by J. D. Robb
“Can you tell me how far you’re into this?”
“I’m hoping to access some data tonight, tomorrow latest that will put some serious weight on it—so you could wait another twenty-four before approaching Asserton.”
“Yeah, I’d rather wait. This is a lot to lift.” Misery on her face, Lilah pressed a hand to her belly. “He’s got the new baby. It could hold, maybe, until you get that serious weight.”
“Use your best judgment,” Eve told her. “When I’m sure we’ve got that weight, I’ll be notifying IAB.”
“Ah, shit.”
“They’re going to want to talk to you.”
Lilah closed her eyes, nodded. “I’ve wanted to be a cop since I was a kid. My brother . . .” She opened her eyes again. “I guess you’ve read my file, so you know.”
“Yeah.”
“I wanted this, and I worked for this. I wanted to do something—to maybe do something so somebody’s mother didn’t get her heart broken, somebody’s sister wouldn’t ask herself, again and again, if she could’ve done more, if she could’ve stopped it, saved him.”
Lilah’s eyes took on a fierceness that reminded Eve of Mrs. Ochi.
“Every time I pick up my badge, that’s why. Even if I don’t think about it, it’s why.”
“The why’s a big part of making us the kind of cops we end up being.”
“Maybe.” Lilah blew out a breath. “This isn’t what I signed on for, Lieutenant. Sitting on my ass in a dirty squad isn’t what I signed up for.”
“She’s exploiting somebody’s mother, somebody’s sister, somebody’s brother every time she takes—the junk, the money—every time she makes a deal. I can promise you, Detective, she thinks about what she’s going to cash in every fucking time she picks up her badge.”
“If I can help you take her down, and the rest of them with her, I will.”
“I’m asking you to be my eyes and ears inside. Watch, listen.” Eve took out a card. “If you need or want to contact me, use a disposable or a public ’link. No point taking chances. My personal number’s on there.”
“Lieutenant?” Lilah said as Eve opened the door. “I knew—some of it anyway. I knew in my gut, but I didn’t do anything.”
“Now you are,” Eve said simply, and closed the door.
Pleased with the progress, Eve took a zigzagging route home, watching for shadows. No one followed her, but as she approached the gate, she realized someone was waiting for her.
The car flashed across the road, directly in her path, and angled broadside to block the gates as she hit the brakes.
Fury came first, but she engaged her recorder as she watched Garnet slam out of the driver’s side.
No one with him, she noted, using her cams to be sure no other vehicles made any move to corner her. She’d be damned if she’d be trapped at the gates to her own home. Her own normal.
Garnet wanted another confrontation? she thought. It might prove interesting.
She slammed out of her own vehicle.
“You don’t come to my house, Garnet. Do yourself a favor. Move your vehicle and keep going.”
“Who the fuck do you think you are? You think you can come into my squad and push me around? You think you can set IAB on me?”
So Webster let him have a sniff, Eve thought. Fuel to the fire she’d built.
“I think I’m your superior.” She said it coolly, braced to defend against what she saw wasn’t just a ride on temper, but a little chemical help to amp the speed.
“You’re nothing. Anybody can marry money and use it for the climb. You’re just another whore with a badge.”
“I still outrank you, Garnet. And you’re about to double that thirty-day rip.”
“Nobody here but you and me, bitch.” He gave her a taunting little shove, both hands to her shoulders. “You’re going to find out rank doesn’t mean dick.”
“Touch me again, Garnet.” She knew she was baiting him now. She wanted to. “Put hands on me again, and you lose your badge for good. You’ve been using. You’ve confronted, threatened, and assaulted a superior officer—again. Get in your vehicle and drive away, or I take you all the way down.”
“Fuck you.” He backhanded her; she let him. She went with the blow, let it propel her around as he moved in, fists raised.
She slammed hers into his face. “No, please. Fuck you.”
The unexpected punch knocked him back a step, had blood trickling from the side of his mouth.
“Now, back off,” she warned, but he charged.
His fist glanced off her shoulder, but had enough behind it to sing down her arm. Still she knew in that moment she could take him one-on-one. He was bigger, had more of a reach, but he was consumed by his fury, and sloppy with it.
She blocked, hit him again with a hard, short-armed punch to the face. “Back the fuck off!”
From behind her she heard the roar of an engine and knew Roarke was barreling down the drive. Time to end this, she thought, before somebody got seriously hurt.
Even as she thought it, she saw the move. On instinct she kicked out, kicked hard so her boot connected with Garnet’s forearm. The weapon he’d drawn flew out of his hand, clattered against the iron gates.
“You’ve lost your mind.” There was a tinge of genuine wonder in her voice. “You’ve completely lost your fucking mind.”
As if to prove it, he started toward her. Then the gates swung open. Like her, he could hear the slam of a door, the rush of footsteps.
“I’ve got this,” Eve said to Roarke as he bent to pick up Garnet’s weapon. “I’ve got this.”
His eyes burned as cold as his voice. “Then you’d best get rid of it before I do.”
Garnet, mouth bloody, left eye already swelling, looked from one to the other. “This isn’t over.” He stormed back to his car, wrenched the door open. “I’ll bury you, bitch!” he shouted before he jumped in, sped away.
“You’re letting him go?”
“For tonight.” Eve rolled her shoulder where Garnet’s fist had hit. “I want to see what he does. He’s sure as hell off his leash. I’ll report this—and it’s on record, my wire, your surveillance. Things go right, they can pick him up tomorrow, charge him with assault, assault with a deadly. It’d be enough, I think, for him to bargain, for him to flip on Renee for a deal.”
“You could take him in now, same results.” Roarke handed her the weapon. “You don’t want a deal.”
“You’re damn right I don’t. I want all of them, all the way—and maybe I’ll have enough for that by tomorrow.” She flexed her fingers, shrugged at the scraped knuckles. “But punching him in the face a couple times didn’t suck.”
Roarke tipped her face up, dabbed gently at her lip with a fingertip. “Your lip’s bleeding.”
She disengaged her recorder. “I let him get one in. The fucker can have the rep of all reps, but that recording, showing him hitting me, drawing first blood, moving in to draw more? Rat in a trap, and no way out of it.”
“I wish you wouldn’t so often use your face as an investigative tool. I’m very fond of it.”
She grinned, then winced as it smarted. “You ought to be used to it. Anyway, thanks for riding to the rescue. You need a white hat. Good guys wear white, right?”
“I look better in black.”
“Let’s go on in. I have to report a rogue cop—and what I’m going to bet is his unregistered weapon.”
“It’s turning into quite a day,” Roarke commented.
It wasn’t over for anyone.
The last thing Renee Oberman needed after suffering through an endless meal that included a lecture from her father was to find Bill Garnet pacing outside her apartment.
One look at his face told her he’d looked for trouble and found it, and he’d brought it to her door.
“Go home, Bill, and put an ice pack on your face.”
He grabbed her arm as she shot her key card in the slot. She’d expected it, but it didn’t make her yank aw
ay any less testy.
“I’m not in the mood for this.”
“I don’t give a shit what you’re in the mood for.” He shoved the door open, pushed her inside.
She whirled around, outraged, shocked. “Don’t you ever put your hands on me again.”
“I’ll put more than my hands on you. I’m done, Renee, done doing this your way. Your way got me suspended.”
“You got yourself suspended. You’re out of control, and the way you’re behaving right now only proves it. I told you I’d deal with the rip.”
“Then fucking deal with it.” Under the bruising his face burned, red and livid.
Not just off the leash, Renee realized. He’d snapped it. She tried for a combination of understanding and weariness. “I’m doing everything I can. For Christ’s sake, I went to the bitch personally to plead your case. And I had to humble myself tonight and ask my father to intervene.”
“And will he?”
“He’ll talk to Whitney tomorrow.” But wouldn’t, she knew, interfere with command’s decision. Saint Oberman had made that crystal.
She turned away, crossing over to her kitchen. She pulled a bottle of whiskey from a cupboard, two short glasses from another—and poured two fingers in each.
Her father wouldn’t back her up, and she wondered why she continued to let herself think he would. Not perfect Commander Oberman, oh no. Not by-the-fucking-book Oberman.
But she put a cool look on her face as she turned with the glasses. No point in letting Garnet know the score while he was on a rampage.
“Have a drink and calm the hell down.”
“I’m not swallowing a suspension, and I’m not getting cut out of the Giraldi deal. I’ll fuck you up, Renee.”
“Understood. So ... who punched you?”
He tossed back whiskey. “Fucking bitch.”
She lowered her glass, had to set it down because the hand holding it shook with rage. “Are you telling me you got into it with Dallas? Are you telling me, goddamn it, Garnet, that you hunted her up and got physical? Again?”
“She earned it. IAB sniffing around me—I got word on it. That whore set them on me, and she’ll get more than what I gave her tonight before I’m done with her.”
IAB—it was a slap in her face, and a singular threat to her business.
Goddamn Garnet. Goddamn Dallas.
“In the fucking name of God! I’m surrounded by idiots. I put Freeman and Manford on a standard tail, and she goes out, and they lose her in five damn minutes. Then you go after her? How the hell did you ...” Fury wanted to choke her. “Freeman told you. You got Freeman to tell you she went out. What the hell did you do, Bill? Don’t tell me, fucking Christ, you went to her house?”
“The house everybody knows she whored herself into.” His knuckles went white on the glass as he gulped down the rest of the whiskey. “So what? Her word against mine, and Freeman will back me. He’ll swear I was with him tonight, and nowhere near that cunt.”
It was falling apart around her, she thought. Men. Goddamn men. She’d be damned if she’d let any of them screw her out of what was hers, what she’d worked for. What she’d built.
What she owned.
She turned away again, struggled for control. And picking up her glass again, her brain went ice cold.
“All right. We’ll deal with it. We’ll deal with her. She’s gotten in the way once too often.”
“About fucking time.”
“I need to set it up. Go hook up with Freeman, make sure you’re seen. Then go home, wait. I might be able to work something tonight to get her off our backs. All the way.”
“I want to do it. I want to do her.”
“Fine, but it’s going to take me awhile to work it. A couple hours, maybe three. Go hook up with Freeman, have a couple of drinks, make it public. Then go home, Bill, and wait.”
“If we don’t clean this up tonight, I’m taking care of it myself. My way.”
“It won’t be necessary.” She took his glass. “Get out.”
“You’re going to give me one too many orders, Renee, and regret it.”
But he got out.
She took the glass into the kitchen, deliberately and viciously smashed it in the sink. “Fucking asshole!”
Everything that had gone wrong in the last few days had started with him. Keener slipping his collar, with the 10K? Direct line to Garnet’s screwup. If not for that she wouldn’t have Dallas on her back, in her face, in her squad. Wouldn’t have had to swallow the commander’s refusal to push the bitch out. Wouldn’t have had to humiliate herself to her stiff-necked, unbending father.
He’d become a liability. Calmer, she poured herself another short whiskey. Liabilities needed to be corrected, and if correction proved impossible, eliminated.
Thinking, she circled the living area of the apartment she’d furnished with care, with some style, and within a strict budget.
She wasn’t a fool like so many who worked for her.
Her home in Sardinia, now, that was a different matter. There she could indulge herself in the lush. She could buy art, jewelry, clothes—everything and anything she wanted. And keep the highest of high-end droids on staff to maintain the house and grounds immaculately.
Nobody was taking that from her, much less an ex-lover who’d lost his edge, and all his appeal.
Time to fix it, once and for all.
She opened her purse, took out her disposable mini-’link, and contacted Bix on his.
“Are you alone?” she asked him.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Good. Bix, I’m afraid I have a serious problem, and you’re the only one who can handle it as it needs to be handled.”
He said nothing for a moment, just looked into her eyes. “What do you need me to do, Lieutenant?”
15
WHEN EVE FINISHED HER ORAL REPORT WITH Whitney on the incident with Garnet, she settled down to write it up, with the attached record.
“Perhaps when you’ve finished that you’d be interested in hearing what I accomplished while you were out getting in fistfights.”
“He was waiting for me when ...” She pushed up, jabbed a finger at Roarke. “You got her.”
“Not quite, but I’m closing in there. I’ll want a bit more time to tie that knot. But I have Garnet and can serve him to you—or IAB, I suppose—on a platter.”
She sat down, grinned—and made her lip throb again. “I love you.”
“Excellent news. You can prove it with lots of sex.”
“We had sex a few hours ago.”
“No, we made love a few hours ago—angels surely wept. I want sex for this job, as it’s given me a buggering headache trying to straddle your far-famed line. I want mad sex, with costumes—maybe props—and an intriguing story line.”
“Milking it, pal.”
“Until it runs dead dry.” He tossed her a disc. “He owns property in the Canary Islands under the name Garnet Jacoby—Jacoby being his maternal grandmother’s maiden name. Amateur.”
“What kind of property?”
“A house to start, with two acres. It’s appraised at five and a half million, and some change. Jacoby paid cash. His ID has him as an entrepreneur, with Brit citizenship. He also owns two vehicles kept there, and a boat. A yacht, you could say. Jacoby is a few years younger than Garnet, has green eyes rather than brown, and lost his first and only wife in a tragic climbing accident.”
“That’s very sad.”
“He has a healthy account in that name, and another, smaller—I’d say backup money—in another under Jacoby Lucerne—the street where he lived as a child. Lucerne is Australian. Between the three—Garnet, Jacoby, Lucerne—they’re worth in the neighborhood of sixty million. Not bad on a cop’s pay.”
“And he called me a whore,” she murmured.
Roarke eased onto her desk. “I’d be very sorry if that hurt you.”
“It doesn’t hurt me. It’s a pisser of biblical proportions to be called a whore
by that motherfucker.”
“All right then.”
“Renee?”
“A bit more time there. She’s smarter, and a great deal more clever than Garnet. I think I have her, but I want to finish verifying and gathering it up. You’re not going to ask how I came by the data on that disc?”
“No. You told me you straddled the line, so you straddled it. Sorry about the headache.”
“That’s what blockers are for. I have Bix on the disc as well. That took some doing, and I’m really going to want costumes. He’s not smarter than Garnet, necessarily, but his ass was surely more covered.”
“That’s interesting.”
“It is. He doesn’t really spend the money, but banks it. Several accounts, various names, nationalities. He has a little place in Montana. A cabin, really, worth a fraction of his partner’s home away from home. And an all-terrain. Collects weapons under several of his aliases, so none of them cause much of a ripple. Added together, it’s quite the arsenal. Still, nothing flashy for Bix.”
“It’s not about the money for him. It’s about the chain of command.”
“I’ve started on the others, made considerably more headway tonight. But I thought you’d be most interested in those three.”
“You’d be right. Anything on Brinker?”
“Brinker.” Roarke’s eyes narrowed in thought. “Ah, yes. He’s the little chateau in Baden-Baden—going back to his roots, I’d say—the manor house in Surrey, and the three mistresses.”
“Three? No wonder he’s asleep at his desk.” So, Lilah’s instincts were off there. “Asserton or Sloan?”
“No, nothing as yet—and as I haven’t had a single hit on either, there’s likely not to be.”
“Agree. Shift them over, push the rest. We serve Garnet up to IAB tomorrow, garnish him with the charges stemming from tonight’s temper tantrum with me. He’s cooked. What you’ve got? It’s the sauce.”
“The clever cooking analogy doesn’t distract me from the fact you don’t want to serve him up alone. You want Renee sharing the platter.”