“Got two more for you.”
He stood, hands in the pockets of his baggy brown suit.
To Eve’s eye, it didn’t look like he’d slept in it because he didn’t look like he’d slept much at all.
“Thanks. We went through five this morning.”
He nodded, wandered to her skinny window. “Anything?” “Did you know Louis Noy? Captain, Anti-crime.”
“That one still leaves a stain. Anti-crime, my ass. Spent his whole fucking career taking payoffs, planting evidence or ditching it depending on the payload. Connected?”
“Nothing I can find, but it’s the only one that stands out.”
She laid out her theory while he nodded, stared out the window. “We’ll add that in, add a filter, see what we dig out.”
“Okay.” She got up, programmed coffee for both of them. Something here, she thought. He’d get to it in his own time.
“The two I brought you? I knew one of them. Rookied with him. Sanctimonious bastard, or that’s how he played it. Turns out, as he worked his way up to lieutenant, he was hustling street LCs, banging plenty of them, but taking a cut, hustling dealers, taking a cut there. Anyway, he got busted, took himself out. Had two ex-wives by then, a couple kids.
“I want to take that one, do those interviews. I knew the son of a bitch.” “Okay.”
“Doesn’t fit the new filter, but—” “We’ve still got to cover it.”
“Yeah, gotta cover it.” As Eve often did, Feeney paced the small space, one eye on the murder board.
He stuck his hands in the pockets of his rumpled suit. “I didn’t much like Greenleaf. Always had a stick up his ass.”
“I didn’t, either, same reason.”
Feeney just nodded, hands in his pockets, eyes on the board.
“Plenty of times, you look at IAB as the enemy,” he said. “Cops got a job to do, right? Who needs that second-guessing, microscoping-what-it- takes-to-do-it bullshit? They’re not on the streets, not going through the door. They’re not living it.”
“No, they’re not.”
“And some who go into IAB, they put a target on a cop’s back because they want that power, like holding it over you. But … Hell, the truth of it is, you gotta have the watchdogs because some fuck up. Maybe make a mistake—and that’s human and, for fuck’s sake, cops are human. But maybe it’s not a mistake, maybe it’s some son of a bitch using the badge as an excuse to do what we’re supposed to use it to stop.
“An excuse to pound on somebody, an excuse to get their palm greased.” He turned to her then.
“You know what it’s like when you go after another cop, a wrong cop. You went after Oberman, dirty as they come, and you nailed her ass. And still some are going to look sideways at you for it.”
“She’ll spend the rest of her life in prison, and I’m sitting here. I can live with the sideways looks.”
“Yeah, there’s that. I was proud of you, what you did, how you did it, why you did it.”
“You were part of it,” she reminded him. “You, EDD, my partner, my bullpen.”
“It was your op, right down the line. Anyway,” he said, and looked away again. “You start looking at these poor fucking excuses for cops, too many of them. You start thinking one’s too many, but, kid, they just keep coming. Makes you sick. Pisses you off, and makes you sick on top of it.
“And you think how Greenleaf did this every goddamn day. Not one bad cop, not a handful, but dozens and dozens. Yeah, maybe he drew a hard line, and maybe I look at some and think too hard, but that was his job. He did it every goddamn day, and he lived with it. What makes me sick and pisses me off, he did every day for years. He took out the trash, Dallas, and somebody had to.”
She got up, closed her door.
“I had a dream about him last night.” “Greenleaf?”
“And all the cops we’re looking at now, all the cops he looked at. At the end of it, he said they haunted him, and now they’d haunt me. I thought, I really thought, that’s bullshit. They don’t and won’t haunt me. But he was right. Or the dream was. I think they did haunt him, and now me. Not the way I figured he meant. What they did, cops like Oberman, and these?”
She tossed a hand toward her board. “The dozens and dozens, what they did using a badge like it was a free pass to do whatever the hell they wanted, the ones who smeared the badge, twisted the law trying to justify what they did? That’s what haunts me. Pisses me off. Makes me sick.
“So when I go to his memorial today, it won’t be just to pay my respects, not even to do my job and see if anything or anyone pops out for me. It’ll be to acknowledge that. He honored the badge, and paid the price for it every day. You taught me to do the same.”
“Hell, I didn’t have to teach you that. If I hadn’t seen that in you, I wouldn’t have taken you on.”
“Worked out for both of us. Have you had anything to eat today?” she asked, then realized, with a jolt, she sounded like Roarke.
“Nah. Couldn’t work up to it.”
She crossed to the AC. “How about a burger?” “Don’t think I have the stomach for it, kid.”
“We’ll split one. Take a seat. I knew one of the cops on the wall,” she said to distract him as she programmed the burger—and fries with it.
“Yeah? Who?”
“Hobbs, Ansel. From the Academy.”
Baggy eyes narrowed, he sat. “Yeah, yeah. I ran him through. Didn’t hit me then you’d have been in the same time.”
“Doesn’t look like he connects on this.”
She rounded it up as she set the burger on the desk. She didn’t think she had the stomach for it, either, but the smell was glorious.
She considered the penknife in her pocket, then opened a drawer, took out a combat knife. And made Feeney smile.
“You keep that sticker in your desk?” “You never know, do you?”
She sliced the burger neatly in half. Because she knew Feeney, she went back, ordered a tube of cream soda for him, a Pepsi for herself.
She sat on the corner of the desk, picked up her half. “There are more good cops than bad, Feeney.”
“Fucking A. We’ve both got a division of them. Word is Webster turned in his papers.”
“He did.” She sampled a fry, felt genuinely joyous when her lip didn’t sting. “He’s starry-eyed over Angelo. He’s moving to Olympus, figures to work at the Academy there, training new cops.”
Feeney grunted over a mouthful of burger. “Ain’t enough money in the fricking universe—and that includes all Roarke’s—could get me to live on some rock spinning out there.”
“I hear that. Plus, New York needs good, solid cops on the job.” He picked up his cream soda. “To the job.”
“To the job,” she agreed, and tapped tubes.
He looked better when he left and, when she weighed that against lost work time, it won by a few hundred miles.
More, she understood what had dragged her down all day. Same damn thing, she thought.
Same damn, dirty thing.
Peabody popped into the doorway. “We should—” She sniffed the air like a hound. “Burgers!”
“Burger, singular. Feeney needed to eat.” “Oh. Well.”
And oh hell, she thought. “Get one if you want.”
“No, but if I’d known the option, I wouldn’t have choked down what claimed to be a Cobb salad from Vending. I was going to say, if you wanted to do dress blues, we should change.”
“Right.”
More time lost, she thought, changing, then changing again. But … They haunt me, he’d said.
“We’ll do that. I’ve got a couple more from Feeney. We’ll pay our respects, come back, change again, hit those.”
Peabody waited until they reached the locker room before she asked, “Is he okay? Feeney? He looked off when he showed up.”
“He’s fine now.” “Burgers’ll do that.” “Yeah, they will.”
Eve pulled on uniform pants. They took her back, she realized. Way back.
“He knew somebody on the list. It can hit hard when you’ve got any kind of a history.”
“And even when you don’t.” Peabody buttoned up her uniform jacket. “McNab and I talked about it last night. How you know there are bad eggs or apples or whatever the hell you call them, but when you really look, look at the spread of what Greenleaf covered over the course of a career? It hits hard.”
She sat to put on the hard, shiny uniform shoes. “I thought about how I stood there in that shower stall, naked and terrified, when Oberman came into the locker room down at the old gym. Talking about killing like it was just business. I guess it was, to her.”
“She’d still be using her badge to do what was just business to her if you hadn’t stood up. What the hell are you doing with that silly hair tail?”
Peabody finished flipping it up, pinning it down. “Fixing it so my cover sits straight.”
And when she’d done just that, she looked, to Eve, pretty much like the old Peabody.
“Let’s go.”
 |
They’d chosen to hold the memorial outdoors, in a green space near the daughter’s home. A good thing, Eve decided, as by her gauge about two hundred attended.
Plenty of cops, she noted, including Whitney and a lot of other brass. She spotted Chief Tibble and his wife, Whitney and his, Morris, Callendar, Mira.
Webster and Darcia sat with the family. Various photos of Greenleaf stood among generous flower displays. The largest stood on an easel and showed Greenleaf in his own dress blues and shining captain’s bars.
Appropriate, Eve thought, since he’d been a cop most of his life.
People spoke, and she listened to eulogies with half an ear as she scanned the crowd.
She picked out Elva Arnez and Denzel Robards easily. She wore a slim black dress and black sunshades against the beat of the sun. He wore a black suit and tie. Not used to that, she decided, as he periodically tugged at the tie or rolled his shoulders against the restriction of the suit jacket.
The widow’s friends sat just behind the family, with the addition of the one who’d come from Maine, along with their spouses if they had them.
She saw no one else she’d interviewed. No one else she’d put on her board.
The widow sat, shoulders straight, even as tears slid down her cheeks.
She saw cops whose faces read they’d come under orders. But they hadn’t walked his path, she thought. She had now.
She made note of faces she didn’t recognize, in case. In case, in case, those faces showed up later.
But for now, there were only words and weeping. And watching.
At the end, people moved up to give the family condolences. She saw Tibble take both of the widow’s hands in his, bend down to speak quietly.
She saw Arnez dab at her eyes under the dark glasses, and Robards put an arm around her in comfort.
“A lot of cops came,” Peabody commented. “A good chunk of them came under orders.” “Oh. You think?”
“Yeah, I think,” Eve said, still watching.
“Santiago and Trueheart stayed back because neither of them were on the job when he was, and somebody had to stay back in case something hit. Jenkinson asked Baxter to stay back, too, and some of the uniforms. But you didn’t order anyone to come, and everyone else in the bullpen did.”
“That’s right. Is there anyone in our squad you wouldn’t go through the door with, Peabody? Anyone you wouldn’t trust to back you up, a hundred percent?”
“No,” Peabody said immediately.
“There you have it. Let’s get to work.”
At Central, she changed out of uniform, then pulled two more possibles, using the new filter, out of the list to make four with Feeney’s two.
In the bullpen, she went to Baxter’s desk.
“Are you clear?”
“My man and I are looking into a cold one, since it seems to be a day when murder’s taking a little break. We’re clear enough.”
“I’ve got four more to interview. You and Trueheart take these two.” She handed him the data. “Peabody and I have the others.”
“Hey, partner,” he called back to Trueheart. “We’re gonna ride.” “Peabody,” Eve said.
“Ready to ride. Where to?” “Tribeca, the West Village.” “West Village. Street art!”
“We’re not shopping.”
Peabody hustled to catch up. “I’ve got eyes, and they’ll know what I want when they see it. They know what McNab wants because we talked it over. Just two interviews?”
“For now.” When the elevator opened nearly empty, Eve risked it. “There aren’t many more on the list that fit the parameters now. If we don’t hit, we’ll have to widen that.”
“I know it sort of feels stalled, but eliminating narrows the field.”
So why did it feel like she was spinning her wheels? Eve thought. “We’ll have a handful left in this direction tomorrow. If we bottom out, we need to change direction.”
And when they returned to Central, Eve felt those wheels still spinning.
“Maybe Baxter and Trueheart got something.” Peabody had a Village street scene canvas tucked under her arm.
“The only one who got anything was you.” “And I appreciate it. It only took five minutes.” Because it had, Eve decided not to bitch about it.
When she walked into the bullpen, Roarke sat on the corner of Jenkinson’s desk, apparently unaffected by tiny rainbow-hued dinosaurs roaming over electric green.
“And here’s the boss,” Jenkinson announced.
“Hit the list again,” Eve told Peabody, and gestured toward her office. “Am I getting another gift?” she asked Roarke.
“Sadly, no. Just a few loose ends to tie on the old one. And since it’s late in the day, I thought I’d see how long it might be before my cop wrapped things up.”
“I’m wrapping nothing up, and getting fucking nowhere.” After dragging her hands through her hair, she dropped down at her desk.
“Ah. Coffee.”
“Yeah, yeah, coffee. Had a talk with Feeney, and I ended up being you.” “You bought Zimbabwe?”
“No. Did you?”
“Not today, but it seems like something you’d consider, being me.”
She just shook her head. “I pushed him to eat a burger. Half,” she corrected. “I had to eat the other half to get him to eat. He looked so damn tired, so off. All these dirty cops. Looking at them day after day. It hits hard.”
He skimmed a hand over her hair before he set coffee on her desk. “I know it does.”
“That’s all you knew once, back in Dublin. Dirty cops.”
“And now I know their opposite. You’re frustrated it’s not falling into place for you yet.”
“Because it should be. If I’m pushing in the right direction, it should. The payback, and the specifics of it. At home, at his desk, service weapon on the floor, suicide. I turn it this way, that way, but every way I look at it, if someone just wanted him dead, easier, simpler, more direct ways, so the specifics matter. But—”
“No one fits. Yet.”
“Not that many more to go through using those filters. If I widen the field back to just dead, disgraced, terminated for cause…” She shook her head again, drank coffee. “It doesn’t sit right. But then I have to ask am I going at it so narrow because I can’t shake off the hunch.”
“Is it a hunch, or is it deduction?”
She hissed out a breath. “Sometimes they’re not so much different.” “In my experience, your hunches have a solid base in deduction.”
“Well, my hunch deduces this is the right direction, and I’ve missed something.” She shoved up. “Where did the killer get the service weapon? Feeney’s working that, and coming up with nothing there so far. We nail that, we’re a step closer.”
“What are the options?”
“You’d know that as well as I do, but okay. Steal it—which should be reported and logged. Another cop or someone with access lifts it out of
inventory or Evidence and manages to cover that up. Black market, a street deal. We’ve got the weapon, so the model, the years that model was issued and used, and that model’s been out of service for fifteen years.”
“What happens when it’s put out of service?”
“Destroyed, melted down, and that’s logged, too. Obviously this one wasn’t. But the ID number’s gone. The lab can’t pull it out.”
“What else do you know about it?”
“It was fired multiple times before Sunday night. It was wiped clean. Greenleaf’s prints are on it, but too clear and positioned incorrectly to substantiate he used it on himself, at that angle.”
She held up a finger. “Wait. Another possible filter there. Shit, I missed that. Shit. Who was on the job on the list during the period that model was issued? I’ve accounted for the model—and the logs checked. But logs can be doctored, and not a stretch if you’re dirty anyway. Take care of the ID number, and you’ve got a drop piece.
“I missed it.”
“Seems as though you’ve caught it,” Roarke corrected.
“Not fast enough. I don’t know what the hell good it’s going to do me, but it’s another detail.”
She paused, studied her board. “You’ve got the piece. It’s not the one— not the one used by the person you’re avenging—but it’s theirs. A weapon they used, then tucked away. Didn’t turn it in—or did, then lifted it again once it was logged. Should’ve been marked down as destroyed after. A bribe could take care of that, or a distraction. A threat.”
A new scent, he thought. He’d ride it with her.
“Would it go back to a family member then, or close friend, lover? Someone not only bent on revenge, but who’d have access to the personal belongings of the one they’re avenging.”
“That’s what I so deduce. It fits right in. We’re not looking in the wrong direction, damn it. It fits. All the pieces fit this way, this profile.
“Hold on.”
She snatched up her ’link. “Feeney, add another filter.”
Roarke sipped his coffee while she ran it through for Feeney, quick, precise. And thought it was always a pleasure to watch her work.
Yes, she’d caught a new scent now, he decided, and the fatigue and frustration that had vibrated from her had turned to energy and focus.
“That’s a damn good angle,” Feeney told her. “We should’ve seen that.” “We see it now.”
“Yeah, we do. We’re going to run the whole batch through with all the filters. Make damn sure nothing slipped through. Good catch, kid.”
When she clicked off, she stood another moment, eyes on the board. “Alibis, plenty of them, and they hold. And the ones without a solid alibi don’t give off any major buzz. None.”
She shoved her hands in her pockets. “Need to look there again anyway. Finances, nothing pops. But you wouldn’t need to pay for a hit if you called in a favor. If you had somebody invested in the payback same as you. Someone not connected, at least it doesn’t show.”
Yes, indeed, Roarke thought, she’d caught a fresh scent.
“I need to—” She broke off, turned as she heard someone coming.
Baxter stepped in.
“Roarke, looking sharp.” “As you do, Detective.”
“Do my best. Serious thanks for this.” He opened the jacket of his sharp suit to show the Thin Shield. “Saved me a solid jolt.”
“I’m glad to hear it.”
“So, LT, nothing on the two we talked to. One was front row center at her kid’s school play—and that checks. The other was on a big date at Calypso. He used the fancy restaurant to propose right about Greenleaf’s TOD in front of wits. Also checks out. And he said yes.”
“New angle, new filter.” She ran it through, as clear and precise as she had for Feeney.
“That’s a good one.”
“Tell Peabody and, if you stay clear, work it with her.” “You got it.”
“I’ve got to write up the last interviews, then start digging on this again.” “I’ll get out of your way,” Roarke added.
“Getting in my way pushed out this new angle, so thanks.”
“Happy to be of service. I could be of more if you want to do your write- up, then leave near to end of shift and do the digging at home. I could amuse myself, then go home with you, help with that.”
“What about Zimbabwe?” “It’ll still be there.”
“Actually, there’s a set of financials. Peabody ran them, but—”
“And there you’ve provided my amusement. Send them to me and I’ll find a spot, entertain myself until you’re done.”
“Sounds like a deal. Seriously, thanks. Bitching to you stopped the wheels from spinning.”
“Wouldn’t you want them to?”
“Not when they’re stuck in the mud.” She revolved her index fingers to demonstrate.
“Ah. Well then.” He took her shoulders. And though she eyed the open door, she didn’t hear anyone coming. She kissed him.
“Give me about an hour to clear things up here. I’ll send you the data, then I’ll tag you when I’m done.”
She got fresh coffee when he left, then sat. She took one last long look at her board.
“I think you’re on there. In my gut I think you’re on there. But if you’re not, you will be.”
Because she needed to focus on the report, the details of the interviews, she set the new angle aside. Its time would come, and soon.
Halfway through the first interview, her communicator signaled. Dispatch, Dallas, Lieutenant Eve. Report to 210 Beach Street. “That’s Carlie Greenleaf’s address.”
Affirmative. Male victim, Greenleaf, Benjamin, found hanging by the neck on premises, currently unconscious, transported to Saint Anne’s Hospital. Called in by Webster, Detective Donald, with request for
your immediate dispatch.
“Acknowledged. On the way. Son of a bitch!” She leaped up, rushed out. “Son of a fucking bitch. Peabody, with me, now!”
She spotted Roarke at Santiago’s desk. Since Carmichael’s was empty, she decided murder hadn’t taken much of a break after all.
Roarke reached her as she strode to the elevators.
“We got another goddamn filter,” she told them both. “Unless we buy Ben Greenleaf just tried to hang himself at his sister’s house right after his father’s memorial, somebody did it for him.”
“Is he dead?” Peabody asked as they pushed on the elevator.
“Not yet. At the hospital, unconscious. Noy, this fits Noy. Son hanged himself. It fits. Work it, Peabody, add this in. We’ll see how many others, if any, it fits. Because it sure as hell fits that.
“Damn it.” As the elevator stopped again, more cops got on, she shoved off for the glides.
“Somebody like Noy, and with his rank? He could’ve made off with his decommissioned service weapon. He’d have found a way, and easy enough. At his desk, weapon on the floor. Son hangs himself a few months later. They didn’t wait that long, but they’re mirroring.”
“If he makes it,” Peabody said as she worked her PPC, “he could ID the killer.”
“If,” Eve repeated, and jumped on the next glide.
