Anna pokered up. "They were dear, good friends."
"Mr. Hammett has told me they were lovers."
Anna huffed out a breath. She was a traditionalist, and unashamed of it. "Very well, that's true. But he wasn't the right man for her."
"Why?"
"Set in his ways. I'm very fond of George, and he made an excellent escort for Cicely. But a woman can hardly be completely happy when she goes home to an empty apartment most nights, to an empty bed. She needed a mate. George wanted it both ways, and Cicely deluded herself into thinking she wanted that, too."
"And she didn't."
"She shouldn't have," Anna snapped, obviously going over an old argument. "Work isn't enough, as I pointed out to her many times. She simply wasn't serious enough about George to risk."
"Risk?"
"I'm speaking of emotional risk," Anna said impatiently. "You cops are so literal-minded. She wanted her life tidy more than she wanted the mess of a full-time relationship."
"I had the impression that Mr. Hammett regretted that, that he loved her very much."
"If he did, why didn't he push?" Anna demanded, and tears threatened. "She wouldn't have died alone then, would she? She wouldn't have been alone."
Eve drove out of the quiet suburbs, and on impulse she pulled her car over to the curb and slumped down in the seat. She needed to think. Not about Roarke, she assured herself. There was nothing to think about there. That was settled.
On a hunch, she called up her computer at her office and had it get to work on David Angelini. If he was like his father, maybe he had also made a few poor investments. While she was at it, she ordered a run on Randall Slade and the boutique in Rome.
If anything popped up, she would have a scan on the flights from Europe to New York.
Damn it, a woman who had nothing to worry about didn't leave her warm, dry apartment in the middle of the night.
Stubbornly, Eve retraced all the steps in her head. As she thought it through, she studied the neighborhood. Nice old trees spreading shade, neat postcard-sized yards with one-and two-story fully detached houses.
What would it have been like to have been raised in a pretty, settled community? Would it make you secure, confident, the way being dragged from filthy room to filthy room, from stinking street to stinking street made her jittery, moody?
Maybe there were fathers here who snuck into their little girls' bedrooms, too. But it was hard to believe it. The fathers here couldn't smell of bad liquor and sour sweat and have thick fingers that pushed themselves into innocent flesh.
Eve caught herself rocking in the seat and choked back a sob.
She wouldn't do it. She wouldn't remember. She wouldn't let herself conjure up that face looming over her in the dark, or the taste of that hand clamping over her mouth to smother her screams.
She wouldn't do it. It had all happened to someone else, some little girl whose name she couldn't even remember. If she tried to, if she let herself remember it all, she would become that helpless child again and lose Eve.
She laid her head back on the seat and concentrated on calming herself. If she hadn't been wallowing in self-pity, she would have seen the woman breaking the window at the side of the modified rancher across the street before the first shard fell.
As it was, Eve scowled, asked herself why she'd had to pull over at just this spot. And did she really want the hassle of dealing with intra-jurisdiction paperwork?
Then she thought about the nice family who would come home that night and find their valuables gone.
With a long-suffering sigh, she got out of the car.
The woman was half in and half out of the window when Eve reached her. The security shield had been deactivated by a cheap jammer, available at any electronic outlet. With a shake of her head for the naivete of suburbanites, Eve tapped the thief smartly on the butt that was struggling to wiggle through the opening.
"Forget your code, ma'am?"
Her answer was a hard donkey-style kick to the left shoulder. Eve considered herself lucky it had missed her face. Still, she went down, crushing some early tulips. The perp popped out of the window like a cork and bolted across the lawn.
If her shoulder hadn't been aching, Eve might have let her go. She caught her quarry in a flying tackle that sent them both sprawling into a bed of sunny-faced pansies.
"Get your fucking hands off me, or I'll kill you."
Eve thought briefly that it was a possibility. The woman outweighed her by a good twenty pounds. To ensure it didn't happen, she jammed an elbow against the woman's windpipe and dug for her badge.
"You're busted."
The woman's dark eyes rolled in disgust. "What the hell's a city cop doing here? Don't you know where Manhattan is, asshole?"
"Looks like I'm lost." Eve kept her elbow in place, adding just a little more pressure for her own satisfaction while she pulled out her communicator and requested the closest 'burb cruiser.
CHAPTER SIX
By the next morning, her shoulder was singing as fiercely as Mavis on a final set. Eve admitted the extra hours she'd put in with Feeney and a night tossing alone in bed hadn't helped it any. She was leery of anything but the mildest painkillers, and took a single stingy dose before she dressed for the memorial service.
She and Feeney had come across one tasty little tidbit. David Angelini had withdrawn three large payments from his accounts over the last six months, to a grand total of one million six hundred and thirty-two dollars, American.
That was more than three-quarters of his personal savings, and he'd drawn it in anonymous credit tokens and cash.
They were still digging on Randall Slade and Mirina, but so far, they were both clean. Just a happy young couple on the brink of matrimony.
God knew how anybody could be happy on the brink, Eve thought as she located her gray suit.
The damn button on the jacket was still missing, she realized as she started to fasten it. And she remembered Roarke had it, carried it like some sort of superstitious talisman. She'd been wearing the suit the first time she'd seen him – at a memorial for the dead.
She ran a hasty comb through her hair and escaped the apartment and the memories.
St. Patrick's was bulging by the time she arrived. Uniforms in the best dress blues flanked the perimeter for a full three blocks on Fifth. A kind of honor guard, Eve mused, for a lawyer who cops had respected. Both street and air traffic had been diverted from the usually choked avenue, and the media was thronged like a busy parade across the wide street.
After the third uniform stopped her, Eve attached her badge to her jacket and moved unhampered into the ancient cathedral and the sounds of the dirge.
She didn't care for churches much. They made her feel guilty for reasons she didn't care to explore. The scent of candle wax and incense was ripe. Some rituals, she thought as she slipped into a side pew, were as timeless as the moon. She gave up any hope of speaking directly with Cicely Towers's family that morning and settled down to watch the show.
Catholic rites had gone back to Latin some time in the last decade. Eve supposed it added a kind of mysticism and a unity. The ancient language certainly seemed appropriate to her in the Mass for the Dead.
The priest's voice boomed out, reaching to the lofty ceilings, and the congregation's responses echoed after. Silent and watchful, Eve scanned the crowd. Dignitaries and politicians sat with bowed heads. She'd positioned herself just close enough to catch glimpses of the family. When Feeney slipped in beside her, she inclined her head.
"Angelini," she murmured. "That would be the daughter beside him."
"With her fiance on her right."