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"Why is a place like this empty?" she wanted to know after she'd assured herself it was indeed empty.
"It won't be next week. We're renting it, furnished, primarily on the short term to off-planet businesses who don't care to have their high execs in hotels. We'll furnish staff, droid or human."
"Classy."
"We try." He smiled at Peabody as they descended the stairs. "All clear, Officer?"
"Nothing here except a couple really lucky spiders."
"Spiders?" Lifting a brow, Roarke took out his memo and plugged in a note to contact the exterminators.
"Where's the next place?" Eve asked him.
"It's only a couple of blocks. I'll lead you over."
"You could give me the code and go home."
He brushed a hand over her hair as they stepped outside. "No, I couldn't."
The second home was back off the street, tucked behind now leafless trees. Though houses crowded in on either side, residents had sacrificed their yards for privacy. Trees and shrubs formed a high fence between buildings.
Eve felt her blood begin to stir. Here, she thought, in this quiet, wealthy arena, where the houses were soundproofed and protected from prying eyes, murder would be a private business.
"He'd like this one," she said under her breath. "This would suit him. Decode it," she told Roarke, then gestured for Peabody to move to the right.
Eve shifted in front of Roarke, opened the door herself. That was all it took.
She smelled fresh death.
Shawn Conroy's luck had run out in a gorgeously appointed parlor, just off a small, elegant foyer. His blood stained the wild roses climbing over the antique rug. His arms were stretched wide as if in supplication. His palms had been nailed to the floor.
"Don't touch anything." She gripped Roarke's arm before he could step inside. "You're not to go in. You'll contaminate the scene. You give me your word you won't go in or I'll lock you outside. Peabody and I have to check the rest of the house."
"I won't go in." He turned his head, and his eyes were hot with emotions she couldn't name. "He'll be gone."
"I know. We check the house anyway. Peabody, take the back. I'll do upstairs."
There was nothing and no one, which was what she'd expected. To give herself a moment alone with Roarke, she sent Peabody out to the unit for her field kit.
"He wants it to be personal," she began.
"It is personal. I grew up with Shawn. I knew his family. His younger brother and I were of an age. We chased some of the same girls on the streets of Dublin, and made them sigh in dark alleys. He was a friend. A lifetime ago, but a friend."
"I'm sorry. I was too late."
Roarke only shook his head, and stared hard at the man who'd once been a boy with him. Another lost boy, he thought. Eve turned away, pulled out her communicator. "I have a homicide," she said.
• • •
When her hands and boots were clear sealed, she knelt in blood. She could see tha
t death had come slowly, obscenely to Shawn Conroy. His wrists and throat had been slashed, but not deeply, not so that the blood would gush and jet and take him away quickly. He would have bled out slowly, over hours.
He was sliced, neatly, almost surgically from breastbone to crotch, again so that the pain would be hideous, and release would be slow. His right eye was gone. So was his tongue.
Her gauge told her he'd been dead less than two hours.
She had no doubt he'd died struggling to scream.
