by J. D. Robb
“She squeezed him out.”
“That’s my take. I’m interested in his.”
Detective-Sergeant Allo had a modest house in a neighborhood of modest houses. And in the short driveway sat a huge boat.
Allo stood on the deck—the bow, Eve thought—polishing the brightwork with a rag. He took a long look when they pulled in, then laid the rag over the rail.
He had a sturdy, broad-shouldered build and carried a little extra weight in the middle. He wore a backward ballcap—Yankee blue—over hair he’d let go gray.
Retired or not, he had a cop’s eyes and gave Eve and Peabody a good once-over as he climbed off the boat, and they stepped out of the car.
“Is there a problem in the neighborhood, Detectives?”
“Not that I’m aware of. Lieutenant Dallas, Detective Peabody. Got a minute, Detective-Sergeant?”
“Got a lot of them since I retired. Put a lot of those into this baby here.” He patted the hull affectionately. “I’ve got you now,” he added with a nod. “Out of Central. Homicide. Somebody dead I know?”
“Again, not that I’m aware of. You were assigned to Illegals out of Central for a number of years, and a few months of that under Lieutenant Renee Oberman.”
“That’s a fact.”
“Would you mind telling us why you transferred out, and into the six-eight?”
His eyes stayed on Eve’s. “Can’t say why this should interest Homicide. Our son had his second kid, moved out here. My wife and I decided we wanted to be close, enjoy the grandchildren. We bought ourselves this place. The six-eight’s a lot closer to home than Central.”
“Nice house,” Eve commented. “Big boat.”
He grinned at it, very much like Mavis grinned at Bella. “I always wanted a boat. I’m shining her up. We’re going to take the family out this weekend.”
“Should be a nice one for it. Would it be fair to say, Detective-Sergeant, that you and Lieutenant Oberman didn’t mesh well?”
His face shifted back to neutral. “That would be fair.”
“Lieutenant Oberman notes in your file you had difficulty with her authority, with taking orders from a female superior.”
His jaw tightened. “What cause do you have to check my service records?”
“They’re of interest to me.”
His stance shifted, combative now. “I served thirty-five years, and I’m proud of every day I spent on the job. I don’t like an LT I never met coming to my home and questioning my record.”
“It’s not your record in question.”
His jaw remained tight, but his eyes narrowed in speculation. “You want me to dish some dirt on Lieutenant Oberman? I don’t much like you coming to my home for that either.”
She’d have been disappointed if he’d launched into a series of complaints, and trusted him more when he didn’t.
“I’m asking for your opinion. Thirty-five years on the job, solid record—and a single rip. Under Oberman. I have reasons for coming to your home, reasons for asking you about Lieutenant Oberman.”
“What are they?”
“I’m not free to give you that information at this time, but can tell you we’re on an active investigation.”
“What, do you think she killed somebody?” When Eve said nothing, he blew out a long breath. With his hands on his hips he looked away, just looked away for a space of time. “It’s a hell of a thing,” he murmured. “A hell of a thing. Have a seat on the porch. My wife’s off with some girlfriends. I’ll see what we’ve got cold to drink.”
He had iced tea, cold and sweet. They sat in the shade of the little covered porch and drank.
“I keep in touch,” Allo began. “Talk to or hook up with some of the guys I worked with. And I keep up with what’s going on. I know your rep, Lieutenant. Yours, too, Detective.”
He paused, drank again. “Let’s be clear. I never had a problem working with a female officer, or taking orders from one who outranked me. I served my last three years with a damn good detective, who happened to be female. I’m still pissed about that rip,” he admitted. “All this time, and it still eats at me. Insubordinate, my ass.”
He shifted, angled more directly toward Eve. “I argued with her, sure. But I never disrespected her. She says we all have to wear suits and ties, even on the desk, I put on a suit and tie. She wants us to clear off our personal items, even family photos. I clear them off. It’s her squad. I don’t like it—and I’m not the only one—but it’s her squad.”
He brooded a moment. “Her squad, that’s the thing. When you have a new boss, you expect changes. In how things are done, in the tone. Every boss has a style, and that’s the way it is.”
“You didn’t like hers,” Eve prompted.
“Cold, nitpicky. Not picking nits over an investigation, but your fricking shoe shine, your haircut. She played favorites. If you were down on her list you got the shit assignments. Every time. All-night stakeouts in the middle of the winter because somebody got a tip maybe something was going to go down. But the somebody who’d be one of the favored was too busy with something else to sit and freeze his ass off all night.”
He puffed out his cheeks, released the air. “Maybe all that sounds like picking nits, too.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Every boss has a style,” he commented, and looked at Peabody. “We pick up the style, learn to work with it so everybody gets the job done.”
“That’s how I see it,” Peabody agreed. “The job’s the thing.”
“The job’s the thing.” He nodded. “But she’d question the direction of an investigation, pull you off one and stick you on another. Dump somebody else’s petty case on you. That happened to me twice. I’m this close to making a bust, and she pulls me in, reassigns. When I argue it, she sits there behind her fancy desk and tells me she’s not satisfied with the quality of my work, or with my attitude.”
“That’s not style,” Peabody put in. “That’s not making the job the thing.”
“Sure as hell not.”
“Did you complain up the chain?” Eve asked him, though she had the answer in the file.
“No. I don’t work that way. The boss is the boss, and hell, the squad was closing cases. Plus this is Saint Oberman’s daughter, and when she came on as boss she was the golden girl.”
“And she hung a life-sized portrait of her father in the office, in case any of you forgot.”
Allo smiled at Eve. “You sure as hell couldn’t miss it. Anybody paying attention could see she was weeding out the old, sowing in the new. Handpicking when she could.”
He shrugged. “Boss’s privilege. But it got so I hated going in to work, hated knowing I’d be sitting in that squad room. It wears at you, makes you hard to live with. Hard enough to live with a cop, right?”
“No argument.”
“It wore me down. She wore me down. I knew she wanted me out, and I knew—after the rip—she was going to find a way. I wasn’t going to go out that way. I wasn’t going to have her put another mark on my record. The boss is the boss,” he said again, “but I’ll be damned. I might as well add my wife put her foot down, and I can’t blame her. So I put in for the transfer. I had another three years with a good squad, a good boss. And when I put in my papers, Lieutenant, it was my choice.”
“I’m going to ask you something, Detective-Sergeant.”
“Allo,” he said. “Just Allo.”
“Was she on the take?”
He sat back, shook his head from side-to-side. “I knew this was coming. Goddamn it.” He rubbed a hand over his face, shook his head again. “Did you see the name of my boat?”
“Yes, I did. The Blue Line.”
“Being retired doesn’t shift the line.”
“From where I stand that line breaks for a wrong cop, or it means nothing. For a cop who uses her badge, her authority to fill her own pockets, and worse, the line breaks.”
He kept his gaze hard on her face. “And if I say hell, yeah,
you’re going to believe me after everything I just told you?”
“Yes, I am. I came to you because I believe you’re a good cop—fuck retirement, Allo, you’re still a cop. You’ll always be a cop. I came to you because I believe you respect the badge, and because I believe I can take your word, even your opinion, to the bank.”
He took a long drink, let out a long breath. “I’m going to say hell, yeah, but I couldn’t prove it, couldn’t give you one solid piece of evidence. Not then, not now. She liked her closed-door meetings with her chosen few. And I know damn well with a couple of the busts I managed to stick on, somebody skimmed. No way I underestimate junk by the amounts it came back to after weigh-in. My mistake there was going to her on just that. Telling the boss I suspected somebody’d skimmed some off the top. That’s when things got bad for me. Or worse, I guess you’d say.”
He shrugged. “Coincidence? Maybe if you believe in coincidence. I never did.”
“Neither do I. I bet you still have your notebooks. I bet you still have your records of the investigations and busts you took part in under Lieutenant Oberman.”
“You’d win that bet.”
“I’m trusting you, Allo, to keep everything said here to yourself. Not to share it, at this time, with the friends you talk to, hook up with. I’m not going to insult you by saying if you do that, if you trust me with those records I’ll see that rip is expunged from your record. But I will tell you, either way you go, I’m going to look into that.”
“I’m not asking for a favor, but I won’t turn this one down.” He sat another minute. “She’s done murder, too?”
“Her hands are bloody.”
“I’m sorry to hear it, sorry because of her old man. You’re going to take her down.”
It wasn’t a question, but Eve answered anyway. “To the ground.”
He nodded, rose. “I’ll get my books.”
He paused at the door, turned back. “There was an officer—female officer—who went down in the line under Oberman.”
“Detective Gail Devin.”
He nodded. “She was a good cop. She was the daughter of an old friend of mine. My oldest friend. We went to school together in the old neighborhood. She had some concerns about Oberman and came to me with them.”
“What concerns?”
“How Oberman tended to have regular closed-door meets with certain members of the squad. How invoices for confiscated illegals and cash were usually under the estimate. Same as me. I looked into it after it happened, as best I could. It looked clean, but I always wondered. I had this place in me that wondered, and it still does. If you look into that, Lieutenant, if you look into what happened to Gail, you can forget about the rip.”
“I’ll be looking into both.”
Driving back to Manhattan, Eve considered angles, approaches, timing.
“I want you to take the lead on Devin.”
“Take the lead?”
“Approaching it like a cold case, an unsolved. Dig into the files. Have McNab and/or Webster help you if you need to shovel anywhere that might send Renee a flag. She’s not thinking about Devin—that’s old, settled business to her.”
“You think Renee had Detective Devin killed?”
“Fact: Devin wasn’t one of Renee’s handpicks. She was a newly minted detective, and according to our source—DS Allo, who strikes me as very grounded—she was solid. In my scan of her records, her evals were the same. Solid. Until assigned to Renee where they took a dip.”
“And that’s pattern with Renee.”
“Add in Mira’s profile, which says Renee has a problem with females. Conclude with another fact. Less than a year under Renee’s command, Devin goes down in a raid. The only officer to go down.”
“How did she go down?”
“The official report states she got separated from her team during the confusion and was found with her neck broken. Read the file, examine the evidence. Dig. Then I want you to tell me if Renee had Devin killed.”
“It could’ve been me. If they’d found me in that shower stall.”
“And you have to put that to the side and study, access, investigate objectively. If there was a cover-up, you uncover it.”
Eve engaged her ’link and contacted Webster.
Twelve
WEBSTER CLICKED OFF THE ’ LINK HE’D PUT ON privacy mode and looked across the table where he’d been enjoying a late lunch. “Sorry about that.”
“It’s not a problem.” Darcia smiled at him. “Do you have to go?”
“Soon.” He reached over, took her hand. “I’d rather stay.”
“There’s tonight. If you’re free, and interested.”
“I’m both. What would you like to do?”
“I happen to have two orchestra seats for a play—a musical. Broadway musical is on my New York checklist.” She lifted the glass of champagne she’d indulged in. “You weren’t. But I made an addendum.”
“Luckiest day of my life.” He was still riding on the thrill of it. “If I were to visit Olympus, what should I put on my checklist?”
“Hmmm, drinks rooftop of the Apollo Tower. The view is stunning. Horseback riding along Athena Lake, with a picnic in its young forest. Me. Will you visit Olympus?”
“Will you have drinks with me on the rooftop, ride with me along the lake, picnic with me in the forest?”
“I will.”
“I have some time coming. There’s something I have to wrap up first. Once I do, I’ll put in for it.”
“Then I’ll show you my world.” She looked down at their joined hands. “Is it foolish, Don, what we’re doing here, what we may be starting here?”
“Probably.” He tightened his grip on her hand. “I don’t care, Darcia.”
“Neither do I.” On a half laugh, she shook her head. “It’s so unlike me. I’m a practical woman.”
“And the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.”
She laughed fully, delightedly. “Your eyes are dazzled—I suppose mine are, too. I’m sitting here in this lovely restaurant in this exciting city, and all I can think is I’m sitting here with this handsome man who can’t take his eyes off me.”
“There’s nothing I’d rather look at.”
“Handsome, charming man,” she added. “But looks, even charm, are only the surface.”
“You’ve got an amazing surface, and I like everything I’ve found under it so far.”
“It’s only our second date,” she reminded him, and her eyes sparkled like her wine. “There’s more.”
“I’m looking forward to discovering you, Darcia. We don’t have to rush it. Well, hard to rush it anyway when we’ll be on two different planets—or a planet and a satellite—in a few days.”
“I like to take things slowly, carefully. The job, as you know, can be difficult, demanding, so in my personal life I prefer the uncomplicated.”
She lifted her champagne again, smiling at him over the pale gold bubbles. “I didn’t ask you into my hotel room last night because this—you and I—this will be complicated.”
“I’ve been taking a break from complicated myself, in the personal area. But I want to see you again, spend time with you. I want to see what happens next.”
“I’ve given some thought to what happens next. And since I know what I’d like that to be, I’ll be asking you into my room tonight.”
He smiled back at her. “I was hoping you would.”
With the data Webster passed to her, Eve ran an analysis of Accounting for Renee’s squad. Then an analysis of the analysis. The flood of numbers, the puzzlement of percentages gave her a headache. And still she couldn’t see a clear pattern. She couldn’t see enough to point a finger at anyone in charge of the accounts.
She toggled away from that—maybe if she let the numbers rest they’d make more sense to her—and took another sweep through Renee’s squad. There she believed she saw a pattern, where Detective Lilah Strong, a rookie uniform, and two other detectives stood as abnormalities
.
She needs clean cops, Eve calculated. To handle the piddly stuff, to turn in legit reports—and as fall guys when she needs or wants them. Use them, then lose them. One way or another.
She thought of Gail Devin, glanced at Peabody.
Her partner was in it deep and would stick, Eve knew, no matter how long it took, no matter how many layers needed to be shifted through.
She looked at her board.
On one side, Rickie Keener. Loser, criminal, junkie, low-life pig. But he was hers now.
On the other, Detective Gail Devin, by all reports a good cop with good instincts—and with the moral code to talk to an older, experienced cop she respected about her concerns over her boss.
Two sides of the scale, Eve decided, but she knew—she knew that while Renee may not have plunged the syringe or snapped the neck, she’d killed them both.
Added to one side of that scale, Detective Harold Strumb—stabbed to death in an alley while his partner and a squad mate walked away unharmed.
They wouldn’t be the only ones. And unless Renee went down, they wouldn’t be the last.
She opened Allo’s case notes, began to read.
She liked his style—terse, even pithy, but thorough. She noted he’d questioned Sergeant Runch’s invoices regularly. And when she correlated with Allo’s file under Renee’s command she found the lieutenant’s notations citing him as malingering or conflicting with fellow officers.
Eve started her own file on Allo’s cases during the seven-month period, the invoices, the evals. Not wanting to disturb Peabody, she sent her a memo to do the same on Devin, and to follow it, as she was with Allo, with a probability analysis.
While it ran, she began to study the Geraldi files she’d forced Renee to send her.
She put it on hold when Webster came in.
“You’ve got something?” she demanded.
“Nothing major. Why?”
“You look like you’ve got something. You look happy.”
“I’m a happy guy.”
She waved that away. “What have you got that’s minor then?”
“Marcell—partner of Strumb, the one who went down. IAB’s got a file on him.”