No, not nanny. She’d called her the “au pair.” People of that ilk always had a fancy name for everything.

Wouldn’t Renquist have had an au pair growing up?

His schedule, daytime, wasn’t as flexible as the others. But would an assistant or admin question him if he told them to block out a couple of hours? She studied the ID image of Renquist on-screen, and doubted it.

No criminal on him or the wife. No little smudges as there had been with Breen and Fortney. Just a perfect picture, all polished and shiny.

She didn’t buy it.

He hadn’t married until thirty, she thought. A reasonable age, if you were going the “till death” route. Plus, a man with political ambitions did better in the field if he presented the package of wife and family. But unless he’d taken a vow of celibacy, there’d have bee

n other relationships before the marriage.

And maybe after it.

It might be worth having a conversation with the current au pair. Who knew family dynamics better than live-in help?

She went back for more coffee. “You could shoot up the data on Carmichael Smith.”

“Do you want that before the data on the Fortney nanny?”

“You’ve got that already?”

“What can I say? I earn my cookies.”

“Fortney first, smart guy. Let’s keep it ordered.”

“Difficult, as it appears there were several child-care providers used. It appears his mother chewed through them like gumdrops. Baby nurses, au pairs, whatever. Seven total over a period of just under ten years. None stayed on the job longer than two years, with an average stay of six months.”

“Doesn’t seem long enough to have any serious impact. So my thought would be the mother remained the authority figure.”

“And from this data, one assumes an incendiary one. Three of the former employees filed hardship suits against her. All were settled out of court.”

“I’m going to have to take a closer look at the mother.” She paced back and forth in front of the screen while she ran it through her head. “Leo has a mother who’s an actress, and his current lover is in the same profession. He goes into a profession where he’ll deal with actors, have some control over them—be controlled, I imagine, by them. That says something. The killer is acting. Assuming a role, and proving he can play the part better than the original, and with more finesse. When I run a probability with this data, it’s going to come out high on Leo.”

She considered. “Let’s go down the list before we do another layer. Find me Renquist’s nanny, or whatever they call them over in England.”

“Roberta Janet Gable,” Roarke announced, then smiled. “I’m multitasking.”

“Usually do,” she replied, then looked up at the image on-screen. “Man.” Eve gave a mock shudder. “Scary.”

“This is current. She’d have been considerably younger when working for Renquist’s mother, but”—having anticipated her, Roarke called up the earlier photo—“still scary.”

“I’ll say.” She studied the split-screen images of a thin face with dark, deep-set eyes and an unsmiling mouth. The hair was brown in the younger, gray in the current, and in both cases pulled severely back. The lines that bracketed the no-nonsense mouth on the earlier image had dug themselves into disapproving grooves on the older woman.

“I bet nobody called her Bobbie,” Eve commented. She started to struggle with the math, and could only be grateful Roarke had gotten there before her.

“She took the job when Renquist was two, and held it until he was fourteen. He didn’t board at Stonebridge, but was a day student. Headed off to Eton at fourteen, and no longer required the services of a nanny. Roberta, don’t call me Bobbie, would have been twenty-eight when she took the position, and forty when she left it to take another position as private child-care provider. She’s now sixty-four and has recently retired. Never married, nor had any offspring of her own.”

“She looks like she pinches,” Eve commented. “One of the providers at the state school was a pincher. She’s got all the credentials, but so did that bitch who decorated my arms with bruises when I was ten. Born in Boston, and went back there when she retired. Yeah, that’s a New England bedrock face, the kind that says shit like ‘spare the rod, spoil the child.’ ”

“She could be an unfortunate-looking woman with a heart of gold who keeps sugarplums in her pocket to pass out to rosy-cheeked children.”

“Looks like a pincher,” Eve said again, and sat on the edge of the desk. “Financially solid. I bet she saved her pennies and didn’t squander them on sugarplums. What is a sugarplum, anyway?”

He was thinking of Eve at ten, with bruises on her arms. “I’ll buy you some. You’ll like them.”

“Odds are. I think we’ll chat, and see what she has to say about Renquist’s early childhood training. Let’s see the annoying Mr. Smith.”

Tags: J.D. Robb In Death Mystery
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