In Death 26 - Strangers in Death

STRANGERS IN DEATH

J. D. ROBB
    G. P. P UTNAM’S S ONS
N EW Y ORK
    ----
    G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
Publishers Since 1838
Published by the Penguin Group
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    Copyright © 2008 by Nora Roberts
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    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
    Robb, J. D., date.
Strangers in death / J. D. Robb.
p. cm.
ISBN: 1-4295-9914-6
1. Dallas, Eve (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Police—New York (State)—New York—Fiction. 3. Policewomen—Fiction. 4. Businessmen—Crimes against—Fiction. 5. Rich people—Fiction. 6. New York (N. Y.)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3568.O243S77 2008 2007044775
813'. 54—dc22
    This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
    While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
    Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle which fits them all.
    —O LIVER W ENDELL H OLMES
    One cannot be in two places at once.
    —S EVENTEENTH-CENTURY PROVERB

Contents
    Chapter 1
    Chapter 2
    Chapter 3
    Chapter 4
    Chapter 5
    Chapter 6
    Chapter 7
    Chapter 8
    Chapter 9
    Chapter 10
    Chapter 11
    Chapter 12
    Chapter 13
    Chapter 14
    Chapter 15
    Chapter 16
    Chapter 17
    Chapter 18
    Chapter 19
    Chapter 20
    Chapter 21
    Chapter 22
    Chapter 23
     
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STRANGERS IN DEATH
    1
    MURDER HARBORED NO BIGOTRY, NO BIAS. IT subscribed to no class system. In its gleeful, deadly, and terminally judicious way, murder turned a blind eye on race, creed, gender, and social stratum. As Lieutenant Eve Dallas stood in the sumptuous bedroom of the recently departed Thomas A. Anders, she considered that.
    Only the night before she’d caught—and closed—a case dealing with the homicide of a twenty-year-old woman who’d been throttled, beaten, then chucked out the window of her nine-story flop.
    The rent-by-the-week flop, Eve mused, where the victim’s boyfriend claimed to have slept through her demise, smelled of stale sex, stale zoner, and really bad Chinese food. Anders? His Park Avenue bedroom smelled of candy-colored tulips, cool, clean wealth, and dead body. Death had come to him on the luxurious sheets of his massive, silk-canopied bed. And to Tisha Brown it had come on the stained mattress tossed on the floor of a junkie’s flop. The header to the sidewalk had just been the flourish.
    The point was, Eve supposed, no matter who you were—sex, race, tax bracket—death leveled it all out. As a murder cop going on a dozen years for the NYPSD, she’d seen it all before.
    It was barely seven in the morning, and she was alone with the dead. She had the first officers on scene downstairs with the housekeeper who’d called in the nine-one-one. With her hands and boots sealed, she walked around the edges of the room while her recorder documented.
    “Victim is identified as Anders, Thomas Aurelius, of this address.