by J. D. Robb
Counters lined one wall and the box-sized window. A couple people enjoying a slice rolled eyes toward her, then hastily away. She could almost hear the relief slide out of them when she walked past.
“What’ll it be?” The woman behind the glass-fronted counter rolled her shoulders as if to dislodge an ache. She was black, with thin, tough-looking arms, her hair tied back in a blue kerchief and a single hoop piercing her left eyebrow.
“Questions.” Eve showed her badge.
“Look, I don’t want trouble so I stay out of it. I’m clean. I’ve got a kid at home, and I’ve got to work to pay the rent.”
“I’ve got no problems for you. Do you know Rickie Keener? Juicy?”
“Everybody knows Juicy.”
“Who was on the counter last night?”
“I was.” She glanced toward the back with a look of avid dislike. “Gee made me work the late shift, even though he knows I gotta get a sitter costs more than I make when it’s night work.”
“Was Juicy in?”
“Yeah, he came in. Got a whole damn pie—with sardines. That’s his usual—the topping, not the whole pie. Whole pie, couple of brews, so he had to be flush.” She pulled another kerchief out of her apron pocket, dabbed at her sweaty throat. “In a real good mood, too.”
“Is that so?”
“He tipped me. I get a tip about once every ten blue moons, but he laid a five on the counter, and says, ‘That’s for your own sweet self, Loo.’ Says how he’s settling his accounts, closing up shop, and going where there’s cool, sea breezes. Full of bull.”
Then she shrugged, stuffed the kerchief back in her pocket. “I guess you know what he does, but he was always polite to me. Always said thanks—and he never did business in here. I guess he’s in trouble.”
“He’s dead, Loo.”
“Oh.” Loo shook her head, cast her eyes down a moment. “I guess it’s hard to be surprised when somebody lives that life.”
“How about this guy?” She gestured for Peabody to show Bix’s shot.
“Haven’t seen him in here. He’d stick out, that’s for sure. Big, healthy white guy. Seen him somewhere, maybe. Maybe ... yeah, I think I saw him—somebody big and white anyway, hanging around down the block when I walked home.”
“What time did you get off?”
“Not till damn near three. Half the streetlights out, and I don’t stroll, if you get me, when I’ve got to walk home at that time of night. I caught a glimpse because I keep my eyes open. Mostly the assholes leave me be because they eat here, but you never know. So I caught a glimpse, like I said. Could’ve been this guy.”
“Good enough. Thank you.”
“I’m sorry about Juicy. I didn’t like how he made his way, but he never did me any harm.”
Not a bad epitaph for a junkie, Eve thought as she left.
Nine
EVE CALCULATED SHE HAD TIME FOR A QUICK shower and change herself. She’d feel better and would be able to turn all the data, statements, and observations over in her mind while she scraped off the grunge from a dead man’s flop.
She began to turn them over even as she walked into the house, into the cool, into the beady stares of Summerset and the cat.
“Have I missed a national holiday? There must be celebrations in the streets for you to be home at this hour of the day.”
“I’m calling it Summerset Goes Mute Day. The city’s gone mad with joy.” She angled for the steps, stopped. “I’ve got a team coming in for a briefing.”
“So I’m informed. You’ll be serving pulled pork barbecue, a cold pasta salad, fresh tomatoes with mozzarella, and green beans almondine.”
“Oh.”
“Followed by peach pie à la mode and a selection of petit fours.”
“We’ll never get rid of them.”
“How is Detective Peabody?” he asked as she started up the steps.
She stopped, shoulders tense. “Why?”
“I’m neither blind nor insensitive, Lieutenant. She was very obviously shaken when she and Detective McNab arrived last night.”
“She’s steady. She’s fine. I also figure you know what goes on in this house, so you know we all went out, two separate vehicles, and came back late. You know Peabody and McNab stayed here, you know Whitney was here early this morning. The circuits are closed on this, closed tight.”
She might’ve been on the steps above him, but Summerset managed to meet her eye and transmit the impression he looked down his nose.
“I don’t discuss your professional or personal business.”
She ordered herself to throttle back. She knew he didn’t gossip. He’d hardly be the man Roarke trusted with, well, everything, if he was a blabbermouth.
“I know that. This is an extremely sensitive and layered investigation.”
“Involving Detective Peabody.”
“You could say. And that’s all I can say.”
“Would you tell me if she’s in trouble? I’m very fond of her.”
She knew that, too—and this time didn’t have to tell herself to throttle back. “No, she’s not in trouble. She’s a good cop. That’s why she’s involved.” Crap. Now she felt obliged. “Listen, I’m sorry I couldn’t spend more time with your friends last night.”
His eyebrows lifted, ever so slightly. “Perhaps it is a national holiday.”
“Anyway.” Leaving it at that, she continued upstairs.
“Go on,” Summerset told the cat. “I expect she’d like the company whether she knows it or not.”
Galahad padded, as briskly as his bulk allowed, after Eve.
In the bedroom, he bumped against her legs as she stripped off her jacket. So she crouched down to give him a rub that had his bicolored eyes slitting in ecstasy.
“I’m going to wrap her up,” Eve told him. “Wrap her up like a smelly fish. Wrap her up, put her in a box, and tie down the lid. Put her in a cage, her and every one of her murdering, cheating, lying, corrupt cops. Jesus, I’m pissed.”
She took a breath, another, as the raw anger she’d managed to cage the entire day threatened to break loose.
“Treacherous whore-bitch cunt using everything and everyone to feed her own pathetic needs. Abusing what she’d promised to honor. Twisting everything she’d been given, everything entrusted to her so she could stroke her bank account and her goddamn sick ego.”
She tried another couple breaths. “Really pissed,” she admitted, “and that won’t help. I should be more like you, more like my cat. Cool and sneaky.”
She gave him a last pat, then removed her weapon, the rest of her clothes. In the shower she let her mind empty, just empty out. And in that calmer space began to test the pieces, calculate the angles, arrange the steps.
Cool and sneaky, she thought again. Good tools when you were planning to take down all or most of a police squad.
Once she’d dressed, she strapped her weapon back on. Hardly necessary inside her own house, but wearing it would be more official. Another symbol, she supposed. And maybe, as silly as it sounded, it offset the casual tone of peach pie à la mode.
She hauled up her file bag and headed to her office.
The door to Roarke’s office stood open. She heard his voice, moved to the doorway. Whoever he spoke with, and whatever they spoke about, utilized the short speak of high-tech that eluded her. It was, she thought, like listening to a conversation in Venusian.
Whatever it was had to do with, she assumed, the weird schematics flashing on-screen—and if she was following the Venusian, the changes Roarke wanted to them.
“Put them in and run a new analysis. I want to see the results tomorrow afternoon.”
“I didn’t know you were here,” Eve said when he’d finished. “What was that thing?”
“What will be the new generation laundry unit.”
She frowned at him. “Like for washing clothes?”
“It’ll do a bit more than that. One self-contained, multi-compartment unit.” In his beautifully cut s
uit, he leaned back against his desk, studied the schematics with obvious satisfaction.
“It should do everything but tuck your clothes in your drawers and hang them in your closet. And if you want that as well, you could purchase the droid attachment.”
“Okay. I guess it seems a little mundane for you.”
“You wouldn’t say that if you ran out of clean underwear.” He crossed to her, gave her an easy hello kiss. “And people need the mundane every day.”
“I used to take all my stuff to Mr. Ping’s place around the corner from my apartment,” she remembered. “He was good at getting blood-stains out.”
“An essential service in your line of work. I don’t see any today.”
“Day’s not over. I’ve got to set up for the briefing. Things are rolling.”
“I’ve got a few things to finish up, then you can fill me in.”
“Okay.” She paused at the doorway. “You know, I guess there was somebody a few hundred years ago, beating a dirty shirt against a rock in a fast stream, who thought there’s just got to be a better fucking way. If he hadn’t found it, we’d all be wading in rivers on laundry day. Mundane’s got a point.”
She moved into her office. She arranged two boards, one for the murder, one for the investigation on Renee Oberman’s operation, adding data on every cop in Renee’s squad she’d acquired through low-level runs.
She grabbed the sweepers report the instant it came through, studied it and the lab analysis on the illegals taken from the crime scene.
Little pieces, she thought. Tiny little pieces—mundane, you could say.
Once she’d input everything in her computer, she sat back with coffee and considered her approach.
When Roarke came in he went to her boards. “You’ve made considerable progress.”
“I know what she’s doing. I have some ideas on why. I even know how to some extent. I know some of the other players, but not all. I know who killed Keener, why and how and when. But it’s not enough. Yet. I had some face time with her today, got to fuck with her a little.”
“I imagine you enjoyed it.”
“I’d have enjoyed smashing my fist into her face more, but yeah, it wasn’t bad.”
He walked to her desk, took her coffee, drank a little. “Sometimes we just have to make do.”
“I had Peabody contact her, fuck with her a little more. Not only because it’s good strategy, but . . .”
“You can’t beat the monster in the closet unless you open the door. Our Peabody won’t be as unnerved by the woman now.”
“Plus Renee lost that round, so even better. Renee’s overplayed her hand, but doesn’t know it.”
Eve looked at the board again, and again thought, little pieces.
“I’m going to say this first, get it out of the way while it’s just you and me.”
“All right.”
“I’ve got this terrible hate on for her—so many levels of it. It’s Peabody, it’s Whitney, even Mira after I saw her today. It’s the department, and it’s the badge and everything it means.”
“I know. And it’s more.”
He would know, she thought. He would see. “Cop’s daughter. Can be rough, I guess. But screw that. She had two parents, a decent home. No hint of anything under that, and you don’t get to be commander of the NYPSD without making enemies. If there’d been anything, somebody would’ve found it.”
“I’d agree with that. And I imagine you spent some time today looking for any hint of that.”
“Yeah, I did,” she admitted. “No traumas, not one that shows—and I think by now, especially with Mira taking a hard, close look—it would. Normal is what she had. Well, a cop’s house probably has its own brand of normal, but—”
“She was housed and fed, educated, very likely loved, certainly tended to,” Roarke continued. “Her father set an example, held to a code. He didn’t lock her in dark rooms.”
Roarke touched Eve’s cheek, just a brush of fingertips. “He didn’t beat her, didn’t rape her, didn’t terrorize a helpless child night after night, year after year. Rather than value what she was given, she chose to dishonor it. She made a choice, and that choice betrays everything you believe in, everything you’ve made yourself.”
“It sticks in me. I need to get over it.”
“No. You’re wrong. You need to use it. And when you end this, you’ll know that what you made yourself from a nightmare beat what she made herself from normal. More, Eve, you’ll know that’s why you beat her.”
“Maybe.” She laid a hand on his. “Maybe. But right now I feel better, just getting that said. So.”
This time when she took a breath, it worked. “She’s not really worried about me, but more pissed off. More annoyed at the inconvenience, at having me bump up against her authority. She handed me this homicide because she got sloppy, because she surrounds herself with people without ethics, without any respect for the job.”
“That would be key.” Roarke took another sip of her coffee. “To run a successful business, it’s an advantage to hire people with a similar vision, or at least the ability to adapt to your vision.”
“Yeah, I think she’s got that down. But when your business is living a lie, you have to take what you get. Hotheads like Garnet, brutes like Bix. Plus, her ego’s a problem. She doesn’t look for the smartest, but the most malleable, the most easily corrupted. It’s most important for her to stay on top, to be in charge. To her way of thinking, as I see her, if she recruits the best and the brightest, somebody might outsmart her, out think her, maybe figure Why should I listen to her?”
“If she can’t grasp or accept it’s not essential to be the smartest person in the room, but to be sure the smartest person in the room is working for you, she was destined to fail.”
“She’s had a good run up till now.” Eve took the coffee back. “She runs her squad precisely—dominating by forbidding any sort of personality. No personal items, no genuine partnerships. Every man for himself,” Eve murmured. “That’s what I felt in there.”
She rose to walk to the board, to tap her finger on Bix’s photo. “She recruited him, and I’m going to bet she helped work his transfer to her unit—because of his skill set. Military, combat trained. Both parents also military. He takes orders, he’ll kill on command. He’s her dog.”
“How does she turn him?”
“I want Mira’s take, but I see it could be done a couple of ways. Maybe he was a good soldier, and good soldiers are often ordered to do harsh things for the greater good, or good or not, the mission. Illegals is an endless war. She could convince him this is another way to fight it. Or she recognized in him a need, a predilection to hurt, maim, kill, and channeled it to meet her requirements.”
“It could easily be both.”
“Yeah, it could. Garnet? She used sex and greed, and likely appealed to a Why the hell shouldn’t we get ours? That’s her play for a lot of it, I think, with variations on Why the hell should we do what we do, risk what we risk, step in what we step in, and settle for a cop’s lousy pay? We’re the ones holding the line. We deserve more.”
“She couldn’t play on the weaknesses if they weren’t there.”
“Everybody’s got weaknesses. You give in to them, you cross the line and do exactly what you’ve taken an oath to stop?”
The anger bubbled up again, the hot surge of it.
“You don’t deserve to be a cop, and you need to be taken down harder than the assholes the rest of us risk what we risk to stop. I’ve been up against wrong cops before. Something the size of the NYPSD? It’s inevitable. But she’s more.”
Eve drilled a finger into Renee’s photo. “She’s worse. A choice, you said, and that’s a goddamn bull’s-eye. It’s not that she’s weak, not that she’s greedy or needy—or not just. She chose to be a cop, then she chose to be dirty. To make a fucking business out of it. Deliberate. Calculated.
“I want to hurt her for it. I want to make the choice—just as deliberate
, just as calculated—to burn her for it.”
He smiled at her. “And that, Lieutenant, is how you use it to beat her.”
Peabody and McNab arrived first.
She handed off some new runs to Peabody, gave McNab the same names.
“I want a property search—one that doesn’t show yet. Just a standard inventory check. What you’re looking for are check-ins of these illegals. I want who was on the property desk, who generated the invoices for them. I want those crossed with the officers who confiscated, and with their reports. Just Central for now. We’ll keep it focused.”
“What can I do for you, Lieutenant?” Roarke asked her.
“Garnet has property in the tropics—which covers a lot of area. I need to find it. I need to find it without sending up any flags—and not using unregistered equipment,” she added, lowering her voice. “I figure if you’ve got nice beach property, you go there whenever you can manage it, which means you have to use transportation.”
“You would, yes. That’s quite an interesting puzzle. I believe I’ll enjoy it.”
“He’ll have a vehicle at that location—something high end. Probably a boat. And almost certainly an alternate ID to cover all of it. I figure it’s a long-term project, picking out the pin in a pretty massive haystack—”
“That would be needle.”
“Whatever. It would be good information to have at some point.”
“I’ll get started.”
“The rest should be here in about twenty. I guess I’ll have them chow down first, so they’re not distracted by the thought of food. Might as well have them temporarily distracted by actual food.”
Since Peabody and McNab were on her comp and auxiliary, she went into the kitchen and used the mini on the counter to run a few probabilities.
Sneaky, calculating, deliberate. Could she be all that, she wondered, and drive it through with this fire of rage and loathing burning in her belly?
“I guess we’ll find out,” she murmured.
When she heard voices, she stepped out again.
Time to get the party started.