“Eight months. The most vital eight months of my life. I only started to live when-”

“Did his wife come here?”

“Rarely.” Chloe pressed her lips together. “She pretended an interest in his work, in public. But in private she was critical, and was draining his energies. Of course, she had no problem spending the money he made from the sweat of his soul.”

“Is that so? He tell you that?”

“He told me everything.” She beat her breast, her hand fisted around the locket. Heart tapped against heart. “There were no secrets between us.”

“So you have the passcode into his studio.”

She opened her mouth, firmed it again before speaking. “No. An artist such as Blair needs his privacy. I would never intrude. Naturally, he would open the door when he wanted to share something with me.”

“Right. So you wouldn’t know if he ever had visitors in there.”

“He worked alone. It was necessary for his creativity.”

Dupe, Eve thought. Foolish, gullible, and probably no more than a casual toy for Bissel. She started to turn as the elevator opened again, and Chloe flung her arms around Eve’s legs.

“Please, please! You must let me see him. You must let me say goodbye to my heart. Let me go to him. Let me touch his face one last time! You must. You must give me that much.”

Eve saw Roarke quirk a brow in a kind of amused horror. Bending, Eve peeled Chloe off her shins.

“Peabody, deal with this.”

“Sure. Come on, Chloe.” Putting her back into it, Peabody hefted the weeping girl. “Let’s go splash some water on your face. Blair would want you to be strong. I’ve got some questions I need to ask you. He’d want you to help us, so we can see justice is done.”

“I will! I will be strong, for Blair. No matter how hard it is.”

“I know you will,” Peabody replied and led Chloe through an archway.

“Second, much younger side dish,” Eve said before Roarke could ask.

“Ah.”

“Yeah. Ah. I don’t think she knows anything, but Peabody’ll coax it out of her if she does.”

“I wonder if it’ll be easier on Reva, knowing what a complete bastard the man was. Her lawyer got her out on bail. She has to wear a bracelet, but she’s out. She’ll stay with Caro until this is cleared up.”

He studied the wide double doorway taking up most of a wall, and strolling over gave it a light tap. “Steel, reinforced, I’d wager. Odd to go to all that for a space such as this.”

“So I’m thinking.”

“Hmm.” He wandered to the security panel. “Feeney contacted me shortly before you did. In fact, I was on the point of heading down to Central when you gave me this interesting assignment.”

Taking a case of slim tools from his pocket, Roarke selected one, removed the plate. “He appears to have had a very fine time with his family in Bimini.”

“He has a tan. He smiles all the time. I’m not entirely sure they didn’t replace him with a droid.”

Roarke made not entirely sympathetic mouth noises before taking a small electronic unit out of another pocket.

“What’s that?”

“Oh, just a little something I’ve been toying with. A good time to try it out, in the field so to speak.” He interfaced it with the pad, waited through a series of beeps, and brushed Eve gently back when she tried to stare at it over his shoulder. “Don’t crowd me, Lieutenant.”

“What’s it doing?”

“All manner of things you wouldn’t understand, and you’d just get testy if I tried to explain. Simplest to say it’s mating-as machines do. And seducing Bissel’s unit into revealing all sorts of secrets. And isn’t this interesting?”

“What? Damn it. Can you get in or not?”

“I don’t know why I tolerate the insults.” He glanced over his shoulder, directly into her annoyed eyes. “Maybe it’s the sex. How lowering that would be. Then again, I’m as weak and vulnerable as the next man.”

“Are you trying to piss me off?”

“Darling, it’s no effort at all. Now what I’ve learned here, through my delightful new toy, is exactly when this passcode was changed. And I think you’ll find it as interesting as I do that it was done at nearly the same time someone was jamming a kitchen knife in Blair Bissel’s ribs.”

Her eyes flickered, narrowed. “No mistake?”

“None. He could hardly have done this himself.”

“Hardly.”

“Nor could his equally dead mistress, or his wife. Or, for that matter, his killer.”

“But I’ll bet you whoever locked this up knew he was dead, or dying. Knew his wife was in the frame. This has to be another stage of the whole bloody mess. Get me inside.”

It didn’t take him long. Such things rarely did. He had thief’s hands-quick, agile, and sneaky-but since he used them for her, and on her, with cheerful regularity, it was tough to criticize.

And when he was done, the heavy doors slid back with barely a sound into wall pockets to reveal Blair Bissel’s studio.

He’d given himself a lot of space here, too. And it looked like he needed it. There was metal everywhere, in long beams, short stacks, in piles of cubes and balls. The floor and the walls were covered in some sort of fireproof, reflective material that did double duty and mirrored back vague ghosts of the equipment and works-in-progress.

Tools that made Eve think of medieval torture devices lay on a long metal table. Tools that cut and snipped and bent, she assumed. And three large tanks fixed into rolling stands were in various positions around the room. From the attachments and hoses on each, she deduced they were filled with some sort of flammable gas and provided the heat used to weld or melt or whatever the hell people who made weird things out of metal did with fire.

Another wall was covered with sketches. Some looked to have been done by hand, others computer-generated. Since one matched the strange twists and spikes of a piece in the center of the room, she decided they were ideas or blueprints for his art.

He may have spent his off time diddling anything female, but it appeared he took his vocation seriously.

She skirted around the centered sculpture, and only then noted that there was a form of a hand, fingers spread as if desperately reaching, plunged out of the twist of metal.

She glanced back at the sketch, read the notation at the bottom.

ESCAPE FROM HELL

“Who buys this shit?” she wondered.

“Collectors,” Roarke supplied, eyeing a tall, obviously female form that was, apparently, giving birth to something not completely human. “Corporations and businesses that want to be seen as patrons of the arts.”

“Don’t tell me you have some of this?”

“Actually, I don’t. His work doesn’t… speak to me.”

“That’s something, anyway.” Turning her back on the sculpture, she walked to the data station set up at the far end of the room.

She glanced at the stack of beams. “How does he get the stuff in and out? No way some of this fits on the elevator.”

“There’s another lift to the roof. There.” He gestured to the east wall. “Installed at his own expense. “It’s triple the size of the standard freight elevator. There’s a copter pad on the roof, and he has pieces and equipment airlifted.”

She just looked at him. “Don’t tell me you own this place.”

“Partially.” He spoke absently as he wandered, studying metal forms. “It’s a conglomerate sort of thing.”

“You know, it gets embarrassing after a point.”

He lifted his eyebrows, all innocence. “Really? I can’t imagine why.”

“You wouldn’t. Which reminds me.” She shoved back her jacket sleeve and held out her arm so the bracelet glittered. “Take this thing, will you? I forgot I was wearing it when we headed out to the scene. Peabody keeps staring at it, and pretends she’s not staring at it. It’s freaking me out, and if I stuff it in my pocket or something, I’ll probably lose it.”