In Death 18 - Divided in Death

justice is done.”
    “I will! I will be strong, for Blair. No matter how hard it is.”
    “I know you will,” Peabody replied and led Chloe through an archway.
    “Second, much younger side dish,” Eve said before Roarke could ask.
    “Ah.”
    “Yeah. Ah. I don’t think she knows anything, but Peabody’ll coax it out of her if she does.”
    “I wonder if it’ll be easier on Reva, knowing what a complete bastard the man was. Her lawyer got her out on bail. She has to wear a bracelet, but she’s out. She’ll stay with Caro until this is cleared up.”
    He studied the wide double doorway taking up most of a wall, and strolling over gave it a light tap. “Steel, reinforced, I’d wager. Odd to go to all that for a space such as this.”
    “So I’m thinking.”
    “Hmm.” He wandered to the security panel. “Feeney contacted me shortly before you did. In fact, I was on the point of heading down to Central when you gave me this interesting assignment.”
    Taking a case of slim tools from his pocket, Roarke selected one, removed the plate. “He appears to have had a very fine time with his family in Bimini.”
    “He has a tan. He smiles all the time. I’m not entirely sure they didn’t replace him with a droid.”
    Roarke made not entirely sympathetic mouth noises before taking a small electronic unit out of another pocket.
    “What’s that?”
    “Oh, just a little something I’ve been toying with. A good time to try it out, in the field so to speak.” He interfaced it with the pad, waited through a series of beeps, and brushed Eve gently back when she tried to stare at it over his shoulder. “Don’t crowd me, Lieutenant.”
    “What’s it doing?”
    “All manner of things you wouldn’t understand, and you’d just get testy if I tried to explain. Simplest to say it’s mating—as machines do. And seducing Bissel’s unit into revealing all sorts of secrets. And isn’t this interesting?”
    “What? Damn it. Can you get in or not?”
    “I don’t know why I tolerate the insults.” He glanced over his shoulder, directly into her annoyed eyes. “Maybe it’s the sex. How lowering that would be. Then again, I’m as weak and vulnerable as the next man.”
    “Are you trying to piss me off?”
    “Darling, it’s no effort at all. Now what I’ve learned here, through my delightful new toy, is exactly when this passcode was changed. And I think you’ll find it as interesting as I do that it was done at nearly the same time someone was jamming a kitchen knife in Blair Bissel’s ribs.”
    Her eyes flickered, narrowed. “No mistake?”
    “None. He could hardly have done this himself.”
    “Hardly.”
    “Nor could his equally dead mistress, or his wife. Or, for that matter, his killer.”
    “But I’ll bet you whoever locked this up knew he was dead, or dying. Knew his wife was in the frame. This has to be another stage of the whole bloody mess. Get me inside.”

Chapter 4
    It didn’t take him long. Such things rarely did. He had thief’s hands—quick, agile, and sneaky—but since he used them for her, and on her, with cheerful regularity, it was tough to criticize.
    And when he was done, the heavy doors slid back with barely a sound into wall pockets to reveal Blair Bissel’s studio.
    He’d given himself a lot of space here, too. And it looked like he needed it. There was metal everywhere, in long beams, short stacks, in piles of cubes and balls. The floor and the walls were covered in some sort of fireproof, reflective material that did double duty and mirrored back vague ghosts of the equipment and works-in-progress.
    Tools that made Eve think of medieval torture devices lay on a long metal table. Tools that cut and snipped and bent, she assumed. And three large tanks fixed into rolling stands were in various positions around the room. From the attachments and hoses on each, she deduced they were filled with some sort of flammable gas and provided the heat used to weld or melt or whatever the hell people who made weird things out of metal did with fire.
    Another wall was covered with sketches. Some looked to have been done by hand, others computer-generated. Since one matched the strange twists and spikes of a piece in the center of the room, she decided they were ideas or blueprints for his art.
    He may have spent his off time diddling anything female, but it appeared he took his vocation seriously.
    She skirted around the centered sculpture, and only then noted that there was a