“How about if Zoe brings the kids, we just hold together at your house for a while?”
Gwen closed her eyes. “That would be great. That would feel right. My aunt—our mother’s sister,” Gwen told Eve, “came in. That’s who our mother really wants now. The rest of us will hold together.”
They’d do just that, Eve thought when they left. They’d hold together.
“It had to be rough, growing up that way. Being ordered to toe a line, never seeing real love and loyalty between your parents.”
“They got out of it,” Eve said. “They made their own.”
She’d done the same.
She went back to her office, added to her notes. Hesitated, then copied Mira. It might be hard to read what Ned and Gwen had said, but she imagined Mira already knew all of it.
She wanted home, too, she realized. She’d find her focus again working at home.
She gathered what she needed, grabbed her coat, then made the mistake of answering her ’link.
The media liaison informed her she needed to give a statement on the Mira case.
Resigned—she’d known it was coming—she went out to the bullpen and Peabody’s desk.
“I have to go do the media statement, and I’m taking this home from there. I want reports on the spouses, and the verified alibis. You can do the rest here or at home, as long as I have everything tonight.”
“I’ll stick with it here until McNab’s off.”
“Copy Mira, but not through official channels. Got that?”
“Got that.”
She might hate this part of the job, but she would get it done. And she was grateful the liaison set a strict time of ten minutes, for statement and questions.
The questions sent up an echoing bang in her head on the drive home.
Is it true Senator Mira was found naked?
Why was his abduction not reported?
Is Dr. Charlotte Mira attached to this investigation?
Is Professor Dennis Mira a suspect?
How long was Senator Mira tortured before his death?
Christ, she thought, Christ, what public had the right to know that? Which was exactly how she’d answered the question before she’d walked away.
Home, she told herself. Maybe a workout or a swim before she dug back into it. Just something to take the edge off the ugliness of the day.
A workout and a swim, she decided as she drove through the gates. Thirty minutes each. She could take an hour, then start back fresh.
Just seeing the house made her feel more centered. She didn’t know why the conversation with Gwen and Ned had left her so unsettled.
They hadn’t been beaten or brutalized. They’d grown up privileged. Nothing like her own experience. But she’d felt her own old dread rising up as she’d listened to them, greasy memories of fear, of helplessness.
She needed it gone.
She prepped herself as she parked. She could start getting it gone by exchanging swipes with Summerset. That should shove back the echoes.
But Summerset wasn’t in the foyer, and that threw her balance off even more. He was supposed to be there, lurking, sneering, making some lame-ass comment.
“Early,” she grumbled to herself as she went up the stairs. “Damn right I’m home early. I made a point of it so I could catch you crawling out of your coffin. That would’ve been a pretty good one. Now it’s wasted.”
She started to head for the bedroom, changed her mind, aimed for her office. She’d dump everything there, take the time to update her board. Then she could let things simmer in the back of her brain while she pounded out a few miles, swam a few laps.
She was still steps away from her office when she heard the humming. Female humming.
What the hell? One of the house droids she rarely, if ever, saw? Did they hum happy tunes?
She stepped into the doorway.
Not a droid, but a glam-type redhead with a tablet, prowling around her personal space humming that fucking happy tune.
And where was her board?
Who the hell was the woman in crotch-high stiletto boots walking around . . . and sitting her skinny ass on HER desk.
Eve flipped back her coat, laid her hand on the butt of her weapon.
“Who the hell are you?”
The redhead let out a quick squeal, bounced her skinny ass off the corner of the desk. She slapped a hand between her perky breasts and goggled at Eve.
“Oh God! You scared me.”
“Yeah?” Hand on her weapon, Eve stepped into the room. “Want to get really scared? You will be if I don’t have your name and how you got in here in ten seconds.”
“I’m Charmaine. You must be Lieutenant Dallas. It’s just lovely to meet you. I was just finishing up the measurements.”
“What measurements?”
“For the . . . I’m so flustered. You really did give me a scare. I’m not really supposed to say. Roarke’s just—”
And he walked in from his office. “Sorry about the interruption. If you’d . . . Eve.”
He noted her stance, the position of her hand, the look in her eye. And sighed. “You’re home early.”
“Yeah, how about that? Who’s this, what’s she doing in my office?”
“Charmaine Delacroix, Lieutenant Dallas. Charmaine’s an interior designer I’ve worked with on a number of projects. Including the dojo.”
“Wonderfully minimalistic,” Charmaine said, “yet far from rigid or Spartan.”
Roarke subtly angled himself between her and Eve. “Do you have everything you need?”
“Absolutely. I can’t wait to get started. I’ll have some options for you by next week. Wonderful to meet you,” she said to Eve. “I know the way out.”
Eve gave her five seconds to beat feet, then rounded on Roarke. “You let somebody prowl around my office.”
“I had a designer come in, get a feel for it, measure, and would have been in here with her the entire time—though she’s perfectly trustworthy—but there was a call I had to take.”
“Why does some designer have to get a feel for my office? It’s my office, isn’t it? And where’s my goddamn murder board?”
“I put it away, as you wouldn’t want anyone not involved to see it. And if you hadn’t come home unexpectedly, it would’ve been back in place.”
Outrage wanted to blow the top of her skull through the ceiling. “So it’s okay if I don’t know the difference? It’s okay if I go into your office, take things and put them somewhere else, tell somebody to come right on in, as long as you don’t know about it?”
“If you had a reason to, as I did.”
“What possible reason did you have for moving my murder board, for letting some humming woman into my space?”
“‘Humming’?”
“She was humming. For Christ’s sake.”
“I suppose she has a cheerful disposition. The reason was to surprise you with some ideas for redoing your space.”
Another round of outrage wanted to blow flames out of her ears.
“Why do I need ideas for redoing it? It’s fine. It was just fine for you, too, when you put it together so I’d move in here. What, now it’s not good enough? Not fancy enough?”
His eyes chilled to blue ice. “If you’re going to deliberately be an ass, if you insist on raving over something this simple, we can talk about it when you’re not.”
“I’m an ass? You start messing with my space, and I’m an ass?”
“People change, Eve. They change their minds, their attitudes, their look, and often the look of their spaces. I thought, after this amount of time, you might be ready for a change here, in this space, to have it reflect what’s now rather than the past. Obviously, you’re not. But that’s not why you’re an ass. You’re an ass for being so pathetically insecure you’d react as if you’d walked in on the two of us naked and banging each other on your precious desk.
“I still have work.”
She set her teeth as he walked back toward his office. “If I’d walked in on that, you better believe I’d have used my weapon. On both of you.”
“That’s something, I suppose,” he said, and shut his office door.
9
Oh, she hated when he did that. Hated when she was primed for a good, bloody fight and he just iced over and walked away from it.