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“Have a nice evening,” Roarke said. “See you Saturday.”
“We’ll be there.”
“Do you have to do that?” Eve muttered when Peabody scurried away.
“Which that is that?”
“Make her go gooey-eyed and stupid.”
“Apparently I have that power, though she didn’t look either to me.” He came in, sat on her desk. “You, however, look tired and cross.” He picked up the PowerBar. “And this is likely part of the reason.”
“Why are you here instead of home?”
“I took a calculated risk that my wife would still be at her desk. Now she can drive me home after we stop and get a meal.”
“I really have to—”
“Work, yes. It can be pizza.”
“That’s fighting dirty.”
“Fighting clean always seems like such a waste.” He two-pointed the PowerBar into her recycler. “Gather up what you need and we’ll eat while I tell you about the round of golf I played today.”
“You hate golf.”
“More than ever, so you owe me. You buy the pizza.”
“Why do I owe you?” she asked as she organized her file bag.
“Because I played eighteen holes with your suspects.”
She stopped dead. “You did what?”
“I arranged to take a golf-mad business associate to the club where Dudley and Moriarity play. We made a foursome.”
She actually felt the temper spurt up from her center to her throat. “Damn it, Roarke, why did you—”
He cut her off by poking a finger in her belly. “You don’t want to start on me after I spent a morning hitting a ball toward a hole in the ground with a club. Which admittedly I’d likely have done anyway, as David loves the bloody game, so it seemed efficient to maneuver it into a little field work. I do occasionally run into your suspects here and there.”
“Yeah, but . . .” She thought about it, and had to admit the spurt ebbed. “Yeah. What did you—”
“Walk and talk,” he interrupted. “I’ve put myself in the mood for that pizza now.”
“Fine, fine, fine.” She grabbed the bag, shut down her computer. “You’ve never played golf with them before?”
“And never will again,” he vowed as they started out. “Though we did end up beating them by three strokes, which didn’t put either of them in a cheery mood. Masked it well enough,” he added and with resignation squeezed into an elevator with Eve and a dozen cops.
“They don’t like to lose.”
“I’d say winning is a kind of religion for them. They cheat.”
“Seriously?” She narrowed her eyes. “Not surprising really. You mean they work together—team cheating?”
“They do. I can’t say how they compete with each other, one-on-one, but with others, they have a system.”
The elevator doors opened. Two cops crowbarred out, three more muscled in. Summer sweat clogged the air like cooking oil.
“How do you cheat at golf?”
