Trueheart lifted a fist to bump. “You got that.”
“They weren’t serious or exclusive, so.”
“Yeah. Somebody else she went out with. Nobody popped.” Baxter rubbed his hands together. “We’re going to make ’em pop.”
“Keep pushing on it.”
She took the glides down. She had to make something pop, she thought. The straight line led to a break-in and theft ending in murder. But who hired the thief? Who knew about the vault?
The family. Potentially the staff—though they denied it. Also potentially four ex-wives, and if she lumped them in, she had to accept any one of them might have told someone else.
Secrets were generally bollocks.
She waited until she’d driven out of the garage to contact Roarke.
“Hey. I’m leaving Central, going by Barrister House for a follow-up and to talk to the daughters.”
“Why don’t I meet you?”
“There’s no need for that.”
“It’s a lovely day for a walk. I’d enjoy one.”
And he had a cop’s sense with people. Plus, he should have had that lovely walk on a Saturday afternoon.
“All right. Traffic’s not too bad. I’m heading up the East Side to avoid the blockades for the street fair, but so are a lot of other people.”
“I’ll stroll. See you shortly.”
It would help to have him, she couldn’t deny it. A second pair of ears and eyes. More, she’d hit an emotional storm at Barrister House, and he had an innate knack for soothing emotional storms.
Though thick, traffic moved smoothly enough, and still gave her time to note the crowds taking advantage of the damn near perfect weather.
Fashionably dressed women carried bags from high-end shops, and others took a break from that to nibble on a salad and sip wine at a sidewalk table. Tourists craned their heads up to gawk at airtrams, skyscrapers. Alternately they gawked at the display windows of those fashionable shops and carried their own bags holding their tangible memories of a trip to the city.
Kids screamed in a playground as if they were charging into battle.Parents and nannies watched with such complacency she wondered what they’d spiked their go-cups with.
She watched a delivery woman with the goofy Zip logo on her uniform cart packages to a building.
A man had made a fortune on that service, she thought. A man whose greed or obsession to hoard what wasn’t his had led to the death of his only son.
For paintings of rocks and trees, for shiny stones, for sleek statues.
Was it just the having—and by nefarious means? Was it a kind of twisted love and admiration for the precious?
Maybe both.
Every indication led her to believe the son hadn’t shared his father’s need, that obsession. Henry Barrister must have known that, seen that. Even on his deathbed he hadn’t told his family about the vault, the contents.
Clearly, he’d created a detailed will, arranged for his property, his company, his money. But not the vault.
Why?
“Because it was still his. Just his. He took it with him. No one else could have it.”
That fit for now. But she decided she’d run it all by Mira, for a shrink and profiler’s analysis.
It would matter in the way everything mattered.
