Big Jack (21 page)

“Could own the place, work or live in it.”

“Could be a building or construction inspector,” Roarke put in. “Though if he is, it wouldn’t have been bright of him to forget about the fire sealant.”

“You got the data I asked for, the properties being built or rehabbed in that area. Is what you sent me the whole shot?”

“It is, yes. But that doesn’t take into account ones that are under the table. Small jobs,” he explained. “A private home or apartment where the owner might decide to do some work, or hires a contractor who’s willing to forgo the permits and fees and work off the books.”

Eve visualized the map of her investigation suddenly crisscrossed with hundreds of dead ends and detours. “I’m not going to worry about side deals until we exhaust the legitimate ones. Sticking with that, don’t they sometimes use gas on construction sites?”

“For some of the vehicles and machines.” Roarke nodded. “As it’s inconvenient to transport it from one of the stations outside the city, you might use a storage compartment on-site or nearby. You’ve a fee to pay for that as well.”

“Then we follow that down, too.”

“Bureaucrats in Permits and Licensing are going to make you jump through hoops,” Feeney reminded her.

“I’ll deal with it.”

“You’re going to need to put the arm on these guys, get the warrants and assorted paperwork and other bullshit. We get lucky with the matches, you’ll cut back on that.” Feeney considered, pulled on his nose. “But you got a lot to wade through one way or the other. I can put my leave off a few days, until this is closed.”

“Leave?” She frowned at him until she remembered his scheduled vacation. “Crap. I forgot all about it. When are you going?”

“Got two more days on the clock, but I can juggle some things around.”

She was tempted to take him up on it. But she paced it off, heaved out a breath. “Yeah, fine, you do that and your wife will eat both our livers for breakfast. Raw.”

“She’s a cop’s wife. She knows how it goes.” But there wasn’t much conviction behind his words.

“Bet she’s already packed.”

Feeney offered a hangdog smile. “Been packed damn near a week now.”

“Well, I’m not facing her wrath. Besides, you’ve already juggled enough to give me this much time. We can handle the rest of it.”

He looked back at the board, as she did. “I don’t like leaving a case hanging.”

“I’ve got McNab and this guy.” She jerked a thumb toward Roarke. “If we don’t wrap it before you have to go, we’ll keep you in the loop. Long distance. Can you give me a couple more hours tonight?”

“No problem. Look, why don’t I get back to it, see if I can work some magic?”

“Do that. I’ll see if I can wrangle some warrants. Okay with you if we brief here tomorrow, oh-eight hundred?”

“Only if it comes with breakfast.”

“I’ll be right along,” Roarke told him, and waited until he was alone with Eve. “I can save you time with the red tape. A little time on the unregistered, and I can have a list of permits for you.”

She jammed her hands into her pockets as she studied her murder board, as she looked at the faces of the dead. Roarke’s unregistered equipment would blind the unblinking eye of CompuGuard. No one would know he’d hacked into secured areas and nipped out data with his skilled hands.

“I can’t justify it for this. I can’t shortcut this just to save myself a little time and a lot of aggravation. Gannon’s secure. To my knowledge she’s the only one who might be in immediate jeopardy from this guy. I’ll play it by the book.”

He stepped up behind her, rubbed her shoulders as they both looked at the images of Jacobs and Cobb. Before and after.

“When you don’t play it by the book, when you do take that shortcut, it’s always for them, Eve. It’s never for yourself.”

“It’s not supposed to be for me. Or about me.”

“If it wasn’t for you, or about you, in some sense, you wouldn’t be able to go on day after day, facing this and caring, day after day. And if you didn’t, who would pick up the standard for people like Andrea Jacobs and Tina Cobb and carry it into the battle?”

“Some other cop,” she said.

“There is no other like you.” He pressed his lips to the top of her head. “There’s no other who understands them, the victims and those who victimize them, quite like you. Seeing that, knowing that, well, it’s made an honest man out of me, hasn’t it?”

She turned now to look him straight in the eye. “You made yourself.”

She knew he thought of his mother, of what he’d learned only a short time before, and she knew he suffered. She couldn’t stand for Roarke’s dead as she did for those of strangers. She couldn’t help him find justice for the woman he never knew existed, for the woman who’d loved him and died at the brutal hand of his own father.

“If I could go back,” she said slowly, “if there was a way to twist time and go back, I’d do everything I could to bring him down and put him away for what he did. I wish I could stand for her, for you.”

“We can’t change history, can we? Not for my mother, not for ourselves. If we could, you’re the only one in this world I would trust with it. The only one who might make me stand back and let the law do what the law does.” He traced his finger down the dent in her chin. “So, Lieutenant, whenever you do take one of those shortcuts, you should remember there are those of us who depend on you who don’t give a rat’s ass about the book.”

“Maybe not. But I do. Go help Feeney. Get me something I can use so we can make him pay for what he did to them.”

She sat alone when he’d gone, her coffee forgotten and her gaze on the murder board. She saw herself in each of the victims. In Andrea Jacobs, struck down and abandoned. In Tina Cobb, robbed of her own identity and discarded.

But she’d come back from those things. She’d been created from those things. No, you couldn’t change history, she thought. But you could sure as hell use it.

 

 

 

She lost track of time when she worked alone. Eve supposed, if pressed on the subject, she lost track of time when she worked with others, too.

But there was something soothing about sitting in or pacing around her office by herself, letting the data and the speculations bump around in her head with only the computer’s bland voice for company.

When her ’link beeped, she jerked out of a half trance and realized the only light in the room was from her various screens.

“Dallas. What?”

“Hey, Lieutenant.” McNab’s young, pretty face popped on screen. She could see the slice of pizza in his hand. Hell, since she could all but smell the pepperoni, it occurred to her she’d missed dinner. “Were you asleep or something?”

She could feel her embarrassment scale rising just because another cop had tagged her when she’d been drifting off. “No, I wasn’t asleep. I’m working.”

“In the dark?”

“What do you want, McNab?” She knew what she wanted. She wanted his pizza.

“Okay. I put in some OT on the ’links and d and c’s.” He took a bite of pizza. Eve was forced to swallow her own saliva. “Lemme tell you, these dink units are tougher than the pricey ones. Memory’s for shit, and the broadband—”

“Don’t walk me down that path, McNab. Bottom-line it.”

“Sure. Sorry.”

He licked—the bastard actually licked sauce from his thumb.

“I got locations on two of the transmissions we believe the killer sent Cobb. One of them matches the location of an aborted trans sent to the Gannon residence and picked up by the answering program on the night of Jacobs’s murder.”

“Where?”

“The location that hit both is a public ’link in Grand Central. The other, generated from a cyber club downtown. Oh, and there’s a second aborted to the Gannon residence, ten minutes after the first, from another public three blocks from her residence.”

Public places, public access. Phony accounts. Careful, careful, careful. “You with Peabody?”

“Yeah. She’s in the other room.”

“Why don’t you check out the club? See if you can pinpoint the unit he used. Maybe you can get us a better description.”

“No problem.”

“We’re going to brief at my home office, eight hundred hours.”

His mouth might’ve been full of pizza, but she recognized a groan when she heard one. Served him right for eating on her empty stomach.

“You get anything hot, I want to hear right away. No matter what time it is. That’s good work on the ’links.”

“I am the wizard. You guys got any of that real bacon?”

She cut him off. Sitting back in the blue-shadowed dark, she thought about diamonds and pizza and murder.

“Lieutenant.”

“Hmm?”

“Lights on, twenty-five percent.” Even in the dimness, Roarke watched her blink like an owl. “You need to eat.”

“McNab had pizza. It broke my focus.” She rubbed her tired eyes. “Where’s Feeney?”

“I sent him home, not without a struggle. His wife called. I think she’s going into a low-level state of panic that he’s going to do what he suggested to you earlier and postpone this family trip.”

“I won’t let him. You got anything for me?”

“The first stage of matching’s done on Judith Crew, nearly so on the boy. Once that’s done we’ll . . . ” He remembered who he was talking to and edited out the techno jargon. “Essentially, we’ll cross-match and reference the two sets. If she kept her son with her until he came of age—and it certainly seems she’d do so—we should be able to locate that match, or matches.”

He cocked his head at her. “Is it going to be pizza for you, then?”

“I would give you five hundred credits for a slice of pepperoni pizza.”

He sneered. “Please, Lieutenant. I can’t be bought.”

“I will give you the sexual favor of your choice at the next possible opportunity.”

“Done.”

“Cheap date.”

“You don’t know the sexual favor I have in mind. Did you get your warrants?” he called out as he went into the kitchen.

“Yeah. Jesus, I had to tap-dance until my toes fell off, but I’m getting them. And McNab’s pinned locations on transmissions. He and Peabody are going to check out a cyber club tonight where one was zipped to Cobb.”

“Tonight?”

“They’re young, able and afraid of me.”

“So am I.” He brought her in a plateful of bubbling pizza and a large glass of red wine.

“Where’s yours?”

“I had something with Feeney in the lab, and foolishly assumed you’d feed yourself.”

“You’ve already eaten and you still fixed me dinner?” She scooped up pizza, singed her fingertips. “Wow, you’re like my body slave.”

“Those roles will be reversed when I collect my payment. I think it may involve costumes.”

“Get out.” She snorted, bit into the pizza and burned her tongue. It was great. “He made a call to both Cobb and Gannon from a port in Grand Central. Called Gannon’s place the night he killed Jacobs—twice, two locations. Just covering his bases, sounds like. Gets her answering program on both aborts, confirms the all clear. Goes over.”

She washed down pizza with wine and knew God was in His heaven.

“Could’ve walked from there, that’s how I’d’ve done it. Better than a cab. Safer.”

“And allows him to case the neighborhood,” Roarke added.

“Then he gets there, gets inside. Maybe he’s smart enough to do a room-by-room check of the house first. Can’t be too careful. Then he goes upstairs to get started, and before you know it, the house sitter comes in. All that care, all that trouble, and for what?”

“Pissed him off.”

Eve nodded, drank some more wine, considered the second slice of pizza. Why the hell not? “I’m thinking, yeah. Had to piss him off. You know he could’ve gotten out. Or he could’ve debilitated her, restrained her. But she’d ruined his plans. She’d become the fly in his soup. So he killed her. But he wasn’t in a rage when he did it. Controlled, careful. But not as smart as he thinks. What if she knows something? He didn’t take that leap in logic.”

“He struck out, coldly, but didn’t take the time to completely calm himself.” Roarke nodded. “He had to improvise. We could assume he’s not at his best when he hasn’t been able to script the play and follow the cues.”

“Yeah, I can see inside his head, but it’s not helping.” She tossed the slice of pizza down and stared at the artist’s image she kept on screen. “If I’ve structured this investigation right, I know what he wants. I know what he’ll do to get it. I even know, if we’re following the same logic, that his next step would be to go after Samantha Gannon or one of her family. To buddy up with them if he calculates it’s worth the time and effort, to threaten, torture, kill, if it’s not. Whatever it takes to get the diamonds or information leading to them out of her.”

“But he can’t get to her, or them.”

“No, I got them covered. And maybe that’s part of the problem. Why it’s stalled.”

“If you use her as bait, you could lure him out.”

With the wineglass cupped in her hand, Eve tipped back, closed her eyes. “She’d do it, too. I can see that in her. She’d do it because it’s a way to end it, and because it makes a good story, and because she’s gutsy. Not stupidly, but gutsy enough to go for this. Just like her grandma.”

“Gutsy enough, because she’d trust you to look out for her.”

Eve shrugged a shoulder. “I don’t like to use civilians as bait. I could put a cop in her place. We can fix one up to look enough like her to pass.”

“He’d have studied her. He might see through it.”

“Might. Hell, he might even know her. Anyway, I’m too tall. Peabody’s the wrong body type.”

“A droid could be fashioned.”

“Droids only do what they’re programmed to do.” And she never fully trusted machines. “Bait needs to be able to think. There’s someone else he might go for.”

“Judith Crew.”