A little annoyed, she noted. A little rushed. He wasn’t the only one who knew his partner.
“If I get through them I’ll be home before you get to this in any case. If not, well, soon as possible. You can reach me if you need to. Don’t work too hard.”
She touched the screen as his image faded. “You either.”
She put on the headset, engaged, then much to the cat’s relief, headed into the kitchen. The minute she filled his bowl with tuna and set it down for him, he pounced.
Listening to the narrative of the diamond heist, she grabbed a bottle of water, took a peach as an afterthought, then walked through the quiet, empty house and down to the gym.
She stripped down, hanging her weapon harness on a hook, then pulled on a short skinsuit.
She started with stretches, concentrating on the audio and her form. Then she moved to the machine, programming in an obstacle course that pushed her to run, climb, row, cycle on and over various objects and surfaces.
By the time she started on free weights, she’d been introduced to the main players in the book and had a sense of New York and small-town America in the dawn of the century.
Gossip, crime, bad guys, good guys, sex and murder.
The more things changed, she thought, the more they didn’t.
She activated the sparring droid for a ten-minute bout and felt limber, energized and virtuous by the time she’d kicked his ass.
She snagged a second bottle of water out of the mini-fridge and, to give herself more time with the book, added a session for flexibility and balance.
She peeled off the skinsuit, tossed it in the laundry chute, then walked naked into the pool house. With the audio still playing in her ear, she dove into the cool blue water. After some lazy laps, she floated her way over to the corner and called for jets.
Her long, blissful sigh echoed off the ceiling.
There was home alone, she thought, and there was home alone.
When her eyes started to droop, she boosted herself out. She pulled on a robe, gathered up her street clothes, her weapon, and took the elevator up to the bedroom before she thought of missed opportunity.
She could have run naked through the house. She could have danced naked through the house.
She’d have to hold that little pleasure in reserve.
After a shower and fresh clothes, she went back to her office. She turned off the audio long enough to handle some details, to make new notes.
Top of her list were: Jack O’Hara, Alex Crew, William Young and Jerome Myers. Young and Myers had been dead for more than half a century, with their lives ending before the first act of the drama.
Crew had died in prison, and O’Hara had been in and out of the wind until his death fifteen years ago. So the four men who’d stolen the diamonds were dead. But people rarely got through life without connections. Family, associates, enemies.
A connection to a thief might consider himself entitled to the booty. A kind of reward, an inheritance, a payback. A connection to a thief might know how to gain access to a secured residence.
Blood tells, she thought. People often said that. She, for one, had reason to hope it wasn’t true. If it was true, what did that make her, the daughter of a monster and a junkie whore? If it was all a matter of genes, DNA, inherited traits, what chance was there for a child created by two people for the purpose of using her for profit? For whoring her. For raising her like an animal. Worse than an animal.
Locking her in the dark. Alone, nameless. Beating her. Raping her. Twisting her until at the age of eight she would kill to escape.
Blood on her hands. So much blood on her hands.
“Damn it. Damn it, damn it.” Eve squeezed her eyes shut and willed the images away before their ghosts could solidify into another waking nightmare.
Blood didn’t tell. DNA didn’t make us. We made ourselves, if we had any guts we made ourselves.
She pulled her badge out of her pocket, held it like a talisman, like an anchor. We made ourselves, she thought again. And that was that.
She laid her badge on the desk where she could see it if she needed to, then, reengaging the audio, she listened as she ordered runs on the names of her four thieves.
Thinking about coffee, she rose to wander into the kitchen. She toyed with programming