The In Death Collection, Books 26-29

by J. D. Robb

  He sighed, nodded. “Yeah, I expect he did.”

  “Vinnie wouldn’t report it to the police.”

  “If he’s mine, he’s entitled to something. And I could be finished there. It’s all he’s entitled to. I tried to contact him through the college, but they said he wasn’t registered. They had no record of him. I argued, because they damn well had two weeks before. But I didn’t get anywhere.”

  How much were they entitled to? Eve wondered. “We believe the man you know as Darrin Pauley is and has been in New York. We believe he has committed various cyber crimes and engaged in forms of identity theft.”

  Vinnie lowered his head to his hands. “Like Vance. Just like Vance. What do I tell my parents? Do I tell them?”

  “Mr. Pauley, there’s more. There’s harder, and within the next forty-eight hours it’s going to be in the media.” He lifted his face to meet her eyes, and his were full of fear. “The man you know as Darrin Pauley is the primary suspect in the rape-murder of a sixteen-year-old girl. The daughter of a decorated police officer.”

  “No. No. No. Mimi.”

  She put her arms around him, and though her face registered shock and horror, it didn’t show disbelief. Her eyes met Eve’s as she held her husband, and she nodded. “I was afraid of him. When he looked at me, I was afraid. That girl, we heard about it. We heard about it this morning on the bedroom screen when we were getting dressed. They said your name. Lieutenant Dallas. I’d forgotten.”

  “I need anything you can remember, any detail you can give me on Darrin, your brother, Inga Sorenson.”

  “I think they may have hit my parents up for money a few times.” Vinnie rubbed his eyes again. “We don’t talk about it, or them, but it’s hard to say no to your own.”

  “Let’s find out.”

  “Let me do that. Let me talk to them, explain . . . somehow. I’ll just use the other room. Is that all right?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “What do we do now?” Mimi asked. “What should we do? If he comes here—”

  “I don’t believe he will. You’ve got nothing he wants. But I’ll talk to your local police. If he contacts you, you should stay calm, behave naturally. And contact your local police, and me immediately.”

  “We’re going on vacation tomorrow.”

  “And you should,” Eve told her. “Go exactly as you planned. Get out of this.”

  “Enjoy your daughter,” Roarke added. “You have a good family. This isn’t part of it.”

  On the drive back to transpo, Eve stared up at the sky. “Just more victims.”

  “She’s a sensitive. At least she has a whiff of it,” he added when Eve turned her head to study him. “Just a sense I got from her, and one I think could explain why she saw what’s inside that boy. Maybe he wasn’t as adept at hiding it, but I think she saw inside, and it frightened her.”

  “She was right to be.” Settling down, she started a standard run on Vance Pauley. “And she was right when she said Vance was a bad man. Lots of trouble here. The juvie’s unsealed, so somebody beat me to that along the way. He had trouble starting at nine. Truancy, theft, destruction of private property, cyber bullying, hacking, assault, battery.”

  “At bloody nine?”

  “I’m moving through. Twelve on the first assault. It was the ID fraud that had him in during the Inga period. Then he drops off, just like that. He’s got a mile-long sheet from childhood to the age of twenty-one, then nothing.”

  “Got smarter.”

  “Or Inga was smarter, and ran the games, taught him. And I’ve got nothing on her, nothing on that name that corresponds to the age, the description Pauley gave me, the location she lived when she was with him. She’s listed on Darrin’s records as his mother, DOD, May sixteen, 2041. He’d have been four. But there is no death record corresponding.”

  “She’ll be in MacMasters’s files. Not under that name, necessarily, but she’s the motive. The reason for the plan he had even seven years ago.”

  “Yeah. And I’ll find her.”

  She pulled out her ’link when it signaled. “Dallas.”

  “Are you seriously in Alabama?” Baxter demanded.

  “I’m on my way to transpo, and will be heading back.”

  “Could you pick up some barbecue? There’s nothing like Southern barbecue.”

  “Baxter, it’s your ass getting barbecued if you’re tagging me for nothing.”

  “Can I have barbecue if I’ve got something? Jesus, Dallas, you’re going to scare my appetite away with that face. Okay, we got a hit. Girl working the bar at a club that caters to barely legal college types. She made the sketch. She says she had some classes with this guy. He really did go to Columbia. Better yet, she’s a grad student, working her way through her master’s, and says she saw him—you’re going to love it—at a party on New Year’s freaking Eve.”

  “At Powders’s.”

  “At Powders’s. Tells us she was there solo, and hey, why not, so she put a little hit on him. He wasn’t into it. Believe me, a man would be crazy not to be. Right, Trueheart?”

  “She’s very pretty.”

  “Hot. Steaming, finger-burning hot.” He sighed the sigh of a patient tutor. “My work is never done with this boy.”

  “Write it up.”

  “That’s where the boy’s work is never done. So we hied ourselves—”

  “What yourselves?”

  “Hied ourselves over to Powders’s, and got confirmation. He, his roommate, and his unfortunately underage twist all recognized him. Just somebody they’d see around now and then. But the girl noticed him party night. She said she always notices frosty guys—and gave our own Trueheart a little flutter.”

  “Sir, she did not—”

  “You need to be more observant, my young apprentice. So we’ve got wits put him in Powders’s on the night the ID was lifted. It’s good.”

  “It’s good.”

  “Dallas, it’s too damn late to go knocking on doors at MacMasters’s.”

  “It’s only . . . shit.” An hour gained, an hour lost. She just hated it. “You’ll hit it after the briefing tomorrow.”

  “We’ve got a couple more maybes here and there. Shilly’s the solid.”

  “Shilly.”

  “I know, she even has a steaming, finger-burning name. About that barbecue.”

  She cut him off.

  “The PA’s going to be pleased with that when we take him down,” she said to Roarke. “It’s nice case-building. If you manage to clean up that hard drive, get me that picture of him going in the door—”

  “And we will.”

  “We’ll put him away. But we have to find him first. Got his face,” she mumbled. “Got a name. Not the one he’s using now, no, not the one he used with Deena. That was David. But a name. Got his connection, got his kinship.”

  She noted they were about to enter the transpo station. “I can start the search for Inga—whatever name she was using—on the way home.”

  “I could find her faster, I’d wager. If you’d like to pilot.”

  “Ha-ha.”

  “You’d enjoy flying more if you’d learn the controls.”

  “I’d rather pretend I’m on the ground.”

  Roarke sent her a quick smile. “And how many vehicles have you wrecked, had blown up, or destroyed in the last, oh, two years?”

  “Think about that, then imagine it happening when I’m at the wheel at thirty thousand feet.”

  “Good point. I’ll do the flying.”

  “Do that, ace.”

  He parked. “They had something, the Pauleys. A solid base, a strong connection to each other. Each of them solid in their own right, from my perception, and more yet together.”

  “I wouldn’t argue. He feels responsible, and feels a kind of grief over Darrin. Even though it’s very unlikely he’s the father.”

  “Blood still, either way. Blood’s a strong tie. Kinship, as you said. And a good man like that, he’d feel it regardless.
”

  “A bad man can feel it, too,” she said and got out of the car to fly home.

  15

  SHE’D BEEN IRENE SCHULTZ—AT LEAST IN June of 2039 when a young Jonah MacMasters had collared her for fraud, possession of illegal substances, and soliciting sex without a license.

  Her male companion, one Victor Patterson, had been questioned and released though MacMasters’s case notes indicated his complicity. Lack of evidence against him, and the woman’s confession made it impossible to hold and charge him.

  A male child, Damien Patterson, had been removed by child services into foster care during the investigation, and subsequently returned to his father. Schultz had taken a deal, and had done eighteen months.

  Case closed.

  “It has to be her,” Eve said as she and Roarke walked back into the house. “Everything fits. Two months after her release, she poofs, and so do Patterson and the kid. Vanish, no further data on record.”

  “Picked up new identities.”

  “That’s the pattern.” She headed up the stairs. “Change ID, move locations, start a new game. But here’s a new angle. From the case notes, it’s clear MacMasters believed Patterson—or Pauley—was part of the fraud. He let her take the rap, and she let him. She went down for it. More, Vinnie said nothing about illegals. His brother’s got no illegals bumps on his record. That’s new. Where’d it come from?”

  It didn’t fit, it didn’t play, Eve thought.

  “And the solicitation? Those are stupid risks for these kind of grifters. Stupid, and it doesn’t come off she’d been stupid. The woman played Vinnie for a year. She knows—knew—how to run a game, long and short. Then, boom, she goes down not just for fraud, but possession and solicitation? It’s off.”

  “Sex and drugs are quick money if you need it,” Roarke commented. “And big money if you know how to play them. That’s telling.”

  Eve paused on the stairs, considered. Quick and big. “It might fit Pauley. Greed, impatience. It might.”

  “And it’s telling,” Roarke added, “that when she made this deal for the eighteen, she didn’t roll on Pauley. It would be SOP, wouldn’t it, to offer her a still lighter sentence if she implicated her partner?”

  “Yeah, it would. And there would have been some sympathy for her. Young mother, clean record—or so it appeared. She went with a public defender.” She moved into her office, straight to her computer. “I’ve got the name, and the name of the APA from MacMasters’s case notes. But he wouldn’t have the negotiations in here. I need his memory on this.”

  “She didn’t die in prison.”

  “No, she didn’t die in prison. Why is MacMasters to blame for her death, whenever and wherever and however it happened? It’s illogical, and in his twisted way, he’s logical.”

  She paced to the board, around it. “Something not in the case files, the notes, something not on record? But he’s a kid, hell almost a baby really, right? So how does he know what happened, how does he know MacMasters has to pay?”

  She pinned up Irene’s mug shot.

  “Because Pauley tells him,” she concluded, studying the photograph, the harsh and weary eyes of the woman. “Pauley tells him how it went down, from his point of view anyway. Or how he wants it to play. It can’t be, yeah, I let your mother take the full rap while I walked. No, it can’t be that.”

  As she circled, spoke, talked it out, Roarke eased a hip onto the corner of her desk. He loved watching her work, watching her re-create, dig down.

  “What kind of man lets the mother of his child take the hit? How can you stand back, let her fall while you walk?”

  She thought of Risso Banks. “I looked at this guy, had to check him out. Young guy. His older brother made him an addict, played him into the sex game, then when the bust came, left the kid and tried to save himself. And that’s how he remembers his brother, leaving him and trying to save his own ass.”

  “Darrin Pauley would have been too young to remember.”

  “Yeah.” Eve nodded. “Yeah, so Vance Pauley can write the story however he wants. They worked together, no question, but she goes down alone. He can’t let it come off like that to his son, or he’s a coward, a user. MacMasters railroaded her? You can make that play, you can always make it play that the cops screwed with you. And still . . .”

  “A year and a half in prison against the rape and murder of the cop’s child twenty years later?” Roarke looked at the photos, the stark differences, on her board. “Very imbalanced.”

  “Symbols. Mira said it was all symbolic. So there’s more, has to be. Something between her release and her death, something that Pauley can point back to? Something about her arrest, her time in that led to her death?”

  She pushed at her hair, tried to put herself in Darrin Pauley’s place. “If Darrin told Vinnie the truth about when she died—and why lie about that—it was about two years after the arrest, about six months after her release. What happened during that six months? I need to find her dead, that’s what I need to find, and track back from there.”

  “You have considerably more data on her now. You’d be able to streamline the search you’ve already done.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Allow me. Computer access results of search of female victims of rape-murder by strangulation and suffocation and refine with DOD 2041. Victims with initials I, S.”

  Acknowledged . . .

  “Computer,” Eve added, “input victim’s age as between twenty and twenty-eight, and as having given birth to at least one child.”

  “Right you are,” Roarke commented.

  She had to smile at him. “You did okay, for a civilian.”

  Acknowledged . . . File accessed, search commenced. Working . . .

  “No,” Roarke said when she turned toward the kitchen. “No more coffee, not at this hour. You’ll never sleep. And while the answers you hope to get with this search are vital, they won’t help you catch your man tonight.”

  It was hard to argue, even though she wanted the damn coffee. She stuck her hands in her pockets. It wasn’t just the comp that could give her answers. “He’s got to have another ID, has to be using one. Why isn’t it popping? Why do we only get Darrin Pauley?”

  “Change your hair and eye color, even skin tone, some features. All perfectly legal, and even fashionable. While he may have elected to use the same basic look for the student ID he used with Deena and his Darrin Pauley ID, he’s likely to have a half-dozen others, with enough variation to slip by a search. More hair, or less, a variance of coloring and some subtle shift in features to pass for mixed race. And with some skill, and some money, it’s very easy to keep an ID off the grid entirely.”

  “If he works, he has to have one that would pass, and would be on the grid. At least initially. It’s routine to do a quick background check before hiring.”

  “Depends who’s hiring, but yes, most routinely. But one doesn’t have to stick with the same. Once hired, how often is an employee’s ID run through the grid? Especially if, as you’ve theorized, he keeps out of trouble, stays steady.”

  “So he uses one look for his time at Columbia, possibly another for his approach to Deena, and maybe varies it otherwise. Different looks and personalities for different marks. Mavis worked that way back when.”

  She itched for coffee, but hooked her thumbs in her front pockets and focused on the job. “Mira’s profile suggests he lives alone. Maybe so, maybe. But maybe he’s still hooked with his old man. A partnership like that, it would continually reinforce the mission, wouldn’t it? And it would help him maintain that control, that patience, because he’d always have someone to talk to about it, to share his success with, to brag to.”

  “Someone to cheer him on,” Roarke added. “To help with the legwork, the research, the income.”

  “Maybe he doesn’t work at all, the income source is the grift. They’re good at it, and it teaches him how to blend, to acclimate, how to get along. That fits profile.”

 
; Task complete, the computer announced. One result from search. Display?

  “On wall screen one,” Eve ordered. “Illya Schooner, age twenty-five, born in North Dakota, parents deceased, no sibs.”

  “Easier if you eliminate any family, as their data would need to be generated.”

  “Yeah, yeah, but she’s got the kid on record. David Pruit this time, and lists Val Pruit as husband and next-of-kin, as father of the boy. She looks different from the ID and mug shots taken as Irene Schultz. Longer hair, lighter hair, curly, change of eye color, fuller lips, sharper cheeks, the mole beside her top lip. She’s shaved off a year on her age, the neck’s longer, the eyebrows thicker and higher.”

  “Much of which can be done by some e-tweaking, if the subject doesn’t want to deal with more permanent facial adjustments. Who really notices some of the more subtle differences, except a cop? And much of it’s just put down to whim. She changed her hair, wanted green eyes instead of blue.”

  “She died with this face, or a close proximity, in Chicago, where she had her address at the time, in May of 2041. Rape-murder by strangulation. I need more than that. I need the case file, the investigator.”

  “Eve, it’s too late to push Chicago PD to search for a file for a murder nineteen years ago. You’d have better luck in the morning.”

  “I can get some data through IRCCA now. And . . . Computer, search for David Pruit, DOB October six, 2037, mother Schooner, Illya, father Pruit, Val. Second search for Val Pruit, same data.”

  Acknowledged. Working . . .

  “They won’t be in the database.”

  “No, but I want to confirm that. At some point, wouldn’t they repeat an ID? You’ve gone through all that time, trouble, expense. Why not update it? Reuse it.”

  “An excellent point.”

  “And meanwhile, I can tap IRCCA, and put through an official request for the case file.”

  “All right then, but you have to be done for the night.”

  With coffee, she could probably push through another hour, maybe two. And would be doing little more than accessing data that could be done while she gave it a rest.