Connections in Death

by J. D. Robb

“She’s not far off. And we’re not far off from Banger HQ. Let’s go chat with Jones.”

  “He said he didn’t order the hit on Pickering,” Peabody began as they walked back to the car. “Could he have ordered this one? Payback for her part in Pickering?”

  “The timing’s off, unless he found out before we told him. If we’d found her floating in the East River, or with her throat slit well inside or well outside Banger territory, I’d lean harder that way. The beat cop says the kill zone’s neutral territory, and the kill violates the code. The kind of violation that can start a gang war.”

  As Eve settled behind the wheel Peabody considered. “Maybe he wants one. He wants more territory, and there’s nothing like blood and war to cement a commander’s cred.”

  “I’d lean harder that way if we didn’t know he has business interests that could end up burned out or attacked in a war. The beat cop gave me a pretty clear idea of the politics. And I’ve got a tag in to Detective Strong to see what she knows or can find out about the illegals trade on Banger turf.”

  “She’ll dig in. She’s a good one. Maybe the Dragons worked this to put Jones and the Bangers on the hot seat. Tie them up with cops, erode power. You hit their HQ last night, and we’re going back this morning. That seat’s pretty hot.”

  “I could lean there. But…” She pulled to the curb near Banger HQ. “Pickering strikes me as personal. So he’s turned his back on the gang,” she added as they got out of the car. “And that might earn a slap, a threat, or a beating followed by derision, not a hit. He went inside and didn’t name names, didn’t give up his gang family. That earns serious cred. You’d think enough to buy him safety.”

  At the door, she repeated the secret knock. The one who opened it gave her the hard eye. “Got a warrant?”

  Not as easy a mark as the one the night before, Eve calculated. More muscle than fat, a tat of a snake coiling over his shaved head. And a look of at least average intelligence in that hard eye.

  “We need to talk to Slice.”

  “He ain’t receiving visitors today. Especially cunt cops.”

  “Why don’t you let him know Lieutenant Dallas is here, see what he says?”

  “Fuck you.”

  When he started to shut the door, she slammed her shoulder against it. The force, and the surprise, took him back a couple steps. She didn’t figure that would last.

  “Fine. I’ll just tag the PA’s office for that warrant. My partner and I will take a stroll around the block.”

  “A nice day for a stroll,” Peabody added.

  “Yeah. And when we get back, we’ll haul Marcus Jones—that’s Slice, by the way—into Cop Central for an interview on suspicion of murder. Two counts.”

  “Bullshit, bitch.”

  She pulled out her ’link, keyed in. “Yeah, Reo,” she began as she strolled away. “I need a warrant. Actually two,” she continued, letting her voice carry back. “The first a search and seizure.”

  “Try it, bitch!” he called out. “You’ll end up bloody.”

  Deliberately, she stopped, turned back to face the door guard. “Make that three. Might as well have one ready for obstruction and assault on a police officer. What’s your name, asshole?”

  “Fuck you!”

  He slammed the door.

  “So, Reo.”

  “I’m barely into my first cup of at-the-office coffee,” Reo complained. “And somebody’s already yelling fuck you.”

  “Well, I’ve got two bodies in under twelve hours, had a trip to the underground, and I’m currently exchanging insults with the door guard at the Banger HQ in the Bowery.”

  “Okay, you win.” Reo, a classy blonde and fierce litigator with a hint of magnolia, rolled her eyes. “You’re looking to search and seize at Banger HQ? And anticipating an altercation?”

  “It might come to that. Let’s give it a minute. So…” Eve dug for small talk. “How are things?”

  On the ’link screen, Reo stared. “You’re asking me ‘how are things?’”

  “I’m killing a minute. It’s the small talk. I say, how are things. You say, good or, they blow. I say, great or, gee, that sucks. Then you say, how about you, and I say— Never mind,” she finished when Jones opened the door. “Minute’s DOA. I’ll tag you back.”

  He stood in black baggies, bare chested and barefooted, with annoyance simmering in sleep-clouded eyes.

  “The fuck you want now?”

  “Dinnie Duff’s dead. We can talk about that out here, in there, or down at Central. Pick, and now.”

  “How’s she dead?”

  “Pick,” Eve repeated. “Now.”

  “Shit.” He rubbed a hand hard over his face. “Gimme five.”

  When he shut the door, Eve glanced at her wrist unit. “If he goes over five, tag Reo back, get her started on the warrants.”

  “You know he’s probably having illegal substances, weapons, and other questionable items scooped and moved out the back.”

  “If he has brains, he did at least some of that last night after our conversation. Right now, he needs to get dressed because he doesn’t want to talk about Duff inside, or out on the street. He sure as hell doesn’t want me to pin his ass in Central.”

  “What’s his other choice?”

  “We’ll see.”

  “Okay.” Peabody waited a beat. “So, how’s it going?”

  Eve couldn’t stop the quick laugh. “Better way to kill the five, dig into Duff, find out next of kin for notification. Movement at a couple windows on the second level—third’s boarded, but we’ve got a couple people awake enough to watch us out here.”

  “Slice works out. He’s got a mag bod going. I don’t think much of the one-armed tat sleeve personally.”

  “This is why small talk is useless and annoying.”

  “Not entirely. I also noted his gang tat’s the same design and in the same place as the one Pickering was having removed—even while admiring his six-pack abs.”

  “Okay, that earns you a point.”

  “Duff has a mother in Jersey City, age forty-eight, domestic worker. And a father in Attica, a lifer. They didn’t make it legal. One sib, male, age twenty-six, with an Atlanta address—employed at a construction firm, same father listed.”

  “We’ll go with the mother.”

  “No criminal there. Father’s a bad seed, in and out, and now in for good this time for aggravated assault. Looks like the brother had some issues as a juvenile, got straightened out. He’s been in Georgia for eight years, employed at the same firm for the last five. No recent bumps.

  “Duff, on the other hand.”

  “Yeah, I skimmed hers. Illegals, possession, possession with intent to distribute, unlicensed solicitation. A long line of petty shit. No real violent crimes on her sheet.”

  “Now she’s dead, and if she wasn’t dead, she’d be looking at charges of accessory to murder.”

  Jones made it out in about three, red hoodie, black pants, scarred high-tops.

  Black, Eve noted, but not Lightning brand.

  “I want some breakfast.”

  Since he kept walking, Eve signaled Peabody, fell into step with him.

  “I have to hand it to you. I don’t know if I’d have an appetite if I had the cops coming around asking about the murders of two people I’m connected to.”

  “I ain’t worried about it.”

  He turned into a grease trap called 24 Hour Eats.

  It smelled like overcooked onions, tremendously bad coffee, and fake meat sopped in that grease.

  The decor ran to walls painted screaming orange, decorated with blissfully optimistic pictures of food. The yellowing white of the counter had scorch scars, and the handful of backless stools carried strips of duct tape along the seats.

  The line of booths looked no more promising, but Jones swaggered back to the last, a corner, slid in, tapped a hand on the scarred laminate of the table like he owned the place.

  Which he did, Eve thought. At least a share
thereof.

  A waitress, somewhere in her forties, Eve gauged, with a lot of tits straining against an atomic-yellow uniform, shuffled right over with a coffeepot.

  “How’s it going, Slice?”

  She poured what pretended to be coffee into the brown mug he turned over. Eve waved a hand in a no signal over hers. Peabody shook her head.

  “Get me the cheese grits, Melba, and three eggs scrambled soft, sausage, and toast.”

  “I’ll put that right in for you.”

  She shuffled off, pausing to fill the mugs of a couple of men who looked more like they were ending the night than starting the morning.

  The counter waitress slapped a plate in front of a solo female Eve tagged as street level.

  Jones added three containers of nondairy creamer and three packets of fake sugar to his coffee.

  “How’d Dinnie get herself dead?”

  “Probably by letting three murdering goons into Lyle Pickering’s apartment. She finished that up getting beaten to death, raped repeatedly, choked, and stomped on. Her assailants stole her shoes, her coat, her ’link if she had one, ripped her earrings out of her ears, and left her under the Manhattan Bridge overpass.”

  He hadn’t shown any reaction to Eve’s listing of the violence, but his face lit with fury at the location.

  “Fucking Dragons.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Fuck you know?”

  “I know she, reportedly, told at least two of your crew she intended to go to work, needed the scratch. But she never showed, and hasn’t worked there in days. I know she went to Pickering’s apartment for the specific purpose of aiding his killers with entry.”

  “She had the softs for Pick.” He jabbed a finger on the table. “I say bullshit she helped him get dead.”

  “Yet that’s exactly what she did, and a few hours later, in fact, about the time you and I had our first conversation, she was being gang-raped—and not onstage for pay—and beaten, kicked, having bones broken and her skull fractured.”

  “If she did that to Pick, she earned it. If she did that, she went in with the Dragons, that’s what.”

  “Unless you can give me a solid reason why the Dragons would order a hit on Pickering, and Duff would work with them on it, I’m not buying they killed her.”

  “Dragons don’t need a reason.” But his tone lacked conviction. Then it turned ugly. “Chinks talking Chink more’n they talk American. Why don’t you go over to Chinktown and bang at that mofo Fan Ho instead of getting on my ass.”

  “We’ll table your racism for now. Who had it in for Pick?”

  “I said, you talk to Fan Ho about that, ’cause it ain’t none of mine. Now, some maybe don’t like how Pick didn’t come back when he got out, but you don’t kill a brother over that. Now, maybe Dinnie got her ass up seeing he didn’t come back to her, neither. Maybe she got high and got pissed and got some fuckers to do him.”

  “You just said she was soft on him, wouldn’t have a part in killing him.”

  “Maybe she didn’t mean to.” He shrugged, drank coffee. “Maybe just give him a good taste of what he’d been missing. That boy loved his Go. Maybe she figures she gets him back on it, he comes back to her.” He shrugged again. “How the fuck I know?”

  She leaned in, ignoring the waitress who set down his plate—grits as orange as the walls, runny powdered eggs, sausage that smelled like something pigs wallowed in, and toast as thin as paper.

  “I the fuck know the men who entered Pickering’s apartment entered with the intent to kill him.”

  “Pick?” The waitress squeaked it out, then trotted rather than shuffled away when Jones aimed a hard look at her.

  “You don’t know shit about what’s in their heads.”

  “They came up behind him, restrained him, jabbed a needle right through his shirt to tranq him. They set him up so it would look, if you didn’t look close, like he pumped himself full of that Go, planted more in his room.

  “Duff got that started, and now she’s dead, too. And you know what I’m going to find? I’m going to find the same three who killed Pickering killed Duff. To shut her mouth. I’m going to find those three are three of yours.”

  “The fuck you will.”

  “Count on it. Who wants a war with the Dragons? Who wants one enough to violate your neutral zone with rape and murder?”

  “Ask the Dragons. If they want one, they’ll get one.”

  Eve watched his face while he squeezed anemic ketchup on his runny powdered eggs. “There’s a lot of collateral damage in wars. People hunker down at home, don’t go out to eat or shop. They don’t look to move into the area. Wars are bad for business, aren’t they, Slice, and you’ve got considerable business in this sector.”

  He began to eat, his eyes on his plate now rather than on her. “My business is my business.”

  “Where’d you get the scratch to buy into the building where you flop? And this place? And Wet Dreams?”

  “My business”—he scooped up more eggs—“is my business.”

  “Banger business mostly runs to illegals, sex work, the protection racket, a little identity theft, a little fraud. You’d pull in a share of that, a top-level share, but it’s hard to see that share spreading out enough to buy into property.”

  “We in the security business. We offer up security to locals, help keep the neighborhood safe.”

  He gestured to the waitress. “We keep the neighborhood safe around here, Melba?”

  She smiled like a woman with a stunner at her throat. “You sure do, Slice.”

  “We got licenses for the sex work,” he continued. “We got those who flop at one of our places paying rent for it. If I got business, it don’t mean I ain’t loyal to my crew.”

  It wasn’t only temper under his tone, barely controlled, but nerves. He didn’t like her pushing on his outside enterprises.

  So she pushed again.

  “Maybe you don’t see taking a little extra off the top as disloyal. Others may disagree. In fact, some in your crew might wonder how it is you can buy property with a disgraced lawyer and his skirt—then charge rent.”

  She could smell the nerves on him now, the way she could smell what passed as sausage on his plate.

  “Owning shit’s no crime. Seems to me you’re saying all this was to spark off a war, and how I got business interests that could get squeezed by a war. Makes no sense for me to get it going.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. Property values go down, you buy it up cheaper. All kind of angles here, Slice.”

  “Screw your angles.” He flicked his eyes, filled with rage now, up to hers. “I got nothing more to say.”

  “Then think about this while you’re finishing your breakfast. If you didn’t order these hits, somebody in your crew went around you and ordered them. Who wants a war?” she repeated, and slid out of the booth.

  “Something to think about,” she added, leaving him to his runny eggs and orange grits.

  “You don’t think he ordered either hit,” Peabody said as they walked back to the car.

  “Fifty-fifty’s down to sixty-forty against. Both kills were sloppy. I don’t think he’d be that sloppy. He’s a killer, and if he had reason, he’d have taken both of them out.”

  Once again, she got behind the wheel, studied the HQ. “Then there’s that forty. Maybe the sloppy had purpose. Maybe he’s got an eye to buy up more, scare people into selling or moving. You fight your way up to top ranks because you want power. You go into business because you want to make money. Right now, he’s got both going.”

  She started to pull out when her ’link signaled. She took it on her wrist unit as she drove. “Dallas.”

  “Strong. I just got in—had an op closing up—and got your message. Lyle Pickering.”

  “In the morgue. So is his onetime skirt, Dinne Duff. What do you know?”

  “I know we need to talk. I can come to you.”

  Something in Strong’s tone had Eve deciding to skip the
trip to Casa del Sol to talk to Pickering’s boss and coworkers. “I’m heading into Central. Give me thirty.”

  “I’ll see you in your office in thirty.”

  “I’ll want Peabody, so the lounge might be better.”

  “Your office, sir. Please.”

  “Okay then. In thirty. Something there,” Eve mused. “For now, Peabody, check in with EDD on Pickering’s ’link. He had to have a sponsor. Let’s see if we can pin that down, and have him or her come in to Central. Seems to me a recovering addict might tell another recovering addict more than he does his family. Add the family to the list, too. We need to have conversations. They come to us or we go to them, whichever works.”

  While Peabody worked, Eve mulled. She turned over what she knew with what she believed. Juggled it all again, turned it over again.

  By the time she pulled into the garage at Central, she figured she had about fifteen of her thirty left to set up her board, her book.

  “Okay, EDD ID’d the sponsor from the frequency of transmissions and the content of same as Matthew Fenster. Forty-one, he’s employed at the Clean House rehabilitation center and also helps run their halfway house—where Pickering did his stint after making parole.”

  “That makes it an even closer connection.”

  “He’s got one marriage—divorced. One offspring. Bumps for possession, for fraud. Lost his position at a financial investment firm due to that fraud. Went into a white-collar prison nine years ago—when his son was two. Did three years—during which time his wife divorced him. Completed mandatory rehab, did a voluntary stint when he got out at Clean House, lived in their halfway house. Looks like he took some courses on counseling. He joined the staff three years ago.”

  She scrolled more as they headed to the elevator. “His earnings took a dive. Before he got axed and locked up, he earned high six figures, not including some nice bonuses. Currently, well, I make more. He has a resident’s apartment in CH, included in his salary. No bumps since his release.”

  “Contact him while I set things up, see if he’ll come in. If he balks, we’ll pay him a visit at work.”

  Eve pushed out of the elevator, headed for the glides after one stop due to the crazy eyes of a woman in restraints between two uniforms.