The In Death Collection Books 6-10 - J. D. Robb [376]
The man never lost a damn bet.
“Looks great.” She helped herself to a cookie, mildly fascinated by the way Karen had to maneuver her body, shift her spectacular belly in order to sit down. How, Eve wondered, did a woman function on any level hauling all that bulk around?
Noting where Eve’s gaze had focused, Karen smiled and stroked a hand over the mound. “I’m due today.”
Eve choked on the cookie. If Karen had whipped out a laser on full and blasted it in her direction, she’d have felt less panic. “Today? Like now?”
“Well, not this minute, apparently.” Laughing, Karen sent Roarke an adoring look as he served her tea. Quite obviously, they’d bonded between cookies and kittens. “But I don’t think she’s going to wait much longer.”
“I guess you’ll be glad to—you know—get it out of there.”
“I can’t wait to meet her—hold her. But I love being pregnant.”
“Why?”
She laughed again at Eve’s obvious puzzlement, then shared a tender look with her husband. “Making a miracle.”
“Well.” Since that dried up her pregnancy conversation, Eve turned back to Will. “We don’t want to take up any more of your time. I appreciate the help. If you could get me any of your old notes on Drury, I’d be grateful.”
“I can dig them out.” He rose, paused by his wife to lay a hand over hers, linking them over their child.
• • •
At Eve’s request, Roarke drove aimlessly while she filled him in on her conversation with Wilson McRae.
“Do you blame him?”
She shook her head. “Everyone has their own, what do you call it, Achilles’ heel. They found his and put the pressure on. Guy’s got a kid, another on the way, a pretty little wife in a pretty little house. They knew just where to jam him.”
“She’s a teacher.” Roarke cruised the freeway under the flood of safety lights and kept the speed steady. “She’s been working on-screen for the last six months and plans to continue that way for at least another year or two. But she misses the personal contact with her students. She’s a very sweet woman who’s worried about her husband.”
“How much does she know?”
“Not all, but more, I believe, than he thinks. Will he go back when you close the case?”
Not if, she noted, but when. It bolstered the heart to have someone with so much faith in her. More faith, she realized, than she had in herself just now. “No. He’ll never get past giving it up. They stole that from him. And sometimes you never get back everything.”
She closed her eyes a moment. “Will you drive downtown? I need to look. I need to see if I remember.”
“There’s no need to take on more now, Eve.”
“Sometimes you never get rid of everything, either. I need to look.”
Another city, she thought, with some of its old stone and brick desperately preserved, and so much of it crumbled to dust to make room for sleek steel and quick prefab.
There would be snazzy restaurants and clubs, slick hotels and glittering shops in the areas where the power board wanted the tourists, and their I’m-on-vacation money, to congregate. And there would be sex joints, dives, scarred units, and alley filth in others where only the doomed and the foolish gathered.
It was there Roarke drove the gleaming silver car through the narrow streets, where the lights pumped in hard colors and promised all the darker delights. Street LCs shivered on corners and hoped for a trick to take them out of the wind. Dealers prowled, angling for a mark, ready to do business at discounted rates because the cold kept all but the desperately addicted inside.
Sidewalk sleepers huddled inside their cribs, drank their brew, and waited for morning.
“Stop here,” she murmured it, squinting at a corner building with bricks pitted and laced with graffiti. The lower windows were barred and blocked with wood. It called itself Hotel South Side in a sign that blinked jerkily in watery blue.
She got out, staring up at the windows. Some were cracked, all were blackened