Promises in Death (10 page)

Eve stopped, frowned. “Okay, that’s a thought. She arms herself first, though, so it’s not a neighborly visit. It wouldn’t be smart, going to another apartment for a meet when it’s on the shady. Then why did the killer, if he’s inside, need to jam the rear door security camera? Maybe to throw us off,” she said, answering herself. “So we’re looking outside the building.”

She paced again. “Unnecessary complication. But we’ll interview the tenants again. It just feels like an extra step to take, when SOP would be to run and interview everyone anyway.”

“I can help with the electronics.”

“That’s Feeney’s call. He’s always happy to have the uber e-geek on board, but he may have it well under control. I’ve got a lot of case files to wade through. I need to study her currents, her closed, her open, and what I got from Atlanta. You can—yeah, yeah, it’s an insult to you—but you can think like a cop. Maybe you can take a look at Atlanta while I do New York. Plus, they need to be cross-referenced. I need to know if anything from before connects with now.”

“And I can do that faster than you.”

“Yeah, you can.” She angled her head. “You can also think like a criminal, which is handy. Would you have sent her weapons to the primary? Why or why not?”

“I wouldn’t have taken them in the first place. A smart criminal takes nothing—unless it’s straight thievery, which this wasn’t—and leaves nothing of himself behind. Otherwise, there’s that connection.”

“But he did take them. And I don’t think he’s stupid.”

“They must have served a purpose. Leaving them—especially if he used one to kill her—would be, in my opinion, more of an insult to her. And you, or whoever caught the case. So taking them served another purpose, even if it was just the jab to you by sending them back. He’s not a pro.”

“Because?”

“A pro does the job, walks away, moves on. He doesn’t taunt the police.”

“Agreed. He might be a professional criminal, but it wasn’t a professional hit. It looks simple, on the surface, but it was actually much too elaborate—and too personal—for a straight hit. A straight hit, you don’t take her in a populated building, but lure her out of it, maybe to a meet. Take her there, or along the way. He wanted something, information or something she might have taken with her we can’t know about. Or he wanted to give her a message before he finished her. And he wanted her found without much delay.

“I want to set up my board here, and run some probabilities before I start on the case files.” She dug out a disc. “Here’s Atlanta. All data’s on my office unit, which I know you can access.”

“Then I’ll get started.”

“Roarke.” It had niggled at her all day, and still she hadn’t meant to ask. Hadn’t meant to bring it up. “Morris . . . when I was with him today, he said that being involved with a cop, being in a relationship with one . . . He said every day you have to block out the worry. Fear,” she corrected. “He said fear. Is that how it is?”

He slipped the disc into his pocket to take her hands, and rubbed his thumb along her wedding ring. The design he’d had etched into it was an ancient charm. For protection. “I fell in love with who you are, with what you are. I took on the whole package.”

“That’s not answering the question. Or, I guess, it is.”

His gaze lifted from her ring, met hers. Held hers. “How can I love you and not be afraid? You’re my life, Eve, my heart. You’re asking, you’re wondering if I ever worry, if I ever fear, that one day Peabody or Feeney, your commander—a cop who’s become a friend—will knock on my door? Of course I do.”

“I’m sorry. I wish—”

He cut her off by brushing his mouth over hers—once, then twice. “I wouldn’t change a thing. Morris is right, you have to block it out, and live your life. If I didn’t, couldn’t, I’d never let you leave the house.” He brought her hands to his lips now. “Then where would we be?”

“I’m careful.”

He gave her a look filled with a mix of amusement and frustration. “You’re smart,” he corrected, “you’re skilled. But not always as careful as you might be. I married a cop.”

“I told you not to.”

Now he laughed, and kissed her again where her brow had furrowed. “And would I listen? I’m damn good at being married to a cop.”

“Best I ever saw.”

His eyebrows shot up. “Well now, that’s quite the compliment.”

“I don’t take it for granted. I know it seems maybe like I do, but I don’t. I don’t take for granted that when I walk in two hours—or maybe it was three—late like tonight, forget we had plans, you don’t get mad. Or all the other things. I don’t take it for granted.”

“That’s good to know.” Odd, he realized, that she would need reassurance here. Or not so odd, really. The death of another cop, and one a friend had loved, brought it home. “We made promises to each other, nearly two years ago now. I’d say we’ve done a damn fine job at keeping them so far.”

“I guess we have. Listen, if sometimes you can’t block it, you should say it. Even if we fight about it, you’ve got a right to say it.”

He traced his finger down the dent in her chin. “Go to work, Lieutenant. There’s no worries tonight.”

Sure there were, she thought when he went into his office. But it seemed like they were handling them okay.

She had told him not to marry her, she remembered. Thank God he hadn’t listened.

She set up her board, pinning up Coltraine, her squad, the names of any tenant in her building with a sheet, the names of the particulars in her most current cases. She added a photo of the shipping box, the weapons, the note, the badge. Lab reports, the established time line. She had a description of the ring the victim should have been wearing, and a close-up of it she’d extracted from a photo in Coltraine’s apartment.

Why had the killer returned the gun, but kept the ring?

She studied the board, angled it so she could study it from her desk. Armed with a fresh cup of coffee, she sat to run a series of probabilities.

The computer calculated an eighty-two-point-six percent that the victim and her killer had known each other or had some previous contact. A ninety-eight-point-eight percent that the victim was a specific target.

So far, she thought, she and the machine were in accord.

She decided to leave it there, and start on the case files.

Neither case contained any actual violence, she noted. The threat of it in the Chinatown case, but no execution of violence. Two males, wearing masks, rush into a market at closing, grabbing the female owner as she wheeled in one of the sidewalk carts, and holding a knife to her throat. Demand all cash and credits on the premises, and the security discs. Get both. Order both the owners—husband and wife—to lie on the floor. Apparently grab a few snack packs and book.

Less than three hundred netted—small change for armed robbery, she mused.

The vics had been shaken up, but unharmed. Though they’d turned over the discs, the husband had noticed a tattoo on the wrist of the knifeman—a small red dragon—and both had stated they believed the robbers had been young. Teens to early twenties.

The snack pack snitch told Eve the same.

They’d given the police a very decent—and unusually consistent—idea of height, weight, build, coloring, clothing. Two witnesses saw two young men matching the description running away from the direction of the market.

Penny-ante, Eve mused. A couple of stupid kids. Confirmed, as the investigating officers had tracked down the tattoo parlor, and were ready to hunt up and pick up one seventeen-year-old Denny Su who’d had the ink on his right wrist.

No idiot teenager, and his as-yet-unidentified dumb friend, had the smarts to access Coltraine’s building and get the drop on a cop.

The break-in—literally, as a window had been smashed to access—netted a bigger profit. But a guy who could finesse the solid security at Coltraine’s building had the skills to finesse the less solid on the electronics shop. Plus, the glass had been broken from the inside, leading the investigators to conclude—ta-da—inside job. They’d begun to lean on one of the employees. From the notes Eve read, she’d say they were leaning in the right direction.

In this case, the suspect was again young, fairly stupid, and had a short sheet of shoplifting charges. Guy liked to steal, simple as that, Eve mused. He didn’t score for her as a cop killer.

She took the time to run both through probability, and in each case the machine agreed with her, with both percentages under eighteen percent.

Eve sat back, studied the board. “Do I run your squad through my comp, Coltraine? It’s an ugly business, cops running cops. The comp’s going to favor them. Nothing in their data to hint at the dirty. Why does a clean cop, at least clean on record, kill another cop? The machine’s not going to find that logical.

“Neither do I. But I have to run it.”

“Eve.”

“What?” She glanced over, saw Roarke in the doorway that adjoined their home offices. “Sorry, talking to myself. You found something interesting in Atlanta.”

“I found something. A case she worked about three years ago. You haven’t gone through these files yet?”

“No. I just got them in this afternoon. What about the case she worked three years ago?”

“A robbery. An upscale antique shop. The manager was beaten, several thousand dollars’ worth of merchandise taken, nearly that much destroyed. They also forced him to open the safe and turn over all the cash, credits, and receipts—which carried the credit and debit card data. One of the other employees found him when he went in to work, notified the police and the MTs. Coltraine was assigned.”

“Okay. So?”

“During the investigation she interviewed the owner of the shop, and according to her case file, spoke with him on the matter several times. His name’s Ricker. Alex Ricker.”

“RICKER.” THE NAME RAMMED INTO EVE LIKE a bare-knuckled jab. Sucker punch. “Max Ricker’s son?” “Yes. I checked to be sure.”

She took one long breath to regain her balance. “So Alex Ricker has property and business in Atlanta. Wasn’t he in Germany or something?”

“He was raised there, and his father kept him insulated. When Ricker and I had . . . business together, Alex was kept back. I never met him. I’m not sure any of Ricker’s associates did—not then.”

Yes, she had her balance back now, and walked it through. “You worked with Ricker, back in the bad old days. Went out on your own, did a hell of a lot better. Years later, you help me take Ricker down, way down, so he’s spending the rest of his miserable life in a concrete cage off-planet. I wonder what his baby boy thinks of that.”

“I don’t know anything of their relationship, but I do know that Ricker’s connected to me—to my father, to yours. I know he went to a lot of trouble to take me down, and failed. And to end you, and failed. Now his son may very well be connected to your victim.”

Eve sat back, tapped her fingers on her thighs. Thinking, thinking. “Max Ricker had a lot of cops in his pocket. A lot of officials, a lot of politicians. We dug some of them out last year, but it’s unlikely we dug them all. Would Ricker have passed them to his son?”

“I can’t say for sure—yet. But who else?”

“Yeah. And his
businesses,
too—what we didn’t find and shut down. Certainly, his contacts, his power points, and there’d be finances. Coltraine meets the son of a notorious criminal, now doing life—well, several terms of life—she’d have run him. She’d run the owner of the business that got hit. It’s routine. Make sure it doesn’t come up an insurance fraud, at the very least. When she did, she’d have made the connection to his father. She’d ask him about it. Have to.”

She pushed up, walked to her board to study Coltraine’s ID shot. “She’d have to ask. Three years ago Ricker was still at large, still slithering through the loopholes, but any standing background check on the son would have coughed out the data on the father.”

“I don’t know if it has any bearing on your case, but . . .”

“Yeah, but.” She looked back at Roarke. “Did she close it? The case?”

“In a manner of speaking. She narrowed it down to three suspects. In each case when she secured a search warrant and went to serve it, she found the suspects gone and several items from the antique shop on the premises. Within two days, the bodies of the three men were found floating in the Chattahoochee River—chained together.”

“The what river? Did you make that up?”

“I suppose I could have, but no. I suspect some Native Americans did that a few centuries ago.”

“I think it’d be embarrassing to be dead in the Hoochie-Coochie River.”

“Chattahoochee.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Quite a bit, I’d think, to Atlantans.” He moved to her, laid a hand on her cheek. “And now that you’ve finished lightening the mood until you can get a handle on this . . .”

After a while, Eve thought, marriage turned walls into clear glass so both of you could see right through each other. “Okay. Okay, so maybe it’s like father, like son? Ricker’s a killer. He didn’t think twice about snapping necks or slitting them. The son gets ripped off, hunts down the ripper-offers—or follows Coltraine’s dots to same—and does them. Or has them done. She’d have to look there.”

“According to the file, Alex Ricker was attending a charity event, in Miami, with a few hundred witnesses at the time of death of the three suspects.”

“Didn’t want to get his hands dirty, ordered the hit when he was covered.”

“Possibly. If so, he proved as elusive as his father did. Oh, and I accessed the ME reports on the dead thieves.” He watched her start to speak—to object, no doubt—then swallow it. “They’d been beaten over the course of several hours, incurred numerous broken bones before their throats were slit. That’s the Ricker touch, in my opinion.”

“She had to know it.” Eve studied Coltraine again, tried to see into her head. “Everyone says she was thorough, detail-oriented. She wouldn’t have missed the link.”