The In Death Collection, Books 26-29

by J. D. Robb

  “Well, I’ll pour that lemonade,” Charity said cheerfully. “See you in a minute.”

  Charity shut down the ’link, set it on top of the piano. “How’d I do?”

  “Perfect,” Eve said.

  “I believe I might’ve missed my calling,” she said as she rose to pour the drinks. “I could’ve been a screen star.”

  Eve watched her eyes go fierce, saw her take a long, deep breath before her face turned harmlessly pleasant again.

  “Here we go,” Charity murmured and started toward the door.

  “Turning up the walk,” Feeney told her.

  “Hold positions. We do this by the numbers. No chatter. Wait for my go.”

  She watched Charity open the front door, and the quick, charming grin on Darrin Pauley’s face.

  “You look real nice today, Mrs. M.”

  “Oh, listen to you. Come on in here! Oh, look at those daisies. Aren’t they pretty?”

  “I just wanted to thank you for letting me take my lesson today.”

  “That’s the sweetest thing.” Charity sniffed at the flowers. “Take a minute to sit down, have some lemonade. I bet the walk made you thirsty.”

  “I guess it did.”

  “A young man like you’s always hungry. You have a muffin.”

  “Thanks.” He shrugged off his backpack, set it beside a chair before removing his cap, his shades.

  Charity stood where she was, smiling at him. “How’s your mama doing?”

  “Oh, she’s fine. I wish she didn’t work so hard. Wish I could do more for her.”

  “I bet you’re doing more than she’d ever think to ask,” Charity said, and Eve hoped she was the only one who heard the underlying ice in the tone. “And won’t she be surprised when you play for her? I don’t know another boy your age who’d go to so much trouble to please his mama.”

  “I owe her everything. I bet your family feels the same about you. Especially your kids. Are you sure you’re going to be all right here on your own? Alone until Sunday, didn’t you say?”

  “Oh, I’ll be fine, and happy to have the place to myself until Deke and the boys get back Sunday. Now you have a muffin while I go put these pretty daisies in water. I won’t be a minute.”

  “Okay.”

  Charity strolled out of the room, didn’t break stride even when she sent one fiercely satisfied glance in Eve’s direction.

  As her footsteps echoed away, Darrin took a small vial out of his pocket, tipped the contents into her glass.

  “Go. All positions, go.”

  Weapon drawn, Eve rushed the room only seconds before a half-dozen cops did the same.

  “Hello, Darrin,” Eve said. She smiled as he stared at her. “Hands behind your head. Now. On your knees.”

  “What’s this about?” He obeyed, but turned his head side-to-side, with the perfect mix of fear and confusion on his face. “My-my name’s Denny, Denny Plimpton. I have identification.”

  “I bet you do. Darrin Pauley, aka Denny Plimpton, among others, you’re under arrest for murder, two counts.” Eve gripped his wrist, yanked his arm behind his back.

  She looked up and into MacMasters’s eyes. “Captain, would you read this son of a bitch his rights?”

  “I . . .” MacMasters cleared the rust from his voice. He looked down at the weapon in his hand, then slowly holstered it. “You have the right to remain silent,” he began as she secured Darrin’s wrists in restraints.

  “Thought you were playing her, didn’t you, Darrin?” Eve hauled him to his feet. “Playing an old woman. But she played you. She played you like a piano. This time? You’re the mark.”

  The frightened boy fell away, and he smiled. And when he smiled, turning his face toward MacMasters, the shadow of the monster slouched behind his eyes. “Maybe you’ll get intent to rob, but that’s all you’ll get.”

  Eve jerked him around so he faced her. “Keep telling yourself that, Darrin.”

  “Look what I found.” Baxter held up a pair of the cutaway restraints bailiffs carried in courtrooms. “There’s a recorder here, too, a can of Seal-It, and hmmm.” He held up another vial and a small package of pills. “I bet these contain illegal substances.”

  “Bag it, log it, bring it. And the contents of Mrs. Mimoto’s glass. Transport this thing into Central, book him. I’ll be in real soon, we’ll chat.

  “Get him out.” She shoved Darrin toward Jenkinson, then walked up to MacMasters. “You did the job. You maintained. We’ve got him now. You should go home, tell your wife we’ve got him now. Be with her.”

  “I’d like to observe your interview.” His face was like stone, pale and sharply carved.

  “We’ll let him sweat a while. You’ve got time to go home, tell your wife. She needs to hear this from you.”

  “Yes, you’re right.” He held out his hand. “Thank you, Lieutenant.”

  “Captain.”

  He started for the door, stopped, turned. “I thought about it, even after what we talked about. I could have taken him out. Clean line, one stream. I could have done it. Now I have to think about that.”

  “Bastard did his job there,” Eve murmured. “Cracked the foundation of a damn good cop.”

  “I think, with some time, the foundation’s going to prove solid. He did the job, like you said,” Peabody pointed out. “It was good, you having him read the bastard his rights.”

  “Yeah. Contact the judge, assure her that her mother’s safe, and it’s done. We can contact her father, but I assume she’ll want to do that herself.”

  She turned away. “All right, boys and girls, good work. Let’s close it down.”

  At Central, Eve formally notified her commander, the PA’s office, contacted Mira with a request she observe. She wrote her report.

  She sat, her boots on her desk, and drank a cup of coffee.

  Peabody tapped on the doorjamb. “He’s been booked and processed, and he’s been sitting in Interview for an hour.”

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  “Reo and the commander are here, MacMasters just came in, and Mira’s on her way.”

  “I’m up on that.”

  “Don’t you think we ought to start working him?”

  “Feeling twitchy?”

  “No. Yes. Well, Nadine’s chomping to break the story.”

  “Not yet. Nothing yet.”

  “Well . . . we’re supposed to be back, you know, with the rehearsal. I know they’re using stand-ins, but if we wrapped this, we could still . . .”

  Eve merely turned her head, stared.

  “And ah . . . We should talk about how we’re going at him,” Peabody decided on the spot. “And if we leave him sitting too long, he might start thinking lawyer.”

  “He’s not going to lawyer. What name is he going to use? What address? His ID’s bogus. Besides, what good did a lawyer do his mother? That’s what he’s thinking. Fuck lawyers, fuck all of us. He’s too smart to go down. Or, if we get lucky, he’ll go down a hero in his own mind.”

  “Well, how do we work him? Oh, let me guess.” Peabody rolled her eyes. “I’m good cop.”

  “No good cop.”

  A quick, almost childish delight bloomed on Peabody’s face. “I don’t have to be good? I can be bad?”

  “We hit, hit hard. Getting the confession isn’t the tricky part.”

  “It’s not?”

  “He’ll want to confess after he understands we’ve got him cold. He’ll want the hero badge. The tricky part? Getting him to flip on his father.” She dropped her feet to the floor. “Let’s do it.”

  Eve walked into Interview, dropped her file on the table, took a seat. Peabody took the chair beside her.

  “Record on,” she said and read in all the data, including every known alias she’d discovered.

  She noted the quick jump of a muscle in Darrin’s jaw, and knew the depth of her knowledge caught him off guard.

  “Legally, I’m covered using the name on your birth records,” she said conversationally, �
��but I like to be thorough, seeing as you’ve used so many names, including the two used when you murdered Deena MacMasters and Karlene Robins. So, which name do you want me to use in this interview? Your choice.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “For the record, would fuck be your first name or your last? Never mind. The courts frown on my using that sort of profanity to address interview subjects. Though, personally, I think it fits.”

  “To the ground,” Peabody agreed.

  “I’ll stick with Darrin. We’ve got you cold, Darrin. You’re a smart guy, so you know this. Well, maybe not so smart as you were set up and knocked down by a ninety-year-old woman. One you intended to incapacitate with an illegal substance, bind, beat, rape, sodomize, and murder.”

  “Give me a break.” His sneer struck her as both young and arrogant. “She’s old. I couldn’t even get wood up to do some dried-up old woman. Makes me want to puke to think about it.”

  “The stiffie pills in your backpack would’ve helped with that, but you’d have gotten it up, Darrin. Even though I suspect you’ve got a twig in your pants instead of a decent bat. Because it’s all about the hurting for you, the torment, the fear, the pain. That’s what turns sick fucks—oops, I said fuck—like you on.”

  “How are you going to prove that?” He leaned back in the chair, relaxed. Looked around the room as if bored. “Yeah, I figured I’d lay her out. She’s got a lot of valuables in that place. I was going to rob her and walk away.”

  “I see. So with Deena and Karlene, your intention to rob just went a little too far. Resulting in . . .” Eve opened the file, tossed the two file shots on the table.

  This time his facial muscles twitched into the smallest of smiles.

  “You are a sick fuck.” Peabody shoved back her chair as she sprang to her feet. She leaned over the table until she was nose to nose with Darrin. “It pisses me off we’re wasting time with you, that we have to go through this routine. We’ve got witnesses, you asshole. We’ve got security recordings of you walking into Deena MacMasters’s house the night you killed her. Of you entering the building the day you killed Karlene Robins.”

  “Bullshit. That’s bullshit, because I was never anywhere near those places.”

  “Bullshit? I’ll show you bullshit. Wall screen on!” She caught herself, glanced toward Eve.

  “Go ahead, you’ve already spoiled my surprise.”

  “Display image 1-A,” Peabody ordered.

  The screen filled with a clear shot of Darrin climbing the steps of the MacMasters’s home toward a smiling Deena. The time stamp pulsed in the bottom corner as the recording continued with him reaching her, offering her the flowers, easing into the doorway, into the house.

  “She told her friends about you—David,” Eve added as he stared at the screen. “She told them all about her secret boyfriend from Columbia University. The shy guy she met in the park.”

  “We’ve got eyewitnesses who saw the meet,” Peabody continued. “We’ve had your face for days, picking up other witnesses who saw you together.”

  “She kept souvenirs—like the program from the musical you took her to at the college. Your prints are on it.” Eve tossed another paper from the file on the table. “We got a match once you were printed downstairs.”

  Face blank, he nodded. “So, you got lucky.”

  “You keep thinking that, too. Now, let’s discuss details.”

  22

  “LUCK?” EVE TIPPED BACK IN HER CHAIR, meeting his smirk with one of her own. “Luck that EDD killed your virus? Or that we know what you were wearing on New Year’s Eve when you lifted Darian Powders’s ID? I know where you bought the shoes you’re wearing, Darrin, and how much you paid for them. The backpack, too, and the Columbia sweatshirt you had on when you lured Deena into the first meet in Central Park.”

  Now she smirked, deliberately, leaning back in a way that transmitted casual derision. “I know what kind of airboard you ride, and exactly where you rode it, with Deena, on a rainy afternoon in May.”

  “That’s bullshit.”

  He didn’t look afraid, not yet, Eve thought. But he looked puzzled, and just a bit defiant.

  “You keep thinking that, asshole.” Peabody all but growled the words, and made Eve think she’d have to teach her new “bad” cop to tune it back.

  “I knew what you looked like when I set you up at the media conference, the day after you raped and strangled Karlene Robins. Drew. I know your name, where you were born, oh, and the name you were using when your mother bought it in Chicago.”

  There, Eve thought, that hit the mark. Rage boiled out of his eyes. He turned it back, quickly, she’d give him that. But she’d seen it and the trigger she needed.

  “We’re just smarter than you, Darrin. You got lucky at the memorial, no question. But, gee, looks like your luck ran out. Like your mother’s did in that prossy flop in Chicago.”

  “You’re going to want to be careful.”

  “About what? You’re nailed. You’ve got some skills with electronics, but they’re average. You couldn’t find a way to jam the cameras or the lock, you couldn’t bypass the system without being inside. The virus?”

  She rolled her shoulders, stretched lazily. “It was a good try, kept our e-team entertained for a while. But the fact is, an e-rookie has more chops than you. But then, you learned most of them from your father.”

  “Well, that depends.” Peabody shrugged. “We’re not sure if Vincent or Vance Pauley is his father. His mother let both of them have the bangs.”

  “Right, right.” Eve waved agreement as Darrin’s jaw clenched. “I wonder if your mother knew, since she fucked both of them. But, hey, it could’ve been someone else altogether. Since she was a whore.”

  “Shut your fucking mouth.”

  “Want to shut it for me, Darrin? The way you shut Deena’s, Karlene’s, when you held a pillow over their faces after you raped them? I wonder, when you were raping them, looking at their faces when you pounded and tore into them, did you see your mother? Is that how you got it up, Darrin? Thinking about Mom, and how you really wanted to fuck her?”

  She didn’t blink when he lurched up. His hands balled into fists as the lead of his restraints clanged against the bolt.

  “Want to take a shot at me? It’s a pisser not to be able to fight back, isn’t it? I guess you know how Deena and Karlene felt. You must be disappointed that you won’t be able to watch Judge Mimoto’s mother struggle, hear her scream. Or Elysse Wagman,” she said and looking into his eyes recited the names of his other targets.

  “We found them all,” Peabody said, piling on scorn. “That’s how lucky we are.”

  “Now you won’t be able to finish your sick homage to your whore of a mother.”

  He got his hands under the table, tried to lift it, heave it, but Eve and Peabody simply counterweighted the other side.

  “Frustrating, isn’t it?” Eve commented. “To be helpless. To be controlled.”

  His muscles trembled with the effort, but he pulled back, sat again. “If you’ve got me nailed, why are we wasting time with all this?”

  “That’s what they pay us for. So, if you’re in a hurry, why don’t you lay it out for the record?” Eve prompted. “You know you want to. It has to be satisfying to brag about what you did manage to pull off. I can give you a little springboard. You’ve been stalking your targets for months, researching them, planning. Hell, you’ve been thinking about it for years. All your life, basically. I have to figure you picked Deena to start as she was the easiest. Just a kid, a shy girl—the virgin—easily dazzled by attention, excited by the idea of a secret boyfriend. You used the Columbia connection. You’d gone there, so you knew the campus. And since her friend Jamie Lingstrom goes there, a little field-work and you could toss out some names she’d recognize. Lower her defenses.”

  He shrugged.

  “If you think we’re going to offer you a deal, like your mother got when she was caught using and whoring twenty years ago,
think again.”

  Darrin bared his teeth in a vicious smile. “You can tell MacMasters his precious daughter was the whore. I’ve been fucking her for weeks.”

  Eve glanced at Peabody. “Did we actually think this moron had some smarts?”

  “We did. He’s sure proving us wrong since we know, conclusively, the only way he could get his pathetic dick into Deena was to drug her, restrain her, and rape her.”

  “All you had to do with his mother was pay her.”

  “Shut the fuck up. You don’t know anything.”

  “Enlighten me. Explain to me why the people involved in your mother’s bust in New York twenty-one years ago are responsible for her death in Chicago nineteen years ago? Help me make that leap, Darrin.”

  “It was that fucking cop who ruined her. Set her up.”

  “MacMasters set her up?”

  “Planted the illegals on her, blackmailed her into having sex with him, the same as rape. Then he covers it up, says she’s whoring. My mother was the best shifter on the grift there was.”

  Eve changed her tone, put a touch of admiration into it. “She had the ID skills.”

  “She could be anybody she wanted to be, take anything she wanted to take. And so what? Nobody got hurt.”

  “How about the people she swindled? How about Vincent Pauley?”

  “Marks.” He shrugged again. “They’re lame enough to get taken, they get taken. Vinnie? He’s always been a dick, always been jealous of my father, always came in second best to him. My mother needed somewhere to stay when she was pregnant with me and my father got railroaded into prison. She only slept with that asshole for my sake.”

  “Is that what she told you?”

  “She never talked about it, any of it. What happened to her ruined her. Took the life out of her before those cops set her up with the Stallions in Chicago. Before they killed her.”

  “Interesting.” Eve furrowed her brow, flipped through the papers in the file on the table. “None of that’s in my file. Where did you get this information?”

  “My father told me everything. How they tore the life out of her before they killed her, how they ripped our family apart because the cops blackmailed her into trying to get the goods on them.”