Page 101 of Passions in Death
“Well…”
In the front seat, Eve felt more time ticking away. “Fine. Fine. We’ll go by there, wait, and take you to the house.”
“We’ll be fast,” Peabody promised.
“Yeah, yeah.” She ignored Roarke’s amused look, and put her mind back in work mode as he drove. “I want to talk to Stillwater again. He’s not on the list, but he’s in the group. He’ll have impressions. It’s a stupid murder. It gains nothing. And it’s not the batshit kind, either. There’s motive in there, specific target, but where’s the gain?”
“Shauna can’t marry a dead woman,” Peabody pointed out.
“Yeah, and that’s it. That’s what we’ve got.”
Roarke slid into a parking space outside the apartment building.
“How do you do that?” Eve demanded. “How do you just find parking right where we’re going? What, do you bribe the parking gods?”
“Every chance I get.”
“We’ll be fast,” Peabody promised as she and McNab climbed out. “We’ll be lightning.”
Eve watched them dash, hands linked, to the building.
“Friendships probe around, find the guilt, until you’re waiting outside an apartment in a parked car.”
Roarke patted her hand. “It won’t take long. And consider this. Friendships, healthy or unhealthy, are very much a part of your investigation.”
“They crisscross all over. But no one I’ve talked to, once I dig down a little, much liked Lopez. Erin must have. If it had just been sex, she’d have eased away over the last year. But she didn’t. Everybody seems to like Barney, Mr. Helpful who hovers.”
“From the sound of it, you don’t.”
“He was nervous,” she muttered. “Why was he nervous? Okay, first, seeing me in the hall—a jolt. Not expected. But after.”
“And you think there was something else in the box.”
“I do. But I can’t imagine what. We went through the place, and there was nothing incriminating. But he was nervous.”
They weren’t lightning, but fast enough as they came out, each carrying a box, lidded, as Barney had. Eve noted theirs were sealed and labeled as, from behind the wheel, Roarke popped the trunk.
“Big thanks,” Peabody said as she slid back in the car. “Getting stuff over there this way’s going to make the final move a lot easier, and we can put in more time helping next door.”
“Don’t want Mavis carting too much,” McNab added. “And when August isn’t there, somebody’s gotta keep an eye on Bella.”
Friendships, Eve thought again, they sucked you right in.
“Mavis tagged us as we were heading up,” Peabody said. “Wanted to know if we’d make it tonight. She’s juiced you’re coming by. I told her you couldn’t stay long. She gets it.”
Well, that was something anyway.
The gates opened as they drove up, and there was the family, sitting in the brightly colored chairs on the big front porch. Bella, hair in two high tails on either side of her head, in bibbed shorts as blue as her eyes, popped out of her kid-sized chair.
Mavis didn’t pop, but sort of levered herself up. Eve didn’t know how—it hadn’t been that long—but the belly under the snug green tee was bigger than ever.
The tee matched the color of the explosive topknot of hair and the swirls all over the white tennis shoes.
Leonardo, the gentle giant, took Mavis’s hand and stood with her in a flowing sleeveless shirt and baggies that cropped at his ankles.
The minute Eve opened the car door, Bella shot off the porch.
“Das here! Das, Ork, Peadoby, Nab. Friends!”
