by J. D. Robb
She broke off when her ’link signaled. “The feds,” she said, reading the display before she answered. “Dallas.”
“What happened to cooperation and sharing all data?” Nikos demanded.
Steamed, Eve thought. Very steamed.
“I’m working against the clock here, Agent Nikos. You can get all data from my commander and from Detective Peabody, who now has the lead in the department’s investigation.”
“If McQueen’s in Dallas, with a hostage, Laurence and I should be in Dallas.”
“Your travel and coordination with Dallas police isn’t my call.”
“It’s handled. We’re about an hour behind you. You could’ve offered us a ride.”
“Look, Nikos, I’ve got just a little more important things on my mind than your transpo. McQueen’s got a hostage, and he has every reason to inflict harm on one who got away. I’m not going to give him any reason to inflict that harm. We believe his partner is one Suzan Devon, current address Baton Rouge. My partner and her team are trying to track her.”
“I’m aware. We also have resources—considerable—and in using them have determined one Sister Suzan Devon didn’t exist until about three years ago. The prints and DNA on record are bogus as they belong to a ten-year-old corpse named Jenny Pike. We’re running face recognition on her to see if we can match her in our system.”
“She’ll be in Dallas, with McQueen.”
“Maybe. Or he may have disposed of her by now.”
No, no, Eve thought. Catch up, catch on. “He still needs her. He hasn’t had time to hunt up a new partner. She’s with him. Her ID as Sister Suzan went in the system before she met McQueen, so that’s on her. He’s got himself a player this time around. My partner’s working Stibble, who set them up together. If he knows anything, she’ll get it out of him. We’re going to land in a minute. We’ll continue this at Lieutenant Ricchio’s house.”
Eve clicked off, looked at Roarke. “Crap.”
“Because the FBI adds another factor?”
“Because I didn’t think to inform them. It didn’t cross my mind, and it should have. I promised full disclosure and cooperation.”
“If they’re that close behind us, they got their disclosure quickly enough.”
“It should’ve come from me.” Shoving a hand through her hair she went back to pacing. “Now I’m going to have to apologize. I hate that. And yeah, there’s the other factor. Ricchio’s not only swallowing a New York cop in his business, but the feds. In his place I’d be feeling a little put out.”
“You’ve got an hour’s jump to convince him not to be put out with you. The FBI will have to handle their own diplomacy.”
She considered. “There is that.”
Roarke snagged her hand on her next pass, tugged her into her seat. “Strap in, Lieutenant.” Reaching across, he buckled her in himself. “This is what you do.” He took her face in his hand, kept his eyes on hers as he knew she hated landing as much as takeoff. “Where you do it is only one aspect.”
“It’s a pretty big one.”
“You know your target and your objective. Those are bigger. And you know yourself.” He kissed her to settle himself as much as her. Because the shuttle glided in, touched down.
And they were in Dallas.
The minute she stepped off the shuttle, she frowned at the vehicle Roarke had waiting.
Amused, he opened the passenger door for her. “I thought something discreet, without flash, would be most appropriate.”
“Just because it’s not a solid gold, open-air zippy toy doesn’t mean it’s discreet. It looks like money. Whole big bunches of money.”
“It’s a quietly styled sedan with all-terrain capabilities because you don’t know where you’ll have to go, do you now? And it’s black.” He got behind the wheel, gave the on-board computer the location of the station house. “In any case, a solid gold vehicle would weigh entirely too much. A nice gold veneer now, that might be appealing.”
“Trust you,” she muttered.
“You can, yes.”
He drove out of the station and straight into Dallas traffic.
She remembered this, from her previous return there. The thick traffic, the roads and streets that curled or angled off rather than forming a reasonable grid. And the buildings, she thought now—not like New York where old mixed with new, where brownstones spread and sleek towers climbed. But spears and towers, arches and wedges, all flashy to her mind.
Like a solid gold zippy toy.
She focused on them, on her instinctive dislike of the skyline, and refused to think about what had happened in a freezing room in a run-down hotel in the city’s hard-edged sex district.
“It doesn’t look the same, really, as it did when we were here. Not even two years ago.”
Roarke gestured to one of the many towering cranes. “Something’s always coming down and going up. It’s a city in perpetual evolution.”
“Maybe that’s good.” She shifted in her seat. “Good it doesn’t stay the same. Maybe I won’t feel anything. It’s like coming to an anonymous city. It’s more off-planet than on to me anyway. Any city, anywhere. It’s nothing to me.”
If it was, he thought, she wouldn’t feel the need to convince herself.
“We’ve got a visitor’s slot.” She read off a text. “Level Three East, Slot Twenty-two. That’s the same level as SVU.”
“Convenient.”
“They’re being polite. They could’ve given us a slot on the other side of the building. So this is a good sign. I’ve got to persuade Ricchio to let me take the lead. He doesn’t know McQueen, he’s got no reason to. He’ll have done his homework since the grab, sure, but he doesn’t know this fucker.”
“Bree Jones does.”
“Yeah, but she’s still got some green on her. And it’s her sister on the line. You add that to the trauma, and believe me she’s relived every second of it since ten forty-three this morning. I don’t know if she’s going to help or muck it up.”
Roarke turned into the garage, wound up the levels. “You’re nervous, anxious. Don’t tell me you’re not. I know you. They won’t see it, but I can feel it.”
“Okay. I can hold that down.”
“No question. You might want to slow it down, follow Ricchio’s lead, get a sense of him, and Bree Jones. Give them a chance to get a sense of you.”
“You’re right. You’re right, and I know that. I just want—”
“To get through it,” Roarke said, and parked in 22.
“Yeah, and that stops. Stops right now. If that’s the best I can do, I should have stayed home.” She got out, looked at Roarke over the car. “Priority one, get Melinda Jones out, safe and alive. Priority two, put Isaac McQueen, and his partner, in cages. The rest? It’s just clutter.”
He walked around the car. “Let’s go clean house.” He took her hand as they walked to the interior doors.
“Hey! Consultants don’t walk into cop shops holding hands with badges.”
He gave her hand a squeeze before letting it go. “That’s my cop.”
Security logged them in, cleared Eve’s sidearm and clutch piece, then had them wait.
The white tile floors all but sparkled. The walls hit a soft brown, several shades richer and warmer than beige, and sported art with colorful geometrics framed in bronze. Benches under them held a shine. Nearby vending machines gleamed spotlessly clean.
Eve felt a nagging itch at the base of her spine that only increased when a couple of uniforms strolled by, smiled, and gave her and Roarke a cheery, “Afternoon.”
“What kind of cop shop is this,” she asked, “with fancy art on the walls and uniforms who give you a big smile instead of the beady eye?”
“You’re the New York in Dallas.”
“What?”
“Buck up, darling. I’m sure somewhere in this facility someone’s getting the beady eye.”
“The security officer smiled and said, ‘Good afternoon, ma’am,’ t
o me before I gave him ID.”
“It’s a sick world, Eve.” He resisted taking her hand for another squeeze. “A sick, sad world.”
“Yeah, it is. So why are these cops smiling? It’s just wrong.”
He couldn’t help it. He gave her a quick one-armed hug, brushed his lips over her hair. “Cut it out, yes, I know,” he said with a laugh. “But it seemed appropriate enough in a world of smiling cops. And here’s one who isn’t.”
Eve made Bree Jones the minute the detective stepped through the doors. For an instant then overlaid now and she had a perfect image of the young face, bruised, swollen, twisted with rage and fear.
Then it vanished, and she saw a pretty woman, blond hair short, spiky, with soft features overset by a sharp, firm chin. Blue eyes dominated a face pale and shadowed.
She couldn’t cover the fatigue, Eve thought, but she cloaked the fear. It barely showed around the edges.
She walked briskly to Eve, a small, compact woman in faded jeans, a white T-shirt, and brown boots.
“Lieutenant Dallas.”
The voice didn’t quiver. There was an inherent drawl in it that made it sound lazy and overcasual to Eve’s ears. But there was nothing lazy or casual about the handshake.
“Detective Jones. This is Roarke. He’s cleared as consultant.”
“Yes. Thank you for coming. Thank you both for coming so quickly. I asked my loo to let me escort you in. I wanted a moment to thank you personally.”
“There’s no need.”
“So you said before, but there is. And was. I’ll take you in to Lieutenant Ricchio.”
“Are you working the case, Detective?”
“Lieutenant Ricchio is persuaded I’ll be an asset.”
“Did you persuade him?”
Bree glanced at Eve, away again as they passed through the doors. “Yes, Lieutenant, I did. It’s my sister. I wouldn’t have attempted to persuade him unless I believed, completely, I can and will be an asset.”
Eve said nothing. Bree walked like a cop—and excusing the drawl, talked like a cop. But the place? Everything glimmered clean and shiny. Treated glass on generous windows diffused the light, and the air hung steady at a pleasant temperature, belying the wet blanket of heat that smothered the city outside.
“Is this a new facility, Detective?”
“Relatively, Lieutenant. It’s about five years old.”
Five years? Eve thought. Every cop she knew could’ve taken the shine off the place in five days.
They turned into SVU with its wide bullpen, its line of cubes for aides and uniforms. Cops at the desks, some in jackets, some in shirtsleeves, working the ’links, the comps. She wouldn’t say every movement stopped when she walked in, but there was a beat.
In it she got stares close enough to the beady eye to put her at ease.
Ricchio used the traditional boss’s attached office with unshuttered window. He stepped out immediately, held out a hand to Eve.
“Lieutenant Dallas, Mr. Roarke, thank you for responding so quickly. Please, come into my office. How about some coffee?”
She started to refuse. Let’s get down to business. But she remembered this was a world where cops smiled and said please a lot. “Thanks, just black.”
“The same,” Roarke told him.
He programmed the AutoChef, and after passing out the coffee, gesturing to his visitor’s chairs—ones with actual cushions—he sat on the edge of his desk.
He wore a suit and tie, and had a lot of wavy brown hair around a face with a deep tan and lantern jaw. His eyes shifted to Bree, back to Eve.
“I expect you’ve read Detective Jones’s statement and report.”
“I have. But I’d rather hear her account, if you don’t mind.”
“Bree?”
“Yes, sir. I didn’t get home until a few minutes after four this morning. My partner, Detective Walker, and I worked a long one. My sister and I share an apartment. I assumed Melinda was home in bed. I never checked. I went directly to bed, and as I’d taken the next day off, I slept late. I . . .”
She wavered a moment.
“It’s my policy,” Ricchio said, “when my detectives put in long hours, close a case, and have nothing hot waiting, they take a day to recoup.”
“Understood.”
“I didn’t get up until about ten-thirty,” Bree continued. “And I assumed Melinda had gone to work. There was a message from her on the fridge, as is our routine. She said she’d gotten a call, had gone out to meet with a rape victim she’d been counseling. She left the message at twenty-three-thirty.”
“Is it usual for her to meet a vic that late?”
“Yes, ma’am—sir. Pardon me, Lieutenant, I understand you prefer sir.”
“Ma’am’s somebody’s tight-assed aunt.”
It nearly got a smile from Bree. “Yes, sir. It’s never too late or too early for Melly. If somebody needs her, she’d be there. I didn’t think anything of it. I’d have known if she’d left the message under duress. She didn’t.”
“She didn’t tell you who she intended to meet or where?”
“No, but that wasn’t unusual, but . . . if she’d come back, she’d have deleted the message, so it gave me a bad feeling. I decided to check in with her. When I did so, I got McQueen’s message.”
As she said McQueen’s name, Bree began to turn a silver ring around and around her finger.
“I checked the apartment, cleared it. I contacted my lieutenant and apprised him of the situation. He dispatched two officers and a Crime Scene Unit to my location, and put out an alert on Melinda and her vehicle. Her vehicle was found in the unsecured lot of a motel approximately three-quarters of a mile from our apartment. No one interviewed remembered seeing Melinda or McQueen.”
“Has the picture of the female we believe is McQueen’s current partner been shown?”
“As soon as we received it from your department, Lieutenant. We didn’t get any hits. We’ve run down or are running down everyone booked into the motel last night. So far, we’ve cleared everyone.”
“They didn’t book,” Eve put in. “They didn’t stay there. They dumped her vehicle there, possibly transferred her to another. Most likely a van. You might re-interview asking about a van parked near where you located your sister’s car. Highest probability?” she continued when Bree took out a notebook. “The female suspect met Melinda Jones outside of the designated location. Probably some sort of restaurant—down-scale, but busy. Café, diner, bar. Requests the vic to take her somewhere else, maybe quieter. She wouldn’t want to go in with her target, be seen with her. The suspect’s behavior is nervous, upset—as the vic would expect, and being predisposed to help she lets the suspect into her vehicle. Is that consistent with your sister, Detective?”
“Yes.” Bree paused in her notes, circled the ring again. “Melinda would have taken her wherever she wanted to go.”
“At some point the suspect asks your sister to pull over, or maybe pull into an empty lot. She feels sick, or she becomes hysterical. It’s smarter, simpler to incapacitate the—your sister and gain control of the vehicle if they’re stopped. Suspect takes the wheel, McQueen joins them, or suspect drives to the motel, meets McQueen. They make the transfer, leave your sister’s vehicle. Doesn’t matter if you find it. It’s better if you do, then waste time looking for them in that area. They’re nowhere near that area.”
“If I’d checked when I got home—”
“It wouldn’t have made any difference.” Eve cut Bree off. They didn’t have time for the luxury of guilt. “It wouldn’t have mattered if you’d been home when she got the contact. She’d have responded, exactly as she did. She may have given you the name of the woman she intended to meet, but that wouldn’t have mattered either because it’s a lie. And within . . . I don’t know the traffic patterns and routes around here, but I’d say in no more than an hour, long before you’d have felt any concern, she was secured in the location they had ready.”
Eve tur
ned to Ricchio. “That’s the most likely scenario.”
“In your opinion, would he have taken her out of the city?”
“He’s an urbanite—and he’s been confined for years, away from the action, the energy, the movement. Neighbors tend to pay more attention to each other in the suburbs or outlyings. Best guess is an apartment or condo, mid-level. Nothing too flashy. His partner would already be established there. Could be weeks or months, but she’s got it all set up for him. It’s soundproofed, has top-grade security, and plenty of room. In prior partnerships, the female maintained her own residence. I don’t see that changing. He doesn’t want her in his space night and day. He likes his privacy.”
“You have an accomplice in custody.”
“Randall Stibble,” Eve confirmed for Ricchio. “We’ll call him a broker. For a fee he set McQueen up with potential partners who visited him in prison. My partner and another detective have him in Interview. If he’s got anything more to give, they’ll get it. Jones knew the female suspect, you said someone she’d counseled. You have her records?”
Ricchio nodded at Bree. “We’ve accessed them, and we’ve run searches on every patient she’s counseled in the last six months. We’ve found no matches on face recognition, DNA, or prints.”
“You need to go back further. It won’t be that recent. A year, maybe more. They’ll have put some distance between the alleged rape, the initial consults, and this contact and abduction. The ID she used to meet with McQueen is fake, good enough to beat the prison scans. Like McQueen, her appearance is probably altered somewhat. But they can’t alter who and what they are.”
“I’d like you to brief my officers, give them profiles. Your experience with McQueen will be invaluable to the search for Melinda.”
“Agents Nikos and Laurence should be here within twenty.”
