“I hate to ask, as he seemed a likable sort, but with her booking the transportation and vacation for both of them, could Matthew have been working with her to scam Marlo somehow? Get close to her, arrange for this blackmail, and then add the actual payoff in later.”

“It’s a thought, and I’ve had it.” But she shook her head. “It’s not gelling well. Why the actual PI and payment? All they had to do was convince Marlo there’d been a PI, a break-in, a plant. Matthew could have planted the camera and saved them a bundle.”

“True enough.”

“I’m going to take a dip in his financials anyway, see if there’s anything hinky. I tagged him, asked for permission to look through his trailer. He gave me the go.” She shrugged. “There’s nothing here.” Eve shoved at her hair. “She wouldn’t risk it. The drugs, the drink, the illegals, they’re only here because she needed them.”

He walked out with her, waiting while she sealed the door. “My money says she planted the cameras she bought in Times Square in Matthew’s trailer, then trashed it when she heard or saw something between him and Marlo.”

“I figure, yeah. It’s the old ‘hell’s got nothing on a woman dumped.’”

“Or words to that effect,” Roarke decided.

“So, I’ve got his go-ahead, and can look through. If I’m right and we find them, I’m free to see what’s on them.”

She led the way down the alley between trailers, turned, and walked to Matthew’s.

While the layout in his was the same as K.T.’s, the feel was entirely different.

Here was casual, lived-in, a little messy. Instead of a bowl of fruit, the table held a music pod and a basket of PowerBars, candy bars, gum. There was a bottle of wine in his Friggie, but it stacked heavily toward fizzies and soft drinks. His freezer held a trio of frozen dessert bars.

Roarke found the first camera fixed to the top of the window trim in under two minutes.

“The other will be in the bedroom,” Eve told him. “You might as well go get it while I finish in here. No point in not looking through his stuff since he gave permission.”

They walked out again in less than a half hour. “No illegals, no drugs except standard blockers, one bottle of wine, no sex toys, and enough snack food for a grade-school class.”

She looked around again. “He and Marlo wouldn’t have snuck in here for a quickie. Too many people wandering around, too much too close. Maybe she thought they would, or maybe she just wanted to spy on him, ended up seeing them do a little kissy-face, or do the kissy-face talk.”

“You have such a way with words,” Roarke observed, and slid an arm around her shoulders. “Let’s hear some kissy-face talk.”

“I’d have to be drunk first.”

“Too true.”

“Either way you work K.T. and the cameras, it’s sick. She was sick and sad.”

“She makes you angry, and she makes you sad.” He hooked an arm around her waist now, pressed his lips to her temple. “Let’s go get that beer and pizza, take a little time away from this.”

“Yeah.” She hooked her arm around him in turn. “Let’s do that.”

12

RECHARGING AND REFUELING WERE FAIRLY NEW concepts for Eve. Before Roarke unwinding time might have been downing a beer at a cop bar, surrounded by other cops talking shop. Occasionally, if Mavis could talk her into it, a night out at a club. But for the most part she’d done the solo, in the apartment now full of color and Mavis’s family.

She’d never looked, particularly, for anyone to share the end of the day with, but doing just that with Roarke—whether it was work or like this, a short interlude without it—had become a habit.

And it was better.

She liked the busy pizzeria with its clatter and conversations, its pretty view of the marina and the boats swaying

in their slips. She had cold beer, hot pizza, and a man who loved her to share them with.

Yeah, it was a whole bunch better.

“Why don’t you have a boat?” she asked him.

“I believe I do have one or two.”

Tags: J.D. Robb In Death Mystery
Source: readsnovelonline.net