“I hate this kind of shit. Why can’t it just be regular bad guy crap? You’ve got money, I want it, I kill you. You’ve been screwing my wife, it pisses me off, I cut out your heart. No, I’ve got to worry about disappearing bodies and weapons designed to turn the lights out on masses of people. Crap.” - Eve to Roarke, Missing in Death[1]
Plot Summary[]
J. D. Robb’s “Missing in Death” investigates a tourist’s disappearance during a ferry ride. Detective Eve Dallas wonders... if she didn’t jump, and she’s not on board, then where in the world is she?
~ Amazon
Map[]
Please reference the Missing in Death Map for locations or approximate locations of sites listed here.
| Spoiler warning! This article contains plot details about an upcoming episode. |
Timeline[]
Approximate Story Date: June, 2060[2]
Day 1[]
Chapter 1[]
- Carolee Grogan of Springfield, MO, is on the Staten Island Ferry with her family, when her younger son, Pete, tells her he’s thirsty. They detour to the bathrooms, where the women’s room has an ‘Out of Order’ sign. She decides to try it anyway so she can remain close to her son, but as soon as she enters, she sees a woman on the floor, bathed in blood, with a man standing over her holding a bloody knife and a stunner. He apologizes and then stuns her.
- A reluctant Eve and a gleeful Peabody race across the New York Harbor to follow up on Grogan’s disappearance. Eve remembers when she and Roarke came close to dying inside the Statue of Liberty, but managed to save it [see Loyalty in Death]. Inspector Warren from the DOT leads them to the bathroom, with all the blood and no bodies.
Chapter 2[]
- Peabody tests the blood, which is human, Type A Negative, and Eve interviews the family. Mr. Grogan confirms that Carolee’s blood type, which is O Positive, doesn’t match.
- An unscheduled fireworks display begins, and Carolee appears, dazed and with a purpling knot on her forehead, and no memory of what happened or even that she was unconscious.
Chapter 3[]
- Peabody’s theory is either a vortex or parallel universe.
Chapter 4[]
- Warren lets them know they are two passengers short.
- Eve and Peabody speculate about why the killer would take the body (and how).
- Roarke meets them at the lab, and fills her in on what the media has been reporting.
Chapter 5[]
- Dick Berenski identifies the blood as coming from Dana Buckley, age 41, born in Sioux City, with a New York address listed as the Waldorf Astoria.
- Peabody verifies that nobody with that name or description is registered there.
- Unsurprisingly, Roarke knew of her – she hacked through several layers of security on holo software Roarke’s company was creating, but he knew her as Catherine Delauter, and suspects she has many aliases since she sells to the highest bidder. About seven or eight years ago, she contacted Roarke; he was not interested, and warned her off since she was also known as an assassin for hire.
- Eve re-interviews Carolee in the hospital, where she still doesn’t remember what happened. Eve shows her a picture of Dana, she doesn’t recognize her but her pulse rate speeds up. Her son Will has a crowd picture that includes Dana in the background so he gives Eve his camera.
- Roarke upgrades the family to The Roarke Palace Hotel while Eve is checking with the doctor, who tells her there was something wonky in Carolee’s memory section, an optic smudge, but the tox was clean, and the blip was resolved on retest.
Chapter 6[]
- Roarke and Eve return home. Roarke tells Eve she won’t find data on the victim but she should start the searches from her office anyway and then they would gather the data on the unregistered computer together – he needs to hack into the CIA, Homeland Security, Interpol, MI5, Global, EuroCom, and others.
- Roarke tells Eve that two years after he turned down Buckley’s offer to work for him, she killed three of his people in an unsuccessful attempt at stealing R&D for one of his projects. Roarke was unable to find her.
- Depending on the source, she is responsible for anywhere from 50 to 250 deaths.
- Roarke thinks the killer used a kind of stunner on Carolee that renders the target incapacitated through an optical signal rather than through the nervous system. He hasn’t seen this technology, but there have been rumors and his R&D is working on something similar.
Chapter 7[]
- Eve is skeptical about ‘alien invasions, secret bunkers in Antarctica for experimentation on human guinea pigs’ until Roarke reminds her about Icove [see Born in Death].
- Roarke pulls up the hit list HSO has compiled for Buckley, along with a very recent and cryptic memo that they believe are ordering a hit from her on somebody, and whoever killed her took her body to delay the identification, not expecting that she would be recognized so quickly.
- While other searches are running they have rough sex (Eve’s request) and then Eve goes to sleep.
Day 2[]
Chapter 7 (Continued)[]
- Eve wakes up to the computer beeping – Roarke has found the killer, Ivan Draski, 62, born in the Ukraine, a scientist inventor initially recruited by the European Watch Network (EWN), doing R&D.
- His wife and daughter were killed twenty years ago in a brutal slaying rumored to be initiated by a fringe wing of EWN.
- Nobody claimed credit for the killing but the names were on Buckley’s extensive kill list, with no employer assigned.
- Draski’s fixed address is a townhouse on the Upper East Side under the name Frank Plutz.
- Roarke says if Eve doesn’t put him in a cage, he will try to recruit him.
Chapter 8[]
- Eve gets a warrant and sets up an operation to take Draski down.
- When she reviews the security disc from the ferry, she sees him getting on with a battered briefcase and a small overnight bag, looking harmless.
- There is no heat source at his house so Eve and Peabody enter the house using Eve’s master to unlock the door. The house is clear and despite all the electronics, they don’t think he plans to return.
- They find a box of weapons, with several missing (2 knives and a stunner), clothes with gaps where he took some with him, and a room full of disguises.
- Roarke tries to persuade Eve into only reporting that he’s in the wind to Whitney, not to the evil HSO [see Divided in Death for details] since she has no proof the killing has anything to do with HSO. Eve agrees to give him 24 hours to look for Draski before she goes to Whitney.
Chapter 9[]
- Eve and Peabody return to the ferry to reconstruct what happened:
- Buckley boarded first, with Draski about 100 people behind her.
- Eve thinks he had a tracker on Buckley and had also set up the meet in advance.
- Draski would have gone into the restroom first, looking like maintenance, pushing a hamper (which he returned before the ferry was searched since no hampers were missing).
- Buckley would want to get to the meet place as soon as possible, so she was there about ten minutes before Carolee.
- Draski verifies Buckley has the money, she verifies he has the stunner, he kills her.
- Buckley was killed before Carolee entered the restroom, otherwise why not just wait to kill her?
- Oh look, the murder weapon is now on the bathroom floor – dagger style knife with 6” blade, made of bone.
- Eve seals up and puts the knife into an evidence bag, speculating that he stunned Carolee on a low setting when she walked in so she didn’t have time to scream.
- Draski puts Buckley’s body and his bloody uniform in the already prepped (lined with plastic or a body bag) hamper.
- Peabody thinks he then used the memory blaster on Carolee, and then mojo’d the people in that sector of the deck.
- Meanwhile, Roarke meets with a weapons runner, Julian Chamain, at a bakery that his niece runs and is swept twice daily for listening devices.
- They have a cryptic conversation about the memory blaster, where Chamain lets Roarke know the auction closes at midnight, and Roarke lets Chamain know that Buckley is dead.
- Roarke goes home to hack his way into HSO to find the men who had allowed Eve to have a horrible childhood. Yes, he destroyed the disc with their info on it, but also yes, he remembers their names. He also runs a search for Draski and Lost Time (code word for the memory blaster).
- McNab calls to tell Roarke what he found on Draski’s strategically shielded computer: massive amounts of data on Buckley, and set up so Buckley is running an auction at an Upper East Side address owned by Dolores Gregory (aka Dana Buckley).
- Roarke tells McNab to call Eve with the info.
Chapter 10[]
- Eve and Peabody search the auction apartment, which is empty of people now that Buckley is dead. Draski has lowered the security, further laying out breadcrumbs so they are exactly where he wants them to be, which is in the ice-cold second bedroom, where Dana’s body is set up in a chair facing a picture of Draski’s wife and daughter and a rose.
- Peabody calls it in.
- The wall screen displays the current status of the bidding, which is up to 4.4 billion, with several hours to go.
- Back at the mansion, Roarke goes downstairs to speak with Summerset, who introduces him to his old friend Ivan Draski.
- Eve returns home, pulls a stunner on Draski, who tells Summerset he killed a woman, and wants to explain the situation to Eve before she arrests him. She lowers the stunner and listens to Draski’s story.
- The HSO set up killing his wife and daughter to look like it was the EWN, so they could recruit him. He only found out six months ago, when he came across Dana’s kill list. He let her come to him, and set up the meet.
- He showed Eve the case she brought on board with her, which contained a bomb – now disabled – which she planned to use as a diversion after she killed him. He left the ferry in a motorized inflatable with Dana’s body. When Carolee walked into the bathroom, he used the Lost Time device on her so she would be susceptible to suggestions; he had her hide until her watch alarm went off and then return to the bathroom, not remembering that hour. The fireworks were a distraction, even though Draski was long gone, plus his daughter loved fireworks.
- He stayed instead of leaving the country because the same people who ordered the hit on his family were the ones who ‘ignored the cries of a child being brutalized.’ He tells Eve that man is dead, years ago and not by his hand.
- He then pulls out the Lost Time device, minus its innards.
- Eve tells Draski she will pass on the investigation to HSO with what she learned up to the time she came home. Since it’s an internal HSO matter, involving one of their employees and a freelance assassin, she will leave it to them to resolve. She tells Draski to disappear.
Epilogue[]
- Eve is torn but thinks she made the correct decision; she’s upset that she was the one to decide, but the system failed in this case.
- Eve writes up her report and Summerset brings her a giant chocolate chip cookie to thank her for not arresting his friend.
Character List[]
List of Main Characters Appearing in this Book[]
List of Secondary Characters Appearing in this Book[]
List of Recurring Characters Appearing or Mentioned in this Book[]
- Dickie Berenski
- Harpo [sic]
List of Minor Characters Appearing in this Book[]
- Julian Chamain
- Ivan Draski (a.k.a Javis Drinkle and Frank J. Plutz)
- Carolee Grogan
- Pete Grogan
- Steve Grogan
- Will Grogan
- Marianna
- Schuman
- Inspector Jake Warren
List of Peripheral Characters Appearing or Mentioned in this Book[]
- Bob
- Dana Buckley (a.k.a. Catherine Delauter and Dolores Gregory)
- Mylia Draski
- Sara Hunning
- Jacko - Ian McNab’s uncle
- Reeanna Ott
- Alan Trendor
- Vickie Trendor
Other Covers[]
| UK edition cover | German 1st edition cover | German Book Club edition cover | 
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| UK edition cover | German 1st edition cover | German Book Club edition cover | Brilliance Audio unabridged edition cover |
YANNI[]
- Peabody and McNab’s Scotland Holiday:
- In Memory in Death, Eve gave Peabody and McNab a gift of transportation to Scotland for Christmas.[3] In Missing In Death, McNab mentioned his uncle Jacko, and Peabody said, “I met him last Thanksgiving when we went to Scotland.”[4] (In Festive in Death Peabody confirms that their visit was over Christmas.[5])
Footnotes[]
- ↑ Missing in Death, Chapter 6
- ↑ “On a day gently kissed by summer...”, Chapter 1; also takes place between Kindred in Death and Fantasy in Death
- ↑ Memory in Death, Chapter 10
- ↑ Missing in Death (978-0-515-14718-6), p. 65
- ↑ Festive in Death, Chapter 3