In Death 28 - Promises in Death

search. And the search may be the only way to find the bumps.”
    “If bumps are there, we’d find them with the unregistered.”
    “Can’t do it. Before, that was for Morris.” She shook her head, knowing as logic it was again shaky. “I’m going after another cop. I have to do it straight. Every step I take has to be by and on the book for the investigation. And for me. She made a mistake somewhere, overlooked something, sometime. She made one by sending Coltraine’s weapon and badge back. By botching the ambush on me.”
    “Assuming it’s Grady. This one.” Roarke tapped Clifton’s photo. “He’s trouble. I know his type.”
    “Yeah, and I won’t be surprised to hear at some point he’s ordered to hand over his pieces and badge. And if Coltraine had been knocked around, he’d be top of my list. That was a mistake,” Eve considered. “Grady did it too clean. It just wasn’t physical enough, either of the hits. That’s pride. She’s proud of her work. She does well on the job, she gets kudos from her LT. She does well on her mission, she gets them from Ricker. She covers both.”
    “ ‘Don’t disappoint me, dear,’ ” Roarke remembered. “It does strike as a warning to a female. One that puts her in a subordinate position, and one that implies a relationship.”
    “Do you ever call your subordinates ‘dear?’ ”
    “Good Christ, I hope not. It’s a kind of backhanded slap, isn’t it? If I need to slap an employee, I do it face-to-face.”
    “Exactly. Ricker can’t, being all busy in a cage off-planet. The whole phrase is an insult, and a warning. His history with women, it just fits again. So where did she catch his eye? I figure I’ll start with that six months in Europe, the college stint. I might find some intersect with Sandy, then I can work back, and forward from there.”
    She went to her desk to do just that. Roarke continued to stand, studying the board.
    Attractive woman, he thought. Compact, athletic, a strong face, but very female in the shape of the mouth, the line of the jaw. Certainly one of Ricker’s type, he mused—as far as he could recall. And still, if that connection went back as far as Eve seemed to think, she’d have been eighteen, perhaps twenty. Ricker certainly hadn’t been above using youth for sex, but had he ever taken an actual interest in a girl of that age?
    Not in Roarke’s memory of him.
    No, that part didn’t fit, not with the man he’d known in his own youth. Women had been commodities, something to be used. Easily discarded. Paid off, discarded, disposed of. Or, as with Alex’s mother, eliminated.
    “Look at her mother.”
    “What?”
    “Her mother,” Roarke repeated. “Run her mother, her parents. Indulge me,” he said when she frowned at him.
    Eve ordered the run, and Lissa Grady’s data on-screen.
    “Attractive woman,” Roarke commented. “Works part-time in an art gallery where she and her husband retired. Suburban Florida. Respectable salary.”
    “No criminal. I ran everyone’s connections before. The father’s clean, too,” she pointed out. “Had his own accounting firm. Small company with two employees. Clean. Now he plays a lot of golf, and works freelance.”
    “Hmm. They must have sacrificed considerably to give the daughter the kind of education she had. Where were they when she started college?”
    Eve ordered the history. “Bloomfield, New Jersey.”
    “No, the employment. She’s a clerk, and he’s working for an accounting firm. Go back on her. Where was she, let’s say nine months before she gave birth?”
    “Chicago,” Eve announced. “Working her way through graduate school—art history major—as an assistant manager in a private art gallery. She moved to New Jersey, where her parents lived, during the pregnancy. She took maternity benefits, then the professional mother’s stipend.”
    “And was single until, what would it be, she was about four months along.”
    “Like that never happens. It’s . . . Wait.”
    “Run the gallery, Eve. Where she worked when she became pregnant.”
    She began, shook her head. “It doesn’t exist anymore and hasn’t for six years. It’s an antique store now. Oh, big, giant pop. I’m an idiot. Not a protegée, not exactly. Not an employee—not only. Not a lover. His freaking daughter.”
    “Alex said he’d spent most of his life trying to please his father. Maybe she’s doing the same. Ricker owned several art galleries, an excellent front for