . . . I didn’t have much breakfast, so I thought it’d be okay if I . . .”

“My AutoChef is your AutoChef. The lieutenant’s in the field, I take it.”

“Yeah. She hauled Peabody out about an hour ago. Feeney headed into Central to tie up some threads. I’m working here.” He smiled then, a quick flash of strong white teeth. “I got the best gig.”

“Lucky you.” Roarke managed to find a French fry on McNab’s plate that hadn’t been drowned in ketchup. He sampled it while he studied the screen. “Running backgrounds? Again?”

“Yeah, well.” McNab rolled his eyes, shifting so his silver ear loops clanged cheerfully together. “Dallas has some wild hair about there might be some way-back connection, some business between Draco and one of the players that simmered all these years. Me, I figure we already scanned all the data and found zippo, but she wants another run, below the surface. I’m here to serve. Especially when real cow meat’s on the menu.”

“Well now, if there is some bit of business, you’re unlikely to find it this way, aren’t you?”

“I’m not?”

“Something old and simmering, you say.” Considering the possibility, Roarke hooked another fry. “If I wanted to find something long buried, so to speak, I’d figure on getting a bit of dirt under my nails.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“Sealed records.”

“I don’t have the authority to open sealeds. You gotta have probable cause, and a warrant, and all that happy shit.” When Roarke merely smiled, McNab straightened, glanced at the entrance door. “Of course, if there was a way around all that off the record—”

“There are ways, Ian. And there are ways.”

“Yeah, but there’s also the CYA factor.”

“Well then, we’ll just have to make sure your ass is covered. Won’t we?”

“Dallas is going to know, isn’t she?” McNab said a few minutes later, when their positions were reversed and Roarke sat at the computer.

“Of course. But you’ll find that knowing and proving are far different matters, even to the redoubtable lieutenant.”

In any case, Roarke enjoyed his little forays into police work. And he was a man who rarely saw a need to limit his enjoyments.

“Now you see here, Ian, we’ve accessed the on-record fingerprints and DNA pattern of your primary suspects. Perfectly legitimate.”

“Yeah, if I was doing the accessing.”

“Only a technicality. Computer, match current identification codes with any and all criminal records, civil actions and suits, including all juvenile and sealed data. A good place to start,” he said to McNab.

Working . . . Access to sealed data is denied without proper authority or judicial code. Open records are available. Shall I continue?

“Hold.” Roarke sat back, examined his nails. Clean as a whistle, he thought. For the moment. “McNab, be a pal, would you, and fetch me some coffee?”

McNab stuck his hands in his pockets, pulled them out, did a quick mental dance over the thin line between procedure and progress. “Um. Yeah, okay. Sure.”

He ducked into the kitchen area, ordered up the coffee. He dawdled. McNab didn’t have a clue how long it would take to bypass the red tape and access what was not supposed to be accessed. To calm himself, he decided to see if there was any pie available.

He discovered to his great delight that he had a choice of six types and agonized over which to go for.

“Ian, are you growing the coffee beans in there?”

“Huh?” He poked his head back in. “I was just . . . figured you’d need some time.”

He was a sharp tech, Roarke thought, and a delightfully naive young man. “I think this might interest you.”

“You got in? Already? But how—” McNab cut himself off as he hurried back to the desk. “No, I’d better not know how. That way, when I’m being charged and booked, I can claim ignorance.”

“Charged and booked for what?” Roarke tapped a finger on a sheet of paper. “Here’s your warrant for the sealeds.”

“My—” Eyes goggling, McNab snatched up the sheet. “It looks real. It’s signed by Judge Nettles.”

“So it appears.”

“Wow. You’re not just ice,” McNab said reverently. “You’re fucking Antarctica.”

“Ian, please. You’re embarrassing me.”

“Right. Um. Why did I ask for Judge Nettles for the warrant again?”

With a laugh, Roarke got to his feet. “I’m sure you can come up with some appropriately convoluted cop speak to justify the request if and when you’re asked. My suggestion would be a variation on a shot in the dark.”

“Yeah. That’s a good one.”

“Then I’ll leave you to it.”

“Okay. Thanks. Ah, hey, Roarke?”

“Yes?”

“There’s this other thing.” McNab shifted from foot to foot on his purple airboots. “It’s kind of personal. I was going to work around to talking to the lieutenant about it, but, well, you know how she is.”

“I know precisely.” He studied McNab’s face, felt a stir of pity wrapped around amusement. “Women, Ian?”

“Oh yeah. Well, woman, I guess. I gotta figure a guy like you knows how to handle them as well as you handle electronics. I just don’t get women. I mean I get them,” he rushed on. “I don’t have any problem with
sex. I just don’t
get
them, in an intellectual sense. I guess.”

“I see. Ian, if you want me to discuss the intricacies and capriciousness of the female mind, we’ll need several days and a great deal of liquor.”

“Yeah. Ha. I guess you’re in a hurry right now.”

Actually, time was short. There were a few billion dollars waiting to be shifted, juggled, and consumed. But Roarke eased a hip on the corner of the desk. The money would wait. “I imagine this involves Peabody.”

“We’re, you know, doing it.”

“Ian, I had no idea you were such a wild romantic. A virtual poet.”

Roarke’s dry tone had McNab flushing, then grinning. “We have really amazing sex.”

“That’s lovely for both of you, and congratulations. But I’m not sure Peabody would appreciate you sharing that piece of information with me.”

“It’s not really about sex,” McNab said quickly, afraid he’d lose his sounding board before he’d sounded off. “I mean, it is, because we have it. A lot of it. And it rocks, so that’s mag and all. That’s how I figured it would be if I could ever get her out of that uniform for five damn minutes. But that’s like it, that’s all. Every time we finish, you know, the naked pretzel, I have to bribe her with food or get her going about a case or she’s out the door. Or booting me out, if we landed at her place.”

Roarke understood the frustration. He’d only had one woman ever try to shake him off. The only woman who mattered. “And you’re looking for more.”

“Weird, huh?” With a half laugh, McNab began to pace. “I really like women. All sorts of women. I especially like them naked.”

“Who could blame you?”

“Exactly. So I finally get a chance to bounce on the naked She-Body, and it’s making me crazy. I’m all tied up inside and she’s cruising right along. I always figured
women, you know, mostly they were supposed to want the whole relationship thing. Talking about stuff so you come up with all those nice lies. I mean, they know you’re lying, but they go along with it because maybe you won’t be later on. Or something.”

“That’s a fascinating view on the male/female dynamic.” One, Roarke was certain, would earn the boy a female knee to the balls if ever voiced in mixed company. “I take it Peabody isn’t interested in pleasant lies.”

“I don’t know what she’s interested in; that’s the whole deal.” Wound up now, he waved his arms. “I mean, she likes sex, she’s into her work, she looks at Dallas like the lieutenant has the answers to the mysteries of the universe. Then she goes off with that goddamn Monroe son of a bitch to the opera.”

It was the last, delivered with vitriol, that had Roarke nodding. “It’s perfectly natural to be jealous of a rival.”

“Rival, my ass. What the hell’s wrong with her, going around with that slick LC? Fancy dinners and art shows. Listening to music you can’t even dance to. I ought to smash his face in.”

Roarke thought about it a moment and decided, under similar circumstances, he’d be tempted to do just that. “It would be satisfying, no doubt, but bound to annoy the woman in question. Have you tried romance?”

“What do you mean? Like goofy stuff?”

Roarke sighed. “Let’s try this. Have you ever asked her out?”

“Sure. We see each other a couple, three nights a week.”

“Out, Ian. In public. In places where you’re both required, by law, to wear clothes of some kind.”