Faithless in Death: An Eve Dallas Thriller (Book 52)

by J. D. Robb

  “That’s how you survive.”

  “Yeah.” Gina swiped away the tears, managed to smile a little. “You get it. Then The Asshole told me we were moving into a house of our own, and as long as I did what I was told—exactly—and kept a clean house and all that, I could live outside the compound. We moved to Zombie Town with our own version of Mother Catherine in Mother Rat.”

  “Her full name?”

  “Barbara Poole. Her asshole’s Vince.”

  “Did she ever assault you?”

  “No. I mean she slapped me a couple of times when I talked back.”

  “Assault. You’re filing charges.”

  “I am?”

  “Yeah, you are.” She gave Peabody the come-ahead when her partner appeared at the door, then picked up her ’link. “Reo, I need you at Dochas.”

  “I’ve got a meeting in—”

  “Cancel it. I’ve got two women in-house now with their three minor children. And a fucking bevy of charges on Natural Order. Kidnapping, enforced imprisonment, torture, rape, assault, assault and battery.”

  “Does this tie to the Piper case? Because that’s the meeting.”

  “It does. I’ve got a briefing at Central in … shit, forty minutes. I need to get this ball rolling. Peabody, get Yancy in here now. Reo, we have to move fast—smart but fast. I’ve got the block locked off, but word’s going to get to their HQ eventually.”

  “I’m on my way.”

  Eve clicked off, turned back to Gina. “APA Reo’s going to review this recording—I’m going to copy her on it. And take your statement, yours and Zoe’s. She’s going to file charges against all the people you mentioned.”

  “They said they’d take my kids.”

  “Nobody’s going to touch your kids. Peabody, this is Gina—it’s not Dawber.”

  “No. No, thanks for that. Thanks. It’s Mancini.”

  “Gina Mancini. Gina, why don’t you take a break? Maybe Zoe’s up. You can hang with your kids, check out what rooms they have for you here.”

  Gina rose. “Can you really do this? Can you really arrest them, make them pay?”

  “Yes, I can. And I will.”

  As Gina went out, Eve held up a finger, tried a run. “No Gina Mancini of her age in New York—that’s where she was living when they took her. We’ve got a Gina Dawber, but the data prior to her bogus marriage is equally bogus.”

  “Bogus marriage?”

  “Drugged, forced, raped. Fuck, it’s uglier than we thought. One of them killed Ariel Byrd, and that opened a crack into the whole sick system. The social worker’s part of it. Jane Po. I’ve got Carmichael and Shelby watching her. I don’t want to move too fast. We pick her up, she tags a lawyer, they know we know.”

  Peabody plopped down. “What the hell happened after midnight?”

  “I’ll brief thoroughly at Central.”

  She gave Peabody the essentials.

  “Listen to the recordings. I need to keep moving.”

  Eve stepped out, and, following the sound of banging and hooting, found a kind of playroom. All three kids ran around like maniacs while the two mothers huddled together, smiling.

  “You got her out.” Zoe leaped to her feet. “You said you would, and you did.”

  “Here’s what I need. The police artist is coming in. I need Gina to describe the recruiter and this Mother Catherine. Zoe, I need you to describe any of the men you saw last night. Gina, what did you see last night?”

  “Westley’s teething, so he was fussy. I didn’t hear the fight—Zoe told me a little just now—but I saw the vans pull up. I saw the men get out. One of them’s a doctor or medical, I think. I know I saw him at the compound. I can describe him.”

  “Good. I need you both to file charges when APA Reo gets here.” She glanced back and both women just stared at her. “Here’s Detective Yancy now. You were quick.”

  “I don’t live far.”

  “Gina, how about you go first? You can use the office we were in before. Zoe’s got the kids, right, Zoe?”

  “Oh, sure. I’m so happy to see them. So happy, Gina.”

  They hugged, swayed with it. Then Gina popped up. “Let’s do this. I really want to do this.”

  Eve led them back. “Peabody, they need the room.”

  “Hey, Yancy.” Peabody’s lips curved, but the smile didn’t reach her eyes as she picked up Eve’s recorder and came out.

  “I didn’t get far,” she told Eve. “But far enough to see where it was going. Po? She’s supposed to help people.”

  “We’ll have her picked up, charged, have a team move in on the halfway house—there’s bound to be some of Natural Order in there, too. We need to coordinate, all of it. It’s going to take time and a shitload of manpower.”

  “We have to conclude Marcia Piper’s dead.”

  “We’ll see what the sweepers find, but it leans that way. We’re going to find more people who’ve been taken or held, or Realigned. More people, even, like Gwen Huffman, who were secretly tracked.”

  “If they had that sort of response to the Piper house, they’ve responded before. Cleaned crime scenes before.”

  “Yeah. Organized, ready. You give somebody that kind of power over somebody else? You’re going to have more bodies to clean up. Who reports it? Nobody. And you just wipe their data, if you haven’t already. Hell of a system.”

  Eve turned when Natalie led Reo in.

  “Good. Natalie, sorry, but I need another private space.”

  “No problem. Moira’s due in shortly, but you can use her office. I’ll explain what I can when she gets here.”

  “It would help if APA Reo could speak to Zoe. She’s watching the kids.”

  “I’ll take over there, and send Zoe up. Oh, good morning, Desi. Would you mind showing these ladies Moira’s office?”

  “Thanks, but I know where it is.”

  Eve started upstairs. “I copied you on the two interviews,” she began.

  “I started listening to them on the way here. Well, to the first one. Zoe Metcalf.”

  “I’ve got to get to Central, so I’m going to leave you to handle things here. Gina, the second recording, is working with Yancy in an office downstairs. I need warrants.”

  She rattled several off, enough to make Reo’s eyes widen. “And you’re going to get me that warrant for their HQ, Reo. You’re going to have plenty to get that warrant. You’re going to get me an arrest warrant for Stanton Wilkey.”

  “On what charges?”

  “You’ll have a slew of them, trust me. We’re going to spread that out to his sons, his daughter, and to every so-called husband and a few of the women on that block in Tribeca. We’re going to clean up after these people—a social worker, a halfway house, and that won’t be limited to New York. That’s not how they operate.”

  “Let me talk to your wits first. I heard enough on the first recording we can put out a warrant for Lawrence Piper. If for nothing else at the moment, for compromising and leaving a crime scene.”

  “Issue it, but I don’t want to use it yet. It’s going to be about timing. To take them down, to break the back of this fucked-up cult, we need to time it perfectly. Come into Central when you finish here, or at least tag me.”

  “Count on it.” Reo smiled easily when Zoe came up the stairs. “And this must be Zoe. I’m APA Reo, Zoe.”

  “Natalie said you needed to talk to me, and she’d watch the kids.”

  “They’ll be fine with her.”

  “I know.” Zoe nodded at Eve. “Everyone here wants to help. Everyone here is so kind. It’s like I was inside a terrible nightmare, and now I’ve woken up in such a nice dream.”

  “We’re going to talk in here, okay?” Reo opened the office door.

  “Tag me,” Eve repeated, then started back down. “Book a conference room,” she told Peabody. “We’re going to need the space. We’ll head in now, get it set up. Listen to the recordings. I need to think, and you need to catch up.”

  Peabody u
sed earbuds to give Eve quiet, and sat grim-faced as she listened.

  When Eve pulled into Central’s garage, Peabody took out the ear-buds. “I didn’t finish, it’s a lot. But I’m damn well caught up. They’ve been running this—I don’t have a name for it—for decades.”

  “Probably didn’t start out this way. It grew. It got greedy. It got arrogant, and it started to believe, really believe, its own bullshit. How are you going to propagate the world without women, pregnant women? Each to their own race. You can’t have people of the same sex getting together—no organizational growth that way. You want young, healthy women with a lot of childbearing years in them. Not enough to make it profitable, to spread the word? You start ‘recruiting.’ ”

  “Then you have, like, a pecking order,” Peabody continued as they got on the elevator. “Like we saw at the compound.”

  “And you have someone valuable, like Gwen? Good genes, deep pockets, loyal members? You do what you have to do to keep her in the fold. Realignment. If that doesn’t work, you watch her, protect your investment, do what has to be done. You’ve just got to get her married and pregnant, and, affairs aside, she’s willing to go along with that for the money and status.”

  “Piper’s a good choice for that. He’s violent, and he’s deep in the loop. Impulsive, like Mira said. He killed his pregnant wife because she talked to us. It had to be because she talked to us and told him, Dallas. Or someone else on the block told him.”

  “Agreed. But I don’t think he killed Ariel. Company man, that’s what he is. They rarely act on their own. If he had orders to take her out, he’d have messed her up first. I see him as a fist guy. Could be wrong.”

  Because she stayed in thinking mode, she managed the elevator clear up to Homicide.

  “Start setting up. I need to do some check-ins. We got a room?”

  “Conference room one.”

  “Get plenty of chairs. I asked Whitney to bring in the feds. We’re going to want them. We’re crossing out of our jurisdiction for this.”

  They split off, and Eve turned into the bullpen. Apparently rolling out Jenkinson early didn’t spare the tie.

  Today’s was a sunburst of yellow with a multitude of fiery red squiggles.

  She literally felt her eyes shake in their sockets.

  “Got Santiago, Trueheart, and Reineke in the break room getting coffee. Rest on their way, boss.”

  “Good, conference room one, twenty minutes.”

  “We gonna bust some ass today?”

  “That’s the plan.”

  “My favorite plan in the world of plans.”

  She couldn’t disagree.

  She got coffee, started to tag Roarke. Her incoming signaled from him before she did.

  “I’m at Central,” she said.

  “As I am—in EDD. We have some work here, but you’d want to know Piper, the social media VP, has thousands of names, IPs. He has what appears to be the membership list—the global one. Or those who sign up for alerts. Only a handful of females there.”

  “Including someone like Paula Huffman?”

  “Including and like, yes. He has considerable correspondence as well. Some’s encrypted, but we’ll deal with that. We’ve found the social media is also segregated. That is, it’s designed for specific race groups and programmed to send to same. No mixing there, for the most part. It’s inclusive only when Whitney himself adds a message.”

  “Get whatever you can get in the next fifteen. You all need to be at this briefing. Conference room one.”

  “I’ll pass that along.”

  “See you then.”

  She pushed at the sweepers next, got an in-progress report from the head sweeper, and added it to her briefing list.

  She put everything she needed together with minutes to spare.

  In the conference room she saw Peabody had done her job, and well.

  “EDD got a little fresh data, nothing earth-shattering, more part of the whole. The sweepers, on the other hand, got blood.”

  “Marcia Piper’s.”

  “Hers and his,” Eve confirmed. “It took a deep-level sweep—the order cleaned up really well, knew what chemicals would disguise or eliminate most of it, and they were pretty thorough. But the problem for them was the hole the vic’s head put in the wall that they needed to patch up. It looked all clean and shiny, but the sweepers knew where to look, and they got blood, some gray matter mixed with the compound they patched with.

  “And Larry—the fuck? He washed up in the kitchen sink—they know that because the cleaners polished that up, including the drain. But when he changed his clothes, the blood on the old ones, just a trace, transferred when he brushed against the bedroom closet door. Inside the door. Cleaners missed it.”

  “Our guys are better than theirs,” Peabody said.

  “Damn straight. No sightings of his vehicle from the APB I put out. He’s in that compound.”

  “We sure as hell have probable cause to look for him there.”

  “And we will. I need to check with Carmichael and Shelby.”

  Cops started to filter in while Eve walked back into the hall, checked in. And took time to speak to Shelby, ask a few more questions.

  She broke it off when she saw Whitney heading her way with a fed she knew, with one she didn’t.

  “Commander, Special Agent Teasdale.”

  “Lieutenant. I look forward to working with you again. This is Special Agent Conroy. He’s well versed on Natural Order.”

  “Tony Quirk is a friend of mine.” A well-built man in his early forties, Conroy held out a hand. “We worked on Natural Order the last two years. He went in, as I’m mixed race and wouldn’t qualify.”

  “I’ve read your reports, and his. I want to say that the murder of Ariel Byrd has blown this open.”

  “I hope to hell we can close it, and it’s not too late for Tony.”

  “We’ve gathered considerable information just in the last few hours. We’re going to close it. If Special Agent Quirk is alive, we’ll find him. We’re waiting for EDD. APA Reo will join when she’s finished interviewing two new witnesses. A police artist is also working with those witnesses. I haven’t had time to write this up. It’s moving fast.”

  “I’ll take you in,” Whitney said to the agents. “We’ll get some coffee.”

  “I’ll be in shortly, Commander. I’ve got a communication coming in. Dallas. What’ve you got?”

  “A damn good wit,” Yancy told her. “We’ve got the recruiter—Gina said she’d never forget, and she didn’t. I got good enough for facial rec, and we’ve got her.”

  “Show me.”

  When he did, she just nodded.

  “You don’t look surprised.”

  “I’m not, but you just nailed it shut. I need to start the briefing, but I need you to finish there, get all you can. I’ll read you in when you get here. You’re in this, Yancy, all the way.”

  “Understood, and I’m good here until it’s done.”

  She needed Mira, she thought. And even as she thought it, Mira hurried down the corridor in her perfect pale blue suit, pale blue heels with their blue-and-white needles.

  “I’m so sorry. Traffic.”

  “You’re fine. I’m waiting on EDD, and any other data that comes through in the next two minutes.”

  “Eve, you look exhausted.”

  It surprised more than irritated because she felt revved. “No, I’m good.”

  “There are shadows under the shadows under your eyes.”

  “I’m good,” she repeated. “Here’s Feeney and Roarke. Get a seat, and we’ll get this started.”

  “I got McNab and Callendar in the lab,” Feeney said, brisk now. “I put them on the Dawber e’s. They already hit on what’s listed as potentials. Women, Dallas. Girls—sixteen to twenty. Either in college or in trouble. Halfway houses, college campuses, foster homes, street kids. He’s got a list of those he refers to as recruits.”

  “And names of finders—they call th
em finders,” Roarke said in disgust. “Jane Po’s on there in the New York system.”

  “This is good, this is perfect. Be ready to brief on that.”

  “He needs to go into a very cold cage for putting that shocker on a child.”

  “We’re going to put him in one,” Eve assured Roarke. “We’re going to put a whole bunch of them there. Go get a seat, get coffee. I just need a minute to organize my thoughts.”

  When she’d had her minute, she walked in. Cops milled, drank coffee, studied the board.

  So many places to start, she thought, but she looked at the board. She knew where, who, and why.

  “Take a seat,” she ordered. “This is going to be long. Ariel Byrd. This didn’t start with her, but her murder is the turning point. We’re going to get justice for her, and when we do, we’re going to take down not just her killer, but the culture that fostered it.”

  She took them through the murder, Gwen Huffman, the Natural Order connection. From there she wound her way to the block in Tribeca, the missing brother, before asking the feds to brief on the missing agent.

  Baxter’s comm signaled at the end of that portion.

  “Sorry, LT, we caught one.”

  Whitney signaled for Baxter to hand him the communicator. “I’ll transfer it, and any others for the duration of the briefing.”

  Rising, he stepped out to handle it.

  Eve stepped back up, continued with the interviews and observations in Connecticut, and onto Ella Alice Foxx.

  She had Feeney brief on the EDD input in that area.

  “They wiped her out.” Carmichael studied Ella—Yancy’s sketch, the ID shot—on the board. “Just disappeared her. Her caseworker, the admin from the halfway house, didn’t file reports? Doesn’t pass the stink test.”

  “No, it doesn’t. Which is why Officers Carmichael and Shelby are watching Jane Po at this time. We have more evidence she’s complicit in this, which I’ll get to.”

  “Pick her up now,” Jenkinson commented, “her first tag’s to whoever she’s working with.”

  “Correct. We have good reason to believe she, in coordination with the halfway house, is funneling young women, potentially young males as well, to Natural Order. She may be a true believer, it may be for money. It could be both.”