After the single bang in response, Mary Kate drank the last swallow of water, then crawled onto her cot.
She needed to rest, to think.
She wasn’t alone.
8
When she couldn’t find a new angle to probe, when she found herself circling the same path with the same results, Eve pushed away from her command center.
There was simply nothing more she could do. A part of her believed Anna Hobe’s time was ticking down, but there was nothing she could do to stop that clock.
The lab, she thought as she walked to the board again. She had to hope the lab provided some leads, some data, some something she could get her teeth into.
It cycled through her brain again. Tattoo, piercings, makeup, hair products, perfume, clothes, shoes.
She’d given the lab rats a big goddamn bouquet of forensics. They’d better come through.
She walked into Roarke’s office to find he’d switched to water while he worked. He’d shed his tie, his suit jacket. Rolled up his sleeves, tied back his hair.
How appalled would he be if he knew she thought of this as his Roarke-cop mode?
Very, she concluded, so she’d save that for when she wanted to annoy him.
“Anything I can use?”
“A large area,” he reminded her. “With plenty of buildings, commercial, residential, a combination, rented, owned, condemned, in the rehab process, that could meet your criteria.”
“I’ll take them.”
He glanced over at her, and immediately saw both stress and fatigue. “It would take you days if not weeks to vet all that fall into the general parameters. It’ll take a bit more time to refine and eliminate some of the possibles.”
“It’s going to be a single man.”
“Understood, but a single man may own or rent under another name, a business name, a false front or legitimate one. A single man may have recently broken ties and not yet changed the ownership or lease—or may be legally bound to hold said ownership or lease in a business name, a partnership—marriage or business—and so on. And you know all that as well as I do.”
Since she did, she walked to his window, back again, then dropped down on the slick new sofa he’d installed when they’d redone their offices.
He’d kept the portrait she’d given him for their first anniversary on the wall across from his command center. It made her feel a little sentimental to see the two of them under that arbor of flowers on their wedding day.
And reminded her, with a kind of jolt, their third—Jesus!—anniversary was coming up in a few weeks.
Which meant she had to come up with another gift.
It never ended.
She scanned his office as if an idea would jump out and dance. All she saw equaled attractive, efficient, stylish, and important.
And she realized she’d never really looked at his space from this angle. She’d never actually sat on this sofa.
He had shelves with stuff on them—artfully arranged. She noted the photograph he’d asked her for, and she’d hunted up. One of her in her Academy days. He had the medal the NYPSD had bestowed on him—their highest civilian honor. Some books—actual books because he liked actual books—held upright by a pair of what she thought were dragons.
And among the other bits and pieces, some of which looked old, some of which were likely priceless, the photo of his mother holding him when he’d been an infant.
The child she’d never had the chance to raise.
Personal, she thought. All of it. Things he kept at home rather than in his big, fancy office in Midtown.
Looked like she had to think of something personal.
She scanned the office again. It sure as hell didn’t strike her he needed anything else in here.
“What’s this wall color?” she wondered out loud.
He glanced up. “Ah, some sort of sage, if I recall.”
“Like what Peabody’s going to burn in the playground once we toss this asshole in a cage?”
“I couldn’t say.” What he could do was switch the search to auto.
“Do you ever sit on the couch? I’ve never sat on this couch.”
He rose, walked over, sat. “We’re sitting on it now.”
“Your office is about three times the size of my office at Central.”
“Easily.”
“But it’s smaller than mine here. Why is that?”
“First, because the original purpose of yours was to replicate your apartment so you’d give it up and live with me. And second, I don’t need the room to gather up teams of cops, feed them, brief them as you often do here. Or need the room so we can sit for a meal together.”