“A moment first. Eve, do you have the name of the couple in Cornwall?”

“What I have or don’t have is police business.”

“Mick might know them.” He shifted his eyes to Eve’s face. “And their competitors.”

It was a good point. A potential weasel was a useful tool, even when he was a houseguest. “Britt and Joseph Hague.”

“Hmm, well.” Mick gave his attention to his laced coffee. “It’s possible, of course, that I may have heard the names somewhere in my travels. I couldn’t say.” He gave Roarke a hard, meaningful look. “I couldn’t say,” he repeated.

“Because you’ve done business with them?” Eve shot back. “The kind Customs frowns on?”

“I do business with a great many people.” He spoke coolly, evenly. “And I’m not in the habit of discussing them or their affairs with cops. I’m surprised you would ask me to,” he said to Roarke. “Surprised and disappointed that you’d expect me to roll on friends and associates.”

“Your friends and associates are dead,” Eve said flatly. “Murdered.”

“Britt and Joe?” His green eyes widened, clouded, and he slowly lowered himself into a chair. “I hadn’t heard that. I never heard that.”

“Their bodies were found in Cornwall,” Roarke told him. “Apparently they weren’t found for some time, and it took longer yet to identify them.”

“Good Christ. God rest their souls. A lovely couple they were. How did it happen?”

“Who would have wanted them dead?” Eve countered. “Who would have paid a great deal of money to take them out of the equation?”

“I don’t know for sure. They’d been having considerable luck running prime liquor and high-grade illegals into London, and dispersing them from there into Paris, Athens, Rome. Stepped on some toes, I imagine, along the way. They’d only been in business, in a serious way, for a couple years. God, I’m sick about this.”

He drank from the mug, made an obvious effort to settle himself. “You wouldn’t have known them,” he said to Roarke. “As I said, they’d only been exporting for a few years, and stuck to Europe. They had a little cottage on the Moors. Liked the country life, Christ knows why.”

“Whose profits were they cutting into?” Roarke asked him.

“Oh, a little here, a little there, I’d say. Always room for another smuggler, isn’t there, with all the goods in the world to be moved? Francolini, maybe. Aye, he’s a vicious bastard, and they’d have cut into him a bit. He wouldn’t think twice about sending one of his men up to cut them out, permanently.”

“He doesn’t use a paid assassin.” Roarke remembered Francolini well. “He has enough men to let blood when blood needs to be let. He wouldn’t go outside his own family.”

“Paid assassin? No, not Francolini then. Lafarge, maybe. Or Hornbecker. Hornbecker’s more likely to pay for blood. But he’d need good reason for it, enough to balance his ledgers.”

“Franz Hornbecker, Frankfort,” Roarke told Eve. “He was small-time when I was exporting.”

“He’s had a good run of luck in the last few years.” Mick sighed. “I don’t know what else to tell you. Britt and Joe. I can’t imagine it. Why, can I ask, should a New York City cop be interested in the fate of two up and coming smugglers out of England?”

“It may tie to a case here.”

“If it does, I hope you catch the murdering bastard who did them.” He rose. “I don’t know what sort of work they might have been up to at the end of it, but I can do some asking. On the quiet.”

“I’d appreciate any information you can give me.”

“Well, we’ll see what we see.” He bent down and picked up the cat, who was rubbing against his legs. “I’m for bed. Oh, Roarke,” he said when he reached the door, “if you’ve time later I’d like to discuss the business I mentioned to you before.”

“I’ll have my admin work it in.”

“God, listen to the man. Admin working it in,” he said to Galahad as he carried cat and coffee away. “Did you ever hear the like of it?”

“Other business?”

“Perfume,” Roarke said. “And legal. Whatever else he might be up to, I’ve told him I’m not interested as it would displease my cop. I’ll make those calls for you.”

“Why is your unit beeping in there?”

“Is it?

Tags: J.D. Robb In Death Mystery
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