by J. D. Robb
“What do we do with this?” Peabody asked her.
Eve looked her dead in the eye, her own flat and cool. “We put it together in a very tidy package, and we take it to Whitney and to IAB. Other than that, nobody outside of this room hears a whisper of this until we’re otherwise directed.”
“Commander Oberman. He’s like a legend. Like a god.”
“I don’t care if he’s the second coming of Jesus. The daughter’s dirty. She’s a wrong cop, Peabody, and the blue line breaks for wrong cops. Let’s get started.”
“You haven’t eaten,” Roarke interrupted, smoothing a hand over Peabody’s hair.
“No, guess not.”
“She’ll do better with some food in her,” he said to Eve.
“You’re right.” She buried impatience as she’d buried the raging fury during Peabody’s report. “We’ll get some fuel, then we’ll lay it all out.”
“I got the shakes,” Peabody confessed. “After. They keep wanting to come back, but it’s better. I have to tag my mom, thank her.”
“For what?”
“I dropped my sweaty crap on the locker room floor, and I would’ve left it there if I hadn’t heard her voice in my head telling me to respect what belongs to me. If I’d left that ugly sports bra on the floor, they’d have seen it. They’d have found me. And I wouldn’t be here telling you Saint Oberman’s daughter’s a wrong cop.”
“Thank her in the morning,” Eve ordered. “Let’s get to work.”
Now Roarke draped his arm over Peabody’s shoulders when she rose. “How about a steak?”
“Really?”
He kissed the top of her head, made her flush. “Leave the menu to me. You’re a brave soul, Peabody.”
“My soul was scared shitless.”
He kissed her again. “You don’t want to argue with a man who’s about to fix you a steak.”
In her home office Eve set up a case board while Peabody and McNab ate. Roarke had been right about the food, the wine, the shoulder rub—all of it. He was usually on target about those things.
And it was better to give Peabody a little breathing room before opening the door to what would be an ugly and difficult process.
“She’s attractive,” Roarke commented, studying the ID shot of Oberman on the board.
“Yeah, and she has a rep for using it—and using her father’s rep. Just whispers—nothing said too loud. I ...”
Eve shook her head, then stepped out of the room.
“What?” Roarke asked when he followed her.
She kept her voice down. “If they’d found her, they’d have killed her. No way around it. She was right about that.”
“It must have been brutal, being trapped as she was.”
“We had this scuffle with these three assholes today, and one of them gives her a couple pretty good knocks. I told her she had heavy feet, needed to work on her technique, so what does she do? She goes down to that empty shithole of a gym. If it had tipped the other way, that’s where they’d have found her body. She takes a punch in the ear, and I can’t just say everybody takes a knock? I’ve got to tell her to work on it, to do better.”
“Because the next time she might take a knife in the ear. You’re not just her partner, Eve, you’re still training her. And you’ve done a damn brilliant job of it so far, in my opinion. She went down because she wants to improve, and yes, because she wants to meet your standards. It didn’t tip the other way,” he reminded her. “And if it had, though it makes me just as sick as you to think that, it would be on the heads of those bollocks excuse for cops. You know that.”
She sucked in a breath. “You’re still mad at me.”
“I am, and you’re still mad at me. But we both understand there are more important things just at the moment.”
They could count on each other for that, she thought. Count on each other to hold the line when it needed to be held. “So, truce.”
“Agreed. She’s precious to me, too.”
Because her eyes stung, Eve pressed her fingers to them. “Don’t pet me,” she said, anticipating him. “I need to hold it together.” Eve dropped her hands. “She’s counting on me to hold it together.”
“So you will.” He petted her anyway, just sleeking a hand down her hair. Then he gripped one of the short strands, gave it a hard tug.
“Hey. Truce.”
“See, you’re a little pissed again. You’ll work better.” He strolled back into the office.
She held it together, and in short order it took no effort. She simply fell into the rhythm of the work.
“We can’t look at their financials, even first-level, without sending up a flag. Much less go digging around for buried accounts and real estate.”
She caught Roarke’s glance, knew he was considering his illegal and unregistered equipment. No flags there. But she sent him a subtle shake of the head. She had to toe every inch of the line on this.
“If we go to IAB with this,” Peabody began, “with what we have, which when I look at it all laid out, isn’t really that much, it could bust open. It could give Renee—I can’t call her Oberman because it makes me think of her father. It could give her and the others time to rabbit, or cover, or ditch. They must have contingency plans, escape routes.”
“I can work that. I’m going to reach out to Webster.” Again she caught Roarke’s glance, the cock of his eyebrow. She supposed it was impossible for Webster’s name to come up in this particular room without both of them seeing Roarke beat the hell out of him.
“I’ll feed this to him, but with conditions,” she continued. “I can work that, especially if Whitney adds his weight. We want to keep this narrow for as long as we can.”
“Keener!” McNab punched a fist in the air, did a little spin in Eve’s chair that had his long, blond ponytail flying. Then he pointed the index fingers of both hands at her computer. “Found him. I did some crosses on some of her closed cases, mixed in others from here and there for cover, skimming wit lists and suspects like a standard search for—”
“Just give me Keener, McNab.”
“Keener, Rickie. Street name Juicy. I can’t dig to see if he’s listed as a weasel without the flag, but he’s got a long sheet. Possession, possession with intent to distribute, other petty shit, and he got busted for selling a primo case of variety packs to a couple of undercovers. One of them, listed as the arresting officer, is our girl Renee.”
“Put the data on-screen,” Eve ordered, and scanned it. “Look there, he gets probation, community service, mandatory counseling. That’s a deal happening there, that’s her turning him weasel as a get-out-of-jail card. With his priors, he should’ve done at least three solid. But he gets time served? Six years ago.”
“That’s how long she said she’d been running the business,” Peabody put in.
“So, this Keener could’ve been her springboard. Her way in.”
She paced in front of the screen. “He knows something. He has more, offers it. Hey, I can give you this and that, but you gotta get me out of this. Alternately, she’s already looking, already getting it off the ground and sees him as an asset. Either way, this is the turn.”
“He’s dead. She was really clear about that,” Peabody added.
“So, we find the body. If ‘her boy’ found him alive, we can find him dead.”
She paced a bit more. “Not in his flop. He was fixing to rabbit, with the money. He had another hole he thought was safe, secret. Take the locations of his busts, his flop, locations of his varied and bullshit employment. According to Peabody’s statement Renee said he hadn’t gotten far. Let’s map out his territory, run some probabilities on most likely locations for his hole.”
“We want to find the body,” Peabody began, “because you think the guy she set on Keener might’ve left some evidence?”
“It’s possible. Unlikely, but possible. We want to find the body, we want to catch this case because Keener’s our weasel now.”
“A con, Peabo
dy,” Roarke told her. “You have the case, you have the controls. And what they’re banking on being an OD becomes a homicide investigation.”
“If I can work it,” Eve agreed. “Either way, she’ll have to come out and ID him as her CI—that’s procedure. If she doesn’t, we can give her a nice slap for it. And we can be bitchy, just by-the-book sticklers and insist on details of their association, information, times, dates—which should all be in her files. Gosh, we’re trying to find out who killed this asshole. A DB’s a DB in my Homicide Division.”
“You want to piss her off.”
“I’m counting on it, and I’m going to enjoy it. Get me the probabilities, McNab, then we’re going on a weasel hunt.”
“You want the body before you go to Whitney and Webster.”
Eve nodded at Peabody. “Now you’re getting it. Keener’s tangible, and dead he’ll be corroborating your statement. With the connection of the arrest to Renee, we’ve got more. She’s a decorated officer. She’s a boss, and a respected, hell, revered, former commander’s daughter. She’s got eighteen years on the force without a blemish.”
“And if I just blow the whistle on her, IAB may end up investigating me.”
“You don’t worry about that,” Eve told her.
“I won’t. I’ve leveled off now, and now I really want to pay her back for every second I was in that freaking shower. I mean, over and above bringing a dirty cop to justice.”
“Naked in the shower,” Eve reminded her.
“With nothing to do but give them an angry towel snap if they slapped open the door.”
“We’ll pay them back,” Eve promised, and looked over to where Roarke and McNab worked together. Roarke in his tailored dress shirt and pants, McNab in pink, multi-pocketed knee shorts and a buttercupyellow tank that sported E-DICK in screaming red letters across his skinny chest.
Geeks were geeks, Eve thought, whatever the wardrobe.
“Your map,” Roarke announced, nodding to the wall screen. “And your most-likelies.”
“Not bad. His type tend to stick to a certain area, to do their business within a handful of blocks where they know the score, the routes, the dodge points.”
“If he was going to rabbit, wouldn’t he move outside his usual turf?”
She shook her head, glanced at McNab. “Look at the time line from the conversation Peabody overheard. The heat’s up, and that says this screwup was fresh. The kill recently ordered and executed. Garnet didn’t even know about it. Add to that, ten thousand on the line. This had to move fast. From Keener’s sheet, he’s not a bright light. Smart enough not to go home, but not, most likely, smart enough to relocate outside his comfort zone. He hadn’t rabbited yet, so he wasn’t finished getting his shit together. We’re going to find him within this area, just like his killer did.”
She studied the map a little longer. “Eliminate anything he’d have to pay for. No tenanted apartments.”
The map adjusted to Roarke’s command.
She knew the area well enough, with its sidewalk sleepers, low-rent street LCs, funky-junkies, ghosts, used-up chemi-heads. Even the gang-bangers had given it up as not worth the trouble.
“I like these five locations. Two-man teams. We’ll get you a vehicle. A nondescript one,” she added when she saw McNab’s face light up.
He shrugged. “I guess it has to be.”
“It does. Roarke and I will take these two, Peabody and McNab these two. If we zero, we’ll converge on location five. We get nothing, we’ll widen the map again. Do either of you have a clutch piece on you?”
At the negative, Eve rolled her eyes. “We’ll get you that, too. There are some people in this sector who just aren’t very nice.
“We’ll seal up. I don’t want to leave any trace we’ve been there. Keep any disturbances to the locations to a minimum, and don’t talk to anybody. Don’t ask questions. Go in, go through, get out.”
“If we find the body?” Peabody asked.
“Get out, signal me, and get gone. We’ll meet back here where I’ll be getting an annoying anonymous tip about a dead guy. Records on, boys and girls, the whole time, so keep the chatter down, too. Records will be turned over to command and IAB.”
She blew out her breath as she studied McNab. “You’re not going on a covert op in that getup. Roarke, have we got anything we can put on this geek?”
“Actually, you’re more his size.”
Eve closed her eyes. “Jesus. I guess I am.”
She found jeans and a black T-shirt, and after she’d tossed them at McNab, closed the bedroom door so both she and Roarke could change.
“I’m partially sorry,” she said.
“Oh?”
“I’m partially sorry because I did start to tag you about being so late, then got interrupted and forgot. But I almost always remember, so I think I could get a goddamn pass on it.”
“I wasn’t angry, and I’m not angry about you not calling—particularly. I don’t give you grief about that sort of thing, Eve.”
“No, you don’t, but I feel guilty about it because you don’t.”
“Ah, my fault again.”
“Oh, shut up.”
“There goes the truce.”
“You could be partially sorry.”
“But I’m not, not a bit, for enjoying the evening with Summerset and his very interesting friends—who I’d never met before either.”
“You’re better at that than I am. And I’m just saying if I’d known I wouldn’t have come home with this other plan, and then had this to deal with.”
“What other plan?”
“I just ...” She felt stupid about it now, and dragged on her weapon harness. “I just thought we’d have dinner, that you’d have waited for me because that’s what you usually do. And I was going to pick it out and fix it up.”
“Were you?” he murmured.
“We haven’t had much downtime in the last couple weeks, and I had this idea that we’d eat up on the roof terrace—the works, you know? Wine, candles, and just us. Then we could watch one of those old vids you like, except I’d put on sexwear and seduce you.”
“I see.”
“Then I come home and you’re already having wine and candles and dinner on the terrace—not the roof one, but still. And it’s not just us, and I’ve got asphalt crap on my pants, and former criminals in my house—I figured. A couple of people Summerset’s probably already told I suck at the marriage thing, and come home with dirty clothes or trailing blood half the time. And I didn’t want to have to squeeze in and end up being interrogated.”
“First, you don’t suck at the marriage thing, and Summerset never said anything of that kind. In fact, he mentioned to them at dinner, when it was clear you’d be late, that you were the first cop he’d had contact with who worked so tirelessly or cared so much about real justice.”
He crossed to her now, cupped her face. “Second, that was a lovely plan you had, and I’d have enjoyed it, very much. And now, I am partially sorry.”
She touched his wrist. “If we put those together, it would be one all-the-way sorry.”
“It would, and that’s a deal.”
She kissed him to seal it, then stood for a moment, snug in his arms. “It’s a good deal,” she decided. “Now let’s go find a dead junkie.”
4
EVE GOT BEHIND THE WHEEL SO ROARKE COULD do more research with his PPC.
“Let me ask you this,” he began. “How many dealings have you had with Lieutenant Oberman?”
“None, really. I know of her, but we haven’t had any cases cross so I’ve never worked with her. Illegals has its own unique setup. There’s a lot of undercover work, some of it deep, some of it rotating. You’ve got squads who focus entirely on the big game—import/export, organized crime. Others stick primarily to street deals, others manufacturing and distribution. Like that.”
“There has to be overlap.”
“Yeah, and each squad is set up sort of like—what do they
call it—a fiefdom?”
“I see, with its own culture and hierarchy.”
“Like that,” she agreed. “Uniforms and detectives reporting to a lieutenant heading that squad, with those lieutenants reporting to a smaller group of captains.”
“Which means a lot of politics,” Roarke surmised. “And when you have politics, you have corruption.”
“Possibly. Probably,” she corrected. “There are checks and balances, there’s a chain of command. Screening—regular screening not only for burnout but for use and addiction. A lot of the undercovers burn out, get made, or get a little too fond of the merchandise.”
“And would have fairly easy access to the merchandise,” Roarke concluded.
It rubbed her wrong, not the statement but that he seemed to expect and accept cops on the take. She knew it happened. But she didn’t, wouldn’t accept it.
“Cops have access to a lot of things. Stolen merchandise, confiscated funds, weapons. Cops who can’t resist temptation don’t belong on the force.”
“I’d argue there’s a gray area, but once you step into the gray, it’s a short trip to the black. Still, easy access,” he repeated. “A cop busts a street dealer, pockets half the stash. The dealer’s not going to argue about how much weight he was carrying.”
“That’s what the lieutenant’s for. To know her men, to supervise, assess. It’s her job—her duty—to stay on top of it. Instead she’s orchestrating it.”
“She’s betrayed her men, from your view, as well as her badge, the department.”
“In my view, she’s a treacherous bitch.” Eve shrugged it off, but it burned in her belly. “As for confiscated product, there’s an accounting division attached to Illegals that’s supposed to keep track of it, paraphernalia, payloads—as it comes in, as it’s used in trial, as it is subsequently destroyed. They have their own Property Room to handle it.”
“And a clever, ambitious woman like Renee could recruit someone from that accounting division to help her skim. Using that, her own squad, her father’s connections, to pluck the department’s pockets. Resell product listed as destroyed.”