“It is. It surely is. I’ll be in your bullpen.”
Eve said nothing until he’d cleared the room.
“You didn’t have to say all that, give him all that. He pushed where he shouldn’t have pushed.”
“Oh, well now, it’s hard to fault him. The heist was brilliant.”
She sighed, scrubbed at her face with her hands. “Just tell me you’re not draping me in pieces of some necklace stolen from some idiot American.”
“Would I?” He kissed her hand again. “I sold it, as contracted, long ago. And bought the nice little resort in Cannes. We should go there sometime.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.” She shifted in her chair, took a hard look at him. “Are you okay?”
“I am. Are you?”
“We nearly had him. I know it. So no, not okay. Let’s go get some coffee,” she decided. “I need to sort my brain out.” She rose. “And I want to know how the hell you got downtown so damn fast.”
“Ah, you remind me to have my vehicle picked up from that rooftop.”
“Great, sure. Whatever.” She cast her gaze at the ceiling. “Coffee.”
She went straight to her office, shut the door, hit the AutoChef. “We couldn’t have missed him by more than minutes. Close enough he might have seen us converge.”
She paced her tiny office as she gulped down coffee. “Booked it out on foot. Fast walk a couple blocks, turn a corner, turn the next.”
Roarke sat, gingerly, in the visitor’s chair as she paced, as she thought out loud. And found it all oddly calming.
“He’s not stupid. Sloppy now, yeah, sloppy, because he’s obsessed and stepped into Crazy Town. If he spots us, he takes off, then he has to think. What does he think, because he’s not stupid? He thinks: The bloody bastard had a trace on me, hooked to his cop bitch. That’s not only true, it’s basic logic.”
She gulped more coffee. “Good.”
“Good?”
“Yeah, because he thinks that—just that—he’s got no reason to rabbit. No reason to switch locations again. Unless one of your sources weaseled to him—”
“Not the ones I used, no.” Roarke raised his coffee and his eyebrows. “As neither am I stupid.”
“Figured that, so. At this point, he’d have no reason to move. He thinks he’s safe wherever he’s holed up. But he’s not. We’ll find his hole.”
She stared at her board, stared hard, then dropped into her desk chair. “Now explain.”
“I drove very fast?”
She might’ve laughed, but she wasn’t in the mood. “Not that. How he contacted you.”
“Ah that. He worked his way up to Caro, using different ’links, different names. On the last he tried Grafton—like the street in Dublin. I was at the school, not that she’d have put him through without clearance in any case. He rang back, and she being Caro, started a trace. Then again, until I got back to the office. Then I contacted you, and you know the rest.”
“One of two things,” she decided. “Either he’s tipped so far he just couldn’t resist the contact, needed to say what he said to you, try to shake you, or it’s about response time.”
“Well, bugger me.” Roarke leaned back despite the miserable chair. “I’m the git for not considering the latter.”
“It’s risky, damn risky, but it would be good data to have. How quick are we off the mark, how accurate, and how much manpower do we put on it?”
“And it’s the pattern again, that I didn’t consider.” Distractions, Roarke admitted, anxiety. He had to put them aside. “He likes watching the cops work after a kill. He likes that edgy little risk. So he played me then, after all.”
“Maybe. But you can bet your ass if he stuck close enough to see you walk out of the building, he got a hell of a surprise. And he’s still trying to figure out how the hell you got in there.”
She pressed her fingers to her eyes. “Do whatever and get that car off the roof.”
“Right.” He took out his ’link to take care of it.
Was he there? Eve wondered. Did he spot Abernathy? If so, would that change anything for him?
Doubtful, she decided. He wouldn’t respect Abernathy, in fact, might be pleased, even amused to know Interpol joined with the local cops.
Local cops, she thought, and grabbed her comm.
“Nothing yet, Dallas,” Feeney responded. “Give us time.”
“He might have spotted the van. If he made contact hoping to get a response, mark response time and force, he could’ve spotted the van.”
“Well, shit.”
“Can you switch it out?”
She saw the sigh on his hangdog face before he let it out. “Yeah, yeah. Pain in my ass. But …” Then he puffed out his cheeks, considered. “We’re getting mostly nobody home right now. It’s a nice day, people are out and about, right? We’ll come in, switch it out. We can do some more cruising, but we could have more luck after midnight, maybe after one.”
She hated the wait, hated the hours in between, but … “That’s a good point. You single out any solo occupancy. We run those and we could have a go before morning.”
They banged it back and forth, and Roarke nodded when she clicked off.
“Best use of time and manpower. And no reason I can see why we wouldn’t tag along with whoever Feeney puts on the late shift.”
She could think of reasons not to have him tag along, but all of them were personal. “I’ll clear it with Feeney. Are you heading home?”
“I’ve things I left undone in my hasty departure from the office.”
“Your car’s on a roof in the Village.”
“I have others.” He rose, stepped to her to rub a thumb between her eyebrows where a worry line had formed. “If he has the brass to be watching Central, he wouldn’t know what vehicle I’d take out of it. But he knows yours now, so I’ve more reason for the worry.”
“I made a promise to you. I’m not going to break it.”
“Then we’re fine, aren’t we, the both of us.” He drew her in, and because she’d closed the door, she wrapped around him. Held on.
“I’ll see you at home.” He kissed the top of her head. “I expect we could use some downtime before what could be a long night.”
She found it harder to watch him walk away than she’d imagined. She wished he’d go home, behind the gates, the walls, the security, where she knew he’d be safe.
Was this how he felt? she wondered. Every time she walked out of the house to do the job, did he feel this low, creeping anxiety?
While she’d acknowledged just how hard it was to be a cop’s spouse, she hadn’t really known until that minute.
She had to put it aside, had to lock it away, as she understood now he did on a regular basis.
She sat again, wrote her report, updated her book.
She got another cup of coffee, drank it with her boots on the desk, her eyes on the board, her mind in the investigation.
And got nothing.
It simply wasn’t the usual, she admitted. Her target had no real ties to New York, no regular haunts, no family, no friends, no business dealings.