Festive in Death

by J. D. Robb

  “You tell me what she said!”

  “Now, JJ, you want to watch that anxiety and blood pressure. My partner and I are just passing the time until your lawyer gets here.”

  “Forget the lawyer. I want to know what Natasha said.”

  “Are you waiving your right to have your legal representative present during interview?”

  “Fine, yes. What did she say to you?”

  “Let the record show Mr. Copley has voluntarily waived said right. What did she say?” Eve turned straight around to face him, smiled. “She said the son of a bitch tried to kill me. Lock him up and toss the key.”

  “You’re lying. You’re a lying bitch.”

  “Now, JJ, you’ve got to expect her to be a little upset when you bash her in the head, when she’s spending her Christmas in the hospital.”

  “I never touched her. I never hit her. I was upstairs. I’ve already told you. I was upstairs. I had the game on. I fell asleep.”

  “Fell asleep? That’s a new one. Are you going to keep doing these add-ons? Because I can tell you, the story’s not getting better.”

  “Oh, I don’t know, Dallas.” Peabody bopped her shoulders. “You’ve got to give him a little credit for trying to add some texture to the overall bullshit.”

  “I drifted off.” He set his jaw. “I played eighteen holes, shot a sixty-eight. That’s four under par.”

  “Wow. Aren’t you special?” Peabody commented.

  “Just shut your mouth, you ignorant twat.”

  “Aw, Dallas, he called me a twat. How come you get to be a bitch, but I only get to be a twat.”

  “It’s the rank,” Eve told her. “You’ll make bitch one day.”

  “Thanks. That means a lot to me.”

  “I’ll make you both sorry. I’ll make you both pay.”

  “Blah, blah, blah.” Eve levered back, smirked at him. “Do you want to brag about your golf game, exchange insults, or add more texture to your bullshit story? It’s all the same to us.”

  “Goddamn it, I was upstairs. I heard her scream. It took me a minute, maybe a couple minutes, because I thought maybe it was a dream. I was asleep, a little groggy. I got up, and I called for her, and I ran out. I ran downstairs.”

  “Why downstairs?”

  “Because that’s where the scream came from.”

  “If you were asleep, how do you know where it came from?”

  “I just knew.” He slapped both fists on the table. “I ran in, and I saw her on the floor, and I saw the other one—Tella’s girl.”

  “Tella’s girl?”

  “That’s right. And I heard something.” His eyes flickered away. “Like somebody running maybe. Maybe a door closing.”

  “Seriously? Now there’s running footsteps and closing doors?”

  “That’s some rich bullshit texture,” Peabody put in. “You’ve got to admire it.”

  Eve snorted out a laugh for form. “Right. So, JJ, why didn’t you mention these mysterious running footsteps and closing doors to the responding officer? To me in previous interview? Or, to any fucking body before this moment?”

  He swiped beads of sweat from his forehead, more from his upper lip. “I didn’t think about it at the time because I could only think about my wife. I had to help Tash.”

  “How? Not by calling for help.”

  “I didn’t have time! I was in shock, and then the police were at the door, and everything happened so fast. I was upstairs when somebody killed that woman and hurt Tash. I want to talk to my wife, goddamn it. She’s confused and scared, and she has to be worried about me.”

  “Her worry? That you’ll try to kill her again. She’s done with you, JJ. She’s done, Felicity’s done. You’ve got nothing and no one.”

  “You leave Felicity out of it.” To Eve’s shock, tears swam into his eyes. “You told her lies about me, didn’t you? She left me! You told her lies, and she left me. I love her!”

  “Who? Your wife or Felicity.”

  “I . . .” He pulled himself in. “Both. In different ways.”

  “The different ways where you tell your wife you’ve broken it off, and you tell Felicity your wife doesn’t understand you?”

  “You don’t know anything about it.”

  “Christ, JJ, do you think we haven’t had your type in here before? How many times, Peabody?”

  “Couldn’t count them.” Peabody cast her dark eyes to the ceiling, shook her head. “But they all think they’re originals.”

  “They’re so damn simple. Here’s how it went. You bragged to Ziegler about the hot dancer you had on the side. He blackmailed you. You finally had enough, even though you’d been paying him off with money you extorted from your wife.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “We found the other accounts, JJ. Offshore, shell corporations. You’re an amateur. Ziegler kept a book. Your name’s in it. The money you paid him is on record.”

  Eve pushed up. “You went to his apartment to tell him you were done, to show him who was boss. He worked in a gym, for God’s sake. Who did he think he was? But he wouldn’t let you off the hook. You lost your temper—you’re good at it. You picked up the trophy and you struck him, struck him again.”

  “No panic attack that time,” Peabody added. “Not when you’d finally solved the problem. It felt good. It felt like something you should have done a lot sooner. Without him in the way, you were free and clear.”

  “So you got creative. You’re a creative guy. You dragged him onto the bed, got a knife out of his kitchen. You wrote a funny little message—you’re good at that, too—and you pinned it on his chest with the knife.”

  “I didn’t do any of that.” His breathing shortened; sweat slicked his face. “That’s crazy. I was never there. I never went there. I want to talk to my lawyer. I demand to talk to my lawyer.”

  “Peabody, get him some water. Take it down, JJ. Take it down before you end up in the Infirmary again. Believe me, I’ve got all the time in the world for this.”

  “I don’t have anything more to say until I’ve talked to my lawyer.”

  “No problem.”

  She waited while Peabody brought in a cup of water.

  His hand shook as he drank.

  Eve stepped over to Peabody, spoke quietly. “Get a uniform to sit on him in case he has one of those fits again. Let’s find out what’s holding up the lawyer. We’ve got him on the ropes. We need to finish him off. I want to check something. Dallas, exiting Interview,” she said for the record.

  Back in her office, she tried Felicity’s ’link. Her stomach clutched when an older woman answered.

  “Yes?”

  “This is Lieutenant Dallas, NYPSD. I need to speak with Felicity Prinze.”

  “This is her mother. She’s not talking to you. You’re that friend of that Copley person.”

  The muscles in Eve’s stomach loosened again at the use of present tense. “No, ma’am, I am not his friend. I have Copley in custody.”

  “For what?”

  “For murder.”

  “Oh my God. Oh my God! My little girl.”

  “Has she been harmed, ma’am?”

  “No, no—not that way. But he hurt my little girl’s heart and soul. He killed his poor wife, didn’t he?”

  Not for lack of trying, Eve thought. “Ma’am, I need to speak with your daughter. You’re welcome to stay with her while I do.”

  “You can be sure I will. Chantal! Get your sister. Right now! She came home,” the woman said to Eve. “So I’m grateful for that. She came home because she found out he’d been lying to her, and using her. And I’ve been holding her ’link because he kept trying to reach her. Felicity, it’s that policewoman you told us about. She arrested that awful man.”

  “Arrested! Mom, let me have the ’link. Hello, hello.
I forgot your name.”

  “It’s Dallas. Lieutenant Dallas. Felicity, did you see or speak to JJ Copley after we spoke?”

  “I wouldn’t. I got thinking when you left. I’m not as stupid as people think.”

  “Nobody thinks you’re stupid,” her mother said.

  “He did. He thought I was stupid, and I was. But I started thinking, and I tagged up Sadie, and we talked.”

  “That’s good.”

  “And after I talked with Sadie, I did what he told me not to. I called his house. I got the housekeeper thing, and she said how she’d take a message because he wasn’t able to come to the ’link. So I said, Oh, he’s out of town, and the housekeeper thing said, No, he was in residence—that’s how she said it—but unable to come to the ’link, and she’d take the message. I just said never mind because I got upset. He lied to me. Did you know he lied to me?”

  “Yes, I’m sorry, Felicity, I knew he lied to you.”

  “It’s why you said I should talk to Sadie, and she said how I needed to find out for sure. So I did. I even went over there, to his house, and I watched, and I saw him. I saw him and his wife come out together and get in a car, and he wasn’t on a trip. They were laughing. She wasn’t being mean to him. He—he kissed her before they got in the car, and I knew it was all a lie. I came home. Am I in trouble?”

  “Why would you be in trouble?”

  “I took some of the clothes he bought me, and I used the credit card he got me to pay for the trip home. I didn’t have enough since I stopped working. I’ll pay it back.”

  “Did he give you the clothes?”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Did he give you the card to use?”

  “He did.”

  “Then you’re not in trouble.”

  “I left him a memo cube. I said how I was leaving, and I wouldn’t have anything to do with somebody who lied and cheated like that, and made me a liar and a cheater, too. I’m not coming back, I don’t think. I think I don’t belong in New York. Did he do something really bad? Worse than lying and cheating?”

  “It looks that way.”

  “He was so nice to me, so I loved him. But it wasn’t real.”

  “I may need to talk to you again, but I’m glad you went home. I’m glad you’re with your family.”

  “Me, too. Um, Merry Christmas, Dallas.”

  “Same to you.”

  Eve clicked off, sat back, sorted through.

  “Lawyer’s here,” Peabody said from the doorway.

  “We’ll give them some time, then start again.”

  Eve gave them an hour, taking the time to fine-tune her approach, then walked through the bullpen to get Peabody.

  She saw Jenkinson had taken her at her word.

  A banner hung over the break-room door, facing out so any who came in would see the sentiment:

  NO MATTER YOUR RACE, CREED, SEXUAL ORIENTATION, OR POLITICAL AFFILIATION, WE PROTECT AND SERVE, BECAUSE YOU COULD GET DEAD.

  Obviously, there’d been some discussion, some teamwork on the wording, but Jenkinson’s original sentiment remained. Her first reaction wasn’t the amusement she’d expected, but a tug of pride. Because it was the righteous truth.

  She took a quick scan of the men and women who served under her. Trueheart in his pristine uniform earnestly working on his comp. Baxter, kicked back, designer shoes propped on his desk, talking on his desk ’link. Jenkinson scowling at his screen as he chowed down on some questionable sandwich from Vending.

  The room smelled of truly terrible coffee, someone’s greasy lunch, the fake pine someone had sprayed on the silly tree. It smelled like cops at Christmas, she thought.

  “Peabody, let’s lock this up. The rest of you? That—” She pointed toward the banner. “That stays up. Anybody from Maintenance or Standards or Legal tries to take it down, kick them to me.”

  Peabody scurried after Eve. “We’re really leaving it up?”

  “How did we start this investigation? Giving our time and effort to get justice for a worthless asshole. The sign stays. It speaks the truth.”

  She walked into Interview, read the necessary data into the record, then sat across from Copley and his lawyer.

  “So, here we are again.”

  And let it hang.

  McAllister broke the silence.

  “My client is a victim of Trey Ziegler, a blackmailer, an extortionist, a man who—through evidence you yourself discovered—used illegal date-rape substances on a number of women.”

  “I’ll give you Ziegler was a lousy human being. It’s still illegal to murder a human being, lousy or otherwise.”

  “My client didn’t murder anyone, and at the established time of death of Trey Ziegler was in his own home.”

  “So he says, but he’s got no one to back that up—including the wife he recently sent to the hospital.”

  “I never touched Natasha.”

  “She says different.”

  “I don’t believe that,” Copley continued, even as his lawyer tried to silence him. “You’re lying.”

  “Do you want me to play the nine-one-one call again?”

  “JJ.” With barbs in the name, the lawyer clamped a hand over Copley’s. “Ms. Quigley was in fear for her life, and called out for her husband. Called out for him to help her.”

  Eve smiled. “You can try that one, but you know what the jury’s going to hear. From the recording, from Natasha Quigley’s own lips in court.”

  “Ms. Quigley suffered a severe head injury during an attack by an unknown assailant, one who very likely killed Ziegler, one who very likely was in league with him. Her recollection, and her testimony on the events, isn’t trustworthy.”

  “And this ‘unknown assailant’ mysteriously went poof?”

  “My client believes that Catiana Dubois assaulted his wife, and in the struggle fell, was killed. My client believes the deceased was in league with Ziegler.”

  Rage tickled the back of her throat. Eve let it show, let it come.

  “So you want to try to hang Ziegler on her? Let me say this, so you both hear it. Try it. Just try it. Your client’s a liar, a cheat, an adulterer, a fraud. Just who do you think a jury’s going to sympathize with? A man who cheats on his wife with a naive young woman he lies to—one he’s set up with money he’s stolen from his wife? A man who paid a blackmailer to keep that arrangement quiet? Or an innocent woman, one who worked for a living, came from a nice family, had no smears on her record?”

  “You leave Felicity out of this,” Copley demanded.

  “I talked to her, too, just about an hour ago. Did you get her memo?”

  He lurched up; Eve rose with him.

  “You had no business talking to her. I’m going to explain everything to her. She’ll come back to me. I love her. I’m going to marry her.”

  “But you couldn’t until you got rid of the wife you already have. Killing her clears the way.”

  “I don’t have to kill her! Why do you think I paid Ziegler to fuck her!”

  “JJ, God! Shut up!”

  “Don’t tell me to shut up.” Color high, he rounded on McAllister. “You useless bitch. Why haven’t you gotten me out of here? I told you I wanted Silbert or Crosby.”

  “You’ve got me.”

  Eve sat again, looked at Peabody. “Now, this is interesting. Don’t you find this interesting, Peabody?”

  “I’m riveted. Absolutely riveted. Did he say what I think he said—on record—that he paid Ziegler to sleep with his wife?” Peabody glanced at Copley. “Did you get to watch?”

  “Shut the hell up. You’re disgusting.”

  “He pays some sleaze to sleep with his wife, and I’m disgusting? Jeez. Okay, if you didn’t do it for kinky watching, what did you do it for?”

  “For Felicity!”

  “
She got to watch?”

  More pride swelled in Eve’s heart as Copley snarled at Peabody.

  “I want to speak to my client in private.”

  “You’ve had plenty of time for that,” Eve said. “It sounds to me like JJ has things to say. Do you have things to say, JJ?”

  “Damn right. And you shut up,” he told the lawyer, who just shook her head and sighed.

  “It was love at first sight with Felicity. I wanted to give her what she needed, fulfill her dreams.”

  “So you lied to her.”

  “I didn’t lie. I just needed time. I intended to divorce Natasha, but without certain stipulations and agreements, the divorce would have left me unable to fulfill Felicity’s dreams.”

  “You needed your wife’s money to fulfill the dreams of the woman you were ditching your wife for.”

  “There’s no need to be crude. Love is its own reason. Natasha and I had grown apart, and—”

  “Really, spare me all the old chestnuts. They’re roasting fresh ones out on the street.”

  “You’re going to pay for your disrespect.”

  “Name your price.” Eve pushed into his face again. “Because I’ve got no respect for you. You’ve got something to say, say it. Clear, on the record. You made a deal with Trey Ziegler. Explain.”

  The look he sent her burned with hate, but he spat out the words. “Simply put, I was aware Ziegler had sex with clients. He bragged about it to me. Claimed he could get any woman he wanted.”

  Still trying, McAllister chimed in, “My client wasn’t aware Ziegler used illegal substances on those clients.”

  After an eye flicker that told Eve Copley had known—Copley continued, “Of course not. That’s deplorable. As far as I knew all the women were willing. I told him I’d pay him if he could seduce Natasha. She had a choice.” Copley jabbed a finger at the table for emphasis. “She chose to have sex with him, and more than once. It had to be more than once, there had to be a clear affair in order for me to preserve my . . . financial advantages.”

  “Your prenup specified if your wife had a sexual affair, you got a divorce with a fat settlement?”

  “It’s fair.”