Disengaged. Son of a bitch. Weapon drawn and ready, she circled to the south.
Roarke did his own circuit in silence, using the trees. He'd bought this property eight years before, had had it remodeled and rehabbed to his specifications. He'd supervised the design and implementation of the security system personally. It was in a very real sense his first home, the place he'd chosen to settle after too many years of wandering. Beneath the icy control, as he slipped from shadow to shadow, was a bubbling, grinding fury that his home had been invaded.
The night was cool, clear, quiet as a tomb. He wondered if he was up against a very ballsy thief. It could be as simple as that. Or it could be something, someone much more dangerous. A pro hired by a business competitor. An enemy – and he hadn't fought his way to where he was without making them. Particularly since many of his interests had been on the dark side of the law.
Or the target could be Eve. She, too, had made enemies. Dangerous enemies. He glanced over his shoulder, hesitated. Then told himself not to second-guess his wife. He knew of no one better equipped to take care of herself.
But it was that hesitation, that instinctive need to protect that turned his luck. As he paused in the shadows, he caught the faint sound of movement. Roarke took a firmer grip on the gun, stepped back, stepped to the side. And waited.
The figure was moving slowly, in a crouch. As the distance between them melted away, Roarke could hear the puff of nervous breathing. Though he couldn't make out features, he judged male, perhaps five-ten, and on the lean side. He could see no weapon, and thinking of the difficulty Eve might have explaining why her husband had held off an intruder with a banned handgun, tucked the Glock into the back of his slacks.
He braced, looking forward to a little hand-to-hand, then lunged when the figure slunk by. Roarke had an arm around a throat, a fist clenched and raised in anticipation of quiet, perhaps petty revenge, when he realized it wasn't a man, but a boy.
"Hey, you son of a bitch, let go. I'll kill you."
A very rude and very frightened boy, Roarke decided. The struggle was short and all one-sided. It took seconds only for Roarke to pin the boy against the trunk of a tree. "How the hell did you get inside?" Roarke demanded.
The kid's breath was coming in whistles, and his face was pale as a ghost. Roarke could hear the audible click in his throat as he swallowed. "You're Roarke." He stopped struggling and tried to smirk. "You've got pretty good security."
"I like to think so." Not a thief, Roarke decided, but ballsy, certainly. "How did you get past it?"
"I – " He broke off, eyes going huge as they shot over Roarke's shoulder. "Behind you!"
With a smoothness the boy would later appreciate, Roarke pivoted, keeping his grip unbreakable. "We have our intruder, Lieutenant."
"So I see." She lowered her weapon, ordered her heart to slow to normal. "Jesus, Roarke, it's just a kid. It's – " She stopped, narrowed her eyes. "I know this kid."
"Then perhaps you'd introduce us."
"It's Jamie, right? Jamie Lingstrom. Alice's brother."
"Good eye, Lieutenant. Now, you want to tell him to stop choking me?"
"I don't think so." She holstered her weapon, stepped up. "What the hell are you doing, breaking into private property in the middle of the night? You're a cop's grandson, for Christ's sake. You want to end up in juvie?"
"I'm not your big problem right now, Lieutenant Dallas." He made a valiant attempt to sound tough, but his voice wavered. "You've got a dead body outside the wall. Really dead," he added and began to shake.
"Did you kill someone, Jamie?" Roarke asked mildly.
"No, man. No way. He was there when I came by." Terrified his stomach would revolt and humiliate him, Jamie swallowed hard again. "I'll show you."
If it was a trick, Eve considered it a fine one. She couldn't take a chance. "All right. Let's go. And if you try to run, pal, I'll zap you."
"Wouldn't make any sense to run, would it, when I went to all this trouble to get in? This way." His legs were rubber, and he sincerely hoped neither of them noticed that his knees kept knocking together.
"I'd like to know how you got in," Roarke said as they headed for the main gate. "How you bypassed security."
"I fool around with electronics. A hobby. You've got a really high-grade system. The best."
"So I thought."
"I guess I didn't disengage all the alarms." Jamie turned his head, tried another weak smile. "You knew I was here."
"You got in," Roarke repeated. "How?"
"This." Jamie pulled a small palm-sized unit out of his pocket. "It's a jammer I've been working on for a couple of years. It'll read most systems," he began, frowning when Roarke plucked it out of his hand. "When you engage this," he continued, leaning over to point, "it'll scan the chips, run a cloning program. Then it's just a matter of backing out the program step by step. Takes some time, but it's pretty efficient."
Roarke stared at the mechanism. It was no bigger than one of the E-games one of his companies manufactured. Indeed, the casing looked distressingly familiar. "You adapted a game unit into a jammer. Yourself. One that read and cloned and breached my security."
"Well, most of it." Jamie's eyes clouded in annoyance. "I must have missed something, one of the backups maybe. Your system must be ultra mag. I'd like to see it."
"Not in this lifetime," Roarke muttered and shoved the unit into his pocket.
When they reached the gates, he disengaged and opened them manually, sliding a narrow look at Jamie as the boy craned over his shoulder to see.
"Way impressive," Jamie commented. "I didn't figure I could get through this way. That's why I had to come over the wall. Needed a ladder."
Roarke simply closed his eyes. "A ladder," he said to no one in particular. "He climbed up a ladder. Lovely. And the cameras?"
"Oh, I blanked them from across the street. The unit's got a range of ten yards."
"Lieutenant." Roarke snagged Jamie by the collar. "I want him punished."
"Later. Now, where's this body you're supposed to have seen?"
The cocky smile fell away from his face. "To the left," he told her, paling again.
"Keep a hold of him, Roarke. Stay here."
"I've got him," Roarke replied, but he'd be damned if he'd stay back. He tugged Jamie through the gate, met Eve's annoyed stare blandly. "Our home, our problem."
She said something nasty under her breath and turned left. She didn't have to go far. It wasn't hidden, it wasn't subtle.
The body was naked and strapped to a wooden form in the shape of a star. No, she realized. A pentagram. Inverted so that the head with its dead doll eyes and gaping throat hung over the bloody sidewalk. The arms were outstretched, the legs parted in a wide vee. The center of his chest was a mass of black blood and gore, the hole hacked out of it bigger than a man's fist.
She doubted the ME would find a heart inside when he opened the body for autopsy.
She heard the choked sound behind her and turned to see Roarke shift his grip on Jamie and step over to shield the boy from the view.
"Lobar," was all he said.
"Yeah." She stepped closer. Whoever had taken his heart had also plunged a knife through a sheet of paper and through his groin.
DEVIL WORSHIPPER BABY KILLER BURN IN HELL
"Take the boy inside, will you, Roarke?" She glanced at the collapsible ladder tilted against the wall. "And get rid of that. Pass the kid off to Summerset for now. I can't leave the scene." She turned, her face blank and impassive. Her cop face. "Will you bring me my field kit?''
"Yes. Come on, Jamie."
"I know who he is." Tears swam in Jamie's eyes and were viciously blinked away. "He's one of the bastards who killed my sister. I hope he rots."
Because his voice had broken at the end, Roarke slipped an arm around his shoulder. "He will. Come inside. Let the Lieutenant do her job." Roarke sent Eve one last look before hefting the ladder and leading Jamie back through the gates.