She had no DNA, no trace evidence, and no evidence that led her to believe the killer had known his victims. Witness reports described a white or possibly mixed-race male, of indeterminate age and coloring. He used accents, she thought. Because his voice was distinctive?
Renquist, with his British tones. Carmichael, with his famous ones.
Possible.
Then again, Fortney ran his mouth to the media and the public often enough. He might assume someone would recognize his voice.
Or it could just be ego again, and any one of them. I’m so important, everyone will recognize me if I don’t disguise myself.
Look for the female authority figure, she told herself. That’s the core and that’s the key. What was the phrase? Cherchez la femme. She thought that was right.
She stripped off her jacket on the way from the car to the house. The air felt close, heavy, and just a bit electric. Maybe a storm coming. Rain couldn’t hurt, she thought, and tossed the jacket over the newel. A good bitch of a storm might keep her man inside, and off the hunt.
Before she went back to work, back to her own hunt, she’d track down another man.
The home locator told her Roarke was on the rear patio, off the kitchen. She couldn’t figure out why he’d be out in the nasty air when the house was blissfully fresh and cool, and provided a room for any possible activity.
But she walked the long stretch of it, and out the kitchen to find him. Then simply stood, struck speechless.
“Ah, good, you’re here. We can get started.”
He was wearing jeans-not his usual around-the-house attire-and a white T-shirt. He was barefoot, and a little sweaty, which appealed to her. The fact was, he would have appealed to her, or any woman, regardless of his attire, or the fact that he was standing on a sun-baked patio on a September evening where the air-quality index had simply waved the white flag and surrendered the field.
But at the moment, she was more interested in the enormous, shiny silver contraption beside him.
“What is that thing?”
“It’s an outdoor cooking system.”
Warily, relieved she was still wearing her weapon just in case, she approached. “Like a barbecue deal?”
“That, and more.” He stroked one of his beautiful hands over the lid, as a man might stroke a woman who bewitched him. “Gorgeous, isn’t she? Just arrived an hour ago.”
It was massive, and the glare of the sun off its surface nearly blinding. There was, she noted, more than one lid as it had extensions on either side, and some doored compartment beneath the main unit.
There were countless buttons, controls, dials. She wet her lips. “Um. It doesn’t look exactly like the one the Miras used.”
“Newer model.” He opened the main lid and revealed another gleaming surface, this one full of shiny bars, with a bunch of silver cubes beneath, and a side surface of solid metal. “No reason not to have the latest.”
“It’s really big. You could almost live in it.”
“After a couple of practice runs, I thought we might have a barbecue of our own. In a few weekends perhaps.”
“By practice run, I don’t guess you mean you’re going to drive it somewhere.” She gave one of its big, sturdy wheels a quick, testing kick.
“Totally under control.” He crouched, opened one of the doors. “Refrigerator unit. We’ve got steaks, potatoes, some vegetables we’ll put on these skewers.”
“We will?”
“It’s just a matter of shoving them on.” He assumed. “And a bottle of champagne, to christen it. Though I thought we’d drink it rather than whack the unit with the bottle.”
“I can get behind that part. Have you ever cooked a steak?”
He sent her a mild look as he opened the champagne. “I read the tutorial and I watched how it was done at the Miras’. It’s hardly rocket science, Eve. Meat, heat.”
“Okay.” She took the glass he’d poured for her. “What happens first?”
“I turn it on, then according to the timetable in the tutorial, the potatoes would go first. They take the longest. While they’re cooking, we’ll sit in the shade.”
The idea of him turning on the monster unit had her taking a cautious step back. “Yeah, well, I’ll just get started on the sitting-in-the-shade part.” Several buffering feet away.
Still, she loved him, so she prepared to leap to his defense if the machine got testy. She watched Roarke arrange two potatoes on some of the smaller sections of grill, fiddle with controls.
Whatever he did had a red light, like a single, unfriendly eye, beam on. Apparently this pleased him, as he closed the lid, patted it, then pulled a little tray of crackers and cheese out of the lower compartment.
He looked pretty cute, she had to admit, carrying the tray, crossing the sunny patio in his bare feet, with his hair tied back as he often did for serious work.
She grinned at him, popped a cube of cheese in her mouth. “You put all this together.”
“I did. Very gratifying, too.” He stretched out his legs, sipped champagne. “I don’t know why I haven’t fiddled about in the kitchen before this.”
The umbrella over the table broke the blast of the sun, and the champagne was ice-cold. Not, she decided, such a bad deal after a long day. “So, how do you know when the potatoes are done?”
“There’s a timer. It also suggested we might want to jab them with a fork.”
“Why?”
“Something to do with doneness. I assume it’ll be self-evident. What did you do to your knee?”
Never missed a trick, she thought. “Some jerk in uniform let an asshole get away from him. I used my knee to discourage said asshole from ramming me down the glide. Now he’s crying because his jaw was dislocated, and he has a mild concussion.”
“Knee to jaw. Sensible. How’d he get the concussion?”
“He says it was from the tube of Pepsi I pitched at him, but that’s bogus. I figure he got it when a bunch of cops landed on him.”
“You threw your Pepsi at him.”
“It was handy.”
“Darling Eve.” He picked up her free hand, kissed it. “Ever resourceful.”
“That may be, but I had to waste time on more paperwork. Officer Cullin is going to rue this day.”
“No doubt.”
He poured more champagne, and they drank it in the shade. When she heard the distant rumble of thunder, she lifted her eyebrows, glanced toward the grill. “You may be rained out.”
“There’s time yet. I’ll just turn it up a bit, and put on the steaks.”
Fifteen minutes later,Eve sipped champagne and watched a little burst of flame erupt from one end of the grill. Since it wasn’t the first, she was no longer alarmed by it.
Instead, she watched Roarke fight his new toy, curse it in two languages, and eye it with frustration.
When jabbed, the potatoes proved to be hard as stone inside their blackened skin. The skewered vegetables were burned to a crisp, and had been on fire twice.
The steaks were a sickly gray on one side, and black on the other.
“This isn’t right,” he muttered. “It must be defective.”
He stabbed one of the steaks, lifting it off the grill to scowl at it. “This doesn’t appear to be medium rare.”
When the juice dripping from it sparked another pocket of flame, he tossed it back on the bars.
More fire spurted, and the machine, as it had a number of times before, issued a dour warning:
ACTIVE FIRE IS NEITHER ADVISABLE NOR RECOMMENDED. PLEASE REPROGRAM WITHIN THIRTY SECONDS, OR THIS UNIT WILL GO INTO SAFETY MODE AS EXPLAINED IN THE TUTORIAL, AND SHUT DOWN.
“Bugger it, you bloody bitch, how many times do you need to be reprogrammed?”
Evetook another hit of champagne, and decided not to point out that bitch was inappropriate as the unit’s voice mode was distinctly male.
Men, she’d observed, habitually termed the inanimate objects they cursed by uncomplimentary female names. Hell, she did the same herself.