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“Has he hit her before?” Roarke asked.
“No! Of course not. I . . .” A mixture of horror and grief flashed into her eyes. “I don’t know anymore. An hour ago I’d have said absolutely not. I’d never have believed it of him, even though he had a temper. And I’d have sworn she’d have told me if he ever had. Now I don’t know. I don’t know anything. I don’t know what happened to my family.”
Eve came back in. “I’ve arranged for officers to take you to the hospital, escort you to your sister’s room. It’s the quickest way.”
“Thank you. I . . . I want to change. I don’t want to go to Tash dressed for a party. It feels wrong. I want to go see Cate’s mother as soon as I can. Am I allowed to do that
?”
“Of course.”
“And Steven. Steven Dorchester, the man she’s been seeing. Does he know what happened?”
“I can have that taken care of.”
“They were in love, just the lovely beginning of it. She was happy. And she was so worked up about their date tonight.”
“How? Worked up how?”
“Oh, just in a hurry to get home, get ready. She just seemed worked up about it all of a sudden. Distracted. Excuse me, please. I need to change. I need to get to Tash.”
When she hurried out, Eve turned to Schubert. “Did you notice this distraction?”
“I did, now that you mention it. I wish I’d paid more attention. I suppose that’s always the way. You always think, Oh, we’ll talk about that tomorrow. And then . . . I don’t want Tella to be alone.”
“We’ll let ourselves out,” Roarke told him.
“Gotta get this down,” Eve said when they went back outside. “Need to work it around, sort it out. Sordid. It’s a good word. Also convoluted.”
“Do you still want to go by the morgue?”
“Yeah, I need to do that. And I need to get this down.”
“Do that. I’m driving.”
He left her to her notes, her muttering, her short periods of silence, eyes closed, then more notes and muttering.
“When I was a kid,” she said abruptly, “in the whole foster/state school cycle, I sometimes wished I had a sibling. Did you ever?”
“I had my mates. That was family for me.”
“Mates. You think of that word first as lovers, that two-person connection. But it’s a good word for friends when you mean it. My sense is Tella and Catiana were mates. She loves her sister, feels close to her, but for the deep and down, she’d turn to the mate. She’d have told Catiana about what happened with Ziegler before she told her sister. And here’s what else. Neither of them much like Copley. They’d golf with him, hang out, go to parties, have family deals, but neither of them would have considered confiding in him. They wouldn’t have trusted him to keep a confidence. And it irked them he treated Catiana like a servant—but they sucked it up, mostly for the sister’s sake.
“And still,” she said when they arrived at the morgue. “Both of them claim, with apparent sincerity, they can’t conceive of Copley hurting anyone.”
“I think, speaking of general population and not cops, or me, most can’t conceive of someone they know well, are family with, killing anyone.”
“A lot of the general population are wrong.”
Eve strode briskly through the tunnel, and through the double doors of Morris’s room.
He wore a clear protective cape over a steel blue suit with steel- gray chalk stripes, a braided tie that twined the two tones. His dark hair slicked into three slim, stacked tails. He sat at a counter working at a comp while some sort of hymn soared through his music system like angel wings.
“Sorry to pull you in.”
“Don’t be. The nights are long; work shortens them. And her nights?” He rose, walked to where Catiana lay on a slab. “Are over. Filling in for Peabody?” he asked Roarke with a faint smile.
“I am.”
