by J. D. Robb
“Bullshit!”
“Listen. Man One on Dubois, assault with intent on the wife. He does twenty-five – no parole. Another ten concurrent on the wife. Again, if I were his lawyer, I’d take it. Saves a trial, eliminates the possibility of life in a cage. Twenty-five years is a good long time.”
“Catiana Dubois won’t get another twenty-five.”
“Nothing we do changes that. But consider how a man like Copley will deal with a quarter of a century in prison.”
He’d cry and wail and blubber like a little girl – but it wasn’t enough. “I’ll get him on Ziegler, too.”
“If you get him on Ziegler, deal’s out.” To illustrate, Reo flicked her fingers in the air. “That’s two murders and one attempted. Murder Two on both, but the addition of the knife in the heart? The jury will be appalled, I promise you. But you have to get him, and right now, you don’t have him.”
“The day’s young.”
“You can tag me until eight. After eight, I’m off the clock and I mean it, until December twenty-sixth. Tie him up before that, we’ll put a bow on it. Otherwise, have yourself a merry little Christmas. I mean that, too.” She rose, patted the bag Eve had given her. “I love this.”
When she sauntered out, Eve kicked her desk. “Man One, my ass!” She thought of Steven Dorchester and the key he’d made, put in a pretty little box. Fuck Man One.
She strode out. “Peabody! With me. Let’s do this,” she said as Peabody scrambled up from her desk.
“His lawyer’s not here.”
“Then she better hustle.”
Eve pushed open the door of Interview B. “Dallas, Lieutenant Eve, Peabody, Detective Delia, entering interview with Copley, John Jake.”
“I’m not talking to you without my lawyer.”
“Then don’t talk.” Eve tossed down her files, played the nine-one-one call, hit replay, hit it again.
On the third play he broke, just a little. “She was calling for me, calling for my help. Anybody who hears it will know that.”
“Really? I heard it, that’s not what I know. Peabody?”
“Didn’t sound like that to me. Just the opposite.”
“Of course, that’s just the two of us. We could take a poll,” Eve suggested to Peabody. “I’m betting people who hear it – like say a jury – hear what we hear. Just like they’ll hear what we heard when we talked to Natasha this morning.”
“You talked to her? What did she say?”
Eve shook her head. “He wants us to answer his questions, Peabody, but he won’t answer ours. Doesn’t strike me as what you’d call equitable.”
“I want to know what she said! Does she know I’m in here, in this place? Does she know what you’re trying to pull?”
He banged both fists on the table. Working himself up to another tantrum, Eve thought, and turned casually to Peabody.
“So, when does your shuttle leave?”
Peabody smiled. “We’re catching one at six, if we can clear things. But we’ll catch a later one if we have to. How about you and Roarke? Big dinner out? Quiet evening at home?”
“You tell me what she said!”
“Now, JJ, you want to watch that anxiety and blood pressure. My partner and I are just passing the time until your lawyer gets here.”
“Forget the lawyer. I want to know what Natasha said.”
“Are you waiving your right to have your legal representative present during interview?”
“Fine, yes. What did she say to you?”
“Let the record show Mr. Copley has voluntarily waived said right. What did she say?” Eve turned straight around to face him, smiled. “She said the son of a bitch tried to kill me. Lock him up and toss the key.”
“You’re lying. You’re a lying bitch.”
“Now, JJ, you’ve got to expect her to be a little upset when you bash her in the head, when she’s spending her Christmas in the hospital.”
“I never touched her. I never hit her. I was upstairs. I’ve already told you. I was upstairs. I had the game on. I fell asleep.”
“Fell asleep? That’s a new one. Are you going to keep doing these add-ons? Because I can tell you, the story’s not getting better.”
“Oh, I don’t know, Dallas.” Peabody bopped her shoulders. “You’ve got to give him a little credit for trying to add some texture to the overall bullshit.”
“I drifted off.” He set his jaw. “I played eighteen holes, shot a sixty-eight. That’s four under par.”
“Wow. Aren’t you special?” Peabody commented.
“Just shut your mouth, you ignorant twat.”
“Aw, Dallas, he called me a twat. How come you get to be a bitch, but I only get to be a twat.”
“It’s the rank,” Eve told her. “You’ll make bitch one day.”
“Thanks. That means a lot to me.”
“I’ll make you both sorry. I’ll make you both pay.”
“Blah, blah, blah.” Eve levered back, smirked at him. “Do you want to brag about your golf game, exchange insults, or add more texture to your bullshit story? It’s all the same to us.”
“Goddamn it, I was upstairs. I heard her scream. It took me a minute, maybe a couple minutes, because I thought maybe it was a dream. I was asleep, a little groggy. I got up, and I called for her, and I ran out. I ran downstairs.”
“Why downstairs?”
“Because that’s where the scream came from.”
“If you were asleep, how do you know where it came from?”
“I just knew.” He slapped both fists on the table. “I ran in, and I saw her on the floor, and I saw the other one – Tella’s girl.”
“Tella’s girl?”
“That’s right. And I heard something.” His eyes flickered away. “Like somebody running maybe. Maybe a door closing.”
“Seriously? Now there’s running footsteps and closing doors?”
“That’s some rich bullshit texture,” Peabody put in. “You’ve got to admire it.”
Eve snorted out a laugh for form. “Right. So, JJ, why didn’t you mention these mysterious running footsteps and closing doors to the responding officer? To me in previous interview? Or, to any fucking body before this moment?”
He swiped beads of sweat from his forehead, more from his upper lip. “I didn’t think about it at the time because I could only think about my wife. I had to help Tash.”
“How? Not by calling for help.”
“I didn’t have time! I was in shock, and then the police were at the door, and everything happened so fast. I was upstairs when somebody killed that woman and hurt Tash. I want to talk to my wife, goddamn it. She’s confused and scared, and she has to be worried about me.”
“Her worry? That you’ll try to kill her again. She’s done with you, JJ. She’s done, Felicity’s done. You’ve got nothing and no one.”
“You leave Felicity out of it.” To Eve’s shock, tears swam into his eyes. “You told her lies about me, didn’t you? She left me! You told her lies, and she left me. I love her!”
“Who? Your wife or Felicity.”
“I…” He pulled himself in. “Both. In different ways.”
“The different ways where you tell your wife you’ve broken it off, and you tell Felicity your wife doesn’t understand you?”
“You don’t know anything about it.”
“Christ, JJ, do you think we haven’t had your type in here before? How many times, Peabody?”
“Couldn’t count them.” Peabody cast her dark eyes to the ceiling, shook her head. “But they all think they’re originals.”
“They’re so damn simple. Here’s how it went. You bragged to Ziegler about the hot dancer you had on the side. He blackmailed you. You finally had enough, even though you’d been paying him off with money you extorted from your wife.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“We found the other accounts, JJ. Offshore, shell corporations. You’re an amateur. Ziegler kept a book. Your name’s in it. The money
you paid him is on record.”
Eve pushed up. “You went to his apartment to tell him you were done, to show him who was boss. He worked in a gym, for God’s sake. Who did he think he was? But he wouldn’t let you off the hook. You lost your temper – you’re good at it. You picked up the trophy and you struck him, struck him again.”
“No panic attack that time,” Peabody added. “Not when you’d finally solved the problem. It felt good. It felt like something you should have done a lot sooner. Without him in the way, you were free and clear.”
“So you got creative. You’re a creative guy. You dragged him onto the bed, got a knife out of his kitchen. You wrote a funny little message – you’re good at that, too – and you pinned it on his chest with the knife.”
“I didn’t do any of that.” His breathing shortened; sweat slicked his face. “That’s crazy. I was never there. I never went there. I want to talk to my lawyer. I demand to talk to my lawyer.”
“Peabody, get him some water. Take it down, JJ. Take it down before you end up in the Infirmary again. Believe me, I’ve got all the time in the world for this.”
“I don’t have anything more to say until I’ve talked to my lawyer.”
“No problem.”
She waited while Peabody brought in a cup of water.
His hand shook as he drank.
Eve stepped over to Peabody, spoke quietly. “Get a uniform to sit on him in case he has one of those fits again. Let’s find out what’s holding up the lawyer. We’ve got him on the ropes. We need to finish him off. I want to check something. Dallas, exiting Interview,” she said for the record.
Back in her office, she tried Felicity’s ’link. Her stomach clutched when an older woman answered.
“Yes?”
“This is Lieutenant Dallas, NYPSD. I need to speak with Felicity Prinze.”
“This is her mother. She’s not talking to you. You’re that friend of that Copley person.”
The muscles in Eve’s stomach loosened again at the use of present tense. “No, ma’am, I am not his friend. I have Copley in custody.”
“For what?”
“For murder.”
“Oh my God. Oh my God! My little girl.”
“Has she been harmed, ma’am?”
“No, no – not that way. But he hurt my little girl’s heart and soul. He killed his poor wife, didn’t he?”
Not for lack of trying, Eve thought. “Ma’am, I need to speak with your daughter. You’re welcome to stay with her while I do.”
“You can be sure I will. Chantal! Get your sister. Right now! She came home,” the woman said to Eve. “So I’m grateful for that. She came home because she found out he’d been lying to her, and using her. And I’ve been holding her ’link because he kept trying to reach her. Felicity, it’s that policewoman you told us about. She arrested that awful man.”
“Arrested! Mom, let me have the ’link. Hello, hello. I forgot your name.”
“It’s Dallas. Lieutenant Dallas. Felicity, did you see or speak to JJ Copley after we spoke?”
“I wouldn’t. I got thinking when you left. I’m not as stupid as people think.”
“Nobody thinks you’re stupid,” her mother said.
“He did. He thought I was stupid, and I was. But I started thinking, and I tagged up Sadie, and we talked.”
“That’s good.”
“And after I talked with Sadie, I did what he told me not to. I called his house. I got the housekeeper thing, and she said how she’d take a message because he wasn’t able to come to the ’link. So I said, Oh, he’s out of town, and the housekeeper thing said, No, he was in residence – that’s how she said it – but unable to come to the ’link, and she’d take the message. I just said never mind because I got upset. He lied to me. Did you know he lied to me?”
“Yes, I’m sorry, Felicity, I knew he lied to you.”
“It’s why you said I should talk to Sadie, and she said how I needed to find out for sure. So I did. I even went over there, to his house, and I watched, and I saw him. I saw him and his wife come out together and get in a car, and he wasn’t on a trip. They were laughing. She wasn’t being mean to him. He – he kissed her before they got in the car, and I knew it was all a lie. I came home. Am I in trouble?”
“Why would you be in trouble?”
“I took some of the clothes he bought me, and I used the credit card he got me to pay for the trip home. I didn’t have enough since I stopped working. I’ll pay it back.”
“Did he give you the clothes?”
“Yeah, but —”
“Did he give you the card to use?”
“He did.”
“Then you’re not in trouble.”
“I left him a memo cube. I said how I was leaving, and I wouldn’t have anything to do with somebody who lied and cheated like that, and made me a liar and a cheater, too. I’m not coming back, I don’t think. I think I don’t belong in New York. Did he do something really bad? Worse than lying and cheating?”
“It looks that way.”
“He was so nice to me, so I loved him. But it wasn’t real.”
“I may need to talk to you again, but I’m glad you went home. I’m glad you’re with your family.”
“Me, too. Um, Merry Christmas, Dallas.”
“Same to you.”
Eve clicked off, sat back, sorted through.
“Lawyer’s here,” Peabody said from the doorway.
“We’ll give them some time, then start again.”
22
Eve gave them an hour, taking the time to fine-tune her approach, then walked through the bullpen to get Peabody.
She saw Jenkinson had taken her at her word.
A banner hung over the break-room door, facing out so any who came in would see the sentiment:
NO MATTER YOUR RACE, CREED, SEXUAL ORIENTATION, OR POLITICAL AFFILIATION, WE PROTECT AND SERVE, BECAUSE YOU COULD GET DEAD.
Obviously, there’d been some discussion, some teamwork on the wording, but Jenkinson’s original sentiment remained. Her first reaction wasn’t the amusement she’d expected, but a tug of pride. Because it was the righteous truth.
She took a quick scan of the men and women who served under her. Trueheart in his pristine uniform earnestly working on his comp. Baxter, kicked back, designer shoes propped on his desk, talking on his desk ’link. Jenkinson scowling at his screen as he chowed down on some questionable sandwich from Vending.
The room smelled of truly terrible coffee, someone’s greasy lunch, the fake pine someone had sprayed on the silly tree. It smelled like cops at Christmas, she thought.
“Peabody, let’s lock this up. The rest of you? That —” She pointed toward the banner. “That stays up. Anybody from Maintenance or Standards or Legal tries to take it down, kick them to me.”
Peabody scurried after Eve. “We’re really leaving it up?”
“How did we start this investigation? Giving our time and effort to get justice for a worthless asshole. The sign stays. It speaks the truth.”
She walked into Interview, read the necessary data into the record, then sat across from Copley and his lawyer.
“So, here we are again.”
And let it hang.
McAllister broke the silence.
“My client is a victim of Trey Ziegler, a blackmailer, an extortionist, a man who – through evidence you yourself discovered – used illegal date-rape substances on a number of women.”
“I’ll give you Ziegler was a lousy human being. It’s still illegal to murder a human being, lousy or otherwise.”
“My client didn’t murder anyone, and at the established time of death of Trey Ziegler was in his own home.”
“So he says, but he’s got no one to back that up – including the wife he recently sent to the hospital.”
“I never touched Natasha.”
“She says different.”
“I don’t believe that,” Copley continued, even as his lawyer tried to silence him
. “You’re lying.”
“Do you want me to play the nine-one-one call again?”