by J. D. Robb
She nodded, spotting Webster. “It’s okay. That’s my meet.”
“Take any table you want.”
“Thanks.” She walked toward Webster, then gestured toward a corner table, and kept walking.
It was always a little awkward, dealing with him, she admitted. Not because she’d bounced with him once, when they’d both been detectives working Homicide. But because he’d taken the bounce a lot more seriously than she had.
More awkward yet as, years after, he’d lost his mind apparently and put a move on her. One Roarke had walked in on even as she’d been deflecting it. The two of them had gone at each other like a couple of crazed wolves, wrecked her home office and caused each other considerable bodily damage before Roarke had knocked Webster unconscious.
They’d come to terms, she reminded herself. She and Roarke, Roarke and Webster, she and Webster, whatever.
Still. Awkward. And that was before you added the sticky layer of Internal Affairs.
Webster, a good-looking man with sharp eyes, scanned the room, then sat—like Eve—with his back to the wall. “Interesting choice of venue.”
“Works for me. I appreciate you meeting me.”
“Aren’t we polite?”
“Don’t start with me.”
He shrugged, leaned back. “Can we get coffee in this place?” “Sure. If you’ve got a death wish.”
He smiled at her. “Does Roarke know you’re meeting me in a sex joint?”
“Webster, I’d as soon nobody knows I’m meeting IAB anywhere, anytime.”
And leaning against the wall, his back went up. “We’ve all got a job to do, Dallas. If you didn’t need IAB, we wouldn’t be here.”
Since he had a point, she didn’t argue. “I need to know if IAB has any connection to or any interest in my investigation of Detective Amaryllis Coltraine’s murder.”
“Why would you ask?”
“Yes or no, Webster.”
“Have you uncovered any evidence or are you pursuing any line of investigation that indicates there is or should be IAB involvement?”
She leaned forward. “Fuck that. A cop’s dead. Try to care a little.”
He mirrored her move. “Fuck that. If I didn’t care I wouldn’t be IAB.”
“Give me a yes or no to my question, I’ll give you a yes or no to yours.”
He leaned back again, studying her. Calculating, she knew, how to handle it. “Yes.”
The knot in her belly twisted, but she nodded. “Yes. I need to know if she was dirty, Webster.”
“Can’t tell you. Can’t tell you,” he repeated, pointing a warning finger when her eyes fired, “because I don’t know.”
“Tell me what you do know. Quid pro quo,” she added. “I’ll reciprocate, with the stipulation we both keep this conversation off our records, unless both agree otherwise.”
“I can do that. You wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t already made the connection between Coltraine and Alex Ricker. Is he a suspect?”
“He is. I don’t have enough, or much of anything on him. But I’m looking. IAB’s been on her since Atlanta, then?”
“The bureau down there got a tip she was involved with Ricker.”
“A tip?” Eve prompted.
“Some photos of Coltraine and Ricker—hand-holding, lip-locking—landed on IAB’s desk.”
“Handy. Somebody wanted her roasted.”
“Probably. It doesn’t change the picture. IAB got the package about nine months before she requested transfer. They followed through on it, confirmed. While each maintained a separate residence, they essentially lived together in a third—a condo in Atlanta in a building owned by Max Ricker. Private entrance, private elevator, private garage. She could come and go with little risk of being seen. They also spent time together when she was off the roll. She traveled with him to Paris, London, Rome. He bought her jewelry, high-ticket items.”
“No high-ticket items in her place,” Eve put in. “No evidence she kept a lockbox anywhere.”
“She gave it all back when they split.”
“How do you know? You had her surveilled? You had the place wired?”
“I can’t confirm or deny. I’m telling you what I know.”
“If all this was going on, why didn’t IAB pull her in?”
“Contrary to popular belief, we don’t go after cops for the fun of it. Alex Ricker? No criminal, no evidence of criminal. No evidence Coltraine was on the take or passing police info to him. Hypothetically, if the place was wired, Alex Ricker and his old man are the types who have places swept regularly.”
“And who are smart enough not to discuss anything incriminating unless they’re sure it’s safe.”
“They got bits and pieces.”
“Did she meet Ricker?” Eve demanded “Max Ricker? Have any dealings with him?”
“Nothing came up. Then again, like I said, she and Ricker’s boy, Alex, traveled. So they could have. But those bits and pieces included the boy making it clear he didn’t want to discuss Daddy. So they didn’t. Upshot is, things got rocky in paradise, seriously rocky after Daddy went down.”
“When we took him down,” Eve murmured.
“Yeah. She started spending more time at her own place. They argued a few times when there were eyes on them. Then it shut down. Few weeks later, she put in for the transfer to New York.”
“That’s when you guys took over.”
“We kept an eye on her. Nothing close. Maybe if we had, she’d be alive. The fact is, we looked, couldn’t find, and put her on the outer rung. Nothing we picked up since she transferred indicates any contact with Ricker—Max or Alex.”
“Alex Ricker’s in New York. She met with him the day before she was murdered.”
“Fuck me.”
“You didn’t know.”
“I just said we’d bumped her down.” Frustration pumped out of him. “We don’t crucify cops, goddamn it. She’d screwed around with the son of a known bad guy, but nobody can pin anything on the son. It smelled, sure, but nobody found anything to pin on her either. She came here, by all appearances kept her nose clean. We weren’t dogging her. I wish we had been. I don’t like dirty cops, Dallas, but I sure as hell hate dead ones.”
“Okay, fine. Throttle back, Webster.”
“Fuck that, too. Are you looking at jealous former lover here? He does her or has her done because she walked away, and she’s heating sheets with Morris?”
Eve lifted her eyebrows.
“Christ, everyfuckingbody knows Morris had a thing going with her. I’m goddamn sorry for him.”
“Okay. Okay.” She did her own throttling back because she knew that as truth. “Yeah, it could play that way. The problem is, he has a really crappy alibi. If he’s a bad guy, he’s a really smart one, so why doesn’t he have a solid alibi?”
“Sometimes the crappy ones are more believable.”
“Yeah, I’ve gone there, too. He was still in love with her, at least part of the way. Still stuck on her.”
Webster twisted his lips into a pained smile. “I know how that goes.”
Eve eased back, cursed herself for walking straight into it. “Come on.”
“I’ve recovered,” he said easily. “But I do know how it goes. It pisses you off, and pushes at you. I never wanted to kill you though.”
“Whoever did her wanted it. Planned it. You can’t tell me either way, if she was dirty or not.”
“No. You can’t tell me either. You can’t give her the benefit of the doubt. Whatever you want to say about IAB, you know you have to look at her for being on the take, or at least under the influence of her feelings for the guy. You have to follow the line.”
“I don’t have to like it.”
Heat leapt back into his eyes. “You think I do?”
“Why do it otherwise?”
“Because we’re sworn to uphold the law, not use it. Protect and serve, not grab whatever you want along the way. Not do whatever you want. We’re supposed to stand f
or something.”
She couldn’t argue. “Did IAB look at me when I hooked up with Roarke?”
“Yeah, some. You knew it, in your gut. Your rep, your record held up. Plus,” he added with a quick grin, “nobody’s ever pinned anything on him either. The fact is, I know from personal experience, he could be the baddest of the badasses out there, and he’d never use you.”
He hesitated, then seemed to come to a decision. “You may never see captain. They may never pull the bars out of their tight asses for you.”
“I know. It doesn’t matter.”
“It should.”
It surprised her to hear the resentment—for her sake—in his voice. And left her without a clue what to say.
“Anyway.” Webster shrugged. “I’ll take a look at things, on my own time. So we don’t put a smear on her if she didn’t earn it. If you get any more on Ricker, either way it leans, I’d appreciate if you’d pass it on.”
“Okay. I can do that.”
“How much does Morris know?”
“I told him about Ricker before I tagged you. I’m not going around him on this.”
“So he knows you were going to run this up with IAB.”
“He put the dots together, yeah.”
“If you talk to him again, tell him I’ll be keeping a lid on it.”
“I will. He’ll appreciate it.”
“Yeah, unless I find something. Then he’ll want to eat my heart with cranberry sauce. I have to get back.” He got to his feet. “Be careful around Ricker. You put his father over. Odds are he’d be happy to eat your heart raw.”
Eve waited until Webster walked out, then went over to say her good-byes to Crack.
Eve supposed it would be weird to most, and just another day in the life of a cop, to go from a meeting in a sex club to a consultation in the pretty, cool-aired office of Dr. Charlotte Mira.
As the department’s top profiler and head shrink, Mira claimed a roomy space, decorated to her own liking. Which edged toward female and class.
Just like the doctor herself.
Mira sat, her legs crossed and shown to advantage in a pale pink suit. Her deep brown hair curled softly around her calm, lovely face as she sipped tea.
“I sent a card of condolence to Morris,” she told Eve. “It seems such a small thing to do for a friend at such a time. You’ve seen him, of course.”
“Yeah. He’s holding on. It’s wrecked him, you can see it, but he’s holding. You were able to read the files, the updates? Everything?”
“Yes. One of our own goes down, it’s a priority. She had an affair with Max Ricker’s son. A dangerous business. A professional risk. Yet I wouldn’t characterize her as a risk taker.”
“She was a cop.”
“Yes, which always involves risks. But according to her files, she never once in her career discharged her weapon. She solved puzzles. She was a thinker. An organized, detail-oriented thinker. She came from a good background, upper-middle-class, single-marriage family. She excelled in school. Her job evaluations were always solid and steady. No black marks, no shiny stars. This was a careful woman. Alex Ricker was the exception.”
“Love, lust, or gain?”
“If gain, or only gain, why risk the connection, the closeness? To continue in the relationship for more than a year, to go to the trouble to hide it from her colleagues, her family? Lust can start the fire, but it rarely keeps it burning for long. It may have been all three.”
“The attraction first—the lust. Hot guy, interesting guy, classy. Dangerous. The good girl gets a tingle from the bad boy.”
Mira smiled a little. “Are you projecting?”
“I didn’t get a tingle. I got hit with a brick. Yeah, I see some parallels, but the way she played it . . .”
“Wasn’t the way you did,” Mira finished, “or ever would. It’s possible the clandestine nature added some excitement. Everything I’ve studied about it indicates she followed the rules. Except here. That’s another form of excitement.”
“So she leads with lust, and there’s all those tingles—the excitement. Come away with me to Paris tonight. Hotdog. And yeah, she jumped through a lot of hoops to be with him,” Eve considered, “and to stay with him, so love—or what she thought was—had to play a part. She’s in love, and he says, maybe you could do me this little favor. Not a big thing. Stars in the eyes, you do the little favor. What does it hurt?”
“And the next favor’s bigger. You’re in deeper.” Mira nodded. “It’s a logical pattern.”
“Maybe he starts to ask too much. There’s more risk for a woman not wired for them, and it starts going south. It went south, according to my source, right around the time Ricker went down. She sees what happened, wonders if that’s going to happen to the son and to her.”
“It changes the pattern,” Mira agreed. “Alex is now, with his father’s defeat, in charge.”
“She can’t handle it, breaks it off. Puts distance between them. Clean slate, that’s what she told Morris. Fresh start. Alex Ricker loses a lover and a resource. Bad break for him.”
“His father is a violent, unstable man. A known criminal, a man of power and no conscience. His mother died when he was very young. Accident, suicide.”
“Or murder,” Eve added.
“Yes, or. While he was given a superior education, and raised with the advantages money can buy, he was placed in confined institutions, regimented schools. As his only acknowledged blood kin—as only son—Max Ricker would have expected a great deal. Demanded it. He’d be expected to excel, and expected—when his father was ready—to step up and take the helm. He, too, from what I’ve studied, is a careful man. While he may be in the business of risk, he’s certainly minimized it by covering himself with layers of protection. His public persona is much more polished than his father’s. He has, with careful, even meticulous PR, evaded the scandal of having a parent convicted of all the crimes Max Ricker was convicted of.”
“It stings him anyway.”
“Oh, it would have to. His only surviving parent, and the one who saw to his needs for most of his life, is locked away. Much of his wealth confiscated. And as you said, his father’s arrest, the repercussion of that, closely coincided with the breakup with Detective Coltraine.”
“He had a real bad week, I bet.”
“He’d have to be angry, feel betrayed, deserted. Again. His mother left him, now his father’s taken, and the woman he loves—or is intimately connected to—leaves.”
“A careful man could bide his time.”
“Yes, a careful man could. But—”
“Damn it. I knew it.”
“There’s no intimacy in the killing. No passion, no retribution. It’s cold, calculated, distant. She belonged to him, in a very real sense. Either just as a woman or as a woman and as a resource. If that sense of betrayal and that anger—even cold and controlled—led him to kill her, I’d expect to see some sign.”
Mira sipped her tea, shifted. “Could he resist hurting her, taking more time? Certainly a man with his profile would be much more apt to choose a safer place for the kill. Still, using her own weapon is personal, even intimate. It’s insulting.”
“He hired it out.”
“Much more likely, in my opinion. A careful man, used to protecting himself and his interests. A hired kill staged to look like a personal one. Sending the weapon back, to you, with a personal message? Again conflicting meanings. A careful man would have left, or ordered the weapon left on the scene. If not, then would have disposed of it. Sending it back, that’s a taunt.”
“It’s an I-dare-your-ass. The killer was proud of his work, and wanted to get that last lick in.”
“Yes. Tell me, was she in love with Morris? You’d know.”
“Yeah. I think she was.”
Mira sighed. “Only more painful for him. But if she was in love with Morris, I don’t believe she’d have betrayed him. It doesn’t fit her. If she’d ended the relationship with Alex Ricker, and found
someone else, she wouldn’t betray it.”
“Which gives Ricker another motive. If their personal relationship was dead, how about their business one? If they’d had one.”
“I’d say, if there was one, they were tied together. Why would she risk it?”
“Maybe he didn’t give her a choice. I want her to be clean.”
Mira reached out to touch Eve’s arm. “Yes, I know you do. So do I. It’s painful to see a friend in pain.”