by J. D. Robb
“No.” Eve spoke flatly.
“The PA wouldn’t do it,” Peabody continued in that same reasonable, wish-I-could-help tone. “Even if we—”
“I won’t do it.” Eve spared Peabody a glare. “I don’t need the statement to close this. Maybe it ties it sooner, and with a bow on it, but I’m not much on the fancy work. Make a statement, or don’t. Your choice. And you?” She lifted her chin toward Billy. “You play make a deal with the PA on your own time. This is mine, and you’re wasting it.”
“Billy,” Luke said softly. “You need to do this. Sam—” He simply held up a hand to stop Samuel from arguing. “Not just for man’s law. You need to do this to begin to make it right with God. You need to do this for your soul. There can be no salvation without the admission of sin.”
Silence fell. It ticked, ticked, ticked. Eve waited it out.
“I believed it was the right thing to do.” Billy gulped in a breath. “The only thing. Maybe it was the Devil working through me, but I believed I was acting on the behalf of God.”
Billy lifted his hands, a supplicant. “Jimmy Jay had strayed, and was straying farther and farther off the path. The drink, he couldn’t see the sin in it, or how his weakness for it corroded his soul. He deceived his wife, his followers, and didn’t see it as deception, but a kind of joke. An amusement. He became less cautious, drinking more, and often writing his sermons, even preaching under the influence of drink.”
“You killed him because he knocked back too much vodka?” Eve demanded. “Hell, why not just hit any given bar or club on a Friday night and get the group-kill rate?”
“Lieutenant.” Peabody murmured it, cocked her head at Billy. “You couldn’t convince him to stop?”
“He enjoyed it, and believed every man was entitled, even required to have flaws and weaknesses. To seek perfection was to seek to take the place of God. But . . . he even brought his children into the deception, having Josie—especially Josie—provide the drink. This isn’t the loving act of a father, is it? He’d lost his way. The drink corroded him, and made him weak so he fell to the temptations of the flesh.”
“And screwed around on his wife.”
“That’s an unpleasant term.” Luke shook his head.
“It’s unpleasant behavior,” Eve countered. “You knew about his affairs.”
“Yes. Five times before he’d committed adultery, broken this commandment. But he repented. He came to me so we could pray together, so he could ask for forgiveness, and the strength to resist temptation.”
“You covered for him.”
“Yes. For too long, yes, I did. He knew what he risked by falling into such sin. His soul, his wife and family, the church itself. And he fought it.”
Tears glimmered in Billy’s eyes as he swiped at them with the back of his hand. “He was a good man, a great man, with deep weaknesses, with the pull of good and evil inside him. And this time, this last time, he didn’t resist, he didn’t repent. He refused to see it as sinful. He’d twisted God’s word, you see, to suit his own base needs. He claimed that with this woman, and with the drink, he gained more light, more insight, more truth.”
“And still, you covered for him.”
“It was becoming more difficult, for my conscience. The weight . . . and knowing I was a party to it, he’d made me a party to it. His betrayal of God, of his good wife. And as with the drink, he became less cautious. It was only a matter of time before his sins were discovered. Sins that could have irreparably damaged all the work that came before. All he’d done, all he’d built, now at risk as he was caught in this cycle of sin.”
“So you stopped the cycle.”
“There was no choice.” His gaze met Eve’s, beseeched her to understand that single point. “The church, you must see, the church is bigger than any one of us. And must be protected. I prayed for him, I counseled him, argued with him. He wouldn’t see. He was blind to it. We’re all just men, Lieutenant. Even Jimmy Jay. He stood as the head of the church, as a representative of the Lord on Earth, but he was only a man. The man had to be stopped to save his soul, and to preserve the work of the Eternal Light.”
“You killed him to save him.”
“Yes.”
“And to save the church.”
“To save all he’d built so that it would go on after him, so it would live and thrive, so others could be saved.”
“Why here and now?”
“I . . . The papist priest. It seemed a sign. I understood then that if Jimmy Jay was to be saved, if the Eternal Light was to go on without him, his death had to be quick, and public. It would stir others to look inside themselves for the light, to understand death comes to all, and salvation must be earned.”
“Where did you get the cyanide?”
“I—” He licked his lips. “I approached a dealer of illegals, in the underground of Times Square.”
Eve’s eyebrows shot up. “You went into the underground in that sector. That’s either brave or stupid.”
“I had no choice.” His hands balled on the table, stayed knotted there. “It had to be done quickly. I paid him to secure it, and paid him twice that when he’d done so.”
“Name?”
“We didn’t exchange names.”
She nodded, unsurprised. Plenty of time to push on that later. “You procured the poison. Then?”
Samuel held up a hand. “Is it really necessary that we—”
“Yes. Then?” Eve repeated.
“I kept it on my person. Such a small amount, really. I had to pray it would be enough. I didn’t want him to suffer. I loved him. Please, believe me.” Billy looked from Luke to Samuel. “Please believe me.”
“Go on, Billy.” Luke laid a hand briefly on Billy’s shoulder.
“I intended to speak with him again, to try to convince him to acknowledge his sins, repent them. And that same day, he went to the room of his consort. And when I spoke to him afterward, he laughed. Laughed. He’d never been stronger, he told me. Or closer to God. To preach against sin, a man must know sin. He was studying the scriptures, he told me.” Billy closed his eyes. “Studying them with a new eye as he had come to believe God meant man to have more than one wife. Each to fill one or more of his needs to clear his mind and heart for God’s good work. I knew then it was too late to bring him back, too late to draw him back on the path. That the only way to save him, to save all, was to end his mortal life. To send him to God.”
He drew a deep breath when Eve said nothing. “I waited until the stage water was in place. I prayed, and prayed, even as I added the poison to the third bottle. Part of me still hoped that I would see him come back to the light before he reached for that bottle. That there would be another sign. But there was nothing.”
“Was anyone else aware of what you planned to do, what you did? Did you take anyone else into your confidence?”
“Only God. I believed I was doing God’s work, following His will. But last night, I had terrible dreams. Dreams of hellfire and horrible suffering. Now I think the Devil came into me. I was misled.”
“Your defense is you were misled by Satan,” Eve concluded. “Not as original an excuse as you might think. And your feelings for Jolene Jenkins didn’t play into you spiking her husband’s water with poison?”
A dull flush rose into Billy’s pale cheeks. “I hoped to spare Jolene from the pain and humiliation of her husband’s betrayal.”
“With the potential side benefit of stepping into his shoes or marital bed?”
“Lieutenant,” Luke interrupted. “He’s confessed to his sins, to his crimes. Is there need for more? He’s prepared to accept his punishment in this world, and the next.”
“And you’re satisfied?”
“It isn’t for me.” Luke reached over, laid his hand over Billy’s. “I’ll pray for you.”
And Billy laid his head down on the table to give in to the tears.
As he wept, Eve rose. “Billy Crocker, you’re under arrest for the premeditated m
urder of one James Jay Jenkins, a human being. The charge is murder in the first degree.” She walked around to cuff him, to lift him to his feet. “Peabody.”
“Yes, sir, I’ll take him. Come with me, Mr. Crocker. You can meet your client after he’s booked,” she told Samuel.
“Record off,” Eve ordered when Peabody took him out. “I appreciate you seeing he came in,” Eve said to Luke. “Record’s off,” she added when he shook his head. “I admire your faith, and your restraint,” she said to Samuel. “And your loyalty.”
“A good man is dead,” Luke said softly. “Another is ruined. Lives are shattered.”
“Murder does that. He coveted another man’s wife, isn’t that how it goes? You know it; I know it. We all know that was part of it, however he justified it.”
“Isn’t it enough he’ll answer to God for that?”
Eve studied Luke. “He’ll be answering for plenty in the here and now, so I’ll give you the rest. Will you continue to represent him?” she asked Samuel.
“Until more experienced criminal defense counsel can be secured. We want to go home. We want to get the family home as soon as possible.”
“I believe I can clear that by tomorrow. If the more experienced defense counsel opts for trial, the circumstances of motive will come out. Something to consider.” Eve opened the door. “I’ll show you where you can wait.”
She went back to her office, wrote and filed the report, requested a media block on the details. No point, she thought, in subjecting Jolene and her daughters to the victim’s transgressions. At least not yet.
She looked up as Peabody came in. “He’s done,” Peabody told her. “I put him on suicide watch. I just had this feeling.”
“I don’t think he’ll take the easy way, but you get a feeling, you go with it.”
“You sure had one on this, from the jump. Do you think they’ll deal it down?”
“Yeah, I think they’ll deal it to Murder Two, and put him in mental defect. Faith as psychosis. He’ll spend the next twenty-five repenting.”
“That seems mostly right.”
“Mostly right’s generally enough.” She checked the time, saw she had to let Baxter off the hook. “We’re coming up to end of shift. I want you to follow up with McNab, keep working on the Lino angle. And since the two of you will kissy-face and eat junk food while doing same, I don’t want to see any overtime logged.”
“I thought we were going to Brooklyn.”
“I’ll take that, see if I can hook Roarke into playing backup.”
“Will you play kissy-face and eat junk food?”
Eve sent her a withering look. “Unless I contact you to tell you otherwise, meet me at St. Cristóbal’s tomorrow morning. Six A.M.”
“Ouch? Why so early?”
“We’re going to Mass.”
Eve picked up her ’link to buzz Roarke.
13
BECAUSE IT GAVE HER TIME TO CONTINUE THE backgrounds she’d begun in her office, Eve asked Roarke to take the wheel for the drive to Brooklyn. As neither of them had finished in their respective offices until after six, traffic was expectedly hideous. Occasionally, she glanced up from her PPC as Roarke maneuvered around, through, and over the horn-blasting, vicious bumper-to-bumper. And wondered why, not for the first or last time, people who worked in Brooklyn didn’t live in Brooklyn, and people who worked in Manhattan didn’t just live the hell there.
“Do they actually like it?” she wondered. “Get off on the rage, consider it a daily challenge? Are they doing some kind of twisted penance?”
“You’ve been working faith-based cases too long.”
“Well, there has to be a point to subjecting yourselves and others to this insanity every day.”
“Finances, lack of housing.” He flicked a glance in the mirror, then arrowed into the breath of space between a Mini and an all-terrain. “Or the desire to live outside the city in a more neighborhood sort of environment while earning city salaries—while others want the energy and benefits of the city for living, and find work in one of the other boroughs.”
In a slick move, he changed lanes again, a dodge and weave that gained them maybe a dozen feet. “Or they’re simply going over the bloody overcrowded bridge for some sort of business. Which, I’m forced to point out, we are at this moment. At a shagging crawl.”
“We’re going to check out a woman who appears to live sensibly, moving across the bloody, overcrowded bridge and securing employment where she lives. She has what’s probably a ten-minute commute—by foot—to work. Less if she takes the subway. If she turns out to be my Lino’s mother, I wonder if he fought his way over to Brooklyn, at a shagging crawl, to visit.”
Accepting he was well and truly stuck now—bugger it—Roarke sat back and waited for his chance. “Would you, in his place?”
“Hard to put myself there as what little I remember of my relationship with my mother wasn’t cookies and milk. But . . . you come back home, hiding out for five to six years, and your mother—your only living blood relative as far as I can ascertain, excepting the half-sibling she’s had since you took off—is living across the bridge—bloody overcrowded or not. It seems you’d be compelled to see her. To check it out.”
“Might be it wasn’t cookies and milk with his ma either.”
“He kept the medal she gave him, so there was something there, some bond. If there’s a bond, that something, you’d want to see her, see how she was, what she was doing, who this guy is she’d married, see the half-brother. Something.”
“If this is your Lino.”
“Yeah, if.” She frowned over that, wondering if a hunch was worth the trip to Brooklyn during the inaccurately termed rush hour. “First big one. If we get over that one, and he did make contact, did go see her, then she has to know, with all the media coverage, that her son’s dead. How would she handle that? No one’s contacted the morgue on Lino, except for Father López. I checked. No inquiries, no requests for viewing.”
Roarke said nothing for a moment. “I considered, spent some time considering actually, not making direct contact with my family in Ireland. Just . . . checking them out, doing a background on my mother’s sister, the others. Maybe observing, you could say, from a distance. Not making the connection.”
She’d wondered about that. She knew he’d gotten drunk the night before he’d gone to see his aunt. And he wasn’t a man to drink himself drunk.
“Why?”
“A dozen reasons. More, a great deal more against it than the single one for making myself knock on that cottage door. I needed to see them, speak to them, hear their voices. Hers, especially. Sinead. My mother’s twin. And I would have rather faced torture than knock.”
He could remember the moment still, the sweaty panic of it. “It was hideously hard to do. What would they think of me? Would they look at me and see him? And if they did, would I? Would they look at me, see only my sins—which are plentiful—and none of her, the mother I never knew existed? The prodigal son’s a hard role to carry.”
“But you knocked on the door. That’s who you are.” She was silent as she considered. “It may not be who he was. Someone who could do what he did, live as someone else, something else for years. Hard to explain that to Mommy, unless Mommy’s the kind who wouldn’t give a shit what her baby boy’s done. And kills the fat cow anyway.”
“That would be fatted, and calf.”
“What’s the difference?”
“A couple of hundred pounds, I’d say. But, to the point, finding out is why we’re going to Brooklyn in this bleeding traffic.”
“Partly. But, you know, I could’ve kept Peabody on the clock. I figured since we’re going to check out Teresa at work, and work happens to be her Italian brother-in-law’s pizzeria, we could have a nice meal together.”
He spared her a glance. “Meaning you can put a check in the column that reads: Went out to dinner with Roarke, and consider that a wifely duty dispensed.”
She shifted, started t
o deny. Didn’t bother. “Maybe, but we’re still getting all this time together, and what’s billed as really mag Brooklyn-style pizza.”
“With this traffic, it better be the best shagging pizza in all five boroughs.”
“At least I’m not asking you to go to six o’clock Mass with me in the morning.”
“Darling Eve, to get me to do that the amount and variety of the sexual favors required are so many and myriad even my imagination boggles.”
“I don’t think you can exchange sexual favors for Mass attendance. But if I decide to go check it out, and I get the chance, I’ll ask the priest.”
She went back to her PPC while Roarke battled through the traffic.
By Eve’s calculations, it took about as long to travel from downtown Manhattan to Cobble Hill in Brooklyn as it would to take a shuttle from New York to Rome. The pizzeria stood on the corner of a shopping district on the edge of a neighborhood of old row houses with decorated stoops where residents sat to watch their world go by.
“She’s on tonight,” Eve told Roarke once they’d parked. “But if for some reason she’s not at work, she lives a few blocks down, two over.”
“Meaning if she’s not at work, I’ll be whistling for my dinner?”
“I don’t know about the whistling, but it might be postponed for the time it takes me to track her down and talk to her.”
She stepped into the restaurant and was immediately surrounded by scents that told her if the best pizza in the five boroughs wasn’t to be had here, it would be damn close.
Murals of various Italian scenes decorated walls the color of toasted Italian bread. Booths, two-tops, four-tops cheerfully crowded together under iron ceiling fans that whisked those scents everywhere.
Behind the counter in the open kitchen, a young guy in a stained apron tossed pizza dough high, made the catch, tossed, all to the thrilled giggles of kids wedged into a booth with what she supposed were their parents. The waitstaff wore bright red shirts while they carted trays and weaved and threaded between tables to serve. Music played, and someone sang about “amore” in a rich and liquid baritone.
