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against her teeth as she thought it through. “He’ll be gone a few more days at least, and my sister’s in Europe. She’ll be hooking up with my parents in about ten days, so I can just keep them all out of this for now. Yeah, I can keep them out of it. I’ll have to contact my grandparents, but that can wait until tomorrow.”
    Eve had been thinking more of Samantha contacting someone to stay with her, someone to lean on. But it seemed the woman’s initial self-estimate was on the mark. She wasn’t a weak woman.
    “Do I have to stay here?” Samantha asked her. “As much as I hate the idea, I think I want to go to a hotel for the night—for a while, actually. I don’t want to stay here alone. I don’t want to be here tonight.”
    “I’ll arrange for you to be taken anywhere you want to go. I’ll need to know how to reach you.”
    “Okay.” She closed her eyes a moment, drew in a breath as Eve got to her feet. “Lieutenant, she’s dead, Andrea’s dead because she was here. She’s dead, isn’t she, because she was here while I was away.”
    “She’s dead because someone killed her. Whoever did is the only one responsible for what happened. You’re not. She’s not. It’s my job to find whoever’s responsible.”
    “You’re good at your job, aren’t you?”
    “Yeah. I am. I’m going to have Officer Ricky take you to a hotel. If you think of anything else, you can contact me through Cop Central. Oh, these diamonds you wrote about. When were they stolen?”
    “Two thousand and three. March 2003. Appraised at over twenty-eight million at that time. About three-quarters of them were recovered and returned.”
    “That leaves a lot of loose rocks. Thanks for your cooperation, Ms. Gannon. I’m sorry about your friend.”
    She stepped out, working various theories in her mind. One of the sweepers tapped her shoulder as she passed.
    “Hey, Lieutenant? The fish? They didn’t make it.”
    “Shit.” Eve jammed her hands in her pockets and headed out.

Chapter 2
     
     
     
    She was closer to home than to Central, and it was late enough to justify avoiding the trip downtown. Her equipment at home was superior to anything the cops could offer—outside of the lauded Electronic Detective Division.
    The fact was, she had access to equipment superior than the Pentagon’s, in all likelihood. One of her marital side bennies, she thought. Marry one of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful men—one who loved his e-toys—and you got to play with them whenever you liked.
    More to the point, Roarke would talk her into letting him help her use that equipment. Since Peabody wasn’t around to do any drone work, Eve was planning to let him, without too much of an argument.
    She liked the diamond angle, and wanted to dig up some data on that. Who better to assist in gathering data regarding a heist than a former thief? Roarke’s murky past could be a definite plus on that end.
    Marriage, for all its scary pockets and weird corners, was turning out to be a pretty good deal on the whole.
    It would do him good to play research assistant. Take his mind off the revelations that had reared up out of that murky past and sucker punched him. When a grown man discovered his mother wasn’t the stone bitch who’d slapped him around through childhood then deserted him, but a young woman who’d loved him, who’d been murdered while he was still a baby—and by his own father—it sent him reeling. Even a man as firmly balanced as Roarke.
    So having him help her would help him.
    It would make up, a little, for having her plans for the evening ditched. She’d had something a little more personal, and a lot more energetic, in mind. Summerset, her personal bane and Roarke’s majordomo, was spending ten days at a recuperation spa off-planet—at Roarke’s insistence. His holiday after breaking his leg hadn’t put all the roses back in his cheeks. Like those sunken, pasty cheeks even had roses. But he was gone, that was