“You really didn’t like him.”
“Really didn’t, which is why I got back in his face after I’d talked to her. He had that smirky, sneery, superior attitude, had me and Peabody tangled up at every level to get to Knight. What would Caro have done, say, if a couple of cops said they needed to speak to you?”
“She’d have tangled them up until she’d spoken with me, then would have followed my lead.”
“Yeah, that’s my thought, too. He didn’t speak to Knight, tell her we were there. Unless she lied to us, and since she was immediately cooperative, I don’t see the lie. And he jumps to lawyer before consulting her. Anyway, I want to check with security, find out if he told me the truth about when he logged out yesterday, and if he had a window to get to Mars.”
“To kill her because she was shaking down his boss? That’s some serious dislike you have there.”
“Maybe. Or maybe he just gave off a vibe. I don’t know yet.”
“Do you think he’s romantically involved, or wishes to be, with Knight?”
She considered it; dismissed it. “No, she and the partner are solid, and the asshole gave off another vibe. The I-like-guys-better vibe, so I don’t think he’s into that or wants to be with Knight in that way. Anyway, it might take me a few minutes to wind my way through security and get the answer.”
“Then I’ll see about that stew.”
It didn’t take as long as she’d calculated. It helped that the man on the desk used to be on the job, and had even worked under Feeney before he’d switched from Homicide to EDD.
When she had what she needed, she sat back, frowned at her board.
“No window?” Roarke asked.
“He logged out at nineteen-six, pretty much when he said. TOD is about thirty minutes earlier, so no. No window. Asshole’s clear.”
“Come console yourself with cocido.”
“It smells pretty good.” She walked to the table, studied the stew in thick blue bowls. “Looks like a lot of vegetables in there.”
“As there’s also a lot of meat, that should balance it for you.”
Suspicious, she sat, spooned up a little as Roarke cut pieces from a small round loaf of warm bread. Even as she wondered why they couldn’t just have regular stew, she warily tasted.
Flavors exploded in her mouth.
“Okay, it’s really good.”
Smiling, he handed her a chunk of bread. “Now you can relax and enjoy it.”
“Did you ever cook anything? I mean where you put stuff with other stuff and add more stuff?”
“I have actually. When I came to Summerset, he insisted on teaching me—or attempting to—how to prepare a few basic meals. I hated every bleeding moment of it, and surely did my best to turn it all to shite.”
He grinned, ate. “Likely I didn’t have to try that hard. It’s the one area where he gave up on me, to the great relief of both of us. You?”
“One of the state schools I was in had a required course. They called it Life Science, and we had to learn how to cook some basics. I did the fake scrambled eggs. They’d either come out hard and dry or runny and mostly raw. The instructor finally gave me the check mark, I figure out of pity or desperation.”
“She and Summerset could have commiserated,” Roarke supposed.
Eve shoveled in more. Vegetables didn’t taste so healthy when they had a kick and swam around in the really damn good.
“Life Science, my ass,” she said between bites. “I was always coming to New York, and you can always get pizza, so cooking was as useless as knowing what year that guy on the elephants crossed the mountains. The strategy, that’s useful. But what the fuck does it matter what year it was? That was then, this is now.”
Amused, Roarke drank some wine. “Summerset’s angle was what if I found myself in some situation where it was cook or starve. And my angle was, I knew how to be hungry, didn’t I, and I could always steal food come to that.”
“He likes doing it.” She dug into the stew again, though she was pretty sure some of the green stuff was cabbage. “It takes all kinds.”
“Even after I was with him weeks, and he saw to it I never went hungry, I stole food. Stashed it away—just in case. After a time, he sat me down, told me I was taking that food out of someone else’s mouth, who might go hungry. And I should have a care for those who had less than I.”