The In Death Collection, Books 26-29

by J. D. Robb

  “Thank you, sir. The information should be helpful.”

  “I remember a few tricks.”

  “I know this,” MacMasters murmured. “I remember this. I was still in uniform, hadn’t taken the detective’s exam yet. Frisco let me take the lead on it. We got a tip from one of our weasels on this woman running scams. She’d solicit a john, then she’d copy his ID, his credit card. Next thing he knew, he’d have all these bogus charges, or he’d find his bank account lighter by a few thousand. A lot of marks don’t report that, especially if they’re married or involved, or have something more to lose.”

  MacMasters studied the screen, nodding slowly. “Yeah, I remember this. I remember her. She had, apparently, been targeting the type least likely to make noise. But she scammed the weasel’s brother, and that rolled it out to us. Frisco and I set up a sting. I posed as the mark and we trolled the area where she was known to work.”

  “And she bit,” Eve prompted when MacMasters fell silent.

  “Sorry, it takes me back. Before Deena was born, when Carol and I were just beginning, when Frisco was alive. He was a tough bastard. Sorry,” he repeated, bringing himself back. “Yes, she bit the second night. It was clean and simple. We busted her on the solicitation without a license, found illegals on her, and a cloner.”

  His eyes narrowed as if he worked to see clearly back through two decades. “Yeah, that little cloner. It was slick, I remember that, too. Barely the size of her palm. Pretty damn slick considering it was twenty years back. She had my ID on her, too. I’d never felt her lift it. She was stoned, and she still pulled the civilian ID I’d put in my pocket without me feeling the grab, even though I’d been waiting for it.”

  “She’d been using?” Eve asked.

  “Yeah. She didn’t have the look of a longtimer, of the street, but she was high. She had ups and Exotica on her, and both in her system. Maybe she needed them to have sex with the marks.”

  “How’d she play it?” Eve asked him. “Did she try to barter, work a deal, bitch, cry?”

  “No, none of the usual. She—the impression I’m remembering is she seemed shaken, a little scared. That’s what I’m remembering, and that she wanted her call right off. You see that here in the notes. She wouldn’t say anything about anything until she’d made her call. But she didn’t call a lawyer, like we figured she would. She cried then. That’s right,” he mumbled. “She started crying during the call. I could see her through the glass, the tears running down her face, and I felt . . .”

  “Go ahead,” Eve prompted.

  “It’s not important, not relevant. I remember I felt bad for her, sitting there, crying, looking so tired and defeated. I guess I said something like it to Frisco, and he told me to toughen up. In more colorful la nguage.”

  MacMasters smiled, very faintly. “He could be a hard-ass. We stood by, and when she finished, she asked for a court-appointed.”

  “You went to see the man going by Patterson.”

  “She wouldn’t talk until she’d talked to the lawyer, and it was late, middle of the night by then, so we didn’t think we’d get a go with her until morning. And we figured she’d contacted this guy, the one listed as her husband, as her kid’s father.”

  “Contacting him so he’d have time to get rid of or conceal anything in criminating.”

  “Had to be,” MacMasters agreed. “What the hell did the guy think she was doing all night? Playing bridge? So while she was in the tank, we went over to her residence. You could see, ten seconds in you could see he was wrong. He was wrong, Patterson. But the apartment was clean. No illegals, no evidence of fraud. Child services took the kid, and we took him in for questioning.”

  “That night?” Eve prompted.

  “Yeah. Frisco and I both wanted to get him in the box, push him. But he played it innocent, and he never came off that. He claimed to believe she worked nights at some dive off Broad. He was sweating,” MacMasters added as he looked back. “I can still see the sweat rolling down his face, like the tears had with hers. Maybe if we’d had more time to work him. But her lawyer told us to get the APA, her client wanted to deal.”

  He took a breath, working it out in his head. “We figured she was going to roll on the husband, implicate him to deal down. We pulled off him, went in to talk to her. She confessed.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Just like that. Her lawyer wasn’t happy, you could see that. The APA hadn’t even gotten there yet, but she insisted she wanted to get it done. Claimed an addiction to Exotica, and that it had caused her to prostitute. Took the full rap. Claimed she bought the cloner on the black market. She wouldn’t flip on Patterson. We pushed there, and when the APA got into it, he offered her a better deal if she pulled the husband in. But she wouldn’t. They dealt her eighteen months, and he walked. They gave him back the kid.

  “Frisco used to say, ‘Sometimes slime slides.’ This was one of those times.”

  “Was she afraid of him?”

  “Hell, no.” MacMasters let out a half-laugh. “She loved him. It was all over her. She loved the son of a bitch, and he knew it. He let her take the fall. More we figured, when Frisco and I talked about it, we figured during that call, when she started crying, the bastard talked her into taking the fall.”

  “It fits,” Eve said quietly. “It runs true.”

  “You can know something without being able to prove it, without being able to make a case.” Even now, twenty years later, the frustration flashed clearly on MacMasters’s face. “We made the case on her, we closed the case. She did the time, and she earned it, but . . .”

  MacMasters shook his head. “It was the law, but it wasn’t right. Not through to the core of it. Patterson let her go down, alone, and he played the shocked husband, the desperate father. We did their financials, you can see here in the file. They didn’t have much more than two months’ rent in their account. Where did the thousands she’d scammed go? She said to her illegals habit and gambling, but she couldn’t tell us where she’d gambled it away. It was bullshit. They had it squirreled, but she never shook off that stand. She stuck firm that she’d spent the money, and he hadn’t been any part of it. Hadn’t known. And he comes to her sentencing with tears in his eyes, holding the little boy, with the boy crying for his mother. It was—”

  He broke off, got slowly to his feet. In place of frustration, a cop’s memory of a case that hadn’t gone down quite right, came shock. “The boy. It’s the boy you think killed Deena?”

  “It’s leaning that way, yes.”

  “But, for God’s sake, he would do that, he would do that to an innocent girl because I once arrested his mother? Because she did less than two years?”

  “Irene Schultz aka Illya Schooner was beaten, raped, and murdered by strangulation in Chicago in May of 2041.”

  He slid back into the chair as if his legs dissolved. “Patterson?”

  “No, he was alibied. I’ll have the full file later this morning, and will reach out to the primary on the investigation, but he looks clear on it.”

  “How could he blame me? How could he blame me for that, and kill my child?”

  “I don’t have the answer for you. Captain, did Pauley—Patterson—did he threaten you in any way?”

  “No, just the opposite. He cooperated fully on the surface. Played the ‘there must be some mistake, please can I see my wife.’ He never asked for a lawyer. When I pushed the illegals, the cloner in his face, he put on the shock, the disbelief, then the shame. He played it like a symphony.”

  “You said it was the middle of the night when you pulled him in. But she didn’t try to stall, try to get her PD to push for a bail hearing?”

  “No. We stalled some, let them stew and caught a couple hours of sleep in the crib. The APA wasn’t coming in until morning anyway. It didn’t make any difference in her statement. I felt for her. Goddamn it, goddamn it, I felt for her. She protected him, and he let her. I felt for her, and that little boy. The little boy crying for her
. Now my daughter’s dead.”

  Sometimes, Eve thought, having the answers didn’t ease the pain. Even as she went down to her office to search for more answers, she felt the weight of that on the back of her neck.

  She found the Chicago file in her incoming, and sat down to read it through. She’d given it a first pass when Lieutenant Pulliti contacted her via ’link.

  “I appreciate you reaching out, Lieutenant.”

  “Happy to. Just because I took my thirty a couple years ago doesn’t mean I’m sailing on Lake Michigan. Cap said this was about an old homicide. Illya Schooner.”

  “That’s right.” He’d retired young, Eve thought. He couldn’t have been more than sixty-five, with a full head of dark hair, clear brown eyes. Either the job hadn’t put the years on his face, or he’d spent a chunk of his pension getting face treatments.

  “Rape-murder,” she said. “Vic was female, mid-twenties.”

  “I remember,” he interrupted. “I was working the South Side back then. It was rough, hadn’t come back far from the Urbans. Scary time.”

  “I bet.”

  “They’d worked her pretty good. Cap said he sent you the file.”

  “That’s right.”

  “So, you can see, they worked on her. Took some time to mess her up that bad.”

  “You say ‘they.’ The ME reports state it appeared she was struck by both a left- and a right-handed attacker. But it’s not conclusive.”

  “The Stallions worked in pairs back then.”

  Eve scrolled down to his notes. “The gang that held sway on that area held the illegals and sex trade.”

  “The Stallions were the illegals and sex trade on the South Side. They held it more than a decade. She infringed. For them, it was business. Somebody tries to cut into your business, you take them out. Hard.”

  “But you looked at the husband.”

  “Yeah, we looked hard, too. Seemed overkill even for the Stallions, unless she was cutting big. And if she was cutting big, where was the cut? Rules of play, they’d’ve warned her off first, or if she was any good maybe give her a chance to work for them.”

  Pulliti tapped the side of his nose. “It didn’t smell right.”

  “You couldn’t tie him in, the husband?”

  “Alibied right and tight. Had the kid at home. About the time she was getting the shit raped out of her, he was knocking on a neighbor’s door to ask for help since the kid was sick, and his wife was—he said—at work. Neighbor verified.”

  “Yeah, I see that.”

  “But it didn’t smell right. We’re knocking on doors and everybody says how he keeps to himself, hardly says boo, stays with the kid at night, takes him off during the day while the woman sleeps, or goes off on his own. But that night, the night he needs an alibi, he knocks on somebody’s door. Sure was convenient.”

  “You think he set her up?”

  “Thought it, felt it. See, the Stallions, back then, they’d initiate a member, or a business partner. Beat-down or gangbang, take your choice. You take the beating or the banging, then you give them their cut of your business.”

  Sex and drugs, she thought. Quick money, big money.

  “You think she went with them for that voluntarily?”

  “Maybe, or maybe he gave her over. They’d take a trade, especially a woman. I’ll tell you, that’s the way it smelled to me, but there wasn’t one shred of evidence pointing that way. She was the meal ticket from what I can find, not that they had anything much to show for it.”

  “Just a couple months’ rent in the financials,” Eve interrupted. “Not hefty chunks.”

  “That’s right. Not a hand-to-mouth kind of thing, but not your caviar and bubble wine either.”

  “Under the radar,” Eve voiced.

  “You could say. So, maybe he gave her over to the Stallions, and things got out of hand. I don’t know, but it was just too damn pat with him. He comes up with the line about how they were having marital problems, and she was having trouble with illegals. But the neighbors said they never heard them fighting. And they looked like a nice little family any time they went out together, except the woman looked kinda worn down.”

  As she talked to him, Eve made her own notes, formed her own theories.

  “This address, where she and the man and boy lived. What kind of neighborhood was that?”

  “Solid middle. Working families, a lot of kids. They had a good apartment in a nice building. Nothing flashy, but nice. The husband, he had some flash.”

  “Did he?”

  “Expensive wrist unit, shoes. The boy had plenty of trendy toys. They had upmarket electronics. He was working in e-repair, consulting sort of deal, and she was—according to him—a professional mother. But he hardly put in any time on the job, and did most of the looking after the kid, according to the neighbors. I asked him about the wrist unit. Said it was a birthday present from his wife.

  “He was off,” Pulliti said. “My gut said he was off, but the evidence said he was clean.”

  When Chicago had given her all it could, Eve sat back, closed her eyes. He was off, but came away clean. There was a pattern.

  He let the woman take the fall for him—just as he’d let the woman sleep with, live with his own brother, and like he may have let her scoop up johns and marks in gang territory.

  Sex, she thought. Did he like her to use sex to scam? Was that part of a thrill?

  When had the illegals come into it? When had she started using?

  MacMasters said she might have needed them to have sex with her marks.

  Maybe so. Not with the brother. It’s kinship in a twisted way. They’d looked alike, and she’d lived the con of making a family.

  She pushed up, paced to the window and back. Paced to her board and away.

  No, he hadn’t knocked on a neighbor’s door out of sheer coincidence the night of her murder. No way in hell. But it wouldn’t have been just a cover for the cops. Couldn’t be. They’d never have put him at the scene of the murder.

  Covering though. Covering his own ass while she was being raped.

  He knew something was going to happen to her, something bad. Something that could involve the cops coming to the door. A deal. A setup. A trade.

  But the boy grows up and goes after MacMasters, mirroring the crime against his mother on MacMasters’s daughter. Why? Because MacMasters was the arresting officer, in another city, two full years before his mother’s murder?

  What kind of sense did that make, even for a sociopath? It didn’t fo llow . . .

  She stopped, turned to stare at the board again. Unless . . .

  “Dallas, I might have a line on—”

  “Who’s the biggest influence in your life?” Eve interrupted. “I mean, who would you say gave you the foundation for what you are, how you think, what you believe?”

  Peabody frowned over the question. “Well, I like to think I think for myself, and there are a variety of factors in my life experience—”

  “Cut the crap.”

  “Okay, at the base? My parents. Not that I go along with everything there, or I’d be in a commune raising goats or weaving flax, but—”

  “The base is there. You’re a cop, but with Free-Ager tendencies.” She tapped Yancy’s sketch as Peabody’s frown deepened over the analysis.

  “So, who most influenced this one? His mother’s murdered when he’s about four. Who’d be the biggest influence on what he believes, how he views the world?” She jabbed her finger into Pauley’s ID print. “This one. He’s a con artist, an operator. He taps his parents for money time and again, even though they know better. He’s grease, he slides. His own brother has to pretend he doesn’t exist to barricade himself. A smart and devious woman falls for him to the extent she takes an eighteen-month rap so he can skate—and she gets into prossing and illegals after they’re hooked. Not before, after.”

  “The wrong guy,” Peabody offered. “Like Trueheart said.”

  “Yeah, a really wrong g
uy. And if he tells the kid how his mother was lost, murdered, because the cops screwed with her, why wouldn’t he believe it?”

  “Because they didn’t?”

  “That doesn’t matter. The kid’s already predisposed to believe it. He’s lived his whole life believing it, and wanting to even the score. He’s lived his whole life targeting marks, taking what he wants, living on the other side. And liking it. Planning out the ultimate con. Pauley let the woman take the fall for him, but that’s not what the kid hears. Pauley covered his ass on the night she was killed, but that’s not what the kid hears. When you keep hearing the same thing from the person who has the power—and Pauley had the power for years—you believe.”

  Her father had held the power, Eve thought. He’d told her she was nothing, told her the police would put her in a dark hole and leave her there to rot. And for a long time, she’d believed him to the extent she was as terrified of the police, of anyone in the system as she was of the man who beat and raped her.

  “Dallas?”

  “It’s classic,” Eve concluded. “If you want to create something, someone, to obey, to believe, to become, you repeat, repeat. Punish or reward, that depends on your style, but you drill the message home. They killed your mother. They’re to blame. They need to pay.”

  It struck like a hammer in the gut. “They, not he. It has to be they. The system, everyone who had a part in it. It’s the system he hates. Oh, goddamn it. We need a run, now, on every official connected to Irene Schultz’s arrest and incarceration. Her lawyer, the APA, the judge, the warden, the CS rep who removed the kid, the head of CS at the time, the foster home. We need whereabouts, family, family whereabouts.”

  Peabody’s dark eyes went huge. “He’s going after someone else.”

  “One cop isn’t enough.” Eve launched herself at her unit, ordered an immediate run. “He started it, but others are complicit. It’s their fault his mother went away, their fault she was murdered. Took her away from him, so he’s going to take something away from them. Frisco, the other cop, he went down. He’s out of play. Can’t punish the dead, can’t make the dead suffer.”