“Can do.” He rose. “Hey, Dallas, thanks for Mexico. All of it. Serious gratitude.”
“Let’s close this case so you can get gone.”
“I’m all about it.”
“Peabody, go ahead and give him a hand.” Eve rose to walk back to the desk. As they bounced and clomped away, she opened the comp to a general search.
It didn’t surprise her to find files that mirrored the theme of the books. Screen, Music, Business, Politics, and so on. She’d go through them for comparisons, but first she wanted to study the marks, priority on males.
She’d save the financial files for later.
Helpfully, Mars had her marks listed in alpha order. Eve started on the A’s. She’d barely moved into the B’s when Roarke came in.
“I didn’t hear you knock.”
“I didn’t.” Like McNab’s, his gaze shifted and locked on the vault. Eve could only interpret his expression as a look of love.
“Ah, there she is.” He crossed to it, skimmed his fingers lightly over the polished surface. “Quite the beauty.”
“Should I leave the two of you alone?”
He tossed Eve a grin and set down what looked like a high-class field kit. “I owe you a solid for this, as you’d say,” he told her as he took off his coat. “So I won’t say too much about all the signs you left that you’d picked the lock on the main door.”
“I had a warrant. I wasn’t worried about leaving signs.”
He all but tsked at her as he took off his suit jacket. “Have some pride in your work, darling.”
“I’m in, aren’t I? I could’ve used a battering ram.”
He only smiled, removed his tie, rolled up his sleeves. “It’s an excellent lock, with illegal master blocks. How long did it take you to lift it?”
When she shrugged, he took a leather strip out of his pocket, tied back his hair. “That long then? We’ll get more practice in.”
“If you owe me a solid, why are you pissing me off?”
He walked back to her, bent down to kiss the top of her head. “Then I’ll tell you: An amateur or third-rate thief would have needed a drill or that battering ram.”
She nearly got to mollified, then
pulled back, eyes narrowed. “Does that make me second-rate?”
“It makes you an excellent student with considerable, innate skill.”
He picked up his kit, walked back to the vault. “Now, let’s have a good look at you, my lovely.”
So saying, he sat on the floor, began to take various tools—many she didn’t recognize—from the kit.
“What is all that?”
He turned, glanced meaningfully at her recorder.
She put it on pause.
“Mementos, you could say, from a past life,” he said, getting down to it again. “I cracked my first Podark in a lovely and graceful Tuscan villa. And a lovely night it was—I can still smell the lemon blossoms. I believe I was about twenty. I had my last…” He glanced back. “Before I had you.”
“How long before?”
“Long enough.”