He lifted a bro
w. One of his companies had manufactured it. “I think I can manage.”
“Fine.” She offered a weak smile. “You’re deputized. You hanging in, Carter?”
“Yeah.” But he walked out of the elevator into the hallway on ten like a drunk trying to pass a competency test. He had to wipe his sweaty hand twice on his slacks to get a clear reading on the palm screen. When the door slid open, he stepped back. “I’d just as soon not go in again.”
“Stay here,” she told him. “I may need you.”
She stepped inside. The lights were blinding bright, up to full power. Music blared out of the wall unit: hard, clashing rock with a screeching vocalist that reminded Eve of her friend Mavis. The floor was tiled in a Caribbean blue and offered the illusion of walking on water.
Along the north and south walls, banks of computers were set up. Workstations, she assumed, cluttered with all manner of electronic boards, microchips, and tools.
She saw clothes heaped on the sofa, VR goggles lying on the coffee table with three tubes of Asian beer—two of them flattened and already rolled for the recycler—and a bowl of spiced pretzels.
And she saw Drew Mathias’s naked body swaying gently from a makeshift noose of sheets hitched to the glittering tier of a blue glass chandelier.
“Ah, hell.” She sighed it out. “What is he, Roarke, twenty?”
“Not much more than.” Roarke’s mouth thinned as he studied Mathias’s boyish face. It was purple now, the eyes bulging, the mouth frozen into a hideous, gaping grin. Some vicious whim of death had left him smiling.
“All right, let’s do what we can. Dallas, Lieutenant Eve, NYPSD, standing in until proper interspace authorities can be contacted and transported. Suspicious, unattended death. Mathias, Drew, Olympus Grand Hotel, Room ten thirty-six, August 1, 2058, one hundred hours.”
“I want to take him down,” Roarke said. It shouldn’t have surprised him how quickly, how seamlessly she’d shifted from woman to cop.
“Not yet. It doesn’t make any difference to him now, and I need the scene recorded before anything’s moved.” She turned in the doorway. “Did you touch anything, Carter?”
“No.” He scrubbed the back of his hand over his mouth. “I opened the door, just like now, and walked in. I saw him right away. You . . . you see him right away. I guess I stood there a minute. Just stood there. I knew he was dead. I saw his face.”
“Why don’t you go through the other door into the bedroom.” She gestured to the left. “You can lie down for a while. I’ll need to talk to you.”
“Okay.”
“Don’t call anyone,” she ordered.
“No. No, I won’t call anyone.”
She turned away again, secured the door. Her gaze shifted to Roarke’s, and their eyes held. She knew he was thinking, as she was, that there were some—like her—who had no escape from death.
“Let’s get started,” she told him.
chapter two
The doctor’s name was Wang, and he was old, as most medicals were on off planet projects. He could have retired at ninety, but like others of his ilk, he had chosen to bump from site to site, tending the scrapes and bruises, passing out drugs for space sickness and gravity balance, delivering the occasional baby, running required diagnostics.
But he knew a dead body when he saw one.
“Dead.” His voice was clipped, faintly exotic. His skin was parchment yellow and as wrinkled as an old map. His eyes were black, almond shaped. His head was glossy and slick, lending him the appearance of an ancient, somewhat battered billiard ball.
“Yeah, I got that much.” Eve rubbed her eyes. She’d never had to deal with a space med, but she’d heard about them. They didn’t care to have their cushy routine interrupted. “Give me the cause and the time.”
“Strangulation.” Wang tapped one long finger against the vicious marks on Mathias’s neck. “Self-induced. Time of death I would say between ten and eleven P.M. on this day, in this month, in this year.”
She offered a thin smile. “Thank you, Doctor. There aren’t any other signs of violence on the body, so I lean toward your diagnosis of self-termination. But I want the results of the drug run. Let’s see if it was chemically induced. Did you treat the deceased for anything?”
“I cannot say, but he looks unfamiliar. I would have his records, of course. He would have come to me for the standard diagnostic upon arrival.”
“I’ll want those as well.”