“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.”
4 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.”