Eternity in Death by J. D. Robb Page A

expression. Roarke shifted, eyes of an almost savage blue. There was a click here, too, but a good solid one, one that made her smile.
    Roarke angled his head. “Lieutenant?”
    “Nothing.” But she thought: Who needs crosses and holy water to fight demons when you have two men like this? Dorian would never have understood that bright and brilliant human link. Her father had never understood it.
    “So.” She crossed to them, and because it amused her, slid her hands into her pockets to mirror their stances. “What’s the word?”
    “Good news,” Feeney began. “We got her clean. Bad news, there’s not much of him.”
    “I don’t need much.”
    “Going to need more than what we’ve got. Computer, run enhanced transmission.”
    Acknowledged…
    Eve watched Allesseria’s face. It was crystal clear now, as was the night around her, as was her voice. A streetlight beamed over her. The movement—rather than the jerky bounce of her quick walk—had been smoothed out, slowed down.
    There was a sound, a whoosh of air, a ripple of fabric on the breeze. Eve watched the gloved hand snake in, between the ’link and the victim’s face. There was an upward jerk, an instant of pain and terror in Allesseria’s eyes. Then the image flipped as the phone tumbled: sky, street, sidewalk. Black.
    “Crap” was Eve’s comment, and her hands fisted in her pockets now. “Anything when you magnify and slow it down?”
    “We can enhance so you can count the stitches in the seams of the glove,” Feeney told her. “Can use the scale program to get you the size of it. We can give you the attacker’s probable height calculated from the size, the angles. But we can’t put on screen what’s not there. Got some snatches of audio though, for what it’s worth.”
    He set the comp again, made the adjustments, then played it back.
    What she heard first was silence.
    “We backed out her voice, her footsteps,” Roarke explained, “the ambient city noises. Now…”
    She caught it. Feet on pavement, the faintest rustle, then the rush she identified as a run followed by a jump or leap. There was a breath, expelled in a kind of laugh as the hand shot out and clamped Allesseria’s throat. And as the images rolled and tumbled on screen, a single low word. You .
    “Not enough for a voiceprint,” Feeney pointed out. “Never hold up in court even if we could match it on one syllable.”
    “He doesn’t have to know that.” Eve narrowed her eyes at the screen. “Maybe what we’ve got is just enough to shake him, to make him think we have more.”
    Feeney grinned at Roarke, tapped a finger to his temple. “She’s got something cooking up there.”
    “Yeah, I do. This time, we con the con.”
    Roarke stepped into Eve’s office, closed the door. “I don’t like it.”
    She continued across the cramped little room to her AutoChef, programmed coffee. “It’s a good plan. It’ll work.” She took the two mugs of hot black out, passed him one. “And I didn’t figure you’d like it. That’s one of the drawbacks of having you inside an investigation.”
    “There are other ways to run him to ground, Eve.”
    “This is the quickest. There’s no putting standard surveillance on him,” she began. “There are dozens of ways in and out of those tunnels. I can’t know what kind of escape hatch he might have in that club, up in his apartment. He decides he’s bored here, or there’s too much heat, he’d be in the wind before we got close.”
    “Find a way to shut down the club. Illegals raid will put him out of business.”
    “Sure, we could do that, we will do that. And if that’s all we do, he’ll be smoke. There are fronts to the business,” she pointed out. “You said so yourself. And it’d take time we don’t have to cut through them and dig down to him. By then he’s gone.”
    He set the coffee down on her desk. “All right, even agreeing that all that’s true, or very likely, it doesn’t justify you going in