“Like a man falling after being coshed.”
“Yeah, like that. She walked down this way. It would take her a minute, maybe two if she went the other way around the central stairs. Finds him, starts screaming. So the killer’s out by the time she gets to the office. But it’s damn close.”
“Ninety seconds, perhaps a little more, from that spot, through the window, and at a run—and you’d run, wouldn’t you then? Bolt away from the house, and over the wall, as the gates didn’t open again until the medicals and cops arrived.”
“The killer could’ve gotten past her in that minute or so, but… doesn’t hit the logic button they’d go for the door. Why go that way, when the window’s there?”
She took another look around. “Locks and monitors set and activated?”
“They are.”
“Then I’m going to seal up the room. I need that copy of what’s in the vault. That’s a whole other thing to deal with.”
“I have that for you.”
“He was the variable.” Eve studied the blood on the floor. “Otherwise, probably in and out again, way under an hour. Slick. But he wasn’t feeling well, wheezy, a cough, little fever. Maybe woke up, came down to make something hot to drink, or decided to work to take his mind off feeling like crap.
“No sign of a struggle. Attacked from behind.”
Roarke said nothing as she sealed the room, until they’d walked out and she disengaged her recorder.
“You run,” he said now. “There’s a reason you don’t bring a weapon to a job like this. Caught? It’s more time in a cage even if you never use it. So you don’t bring one.”
Eve heard it in his voice, the lightest touch of anger.
“A job goes wrong, you run, as nothing’s worth your life or anyone else’s. But this one didn’t run. So it’s panic at best, or it’s just being willingto take a life at worst. The rest was well-thought-out, I’m figuring. And as you say, the victim was a variable not considered.
“It should’ve been. You always consider the variables. If his wife heard him fall, the thief had the Suite in hand. No need, no need to kill when you can run. The victim had no weapon, you’d have found it.”
Eve slid into the passenger seat as Roarke got behind the wheel. “Killer could’ve taken it.”
“That would be as foolish as it comes, and I don’t see foolish in this setup.”
As he drove, he sighed. “And now I’m going to add to your troubles. There’s an ivory statue, sixteenth century, in the vault. Exquisite work. A sculpture of the goddess Venus. Some—as I recall—seventeen, eighteen years back, I lifted that from a museum in Florence.”
“Shit. Just shit. You said you didn’t know the Barristers.”
“And don’t. I took a job—for that specific item—through a broker. As I did, darling Eve, when I stole the Royal Suite from the Tate Gallery in London a year or so before.”
Now she just stared at him. “Well, fuck me.”
“Ah well, I’ve a strong feeling you won’t be in the mood for that. Not in the least.”
Chapter Four
Since pulling out her hair wouldn’t change a thing, Eve let her head drop back and stared through the sky roof of Roarke’s fancy car.
“I need to know everything.”
“And you will. I didn’t note the Venus straight off, you see. Then McNab and I got into the tablet, the inventory. Well, that was a bit of a jolt, I admit.”
“Oh, really?”
Understanding, he patted a hand on hers. “I could hardly say: ‘Why, look here, Ian, that ivory piece the old man paid sixteen million for? Well, I had that in my hands one lovely spring night.’ Then there was the bigger jolt when I saw the Royal Suite on that list, and not in the vault. So what I’d had in my hands on a damp and windy night in London had ended here. And been taken again, in blood.”
She sat in silence a moment.
“How did you hook up with the broker?”
