by Nora Roberts
“I’m careful.”
He gave her a look filled with a mix of amusement and frustration. “You’re smart,” he corrected, “you’re skilled. But not always as careful as you might be. I married a cop.”
“I told you not to.”
Now he laughed, and kissed her again where her brow had furrowed. “And would I listen? I’m damn good at being married to a cop.”
“Best I ever saw.”
His eyebrows shot up. “Well now, that’s quite the compliment.”
“I don’t take it for granted. I know it seems maybe like I do, but I don’t. I don’t take for granted that when I walk in two hours-or maybe it was three-late like tonight, forget we had plans, you don’t get mad. Or all the other things. I don’t take it for granted.”
“That’s good to know.” Odd, he realized, that she would need reassurance here. Or not so odd, really. The death of another cop, and one a friend had loved, brought it home. “We made promises to each other, nearly two years ago now. I’d say we’ve done a damn fine job at keeping them so far.”
“I guess we have. Listen, if sometimes you can’t block it, you should say it. Even if we fight about it, you’ve got a right to say it.”
He traced his finger down the dent in her chin. “Go to work, Lieutenant. There’s no worries tonight.”
Sure there were, she thought when he went into his office. But it seemed like they were handling them okay.
She had told him not to marry her, she remembered. Thank God he hadn’t listened.
She set up her board, pinning up Coltraine, her squad, the names of any tenant in her building with a sheet, the names of the particulars in her most current cases. She added a photo of the shipping box, the weapons, the note, the badge. Lab reports, the established time line. She had a description of the ring the victim should have been wearing, and a close-up of it she’d extracted from a photo in Coltraine’s apartment.
Why had the killer returned the gun, but kept the ring?
She studied the board, angled it so she could study it from her desk. Armed with a fresh cup of coffee, she sat to run a series of probabilities.
The computer calculated an eighty-two-point-six percent that the victim and her killer had known each other or had some previous contact. A ninety-eight-point-eight percent that the victim was a specific target.
So far, she thought, she and the machine were in accord.
She decided to leave it there, and start on the case files.
Neither case contained any actual violence, she noted. The threat of it in the Chinatown case, but no execution of violence. Two males, wearing masks, rush into a market at closing, grabbing the female owner as she wheeled in one of the sidewalk carts, and holding a knife to her throat. Demand all cash and credits on the premises, and the security discs. Get both. Order both the owners-husband and wife-to lie on the floor. Apparently grab a few snack packs and book.
Less than three hundred netted-small change for armed robbery, she mused.
The vics had been shaken up, but unharmed. Though they’d turned over the discs, the husband had noticed a tattoo on the wrist of the knifeman-a small red dragon-and both had stated they believed the robbers had been young. Teens to early twenties.
The snack pack snitch told Eve the same.
They’d given the police a very decent-and unusually consistent-idea of height, weight, build, coloring, clothing. Two witnesses saw two young men matching the description running away from the direction of the market.
Penny-ante, Eve mused. A couple of stupid kids. Confirmed, as the investigating officers had tracked down the tattoo parlor, and were ready to hunt up and pick up one seventeen-year-old Denny Su who’d had the ink on his right wrist.
No idiot teenager, and his as-yet-unidentified dumb friend, had the smarts to access Coltraine’s building and get the drop on a cop.
The break-in-literally, as a window had been smashed to access-netted a bigger profit. But a guy who could finesse the solid security at Coltraine’s building had the skills to finesse the less solid on the electronics shop. Plus, the glass had been broken from the inside, leading the investigators to conclude-ta-da-inside job. They’d begun to lean on one of the employees. From the notes Eve read, she’d say they were leaning in the right direction.
In this case, the suspect was again young, fairly stupid, and had a short sheet of shoplifting charges. Guy liked to steal, simple as that, Eve mused. He didn’t score for her as a cop killer.
She took the time to run both through probability, and in each case the machine agreed with her, with both percentages under eighteen percent.
Eve sat back, studied the board. “Do I run your squad through my comp, Coltraine? It’s an ugly business, cops running cops. The comp’s going to favor them. Nothing in their data to hint at the dirty. Why does a clean cop, at least clean on record, kill another cop? The machine’s not going to find that logical.
“Neither do I. But I have to run it.”
“Eve.”
“What?” She glanced over, saw Roarke in the doorway that adjoined their home offices. “Sorry, talking to myself. You found something interesting in Atlanta.”
“I found something. A case she worked about three years ago. You haven’t gone through these files yet?”
“No. I just got them in this afternoon. What about the case she worked three years ago?”
“A robbery. An upscale antique shop. The manager was beaten, several thousand dollars’ worth of merchandise taken, nearly that much destroyed. They also forced him to open the safe and turn over all the cash, credits, and receipts-which carried the credit and debit card data. One of the other employees found him when he went in to work, notified the police and the MTs. Coltraine was assigned.”
“Okay. So?”
“During the investigation she interviewed the owner of the shop, and according to her case file, spoke with him on the matter several times. His name’s Ricker. Alex Ricker.”
6
“RICKER.” THE NAME RAMMED INTO EVE LIKE a bare-knuckled jab. Sucker punch. “Max Ricker’s son?” “Yes. I checked to be sure.”
She took one long breath to regain her balance. “So Alex Ricker has property and business in Atlanta. Wasn’t he in Germany or something?”
“He was raised there, and his father kept him insulated. When Ricker and I had… business together, Alex was kept back. I never met him. I’m not sure any of Ricker’s associates did-not then.”
Yes, she had her balance back now, and walked it through. “You worked with Ricker, back in the bad old days. Went out on your own, did a hell of a lot better. Years later, you help me take Ricker down, way down, so he’s spending the rest of his miserable life in a concrete cage off-planet. I wonder what his baby boy thinks of that.”
“I don’t know anything of their relationship, but I do know that Ricker’s connected to me-to my father, to yours. I know he went to a lot of trouble to take me down, and failed. And to end you, and failed. Now his son may very well be connected to your victim.”
Eve sat back, tapped her fingers on her thighs. Thinking, thinking. “Max Ricker had a lot of cops in his pocket. A lot of officials, a lot of politicians. We dug some of them out last year, but it’s unlikely we dug them all. Would Ricker have passed them to his son?”
“I can’t say for sure-yet. But who else?”
“Yeah. And his businesses, too-what we didn’t find and shut down. Certainly, his contacts, his power points, and there’d be finances. Coltraine meets the son of a notorious criminal, now doing life-well, several terms of life-she’d have run him. She’d run the owner of the business that got hit. It’s routine. Make sure it doesn’t come up an insurance fraud, at the very least. When she did, she’d have made the connection to his father. She’d ask him about it. Have to.”
She pushed up, walked to her board to study Coltraine’s ID shot. “She’d have to ask. Three years ago Ricker was still at large, still slithering through the loopholes, but any st
anding background check on the son would have coughed out the data on the father.”
“I don’t know if it has any bearing on your case, but…”
“Yeah, but.” She looked back at Roarke. “Did she close it? The case?”
“In a manner of speaking. She narrowed it down to three suspects. In each case when she secured a search warrant and went to serve it, she found the suspects gone and several items from the antique shop on the premises. Within two days, the bodies of the three men were found floating in the Chattahoochee River-chained together.”
“The what river? Did you make that up?”
“I suppose I could have, but no. I suspect some Native Americans did that a few centuries ago.”
“I think it’d be embarrassing to be dead in the Hoochie-Coochie River.”
“Chattahoochee.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Quite a bit, I’d think, to Atlantans.” He moved to her, laid a hand on her cheek. “And now that you’ve finished lightening the mood until you can get a handle on this…”
After a while, Eve thought, marriage turned walls into clear glass so both of you could see right through each other. “Okay. Okay, so maybe it’s like father, like son? Ricker’s a killer. He didn’t think twice about snapping necks or slitting them. The son gets ripped off, hunts down the ripper-offers-or follows Coltraine’s dots to same-and does them. Or has them done. She’d have to look there.”
“According to the file, Alex Ricker was attending a charity event, in Miami, with a few hundred witnesses at the time of death of the three suspects.”
“Didn’t want to get his hands dirty, ordered the hit when he was covered.”
“Possibly. If so, he proved as elusive as his father did. Oh, and I accessed the ME reports on the dead thieves.” He watched her start to speak-to object, no doubt-then swallow it. “They’d been beaten over the course of several hours, incurred numerous broken bones before their throats were slit. That’s the Ricker touch, in my opinion.”
“She had to know it.” Eve studied Coltraine again, tried to see into her head. “Everyone says she was thorough, detail-oriented. She wouldn’t have missed the link.”
“The files note a follow-up interview with Alex after the bodies were recovered, and the verification of his alibi. While the homicide case went cold, all of Ricker’s property was recovered.”
Eve rubbed the back of her neck. “Three years ago. She didn’t put in for transfer here until just under a year ago. As much as I’d like to burn another Ricker for pretty much anything, I can’t see the connection between her murder and a trio of payback homicides three years ago.”
“Maybe there isn’t. But Alex Ricker is in New York, and has been for the last week.”
“Is that so?” Eve stuck her hands in her pockets, rocked on her heels. “Now, see, that’s just too much coincidence. Where is he?”
“He has a pied-a-terre on Park Avenue.”
“Convenient. I’ll have to pay him a visit in the morning.”
“I’ll be going with you.” He held up a hand before she could speak. “Anything that involves Ricker, his son, his second cousin, his bloody pet poodle, I’m in it, too.”
“They don’t allow dogs on the Omega Penal Colony. Okay. I’m not going to argue about Ricker-either of them. We did enough of that a year ago.”
“A year ago,” Roarke pointed out. “A kind of anniversary. And here we have another dead cop-and you were littered with them last spring-as well as another Ricker. Oh, aye, far too many coincidences here.”
She’d already followed that path. “We need to do a deep background on Alex Ricker. When did he buy the Park Avenue property, what other businesses does he have, and how many of them are in New York? How often does his name pop up in conjunction with an investigation? And what has he been doing for the past year? Has he contacted his father? A lot of questions.”
“You won’t find the answers to all of them on these units. Not with the privacy laws and CompuGuard. Believe me, he’ll be protected under several layers.”
“Then we’ll use your unregistered.”
He angled his head. “That’s a quick leap for you, Lieutenant.”
“Maybe.” She stood as she was, hands in pockets, and stared into Coltraine’s face. “And maybe she found out more about Alex Ricker three years ago than she noted in her files.”
“You think he, like his father, had cops in his pocket? Including her?”
“I don’t know.” Inside her belly knots twisted. “God, I hope not, for Morris’s sake. But if she was dirty, I need to find out. If she was clean, and if Alex Ricker had something to do with her death, I need to find out.”
In Roarke’s secured office, the privacy-screened windows opened to the lights of the city. The slick U-shaped console held the sharpest of cutting-edge equipment-shielded as well-from the vigilent eye of CompuGuard.
Illegal, Eve thought, so whatever they found here couldn’t leave the room. But she’d know. For Morris, she needed to know.
Roarke, his hair pulled back in a short tail, his sleeves rolled up, stepped behind the console. He laid his hand on the palm plate. “Roarke. Power on.”
The console flashed on, a sea of jeweled lights and controls.
Roarke acknowledged. Power on.
“We’ll want coffee,” he said to Eve.
“I’ll get it.” She programmed a full pot from the office AutoChef, poured two tall mugs. When she turned, Roarke stood where he was, watched her. Waited.
“All right.” She crossed over, set his mug down, placed hers on the jut that held the auxiliary computer.
For Morris, yes, she thought. But not only.
“My father worked for Ricker. Your father worked for him, and we’ve established before that they met, and were working on the same job before the night in Dallas. Before I killed my father.”
“Before you, an eight-year-old girl, stopped him from raping you again.”
“Okay.” Truth could still dry the throat and chill the blood. “The fact is, he’s still dead. So’s your father. And your father pulled a double-cross, on Ricker, on a weapons deal. About twenty-four years ago.”
“In Atlanta.”
“Yeah. In Atlanta. Down the line, you worked for Ricker.”
Roarke’s tone turned very cool. “In a manner of speaking.”
“Were associated with him. Jump further down the line, Ricker shows up in New York, and he’s hell-bent on destroying you.”
“And you.”
“Three years ago, when Ricker was probably dreaming about eating your liver, Coltraine connects with Ricker’s son. In Atlanta. Between that point and this point, we brought Max Ricker down. One year ago. And a couple months after that Coltraine requests a transfer to New York. She gets cozy with the chief medical examiner. A man I have a close work relationship with, and who we both consider a friend. Alex Ricker comes to New York; she dies. I think when you’ve got that many intersections, you have to take a real hard look at the road.”
“And how will this be, for you, if this somehow tracks back to your father and mine?”
“I don’t know. I guess we’ll have to find out.” She took a breath. “I don’t know how it’ll be for either of us, but we need to find out.”
“We do, yes.”
“The killer sent her weapons, her badge back to me. Personally. Maybe he’s got a mole in Dispatch, and arranged for me to be assigned. But the fact is, it doesn’t take a brain trust to figure out that even if someone else had caught this case, I’d have been involved. Because of Morris. That package was always going to come to me.”
“Then we’re on the same page. And the note inside the package becomes more a threat than bravado.”
“Possibly. She wasn’t a street cop, Roarke. She was a puzzle solver, a detail chaser. But she wasn’t street, sure as hell wasn’t New York street. Nobody’s going to take me with my own weapon. Damn if I’ll have that in my jacket at the end of the day.”
/>
He nearly smiled. “So pride will keep you safe?”
“Among other things. If I’m a target, why take her down? Why put every cop in the city on alert, then go for me?” She faced Roarke over the wink of jeweled lights. “I’m better than she was. That’s not bragging, that’s just fact. So it’s smarter to try to take me out cold than to try it when I’m already looking for a cop killer. And when, within the first twenty-four hours, I’ll find Alex Ricker in her files.”
“Logical. And somewhat comforting.”
“In any case, that’s all speculation. We need data.”
“It’ll take some time, to get under the layers.”
“I’ll use the auxiliary and keep going through her case files.”
Roarke sat, and began to peel at the first layers.
Ricker, he thought. The name was like a virus in his life, springing out, spreading, then crawling back into hiding only to slither out again. And again.
He had reason to wonder if Ricker had been responsible for jamming the knife in Patrick Roarke’s throat in that alley in Dublin years ago. And that, Roarke admitted, was the single thing he’d have to be grateful to Ricker for.
Not true, he corrected, not entirely true.
He could be grateful for what he’d learned during his association with Ricker. He’d learned how far he would go, and where he wouldn’t go. He knew it had both amused and annoyed Max Ricker that he wouldn’t deal in the sex trade when it involved minors or the unwilling. That he wouldn’t kill on command, or for the sake of spilling blood.
He’d taken lives in his time, Roarke admitted. He’d spilled blood. But always for purpose. Never for profit. Never for sport.
He supposed, in some oddly twisted way, he’d learned more of his own lines, his own moralities from Max Ricker than he had from his own unlamented father.
What, he wondered, had Alex Ricker learned from his father?
German boarding schools, Roarke noted. Military type. Very strict, very costly. Private tutors on holidays, then private university. Studied in business, finance, languages, politics, and international law. Played football-soccer to the Yanks.