Strangers in Death

by J. D. Robb

  “They earned it. Do you know what I had to swallow to sign my boys up for the program? To take charity, to let them know they had to take handouts? Dom wanted to play ball so bad, and Paulie wants what Dom wants. I couldn’t afford the fees, the equipment, so I swallowed it and signed them up. They earned the rest. They earned the rest,” she repeated as she got to her feet. “Now I got nothing more to say. You get your warrant to take me in if that’s the way it is. I’m going to call Legal Aid. You get out, ’cause I’ve got nothing more to say.”

  Shook her,” Peabody said when they were back on the sidewalk.

  “Yeah, it did. She relaxed some when we veered off into her family. Stayed bitchy, but relaxed. That’s interesting.”

  “She didn’t like seeing us at the door either. Most don’t,” Peabody admitted. “But she got the jumps the minute she made us. Guilty conscience, maybe.”

  “Maybe. The boys are good levers, excellent buttons to push. Takes half a minute to see she’d do most anything for her sons. Ava would’ve seen that, factored that. Used that.”

  “She’d have to get from here to there and back again,” Peabody considered. “I know you said Ava could’ve helped her with that, but I don’t see Ava putting down bread crumbs by hiring personal transpo for her.”

  “No, neither do I. Have to be subway or bus. Take the neighbor on the right, I’ll take the one on the left. Let’s see what they say about the comings and goings. Then we’ll go have a talk with her boarder.”

  I mind my own,” Cecil Blink stated the minute Eve stepped inside the musty, overheated row house. “What’s she done?”

  There was an avid look in his eye, and the smell of fried meat substitute in the air. “We’re just making inquiries in the neighborhood. Why would you assume Ms. Petrelli had done anything?”

  “Keeps to herself. That’s what they say about serial killers, ain’t it?” He nodded knowledgeably, and a thin storm of dandruff trickled from his scalp to the shoulders of his red-checked bathrobe. “And she don’t say three words to nobody if one will get her by. Don’t trust a closed-mouthed female. Used to own a restaurant, before they beat the horseshit and guts out of her husband and tossed him in the river. Mafia, that’s what. She’s connected.”

  He said it as if he were giving her hot news, so Eve pasted a look of interest on her face. “You don’t say?”

  “I do say, and right out loud. Probably was running illegals outta that restaurant, and they killed him—rival Mafia types. That’s how it’s done.”

  “I’m going to look into that, thanks. Meanwhile, did you notice anyone in the neighborhood out very early in the morning on March eighteenth? This past Tuesday. Say four A.M.?”

  “I mind my own.”

  Like hell. “Maybe you were restless that night, or got up for a drink of water. Maybe you noticed activity out on the street. Someone walking, or getting out of a car or cab?”

  “Can’t say I did.” Which seemed to disappoint him. “Her next door, she comes home late—midnight maybe—three nights a week. They say she cooks for Fortuna’s restaurant. Me, I don’t go to restaurants. They charge an arm and a leg.”

  “Any visitors next door?”

  “Boys have boys over. Probably up to no good. Woman who lives there with her—Nina Cohen—has some other biddies over every Wednesday night. Say they’re playing bridge. Couple of the other neighborhood women got boys her boys fool with, go over now and then. Her boys don’t go to school around here. Not good enough for her. They go to private school. They say on scholarships or some such thing. More likely Mafia money, if you ask me.”

  “Okay. Thanks for your time.”

  “I’m going to be locking my doors double quick. A closed-mouth woman’s a dangerous woman.”

  Unable to resist, Eve gave him a closed-mouthed smile, and left.

  The boys are well-behaved,” Peabody reported. “She keeps a clean house. Both the neighbor and her husband were sound asleep—bedroom’s at the back—on the night in question during the time line. She gives Petrelli big mother points.” When Eve only nodded, and continued to sit in the car, Peabody looked around. “What are we doing now?”

  “Giving Bebe a little more to think about. Unless she’s going to blow off work, she should be coming out soon.” Eve settled back. “You know what would be an even bigger incentive for somebody who earns mother points? You give the kids this big juicy carrot, then you threaten to yank it away. Unless.”

  “Get the boys in school, into the camps, give them a good taste of how it can be. Then, it’s the old ‘If you want them to keep this, you have to do this one little thing for me. Nobody’ll ever know.’”

  “It could play. There’s something about her though.” Eve studied those hopeful window boxes and tapped her fingers on the wheel. “But there’s also something under the something. So we give her a little more to think about.”

  It didn’t take long. Bebe came out of the house wearing a dull brown coat. Don’t notice me, it said to Eve. Just getting through here, just getting by.

  Her gaze flashed to the car, to Eve, and her mouth folded into a sharp, thin line. The neighbor might’ve given her points for motherhood, but Eve gave her points for shooting up her middle finger. It took spine to flip off a couple of cops who were dogging you for murder.

  Bebe stomped up the block. Giving her a few yards, Eve eased from the curb and slowly followed. Two and a half blocks to the bus stop, Eve thought. Had to be a bitch in the worst of the winter, in the rain, in the wind. Eve slid back to the curb as Bebe stood at the stop, arms folded, eyes straight ahead.

  When the bus lumbered up, Bebe stomped on. And Eve pulled out to follow. It chugged to the next stop, then the next, belching its way out of the tattered neighborhood into the next. The houses grew brighter, the sidewalks smoother, the vehicles more plentiful and newer.

  “Has to be hard,” Peabody said, “to come out of where you landed to work for somebody else in what you used to have.”

  “Slap you in the face every day.” She watched Bebe get out at the next stop, shoot her a furious glare, then hurry down the block to a whitewashed restaurant with a bright yellow awning.

  “Peabody, see what precinct covers this area. And let’s see if we can impose on a couple of our brothers from the Bronx to have Italian for lunch.”

  “Going to keep the pressure on.”

  “Yeah. She’s tough, but she’ll pop.”

  “I don’t know. I think making another pair of cops is just going to piss her off, dig her in. Legal Aid lawyer’s going to call us whining about harassment.”

  “She didn’t call Legal Aid. She’ll pop,” Eve repeated. “Twenty says she pops before end of shift today.”

  “Today? With those DeSalvo genes?” Peabody snorted at the idea. “I can use twenty. You’re on.”

  16

  AT CENTRAL, EVE SIGNED ANDERS’S VITAMIN DISPENSER out of evidence. She set it on her desk, sat, studied it. A solid gold pill dispenser, she mused. Even Roarke didn’t have one of those to her knowledge. Of course, he wasn’t one for popping a bunch of pills every night of his life either.

  If and when that day came, he’d probably have a platinum one, with diamond accents. Okay, no, he wouldn’t. That was entirely too fussy and girly.

  Which, she thought, Anders’s certainly was.

  More sports clothes than stylish ones. A man cave for an office.

  “Bought this for him, didn’t you, Ava? Planting those seeds. The poor schmuck had to use it if it was a gift from you.”

  Program it, she mused, turning the heavy gold box over in her hands, lift the cannily hidden tube, dump pills in. Pills tumble into proper slot. Load it up, and it tells you how many pills in each slot. Request number of any type, or any combination of types, and it dispenses, IDing by slot.

  “Well, you liked your gadgets, Tommy, and she knew it.”

  She put in a call to EDD expecting to get the acting captain, and was surprised to hit Feeney.

 
“So. You’re alive.”

  “Back in the saddle.” He grinned at her. “Feel like a couple billion, tax-free. Whatever they gave me knocked the bastard out of me. Or the wife’s chicken soup did.”

  “Glad to hear it. I’ve got this thing. Electronic pill dispenser.”

  “Why in hell would anybody need that?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine. It was Thomas Anders’s, and I’m working on the idea that his wife slipped a couple sleepers in here. All right if I bring it up?”

  “Sure. I can send somebody down for it.”

  “No, I’ll bring it. I want to run it by you anyway. Give me five.”

  She clicked off, resealed the box, initialed it, then tucked it under her arm as she headed out and up. In EDD, she veered straight away from the color and sound, and into Feeney’s office.

  With healthy color back in his basset hound face, Feeney sat at his desk. “I got work up the wazoo,” he told her, “and already had to kick a couple asses this morning. It’s good to be home.”

  “I spent a couple hours this morning intimidating a widowed mother of two. I love this job.”

  He laughed, then lifted his wiry eyebrows at the box she put on his desk. “Jesus, a gold pill spitter, with engraved initials?”

  “For the man you want to kill who has everything.”

  “You said a couple of sleepers. They wouldn’t do that much.”

  “He had traces of over-the-counter in him, but nobody can confirm he took same routinely. Ingesting one would put him out good enough to let somebody get into the bedroom, shoot him up with barbs and cock hardener. Or groggy enough so he could be bound up before he came around enough to know what was going on, because I think the barbs weren’t on the order sheet. They threw the scene off from the jump. Our girl Ava isn’t going to make a wrong turn like that.”

  “Wanted him awake for it.”

  “Yeah. Killer was meant to come up, truss him up, noose him—throat starts to constrict, what do you do?”

  “Open your mouth and try to suck air in.”

  “And when he does, killer shoves the dick trick into him. The asphyxiation would get him going, then you ring the cock. Let him gasp and flop while you set the scene. If you do it right—and it wasn’t done right—it’s going to look like the vic was playing around on the side, dipping into the kink. Kink got out of hand. I bet part of the instructions were to loosen the scarfing after he was cooked, at least loosen it so it would appear some attempt was made to revive. Then you have your kinky cheater, a tragic, embarrassing, but fairly routine accident, and the panicked partner fleeing the scene.”

  “Voi-fucking-là.”

  “We’d look for her, sure, but we’d get nowhere. Because Anders didn’t cheat, wasn’t into the kink. But the scene and the evidence would read that way.”

  That, Eve realized—taking his decent reputation as well as his life—gripped her guts. “But see, the killer shot him up with the dick hardener. It wasn’t taken orally. Shot him up with that, I’m betting, after she shot him up with the tranq.”

  “You want me to see if the wife diddled with the box?”

  “Yeah. If you can open it up, see if anything was taken out or added before his death. Couple of days before, probably. The wife left New York on March fifteen.”

  “Let me play with it.” Feeney initialed the bag, unsealed it to draw the box out. “Bitch is heavy. It’s got voice or manual settings. She did it manually, it’s going to be tougher to pin. Even if she did it by voice, a lawyer’s going to argue she was his wife. She filled it or added to it at his request, even the sleeper. He’s not here to say different.”

  “One step at a time.”

  She left him to it, started back down. She needed to see if Peabody had contacted Petrelli’s tenant, then they needed to start working on the other possibles she’d culled from the files. Run some probabilities.

  She had a feeling the computer would look favorably on Petrelli, given the data, but…

  She paused when she spotted Benedict Forrest outside her bullpen. It was getting so she couldn’t scratch her ass without coming back and finding some civilian waiting for her.

  He sprang to his feet. “Lieutenant Dallas, I need to talk to you.”

  Since she wouldn’t mind having another round with him, she gestured. “Let’s take it in my office.” She led the way, caught Peabody’s eye as she moved through the bullpen. The gleam in it had her pointing Ben toward her office. “Go ahead in. I’ll be a minute.”

  She skirted around desks to Peabody’s. “What do you have?”

  “Charles and Louise are getting married.”

  “I know. Did you—”

  “I know you know because Charles just told me he told you, but you didn’t tell me. All morning you didn’t tell me.”

  “It wasn’t the first thing on my mind.”

  “But this is huge.” She bounced in her chair, and made Eve wonder what it was about weddings that made grown women bounce. “It’s mega-mag! And he said he’s turned in as LC and he’s opening a practice as a therapist, and they’re going to have the wedding at your house in a couple months, and—”

  “Gee, Peabody, I have this connection to a murder waiting in my office. Maybe we could not take an hour later to talk about somebody else’s life.”

  “Aw, but it’s so sweet. And romantic.”

  Eve leaned down. “You do not sit here getting shiny-eyed at your desk, Detective. Not in my bullpen. Not unless you’ve gotten tagged by Ava Anders who gave you a full confession. Also, the words ‘sweet’ and ‘romantic’ don’t come out of your mouth in my bullpen unless they are coated and dripping with sarcasm. Now suck it up.”

  “Spoilsport.”

  “Lieutenant Spoilsport to you. Nina Cohen.”

  “As far as she knows, Petrelli didn’t leave the house on the night of the murder. But she also says Petrelli never leaves the house after midnight, so she’d assume she didn’t leave.” Peabody checked her watch. “Getting closer to the time you owe me twenty.”

  “Don’t count your twenty before it crosses the road,” Eve warned, and walked to her office.

  Ben paced. Eve could hear the slap of his feet on her worn floor. Back and forth, back and forth. She tended to do the same herself if something was screwing with her mind.

  “Sorry about that,” she said as she went in. “Have a seat.”

  “You’re looking at Ava as a suspect.”

  Eve closed the door behind her. It turned her office into a smaller box, but it was private. “It’s a habit of mine to look at people as suspects.”

  “But if you’re wasting time looking at someone who couldn’t possibly have hurt my uncle, then you’re not looking for the person who did.” He pushed at his hair with both hands. “Leopold told me you were in asking questions about her. He’s half inclined to think you’re right and felt he had to warn me. As if she’d strangle me with my own belt or something. It’s crazy.”

  “Your uncle was a wealthy man. Now she’s a wealthier woman than she was when he was alive.”

  “So am I. Man, I mean. I’m wealthier if you want to look at the damn dollars and cents of it.”

  “Dollars and cents are a tried and true motive for murder.”

  “She wasn’t even in the country. Now you’re asking for files on staff and volunteers, on women with kids in the programs. Good God.”

  Eve eased down on the corner of her desk. “You’re pretty passionate in her defense.”

  “I’m the only family, the only close family she has left.” He rubbed the back of his neck as if pain lived there. “Uncle Tommy would expect me to take care of her, to support her, and damn right to defend her.”

  “I got the impression you and Ava weren’t particularly close. Before.”

  “As I said—” Both his voice and his handsome hazel eyes chilled. “I’m the family she has left.”

  “And between you, you own all but a fistful of Anders Worldwide. I guess something like
that brings people closer.”

  Coldness flipped so quickly, so completely into shock, it surprised Eve the man didn’t physically revolve with it. “That—that’s a despicable thing to say.”

  “You’re a healthy single man. She’s an attractive woman.”

  “She’s my uncle’s wife. His widow. God, is this how you have to think? Do you make everything ugly and obscene?”

  “Murder does, Mr. Forrest. Both you and Ava have tight, solid alibis. That’s interesting, that both of you should be so solidly alibied.”

  “Interesting that she was away on a long-planned trip and that I got lucky? What’s wrong with you? If you want to take shots at me, fine. But I can’t have you taking them at her. Not with what she’s going through.”

  “Does she know you’re here?”

  “No. As if I’d tell her what you’re doing, add to her stress.”

  “Good. Now, take a step back. Take one back and describe your relationship with Ava before your uncle was killed.” She lifted a hand before he could speak. “Don’t bullshit me, Ben. Every lie I have to unknot wastes time. You want your uncle’s killer caught and justice served?”

  “Of course I do. Jesus, Jesus, I can hardly think of anything else. Of course I do.”

  “Tell me how you and Ava got along before Tuesday morning.”

  “All right, all right.” He pressed his hand to his temple, then dropped into her visitor’s chair. “We weren’t particularly close. Not at odds or anything, not exactly.”

  “What, exactly?”

  “We just…I guess we didn’t have anything in common. Except for Uncle Tommy, and maybe we didn’t always see eye-to-eye on how the programs were run or handled. But—”

  “Don’t but, don’t qualify. Give me a picture.”

  He blew out a breath. “Maybe it felt, in a weird way, as if we were in competition for him. That sounds so stupid. You could say I felt the longer they were married, the less she wanted me around. Maybe the less I wanted to be around her. We just…But she loved him, and that’s what matters. She loved Uncle Tommy. She was always buying him little gifts, or arranging for him to take a golf trip or a ski weekend, whatever.”