by J. D. Robb
“Yes, sir?”
“You’re not always a complete asshole.”
It made him grin, and he slipped his hands into his pockets and wandered over to Roarke. “Hey. You doing a ride-along, too?”
“Apparently.” Roarke had a low-grade urge for a cigarette, which annoyed him. “What’s the story on Captain Roth?” When McNab started to shrug, Roarke smiled. “Ian, no one knows the gossip like an e-detective.”
“You got that right. Okay, maybe we poked around a little when we heard about Kohli, seeing as he was hers. She’s a hard-ass, eighteen years on, got a shit-pot load of busts under her belt, a slew of commendations, and a couple minor reprimands for insubordination. They came early on, though. Moved up the ranks, and took a lot of crap work to do it. Been captain under a year, and word is she’s holding onto it by her fingernails since the Ricker case blew up under her.”
They both glanced back to where Roth and Eve had squared off. “And that,” Roarke said, “makes her touchy.”
“Looks like. Had a little problem with alcohol a few years back. Did voluntary rehab before it became a big one. On her second marriage, and my source says it looks pretty shaky right now. She lives and breathes the job.”
He paused a minute, watching Roth talk to Clooney. “You want my take, she’s territorial and competitive. Probably have to be to wear captain’s bars. Losing two men stings. Having another cop handle the cases is going to eat at her. Especially when it’s a cop with a rep like Dallas.”
“And what would that rep be?”
“She’s the best there is,” McNab said simply. He smiled a little. “Peabody wants to be her when she grows up. Speaking of Peabody, I just wanted to say how that advice you gave me—you know about the romance angle—it’s working pretty good.”
“Glad to hear it.”
“She’s still seeing that slick-handed LC though. Burns my ass.”
Roarke glanced down as McNab held out a jumbo pack of wild grape bubble gum. What the hell, he thought, took a cube.
Chewing thoughtfully, they watched their women work.
Eve ignored the onlookers. She could have ordered the scene cleared except for essential personnel, but it felt wrong to do so. The cops were there, a kind of homage to the badge, and to reassure themselves they were alive.
Both were valid reasons to stand by.
“Victim is identified as Mills, Lieutenant Alan, attached to the One two-eight, Illegals Division. Caucasian, age fifty-four.”
Eve recited the data into the record as she gently lifted the chin. “The victim was found by civilian Stein, James, in the passenger seat of his official vehicle, on the break-down lane on the George Washington Bridge, eastbound. Cause of death not yet determined. He’d been drinking, Peabody.”
“Sir?”
“Gin, from the smell of it.”
“I don’t know how you catch it,” Peabody muttered, breathing between her teeth. “With the rest of the stench here.”
With a sealed hand, Eve turned back Mills’s jacket, saw his weapon still holstered. “Doesn’t look like he even went for it. Why wasn’t he driving? It’s his unit. Most cops have to have their hands pried off the wheel before they let somebody else man their ride.”
She wrinkled her nose. “That’s more than blood and bowels and gin I’m smelling.”
She released the seat belt, then jerked her hands back, an instinctive move, as his guts slithered out, sliding nastily from under his shirt.
“Oh. Oh Christ.” Peabody choked, went glassily pale, stumbled back. “Dallas . . .”
“Get some air. Go on.”
“I’m okay, I . . .” But her head spun, her stomach revolted. She managed to get to the side of the bridge before she lost the cheese and bean tacos she’d shared with McNab.
Eve closed her eyes a moment, bore down and bore down hard. There was a dull roar in her head, like the sea cresting. She blanked her mind until she was certain the rumbles she heard were from the traffic on the level below and from the sky overhead.
With steady hands, she unbuttoned Mills’s fouled shirt. He’d been sliced, one long wide swath, from breastbone to crotch.
She noted it into the record while Peabody retched.
Sickened, she straightened, stepped back, let the marginally fresher air fill her lungs. Her gaze skimmed over a sea of faces: some grim, some horrified, some frightened. Peabody wasn’t the only cop leaning over the bridge.
“I’m all right. I’m okay.”
Through the pounding bells in her ears, Eve heard Peabody’s weak voice.
“Come on, sit down a minute. Sit down, honey.”
“McNab, get her recorder. I need it here.”
“No, I can do it. I can.” Peabody nudged McNab’s patting hands away, straightened her shoulders. Her face was dead white to the lips. She shuddered once, but she walked back. “I’m sorry, Lieutenant.”
“There’s no shame in it. Give me your recorder. I’ll finish this.”
“No, sir. I can hold.”
After a moment’s study, Eve nodded. “Get him on record. Don’t think about it. Close your mind to it.”
“How?” Peabody asked, but turned to do the work.
Eve lifted a hand, had nearly rubbed it over her face before she remembered what it was smeared with. “Where the hell’s the ME?”
“Lieutenant.” Roarke stepped to her, held out a pristine white silk handkerchief.
“Yeah, thanks.” She used it without a thought. “You can’t be here. You have to stay back.” She looked around for somewhere to dispose of the smeared silk and ended up stuffing it into an evidence bag.
“You need to take a minute,” Roarke said quietly. “Anyone would.”
“I can’t afford it. I fold, even look like I’m going to, and I lose control of the scene.” She stayed crouched, added a fresh coat of sealant to her hands. She got to her feet, handed him the ruined handkerchief in its bag. “Sorry about that.”
Then she planted her feet, legs spread, as Roth marched back to Mills’s car with Clooney in her wake. Roth stopped short, as if she’d run into an invisible wall, and stared at what there was of the man who’d served under her command.
“Ah, holy mother of God.” It was all she said, her only sign of distress. While her eyes were burning dry, Clooney’s misted with tears.
“Jesus, Mills. Jesus, look what they did to you.” He closed his eyes, breathed long and deep. “We can’t tell the family this. Can’t give them the details of this. Captain Roth, we have to go inform next of kin before they hear some other way. We have to cover over the worst of this for their sakes.”
“All right, Art. All right.” She looked over as Eve took out her communicator.
“What are you doing?”
“Checking on the ME, Captain.”
“I’ve just done so. ETA is under two minutes. A moment, Lieutenant. In private. Clooney, assist the lieutenant’s aide in keeping the scene secure. I don’t want any of those cops moving closer.”
Eve walked away with her, away from the glare of lights into the softer shadows. The air cleared, the scent of exhaust and pavement was like balm after a burn.
“Lieutenant, I apologize for my earlier outburst.”
“Apology accepted.”
“That was very quick.”
“So was your apology.”
Roth blinked, then nodded slowly. “I hate making them. I haven’t gotten where I am on the job by indulging my temper or apologizing for it. Neither, I imagine, have you. Women are still more closely scrutinized in the department and more strictly judged.”
“That may be true, Captain. I don’t let it concern me.”
“Then you’re a better woman than I, Dallas, or a great deal less ambitious. Because it burns the living hell out of me.” She inhaled, hissed the breath out through her teeth. “My coming at you as I have has been an emotional reaction, an indulgence again, that was both inappropriate and ill-advised. I’m going to tell you that I over
reacted to Kohli’s death because I liked him, very much. I believe I overreacted to Mills because I disliked him. Very much.”
She glanced back at the car. “He was a son of a bitch, a mean-spirited man who made no secret that, in his opinion, women should be having babies, cooking pies, and not wearing a badge. He disliked blacks, Jews, Asians . . . hell, he disliked everyone who wasn’t just what he was: an overfed white male. But he was my cop, and I want whoever opened him up that way.”
“So do I, Captain.”
Roth nodded again, and together they watched the ME arrive. Morse, Eve noted. Only the top dog for one of the boys in blue.
“Homicide isn’t my sphere, Dallas, as Clooney in his calm, reasonable manner has pointed out to me. I know your rep, and I’m depending on it. I want . . .” She trailed off and seemed to bite down on impatience. “I’d appreciate being sent a copy of your report.”
“You’ll have it in the morning.”
“Thank you.” She looked back, her eyes skimming over Eve’s face. “Are you as good as they say?”
“I don’t listen to what they say.”
Roth gave a short laugh. “You want to wear bars, you’d better start.” And she held out a hand.
Eve took it. They parted ways, one to speak of death and the other to stand over it.
As she walked, Eve glanced up and spotted the first media copter.
That, she decided, was a problem for later.
“Well, they made a mess out of him, didn’t they?” Morse took the time to pull on a protective gown, then placidly sealed his hands and shoes while Eve waited beside him.
“Push the tox reports. I’m betting he was unconscious when he was sliced. His weapon’s still on safety, and there aren’t any defensive wounds. I could smell gin on him.”
“Take a hell of a lot of gin to take a man his size under far enough that this could be done to him without his objection. You think he was killed while he sat there?”
“Too much blood for otherwise. The killer got him drunk, doped, whatever, took the time to unbutton his shirt, sliced him right down the middle. Then he buttoned him up again, strapped him in. Even tipped the seat back just enough so that his insides would stay in, more or less, until some lucky winner unstrapped him.”
“Bet I can guess who that lucky winner was.” Morse smiled at her with a great deal of sympathy.
“Yeah, I rang that bell.” She was, damn it, going to feel the sensation of Mills’s intestines slopping over her hands for a long, very long time. “The killer drove Mills here,” she continued, “and walked away. We won’t find any prints.”
She scanned the area. “Ballsy. Ballsy again. He’d have to sit here. Maybe he even did it here, but I’m thinking he’s not that much of a fucking daredevil. But he’d have to sit here and wait until he was sure it was clear enough for him to get out of the car. He had to have another transpo close by.”
“An accomplice?”
“Maybe. Maybe. I can’t rule it out. We’ll check with the traffic cops, see if they spotted another car in the break-down lane tonight. He didn’t just walk off the goddamn bridge. He had a plan. He knew the steps. Get me the tox, Morse.”
Peabody was standing by the rail, McNab beside her. She’d gotten her color back, but Eve thought she knew the kind of images her aide would see when she closed her eyes that night.
“McNab, you want in on this?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Go with Peabody, get the traffic discs from the toll booths. All discs, all levels, for the last twenty-four hours.”
“All?”
“We’re going to be thorough, and maybe we’ll get lucky. Start scanning them, starting backward with this level from twenty hundred hours. Find me this vehicle.”
“You got it.”
“Peabody, do a standard background on James Stein, the Good Samaritan. I don’t expect you to find anything, but let’s clear him out. Report, my home office, oh eight hundred.”
“You’ve got Lewis in the morning,” Peabody reminded her. “I’m scheduled for six-thirty at Central.”
“I’ll handle Lewis. You’re going to be putting in a long night.”
“So are you.” Peabody’s face turned mulish. “I’ll report to Central as ordered, Lieutenant.”
“Christ, have it your own way.” Eve dragged a hand through her hair and reorganized her thoughts. “Have the first uniforms on-scene provide your transpo. One of them’s a hot dog. He needs something to do.”
She turned away from them, strode to Roarke. “I have to ditch you.”
“I’ll ride with you to Central, then find transportation home.”
“I’m not going to Central straight off. I have some stops to make. I’ll have one of the black and whites take you back.”
He looked toward the units with mild disdain. “I believe I’ll find my own transportation, thanks all the same.”
Why, she thought, was everyone arguing with her tonight? “I’m not going to just leave you on the damn bridge.”
“I can find my way home, Lieutenant. Where are you going?”
“Just some things I have to do before I write my report.” His voice was so damn cool, she thought. His eyes so detached. “How long are you going to be pissed off at me?”
“I haven’t decided. But I’ll be sure to let you know.”
“You’re making me feel like a jerk.”
“Darling, you managed that perfectly well on your own.”
Guilt and temper tangled inside her, had her glaring at him. “Well, fuck it,” she said, then grabbed him by the lapels of his coat, yanked him to her, and kissed him hard. “See you later,” she muttered and stalked away.
“Count on it.”
chapter eight
Don Webster was awakened out of a dead sleep by what he initially took to be a particularly violent thunderstorm. When the clouds cleared from his brain, he decided someone was trying to beat through the walls of his apartment with a sledgehammer.
As he reached for his weapon, he realized someone was pounding on his door.
He pulled on jeans, took his weapon with him, and went to look through his security peep.
A dozen thoughts ran through his head, a morass of pleasure, fantasy, and discomfort. He opened the door to Eve.
“Just in the neighborhood?” he said.
“You son of a bitch.” She shoved him back, slammed the door behind her. “I want answers, and I want them now.”
“You never were much on foreplay.” The minute it was out, he regretted it. He covered that with a cocky grin. “What’s up?”
“What’s down, Webster, is another cop.”
The grin vanished. “Who? How?”
“You tell me.”
They stared at each other a moment. His gaze shifted first. “I don’t know.”
“What do you know? What’s IAB’s angle on this? Because there is one. I can smell it.”
“Look, you come barging in here at . . . Christ, after one in the morning, jump down my throat, and tell me a cop’s dead. You don’t even tell me who or how it happened and I’m supposed to be some fount of fucking information for you.”
“Mills,” she snapped. “Detective Alan. Illegals, same squad as Kohli. You want to know how? Somebody sliced him wide open from neck to balls. I know because his guts spilled out on my hands.”
“Christ. Christ.” He rubbed both hands over his face. “I need a drink.”
He walked away.
She stormed after him. She remembered, vaguely, his old place, the one he’d had when he’d worked the streets. This one had a lot more space, and more of a shine on it.
IAB, she thought bitterly, paid well.
He was in the kitchen, at the refrigerator, pulling a beer out. He looked back at her, took out a second. “Want one?” When she simply stared at him, he put it back. “Guess not.” He flipped off the top, let it fly, then took one long swallow. “Where’d it happen?”
“I’m not here to answer
questions. I’m not your goddamn weasel.”
“And I’m not yours,” he countered, then leaned back against the refrigerator door. He needed to get his thoughts in order, his emotions under control. Unless he did, she’d spring something out of him he wasn’t free to say.
“You came to me,” she reminded him. “Either fishing or smelling bait. Or maybe you’re just IAB’s messenger boy.”
His eyes hardened at that, but he lifted the bottle again, sipped. “You got a problem with me, you take it to IAB. See where it gets you.”
“I solve my own problems. What do Kohli and Mills and Max Ricker have in common?”
“You’re going to stir up a hornet’s nest and get stung if you mess with Ricker.”
“I’ve already messed with him. Didn’t know that, did you?” she said when his eyes flickered. “That little gem hasn’t dropped in your lap quite yet. I’ve got four of his storm troopers in cages right now.”
“You won’t keep them.”
“Maybe not, but I might get more out of them than I’m getting from one of my own. You used to be a cop.”
“I’m still a cop. Goddamn it, Dallas.”
“Then act like one.”
“You think because I don’t get all the press, don’t go out closing high-profile cases so the crowds cheer, I don’t care about the job?” He slammed the bottle on the counter. “I do what I do because I care about the job. If every cop was as hard-line straight as you, we wouldn’t need Internal Affairs.”
“Were they dirty, Webster? Mills and Kohli. Were they dirty?”
His face closed in again. “I can’t tell you.”
“You don’t know, or you’re not saying.”
He looked into her eyes. For an instant, just an instant, she saw regret in his. “I can’t tell you.”
“Is there an ongoing investigation in IAB involving Kohli, Mills and/or other officers in the One two-eight?”
“If there was,” he said carefully, “it would be classified. I wouldn’t be at liberty to confirm or deny that, or to discuss any of the details.”
“Where did Kohli get the funds he’s funnelled into investment accounts?”
Webster’s mouth tightened. Spring it out of him? She’d pry it out, he thought, with her fingernails. “I have no comment regarding that allegation.”
