“Yeah.” Still.

He’d chosen asparagus—a green thing she actually liked well enough—and tiny new potatoes with red skins roasted with butter and herbs. She added more butter to them anyway—she strongly believed you could never have too much butter—before she cut into the steak.

“Okay, so Eloise. She’s been recovering from pneumonia, still looks on the pale and frail side, but she came down on her own when Darla was out of the room.” Now Eve rolled her eyes. “She liked the damn vid, and wanted to meet us—me and Peabody.”

Roarke only smiled, and listened as she relayed the interview, her impressions.

“You liked her,” Roarke concluded.

“I guess I did.” Eve stabbed a bite of potato. “Doesn’t mean I won’t take her down if she had any part in this.”

“You don’t think she did. I know my cop,” he added. “She’s as far down on your list as she can get without dropping off.”

“Maybe, yeah. I’ll say the affection between her and Darla read real, even deep, and while she looks damn good for ninety-whatever, you can see she’s getting over a serious illness. And she didn’t like Pettigrew. She didn’t roll over him—and I think she might have if the granddaughter hadn’t been around. She still wears a wedding ring, and her husband died decades ago.”

“Bradley Stone,” Roarke remembered. “Their love story’s another thing of legend. If the legend’s reality, she wouldn’t think much of a man who cheated on and betrayed a granddaughter she loves.”

Nodding, Eve waggled her fork. “Which is why she’s not all the way off the list. Maybe she’s covering for Darla. She might not be absolutely sure what Darla’s up to, but she covers for her. Like I said, the affection, devotion between them reads real. Would Darla leave her grandmother, still recovering from a serious illness, alone? Would she go out hunting and leave Eloise alone? Spend hours torturing her targets while Eloise slept upstairs?”

“Lady Justice,” Roarke reminded her. “You and I know very well one can justify anything if they believe or want enough.”

“You’re right.” She gestured with her wineglass. “You’re damn right. Still, what if Grand—she calls her Grand—wakes up while you’re out, comes looking for you? How do you explain that? Oh, I just went out for a walk or whatever—and left you alone.”

“But if Darla attended the support group, she’d have left Eloise alone.”

“Not really. Last time she went—last December—she talked about worrying her grandmother was coming down with something. They have a nurse come in during the day, but they both stated Darla’s the main caregiver, and the one in charge in the evenings, through the night. Droids.”

Eve ate as she considered it. “Crowded club, dim lights. Could she send a droid? Pettigrew couldn’t have had more than a couple minutes with the LC, so would he have made her for a droid?”

“How long does it take you to make one?”

Eve huffed out a breath. “I’m a cop. A really well-made droid could pass for a short time, especially in dim light. It lowers the risk, and it hits the irony meter hard re Pettigrew. Another droid to drive—or you have the one droid order autopilot at least until the target’s compromised. A droid could easily lift an unconscious man, or a dead one.”

“Death by droid?”

“No, no, she needs to do that herself” Needs the blood, Eve thought. Needs to hear them scream.

And ultimately, needs to cut away what makes them men.

“Sure, with her knowledge she’d be able to program droids for violence and block detection,” she considered. “Probably. But she needs to confront, torture, kill. She’s not going to be a passive observer to that. Lady Justice has to act.”

She stabbed some steak, then narrowed her eyes. “Better—maybe better. How good is she at the programming, the creation? Maybe you’ve programmed a droid to watch over Grand while she sleeps. One who can send you a notification if you need to abort and get home, or get cleaned up—torture’s messy—and get up to her. You can program a droid with medical skills, same as you do a beat droid, a domestic, a sex droid with whatever skills are needed.”

“Risky,” Roarke pointed out. “If something happened to her, something went wrong while she was out of the house, how to explain it?”

“But nothing’s gone wrong, has it? They’ve got a domestic droid,” Eve added. “At least one that I saw. She piled on the shock and grief, Roarke. I mean piles and piles of it, and that just keeps hitting me wrong. It’s off. Are you going to feel all that for a man who screwed you over? Still feel all that for two years?”

Studying Roarke, Eve considered.

And he sighed. “I know that look.”

“I’d never get over you. If you screwed me over like that, it would crush me—I’d do my best to make you pay for it, but it would crush me.”

“No graphic example of making me pay?”

“They’d never find what was left of your body.” She smiled with it. “But the point is, I wouldn’t let people see it. If I grieved, if I still had feelings, they wouldn’t see it. Or not like that.”

“Well, to be fair, not everyone is capable of controlling their reactions, their emotions.”

Tags: J.D. Robb In Death Mystery
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