Pepper blew out a breath. “All right. Leo has trouble with the truth occasionally, but he’d never hurt anyone. Not seriously.”
“Can you tell me where he was on Sunday morning?”
Pepper’s lips firmed, and her eyes stayed direct. “I can’t. I can only tell you where he said he was, and he’s already told you that. Lieutenant, don’t you think I’d know if I was living with, sleeping with, if I were intimate with a murderer?”
“I can’t say. You may want to tell him that if he wants to get clear of this, he can start being straight with me. As long as he . . . has trouble with the truth, I’m going to keep looking at him.”
“I’ll talk to him.” She got to her feet. “Thanks for seeing me.”
“No problem.” Eve walked her to the door, and opening it saw the waiting car. And her aide huffing down the drive on foot.
“Officer . . . what was her name?” Pepper asked.
“Peabody.”
“Oh yes. Officer Peabody looks to have had a difficult morning already. That storm last night cooled things off a bit, but not enough. Not nearly enough yet.”
“Last gasp of summer in New York. What else can you expect?”
“Teach me to stay in London.” She offered her hand. “I’d still love for you and Roarke to come to the play. Just contact me anytime and I’ll arrange for seats.”
“Soon as things cool off for me a bit, we’ll take you up on it.”
She watched the driver get out, open the rear door of the small town limo. And waited until a breathless and sweaty Peabody rushed up the steps.
“Sir. Sorry. Overslept, then the subway . . . breakdown. Should’ve contacted you, but didn’t realize—”
“Inside, before you fall over with heatstroke.”
“I think I’m a little dehydrated.” Peabody’s face was lobster red and starting to drip. “Can I have a minute? Splash some water on my face.”
“Go. Christ, next time take a cab!” she called out as she jogged upstairs to get her jacket and what she needed for the day.
She grabbed two bottles of water from her kitchen, and met Peabody coming out of the powder room. Her aide’s color had calmed down, her uniform was straightened, her hair neatly combed and dry again.
“Thanks.” Peabody took the water, and glugged at the bottle to add to the water she’d slurped up in the powder room. “Hate to oversleep. I was up late studying.”
“Didn’t I tell you that you can overstudy? You won’t do yourself any good going into the exam burned out.”
“I just gave it a couple hours. Wanted to make up the time I took checking out apartments with McNab. I didn’t realize we had a meet with Pepper Franklin.”
“We didn’t. She stopped by to defend Fortney.” Eve headed out the door and around to the garage. She hadn’t thought to tell one of the droids to have her car brought out in front. Summerset did it without her asking. The fact that it was the sort of detail that slipped her mind, and never slipped his, just annoyed her.
“Well, as least I know I’m not losing my mind,” Peabody managed as she quickened her pace to match Eve’s. “So much going on right now. Jesus, Dallas, we signed a lease. It’s a good space. Got an extra bedroom we can set up as a shared office, and it’s close to Central. It’s in your old building, so Mavis and Leonardo will be neighbors, and that’s mag, and it was really great of Roarke to put us on to it, but . . .”
“But what?”
“I signed a lease, with McNab. It’s like, huge. We’re going to be moving in together in thirty days.”
Eve coded into the garage, waited for the doors to open. “I thought you were already cohabitating.”
“Yeah, but informally. Real informally. He just hangs at my place most of the time. This is the real deal. I got the jitters.” She pressed a hand to her stomach as she walked to Eve’s police issue. “So I dove into studying as soon as we got back, then I got the jitters from that. Then I couldn’t sleep because of the jitters, so I jumped McNab to sort of remind myself why I’m doing this, and that took awhile because, you know, I was pretty jittery—”
“I don’t want to hear that part.”
“Right. Well, I didn’t settle down until pretty late, and was so conked I must’ve deactivated the alarm before I was fully awake. Next thing I knew it was an hour later.”
“If you got up an hour late, why are you only . . .” She checked her wrist unit. “Fifteen minutes behind?”