The Other Side - J. D. Robb [26]
“Roommates make it harder for him to take Beata, hold her, unless they’re complicit.”
“The information on the roommates is as benign as this one.”
“Switch to the theater,” Eve decided. “Where she was understudying. What did Peabody get?”
She studied the data as it scrolled, listened to Roarke’s summaries. And paced.
None of them popped for her. Holding a woman against her will for an extended length of time required privacy, sound-proofing, supplies, and time.
Maybe she was wrong—maybe the old woman had been wrong—and the girl was dead. And the thought of that pierced her so deep, she shuddered.
“Eve—”
“No, it’s nothing. Keep going. I need to set up a murder board. I should’ve done it already.”
She pinned up her photos, let the information Roarke provided wind through while she arranged what she needed on the board.
“Work and the school,” Eve said. “Her most usual and regular spots other than her apartment. We focus there. She went out on auditions, and that’ll be another level if we bomb here. Work, school, her neighbors. Then the theater, then audition sites, shops, and so on.
“Let me see the map again.”
She moved closer to the screen. “She takes this route basically every day. Home to morning class. Then from class to work if she was scheduled. Back to class, back to work or an audition. Evening class three nights a week, and work again four nights.”
“A regular customer at the restaurant,” Roarke suggested. “Someone she waited on routinely. Wanted her, took her.”
She nodded. “Possible. Someone she knew is most probable. Someone who could lure her where he wanted her to go. Doesn’t make the ripples a forced abduction would. Had to have a place. Underground. A basement? A cellar?”
“The underground itself,” Roarke commented. “There are places under the streets no one would pay attention to a woman struggling, screaming, calling for help.”
“Too many,” Eve agreed. “But it’d be risky. Someone could take her from you. Private,” she said again. “Can you get the blueprints for the building—the dance school?” When his answer was simply a long look, she rolled her eyes. “Go ahead, show off. Let me see the uncle’s data. Sasha Korchov.”
“I’ve got deeper data on Natalya Barinova as well.”
“It’s a man. Go with the man first.”
Benign. That was the word Roarke had used to describe Beata’s coworker and his roommates. It was a word that came to mind with Sasha. Dreamy eyes, she remembered—a little like Dennis Mira there—and indeed his ID photo showed the same, along with the soft smile.
But the images Roarke had dug up from before the accident that had cost him his career and his lover showed a dynamic, intense, passionate man. Leaping, spinning a long, leanly muscled body showcased in dramatic costumes. The mane of hair coal black, the eyes on fire.
“How do you lose that?” she murmured. “Lose that energy, that passion, that fierceness? It must be almost like death or losing someone to death. Something breaks, something more than a leg, an arm. Something gets crushed, more than a foot, more than ribs.”
How do you get over the anger—that’s what she’d asked Lopez about survivors, about families who lost someone to murder.
“You lost your badge once,” Roarke reminded her. “What did it do to you?”
“Destroyed me. Temporarily. Cut me off from what I was. But I had you to help bring me back, and I got my badge back. He lost his woman, too. His woman,” she repeated. “Another dancer. And look here, they danced the Diabolique ballet together. The Devil was his signature role. Son of a bitch. I should’ve seen it.”
“The building has a basement,” Roarke told her. “It runs the length and width of the building and holds a number of rooms, listed as storage and/or utility and maintenance on the plans.”
“Who owns the building?”
“Funny you should ask. He owns it. He made quite a bit of money during his career and was awarded a large settlement after the accident.”
“He’s got no record anywhere. Unless it got