by J. D. Robb
“Let’s leave that to the geeks and be cops. Finish the contacts, get the waivers. I’ll connect with the PD again, then we’ll bring her in.”
It was weird, Eve admitted, but it was also smooth and efficient. In moments, she had the former public defender sitting in her programmed office.
“I appreciate the time, Ms. Drobski.”
“It’s no problem. I’d like to get this business resolved as soon as possible. It’s unnerving.”
“I’m sure it is. Your safety, and the safety of your family is a priority.”
“You have viable evidence that I—or my family—is being targeted? Evidence that substantially links this jeopardy to a defendant I represented more than twenty years ago?”
“You’re thinking like a lawyer. I’m thinking like a cop. Which one do you want to trust your life to, and the lives of your family?”
The woman shifted either in discomfort or annoyance. “I’m here, aren’t I?”
“You were shown an artist rendering of the suspect. Are you still certain you’ve never seen this man before? On screen image, Darrin Pauley.”
Drobski studied the screen. “I haven’t, not to my knowledge.”
“You have a brother.”
“Yes, Lyle. As I told you, he’s a financial consultant. I spoke with him, and he’s been shown the sketch, as has his wife, and their son. I’m concerned enough that I’ve been through this with my parents, and they live in Arizona. None of them recognize this man.”
“Who are you closest to?”
“I’m sorry?”
“In your family. Who are you closest to?”
“That’s very difficult to . . . my father, I suppose. He’s the reason I became a lawyer. I can promise you, Lieutenant, he’s not naive or gullible enough to allow himself or my mother to be put in danger. And he’s targeting women, isn’t he?”
“We don’t rule out a change to male target. Who else is there?”
“I don’t have any other family.”
“Who else are you close to? Family isn’t always blood.”
“Oh. God.” For the first time, Drobski looked shaken. “Lincoln, Lincoln Matters. We’ve been involved for over a year now, and my partner, Elysse Wagman. We’re very close, have been since college. She . . . she’s like a sister.”
“Peabody.”
“On it.”
“You think he might go after Lincoln or Elysse? I need to tell them—”
“We’re taking care of it right now. Is Elysse married, cohabbing?”
“No. In fact she just came out the other side of a difficult divorce. She has a daughter, my goddaughter, Renny. She’s only eleven.”
“We’ll take care of them.” She saw Peabody give her the nod out of the corner of her eye. “Police officers are on their way to her residence right now, and to Lincoln’s. When we’ve finished, I’ll contact both of them myself, and explain everything.”
“You really think it could be—”
“I’m not going to take any chances. I want you to tell me everything you remember about the Irene Schultz case.”
“I remember it very well. I hadn’t been a PD long, and I was still idealistic. Green. I felt, since she didn’t have any priors, she had a young child, I could make a good deal for her. I figured I’d get them to kick the illegals charge, the solicitation, maybe plead it down to a year, and mandatory rehab. Maybe get part of the year in a halfway. Then even before I talked to her, I got the whiff that they wanted her husband, and maybe I could get her straight into halfway and rehab with no cage time if she flipped on him.”
“But she didn’t.”
“Wouldn’t. She insisted, even to me, he had no part in what she’d done, no knowledge of it. I explained, tried to nudge her some, but she wouldn’t budge. I tried the mom card. I really wanted to help her. She wouldn’t be able to take care of her little boy if she was in prison. But, she stuck. Worse, when the APA came in the next morning to deal, she insisted on taking the first round. I could’ve dealt it down to a year, but she wouldn’t let me. I felt like a failure.”
“Did you speak with the husband?”
“Yeah. He was angry. Outraged when I told him she’d taken the eighteen. He said she shouldn’t do more than a year inside. I agreed with him, but he blamed me. When I told him she wouldn’t let me try to deal, he calmed down some, even apologized. When we went into court, he brought the baby. A really beautiful baby.”
Her gaze went back to the wall screen. “God. I held him. I held that baby while Irene and her husband had a minute. I actually held him. I felt sick when he cried for his mother. Sick that I hadn’t been able to do more. You get over that after a while, after being buried under the work, the system. That’s when you have to get out, when you get over being sick you couldn’t do more.”
When Eve felt she’d gotten everything she could, she brought in Elysse Wagman, keeping Drobski in place as both of them requested.
The woman absorbed the information Eve gave her, took it all in without a flinch. “I’m going to send my daughter to Colorado, to my mother. Tonight.”
“Lissy, you should go, too. You should—”
“Ms. Wagman.” Eve interrupted Drobski’s worry. “I understand your concern for your daughter’s safety. The officers will assist you in any way they can with the arrangements for her transportation to your mother. I can’t order you to stay, but I will ask you. If you have been targeted, any change in routine may tip him off. We can and will protect you.”
“For how long?”
“As long as necessary. Would you please take another look at the image on screen? A closer look.”
“I’m just not sure, either way.”
“He may have longer hair, or shorter. He could look just a little older.”
“Longer hair,” she murmured. “It could be . . . Jesus, it could be. Longer hair and a beard. Dom Patrelli.”
Bingo, Eve thought. Even as she turned to order Peabody to run it, her partner was working her PPC. “How do you know him?”
“I do pro bono work out of a legal-aid clinic, Lower East Side. About three weeks ago, when I was leaving this—he—came running up. Out of breath. Asked if I was Elysse Wagman. He said he was a journalist, and doing a spec piece on women in law with an emphasis on domestic cases. It’s my specialty. He said he’d run behind, had tried to get there before the clinic closed, asked if he could just walk with me, ask me some questions. I didn’t see the harm. He was charming and earnest, and so interested in the work we’re doing.”
“He gave you his name, his credentials.”
“Yes. I guess it was kind of quick, he was a bit fumbly. But we were right on the street. He just walked with me for a few blocks, asked the right sort of questions. He’d done some good background on the clinic. I was impressed, and pleased. We can use some positive exposure. He bought me a cup of coffee from a glide-cart, and asked if he could contact me if he had any follow-ups.”
“And did he?”
“The next week, he was waiting outside the clinic when I closed up, with coffee. I had some time, so we walked over to the park, sat on a bench, drank coffee while we did his follow-up. He was . . . he was a little flirty, nothing over the top or offensive. I was flattered. He’s twenty years younger, easily, and I . . . I’m an idiot.”
“No. He’s very good at what he does.”
“We talked, that’s all, and it came out he’s a fan of Zapoto’s films.”
“Jesus,” Drobski murmured.
“I know. I’m a rabid fan, and we got into that, debating, dissecting. There was a mini-festival in Tribeca that weekend.”
“You went out with him.”
Elysse moistened her lips, pushed at her hair.
Nervous, Eve thought, but equal parts embarrassed.
“I met him there Saturday night. We had drinks after, a little dinner. God, I actually told him I couldn’t ask him back to my place because of my daughter, which was an obvious way of saying let’s go to hi
s. And he said his roommate’s mother was visiting, and it would be awkward. Then he kissed me and put me in a cab. He kissed me,” she repeated, pressing her hand to her lips.
“We went out again the next week—just lunch, soy dogs down on the wharf. He made me feel young, sexy—and eager,” she confessed, “because he said he wanted me to have a little more time. I’d told him about the divorce, and my daughter. I told him about my girl. He wanted me to have more time because he wanted me to be sure.”
“When are you seeing him again?”
“A week from Friday. He’s working this weekend.”
Not if I can help it, Eve thought.
19
“SHE’S NOT THE NEXT IN LINE,” EVE SAID. “He’s playing her along, stringing it out. Divorced—that’s a couple steps further along. He plays her perfectly. Changes his look, his image. Young, but not too young, flirtatious, but not too, interested in what interests her—knowledgeable about those interests.”
“She doesn’t tell anybody about him because it’s early days yet,” Peabody put in. “And she feels a little foolish contemplating an affair with someone twenty years younger.”
“He doesn’t have a house ’link, he tells her, his pocket’s broken. He hasn’t gotten around to replacing it. He doesn’t want her contacting him yet. He needs to keep her anxious and off balance. He’s got the power. But she’s not next.”
“Somebody else is.” Concern covered Peabody’s face as she studied the images of possible targets Eve had displayed on the rear wall screen. “And probably this weekend.”
“He doesn’t get another one. Let’s take the child services supervisor, then the APA.”
She downed coffee between interviews and gave Peabody a twenty-minute break to grab a sandwich of her own.
She began to see the steps, the stages, the story that took place twenty years before, and thought she understood the players, their roles, their choices.
“She went down for him,” Roarke concluded. “He conned her into it, or convinced her in that call she made after the bust. ‘We can’t both go down, baby, who’ll take care of the boy?’ ”
“That, maybe,” Eve agreed, “but he’d already been in once. Prints on file. They’d bust him hard on the ID fraud if she admitted he’d been involved, and he’d do more than the eighteen months for the second offense. He’d use that. ‘You’ll do a year, sugar, and I’ll be there for you. If they look at me, it’s five to seven.’ ”
“You got that right. He had more on the line than she did.”
“And he’d need her to go down quick and clean, make it easy for the cops and the PA. No fuss, no muss, no looking too hard at him.”
“And more, I think more, if they both went down, there’d be no one to maintain their identities. He could push that. The center wouldn’t hold, and they’d be exposed for what they were. A lot more than a year and a half at stake. And she’s the one who got caught, wasn’t she? She’s the one who got careless. Why should they lose it all when she could suck it up?”
“That’s my take,” Eve agreed. “He’d already gone in once, and he wasn’t going back. Some time, some dealing, some pleading hardship, she could’ve gotten off with the year, and part of that, maybe most, in a halfway, mandatory rehab. But that would’ve made it risky for him. The quicker she goes down, the quicker he’s clear. But it’s more, I think.”
Sliding her hands into her pockets, she wandered the room so familiar—an illusion, but familiar. And remembered.
“With my mother, I’m vague. It’s blurry with only a few clear flashes. But I know—I knew—she hated the . . . fact of me. But she had me, and she stayed at least long enough for me to have a few pictures in my head, to remember specific events.”
“As Darrin Pauley does?”
“Whatever he remembers, or has been taught to remember is different. I know I wasn’t a child to either of them. I was a commodity. A potential income. But did they come up with that together, or did one convince the other? That’s a question I’ll never have the answer to, and isn’t important.”
She wouldn’t let it be important.
“But in this case, maybe it is.”
“Why she chose, or they chose to have the boy,” Roarke continued.
“She’s the player, the brains, the front man. He’s the manipulator who likes the flash and she taught him what she knew. The sex, the drugs, that’s cheap money, and lacks finesse. Quick and greedy, like you said. She had to have finesse to play Pauley for a year. And the kid? He should’ve been baggage, she should have shucked that off. She didn’t. So she either wanted the kid or she wanted Pauley—maybe both. The kid wasn’t a commodity. Maybe a cover, but even that’s a stretch.”
“Easier to move, to blend, to work the grift without an infant to tend to,” Roarke agreed.
“When Pauley got out, they could’ve left the kid with Vinnie. Poofed.”
“Taking them both, the woman Vinnie loved, the child he thought was his? It’s cruel.”
“Fits the pattern. She was clean and healthy, and they had a decent stake—one they stole from Vinnie—and in a couple of years, she’s using and soliciting. And it shapes up that he was running the show.”
“Easy money,” Roarke concurred, “with her doing the work.”
“It’s Pauley, he was her weakness. She whored for him, and dealt for him—and somewhere along the line he started running the show, looking for easier money, more flash, more cash. By the time she did her eighteen and they shifted to Chicago, he was in full charge.”
She took a breath. “That’s the way it was, that’s the way I remember it. The way it felt to me when I remember them together, or get those flashes of events. She was a junkie and a whore—and he ran the show. So maybe I’m projecting.”
“I don’t think so.”
She shook her head. “That’s for later, maybe it’ll be useful. We have to deal with the now. Let’s get Peabody back and take the judge.”
He went to her first, took her face in his hands. “Whatever you remember, or feel, you need to know that whatever they were they did one worthwhile thing in their miserable lives. And that was you. Whatever they were, they couldn’t destroy that. They couldn’t stop you from becoming.”
Judge Serenity Mimoto, a trim and tiny woman, studied the sketch of Darrin Pauley on screen. “He looks like his father.”
“You remember the father?”
Mimoto cut intense eyes to Eve. Their striking azure color radiated against smooth hazelnut skin. “I refreshed myself on the matter, and those involved, when your office contacted me earlier. I’m familiar with the details of the case. The defendant, through her attorney, had reached an agreement with the prosecutor. She pled guilty to all charges, with the APA recommending a sentence of eighteen months. Taking into account the nonviolent nature of the crimes, the lack of previous criminal record, the defendant’s cooperation and plea, I so ordered. She was remanded to the Minimum Security facility at Rikers.”
Mimoto nodded toward the screen again. “And I remember him, the baby in his father’s arms, crying for his mother. I allowed them a moment to say good-bye. She took the boy briefly, very briefly, then passed him to her attorney and embraced the man. I thought, so she has no comfort to give her son, but needs to take it from the father.”
“You haven’t seen him, the father or the son, since that day in court?”
“No, I don’t believe I have. If this young man’s case comes before me, when you’ve arrested him, I’ll be forced to recuse myself due to this conversation, and the previous connection. So I’ll ask you, Lieutenant, do you have enough for an arrest?”
“I believe we do, and will have more.”
Mimoto inclined her head. “You hope I can provide you with some of that more.”
“Yes, I do, and by doing so prevent him from harming someone close to you. You pronounced the sentence that put his mother in prison. Six months after her release, when she, her son, and her partner were going by differ
ent names, and I believe continuing the confidence games and illegal activities that resulted in her arrest and incarceration, she was raped and murdered in a manner nearly identical to that of my two victims.”
“And you believe this is the man responsible for two murders, because he somehow blames his mother’s death on her arrest and in carceration?”
Eve appreciated Mimoto’s calm demeanor as much as her quick understanding. “Yes, and I believe he’s been indoctrinated to make that connection throughout his life.”
Mimoto lifted a sharp black eyebrow. “That’s for the psychiatrists and lawyers to sort out. He won’t come after me. That’s a pity as it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve been threatened or targeted in my twenty-six years on the bench. Someone in my family. I have a very large family, Lieutenant.”
“Yes, Your Honor, you do. Four siblings, all currently married, three children, also all currently married. Eight grandchildren.”
“And another on the way.”
“Ma’am. Your oldest granddaughter is also married.”
“And made me a great-grandmother only yesterday.”
“Oh.” That one hadn’t made the data records yet, Eve thought. How did anyone keep track? “Congratulations.”
“A boy. Spiro Clayton, seven pounds, eight ounces.”
“Um. Nice.” She supposed. “Your husband, who has four siblings and so on. Your parents, and all four of your grandparents.”
“Along with various aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, nephews, and the progeny thereof. We are, one could say, legion.”
Exactly, Eve thought. Where to begin?
“I’ve found a pattern, Your Honor. A way he chooses his targets. From the . . . breadth of your family, I don’t doubt there would be a member who fit any of his criteria. However, I have established contact with three other potential targets, so fining down the remaining pattern to two of his requirements. I’m looking for someone you’re close to—in that family or someone you consider as family—who is recently married or who has recently lost a spouse through death.”
