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“I’ll look into it.”
“Roarke—”
“Goddamn it, Eve, you’re not going to ask me to stand by a second time. I did what you asked before. I let it go. I let go the ones who’d had a part in letting you be abused and tormented.”
Now it was her heart, squeezing inside a fist of tension. “I know what you did for me. I know what it cost you to do it. I’m not going to have a choice. It’s national security. For God’s sake, Roarke, I don’t want to bring them in. I don’t want anything to do with them. It makes me sick. But it’s not about me, or you, or what happened when I was eight.”
“You’ll give me
twenty-f our hours. I’m not asking,” he said before she could speak. “Not this time. You’ll give me twenty-f our hours to track him.”
Here was the cold and the ruthless that lurked under the civilized. She knew it, understood it, even accepted it. “I can stall that long. At twenty-f our and one minute, I have to turn it over.”
“Then I’ll be in touch.” He started to walk by her, stopped, looked into her eyes. “I’ll be sorry if we’re at odds on this.”
“Me, too.”
But when he walked out she knew sorry was sometimes all you could be.
Nine
When a trail went cold, Eve’s rule of thumb was go back to the beginning. For a second time she stood on the deck of the ferry under a blue summer sky.
“According to the security discs, the victim boarded first.” Eve studied the route from the transport station to the deck. “He was easily a hundred passengers behind her. Several minutes behind her.”
“It doesn’t seem like he could’ve kept her in view,” Peabody commented. “And from the recording, it didn’t look like he tried to.”
“Two likely scenarios. He’d managed to get a tracker on her, or had set up this meet in advance. Since I can’t think of any reason he’d take chances or play the odds, my money is he did both.”
“We haven’t turned up a thing that points to her meeting a third party on Staten Island.”
Eve huffed out a breath. “I’d say we haven’t turned up a lot of things. Yet.” She started up to the second deck. “She went up here. We’ve got that from the Grogan kid’s camera. The ride over takes less than a half hour, so if she had a meet, and if she planned to make an exchange, she wouldn’t have waited too long once they left port. The best we can gauge, Carolee went into the restroom less than halfway through the trip. About ten minutes in.”
“But since she doesn’t remember, and we’ve got no body to calculate TOD, we don’t know if Buckley was already dead when Carolee went in.”
“Odds are.” Eve stood at the rail, imagining the roll and hum of the ferry, the crowds, the view. “Lots of excitement as people are boarding, right? Crowds, happy tourists off on an adventure. People would be securing their places at the rails, grabbing a snack, taking pictures. If I’m Buckley, I take my position, scope it out.”
She took a seat on the bench. “Sitting here, and you can bet she sat here before or she’d never have picked or agreed to the location, she can judge the crowd, the traffic, the timing. If I’m Buckley, I move to the meet location as close as possible to leaving port.”
Rising, Eve strolled off in the direction of the restroom. “That’s around ten minutes before Grogan went in. Plenty of time for the kill. If Grogan had gone in before the attack, why not let her finish up, get out? If she’d gone in during, she should’ve been able to call out or get out and raise an alarm. She went down at the dividing point between stalls and sinks. That’s where the sweepers found trace of her blood and skin from her head hitting the floor. She’d just turned at the wall. And got an eyeful.”
“Do you think Mira can help her remember?”
“I think it’s worth a shot. Meanwhile . . .” Eve detoured toward concession. “Before the eyeful, Carolee and the kid—”
“Pete.”
“Right. They start toward the concession area, then swing to the restrooms.” Eve followed the most logical route. “Stand here, discuss. Wait for me, blah blah. Carolee watches the kid go in, then notices the sign on the door. Debates, then decides to give it a try after all. And after that, doesn’t remember. So we reconstruct. Going with the theory the meet was set in advance, and the murder was premeditation, Draski would go in first. It’s a women’s room; he’s a guy.”
“Right. Well, he might’ve slipped in when most people are focused on the view, but the Out of Order sign. He’d be smarter to go in looking like maintenance. A uniform.”
“Which he could’ve slipped into right next door.” Eve gestured toward the other restroom. “If we’re dealing with premeditated, and a need to hide or transport the body, he’d need means. No one would question a maintenance guy going into an out-of-order bathroom pushing a hamper.”
“None of the hampers were missing.”
“He had an hour to put it back. He comes out of there”—Eve pointed toward the men’s room—“goes in here. Who notices? Apparently nobody. Inside to wait for Buckley.”
Eve pushed open the door. “I doubt he wasted much time once she came in.”
