Chapter Two #2
“Do you want to sit down?” Eve asked him.
“No. No. I can’t. My father.” He looked toward the office. “Is he . . .”
“No, he’s been transported.”
“To the morgue.” Bradley, slim, dark-haired, closed eyes that carried deep shadows of fatigue. “I know the procedure. I’m a doctor. I work in emergency medicine. I don’t understand how, why. You need to tell me more than you did over the ’link.”
“Do you have your father’s security code to the residence?”
“No.”
“Are you aware of anyone, besides your father, who would?”
“No. Dad’s obsessive about security. His work sets that tone. Are you saying someone used it to break in?”
“We believe so, yes. Do you know of anyone who wished your father harm? Someone he argued with, someone at work he reprimanded or fired?”
“No. He was a get-along kind of guy. A let’s-find-the-solution type. When Nate and I were growing up, Mom handled the discipline. You said he was attacked, in his office here?”
“Yes.” An ER doc, Eve thought, who looked as if he’d put in a lot of tough hours.
She had to give him more, and tougher. “Dr. Chu, your father was beaten, severely. The medical examiner will determine the full extent of his injuries, but I can tell you he suffered multiple broken bones, severe head and facial trauma.”
He paled slightly, but his gaze held steady on hers. “Beaten. What did they want? What did they take?”
“So far as we know at this time, they took nothing. He still had his wrist unit, cash. Evidence indicates the assailant remained inside the office for some time before and after your father’s death.”
“I need to see it.”
“Crime Scene is processing. I can’t let you go inside.”
“I don’t need to go in to see it. I’m a doctor, I don’t cringe at the sight of blood. I know the office. If something’s missing, I’ll know.”
“Just to the doorway.”
She walked with him, heard his hard indrawn breath, saw his right hand ball into a fist. Inside, the white-suited sweepers did their work in a room that smelled deeply of blood and death.
“Mother of God, my dad. Someone did this to my dad. The blood loss . . .”
Then Bradley took a breath. Another.
“There was a paperweight on his desk. Tricia made it for him. She’s a glass artist. A globe, sunset colors.”
“It looks like sunset over the water,” Eve said. “We have it.”
“I don’t know if all the photos and plaques are there, the ones he had on the wall. I don’t know why anyone would take any of them, but I can’t be sure of that.”
He turned to Eve. “This is madness. You know that. My father kept in shape, he wasn’t weak or frail. But he wasn’t a physical man. He wasn’t a fighter, but a negotiator. Still, he would have tried, anyone would. Whoever did this to him? It’s madness.”
She couldn’t argue with that.
When she finally stepped out, the night held a hint of the brisk that said fall in New York.
“I sent my car back,” Roarke told her. “I’ll drive. You take a blocker.”
“I don’t have a headache. No, really,” she said when he just looked at her. “Regel said it’s a puzzle, and he’s right. It’s the puzzle rolling around in there, not a headache.”
But she didn’t object, at all, to taking the passenger seat.
“So somebody got his security code, used it to get in through his office window, and proceeded to beat him to death. Who knew he’d be in the office at that time?”
“His wife. But you believe her.”
“Yeah, I believe her. You can’t always tell when someone’s lying. Some people are really, really good at it. But I believe her. You’re the e-man, but I’m thinking if someone could access his security code, they could access his texts.”
“You’d be right.”
He drove smoothly. Traffic had hit the point where people had settled into home or bars or restaurants, the theater, a club, so it chugged along as they headed crosstown.
“They broke in for one purpose,” Eve continued. “To kill him. Not just kill him, eradicate him. That takes a special kind of hate, of rage. Revenge hits first, but there’s also poking into something somebody doesn’t want poked into. Or, if he’d had a side piece, pathological jealousy.
“Then,” she added, “there’s his work. Something he’s working on, something someone wants for their own—or something that is their own, and he took or was taking credit for.”
No, not a headache, she thought again. Just so many pieces that might or might not fit.
“Do you know anything about biotech, biomedicine, blah biowhatever?”
He had to smile. “Bits and pieces, and enough to hire those who know a great deal more.”
“Are you and Banner-Wyst competitors?”
“There’s plenty of room for all. They’re innovative, well established. Since, ah, I think the later years of the last century. I began testing those waters fifteen or sixteen years ago.”
“And now?”
“Swimming along quite well, thank you.”
“But there’s competition, right? To get those innovations. The bigger tomato or the better heart replacement.”
“There is, of course, and Banner-Wyst, in my opinion, has a ruthless way coated with humanitarian efforts. You’re toying with the victim hitting an innovation or pushing to beat someone else to it, or trying to undermine someone else’s work.
Bribing them, perhaps, and somehow ruining their career or life or squeezing them out. ”
“His son called him a negotiator, and his wife said he looked for compromise. Bribes and blackmail can be a kind of negotiation or compromise.”
She sat back with a shrug. “Or he banged someone else’s wife, fired someone, found out something that threatened the wrong person. Lots of ors. One solid? He seriously pissed someone off. Somebody strong, somebody smart, and someone who couldn’t stop killing him even after he was dead.”
She let out a breath when he turned into the gates of home and she saw the castle Roarke built silhouetted against the night sky. Lights glowed in windows, and inside there would be quiet.
There’d be work, but quiet as well, and relief and the warmth that came from belonging.
“He thought he was safe in his nice house in the nice neighborhood, with excellent security. Someone destroyed that, and him. What did he do, what did he know?” she muttered.
Then shook her head. “The killer knew him. They knew each other. If this was some kind of corporate hit, a science deal? You’re-not-beating-me-to-the-finish-line thing? You go cleaner. An accident, a mugging. Because it’s not personal.”
“And this was, I agree.”
“Very personal.” She got out of the car. “I think the killer has a family. Maybe kids. Young ones.”
“And why is that?”
“That photo on the desk, the one of the victim and his family, down to the grandkids. It was facedown. Others are smashed, tossed around, but that one is lying, undamaged, facedown on the desk.”
“Where it could have fallen during the melee.”
“Yeah, could’ve. But it’s giving me an itch.”
“I for one trust your itches. What does it tell you?”
“Maybe Chu threatened his family somehow. Their safety or security. A guy gets fired, his family pays, too. Maybe little Herbie needs a medical treatment, and now they can’t afford it.
Or sweet young Ernestine has to give up her dream of being a concert pianist because you can’t pay for the lessons. ”
Roarke waited a beat, then reached for the door. “If we ever have children, I’m in charge of names.”
“Right, but you follow me?”
“I do, yes.”
They went inside. No Summerset loomed in the foyer, no cat sat at his feet. And peace ruled throughout the land.
“Where’s the Ghoul of Roarke Manor?”
“Adorable. As it’s near to ten, I expect he’s in his quarters.”
Later than she’d realized, she thought, and sent Roarke an apologetic look. “I have to give this a couple hours. I need to write it up, send it to Peabody. And—”
“Understood,” he told her as they started up the stairs. “But inside that couple of hours, you’ll have a meal.”
“I can hold a slice in one hand and work. Multitask.”
“Darling Eve, you’re pale, which tells me if you had anything after breakfast this morning, it was many hours ago. You need meat, and I’m told we have a very nice beef stew with dumplings.”
“I like dumplings, but where do they get that name? Dumplings? They’re sort of soft biscuits that go inside the stew. Or on top of it. Dumplings sound like some little thing you dump . . . Okay, that one makes weird sense now.”
“Thank God, as I’d have pondered over the question for hours.”
They walked into her office, where the cat sprawled on her sleep chair. Galahad shifted, stretched his pudgy body, yawned fiercely. Then he hopped down, strolled over to greet the humans.
Eve leaned down, gave him one long stroke. “Summerset fed you, no question, so don’t think you’re getting another dinner out of us.”
He gave her a long study out of one amber eye, one green eye, then wound around Roarke’s legs.
“He knows you’ll cave and give him some of that cat candy.”
“Well now, he did wait up for us, more or less. I’m going to have some wine.”
“I need to work first. I could go for a glass with the stew deal.”
“Write it up, and I’ll start on your board. You can fiddle with it after if need be.”
She turned to him, took his face in her hands. “You make a solid Peabody, a really good McNab. But you’re an even better Roarke.”
She kissed him, intending to make it quick and casual. But he drew her in, took it long and deep.
“Yeah,” she murmured. “An even better Roarke.”
“Since I played my alternate parts so well, I hope my reward includes looking into finances.”
“They need looking at. The vic, the widow, the sons.”
“After dinner then.”
She sat at her command center, opened operations. Roarke poured himself a glass of wine before taking her auxiliary to generate what she needed for her board.
She finished with a memo to Peabody.
Caught this on the way home. Get up to speed on the investigation, and meet me at the morgue at eight-thirty.