Obsession in Death (28 page)

“But the UNSUB’s been obsessed with being your friend and partner, not sending you and your pus-seeping heart into everlasting hellfire.”

“Maybe that’s bullshit – the friend and partner. Maybe a smart cop could figure out how to send us chasing the wild turkey.”

“It’s goose, the wild goose. I’m pretty sure wild turkey is some kind of whiskey.”

“Kentucky bourbon,” said a helpful uniform sardined in the elevator with them. “Good stuff if you can get it. Got family in Lexington. My uncle’s been known to chase the wild goose after a few rounds of Wild Turkey.”

That got him a laugh from some of the cops before he squeezed off.

“Goose, turkey, they’re both weird-looking birds. The messages link me to two murders in the media,” Eve continued as they rode the elevator to the garage. “We can look at it as a kind of payback. Long shot,” Eve added before Peabody could. “But the mother’s letters are full of crazy rage. The daughter’s a wrong cop. Maybe she’s full of crazy rage, too.”

In the garage she headed for the big All-Terrain. “Then we’ll take the other tack with ex-officer Farmer. I don’t know how this one got through the screening for a badge in the first place.”

Eve strapped in, thought it was a little like sitting at the controls of a fancy tank, reversed out of the slot.

“She’s loony. Smart though, which may be how she got through screening. She did the six-week fast track, aced pretty much across the board. But she fell apart once she was on the job. Unless it’s true pretty much everyone she has contact with – male, female, cop, suspect, bystander – sexually harasses her. She filed charges about every five minutes, then whined nobody understood her or would work with her.”

“Gee, that’s really unfair.” Peabody rolled her eyes.

“She knows I get it, though, and has contacted me a few times with requests to work as my aide. Failing that, given her experience – for the last eight months as a skip tracer – she could be my main CI.”

“She sounds like a real winner. But the sex part doesn’t fit.”

“No, it doesn’t. But the rest does. And still, both the mother and this perennially sexually harassed skip tracer both contacted me through active e-mail accounts.”

“Still have to follow them up.”

“So we are. Mavis is in rehearsal. Mantal and Grommet are on her and Leonardo and Bella.”

“Good hands. We had Delivery Roulette with them a few weeks ago.”

“Delivery Roulette?”

“Yeah.” Though the temperature had risen enough to turn the ice to slush, Peabody kept a choke hold on the chicken stick. “Mavis tagged us, and we were just hanging, so we went down. We play it every couple months I guess – their place or ours. Easy since we’re in the same building. Security was there because she asked them to stay after the gig. What she does is spread out all the delivery menus, then you have to close your eyes, pick one – then pick a number. You have to order from that menu, and that item. It goes down the line. Hilarious when you end up with this mix of Thai, Chinese, Italian, vegan, and whatever. Ben and Steve were good sports about it.”

“Trina,” Eve remembered.

“Sure, she’s been in on it a few times.”

“No, you need to contact her because I’m not putting myself there. I want her to watch her ass while this is going on. Just text her, otherwise the two of you will start on hair or something else that makes me want to punch you.”

While Peabody made the contact, Eve hunted for parking somewhere in the vicinity of the squat, dumpy building that housed Arsenial Investigators. Giving up – the size of the All-Terrain made it next to impossible to find any suitable street parking – she bumped into a potholed lot, squeezed into a viciously overpriced slot.

“Thirty-two-fifty an hour.” She shoved the ticket into her pocket. “Whoever runs this place should be arrested for petty larceny. Make that grand larceny by the end of a single freaking day.”

“At least it stopped raining ice.”

Bright side be damned, Eve thought as they hoofed the two and a half blocks to the building.

Sidewalk sleepers, most with their beggar’s licenses displayed, camped against buildings. One with an explosion of yellow-white hair that made the bony guy look as if he’d been lightning-struck played a mournful tune on a harmonica. A couple of LCs who looked barely old enough to be legal huddled in a doorway in their microskirts and fishnets, shivering.

On the corner a glide-cart smoked. With no takers, the operator leaned against the cart munching a loaded dog.

Eve turned at a skinny flight of stairs, following the helpful pointed finger that announced:

A
RSENIAL
I
NVESTIGATORS
 

T
HIRD
L
EVEL
 

Four Aces, a pawnshop, occupied the storefront, with Madame Curracus, Palm Reader, and Office For Let occupying the second floor.

They climbed to three, buzzed at the old iron door.

At the answering buzz, Eve muscled the door open.

The reception area boasted a spindly desk, with a clunky data and communication center, and the sulky brunette who clunked away on it. The waiting area held a pair of orange plastic chairs and a coin/credit-operated bubbler.

The brunette stopped clunking, looked up with a pout. “You gotta appointment?” she demanded in a voice so nasal she could’ve warned fog-blanketed ships away from rocky shores.

Eve drew her badge. “I do now.”

The brunette shifted, and Eve saw her hand slide under the desk. Cop alert, she assumed.

“Mr. Arsenial is out of the office on an investigation. You can leave your contact information.”

“Mr. Arsenial is back in his office, probably with his feet up on his desk while he scratches his ass. I don’t care. We’re here to see Gina Tortelli.”

The brunette sniffed through her honker of a nose. “And the nature of your business?”

“Isn’t any of yours.”

“Sheesh, why you gotta be so bitchy?”

“It’s the nature of my business. Now if Mr. Arsenial’s that skittish about cops coming by, he’s probably got a reason. I can also make it the nature of my business to find out why and make his life a living hell, or you can produce Gina Tortelli.”

“Why’nt you give me a minute? Sheesh.” She turned to the ’link, punched private, picked up the handheld. “Yo, Gina. A coupla badges out here wanna see you, won’t say why. Yeah, sure. Nuh-uh. ’Kay.” She disengaged. “She’s coming out. You can sit down if you want.”

Eve glanced at the plastic chairs, imagined what kind of asses may have warmed them.

“No, thanks.”

Tortelli came out with attitude. Her data listed her at five-eight, and the laced boots added another couple inches with their thick stubbed heels. She wore her blond-streaked brown hair in short dreads. Eve thought of Hastings’s description of the attacker’s skin tone.

Café au lait, heavy on the lait.

It fit.

Tortelli’s dark eyes narrowed, flattened as recognition flickered over her face.

“Slumming, Lieutenant?” She said Eve’s rank with a verbal sneer.

“Working. You want to do this out here?”

Tortelli fisted one hand on her hip, gave a go-ahead flick with the other. “You got something to say, say it.”

“Two people are dead, another was assaulted last night. You fit the description, pretty much down the line.”

Tortelli’s lips parted on a quick, indrawn breath, but she recovered quickly. “That’s bullshit. I saw the sketch you released. It fits half the people in New York.”

“You were on the job long enough to know we don’t release everything to the media. Whereabouts, December twenty-seventh between seventeen hundred and nineteen hundred hours.”

“I’m not telling you dick without a rep.”

“Fine, contact one, have your rep meet us at Central.”

“And I don’t have to go anywhere with you.”

“You want to play it that way, we’ll play. We’ll go talk to your mother.”

“What the fuck!” Tortelli exploded as Eve turned toward the door. “You don’t go near my mother.”

“I can go near her, and I can haul her into Central, put her in a box. I can charge her with threatening a police officer, cyber bullying, and hold her on suspicion of conspiracy to murder.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

Saying nothing, Eve pulled out her PPC, brought up the first e-mail from Tortelli’s mother, held it out.

The combative stance broke a bit as Tortelli read. “Oh, for Christ’s sake.” Now she twisted a chain around her neck that held a silver cross. “Just spouting off, that’s all, and that was damn near two years ago.”

“There’s more. This is just the first. I talk to you, or I talk to her. Choose.”

“Gina? You want I should get somebody?”

Tortelli glanced at the receptionist as if remembering she was there. “No, no. It’s okay. It’s nothing. It’s nothing. Back here,” she said to Eve, turning away.

She led the way into an office even smaller than Eve’s with a slit of a window. A match to the spindly desk held as creaky a D&C as in reception. But the office was rigorously clean and organized.

“Look, my ma’s got a temper, okay? And I’m her only daughter. I’m going to talk to her about this, tell her to knock it off, but for Christ’s sake, anybody on the job gets a rash of shit from somebody every fricking day.”

“Whereabouts.”

“Couple of days after Christmas.” She turned to the comp, ordered up a calendar. “I’ve been tailing a woman. Husband thinks she’s cheating, and he ain’t wrong. I was on her from fourteen hundred hours, twenty minutes on the twenty-seventh to nineteen-thirty, when she went back home. Husband tagged me at thirteen-fifty when she said she was going out, and I followed her. I got it right here in my log.”

“Your log, Tortelli.”

“Yeah, my log – and the tags from the client are on my ’link log. Subject exchanged some Christmas stuff, then went straight to the Swan Hotel over on Park. Got on the elevator. Had luck ’cause they’ve got glass ones. She gets off on the fourteenth floor. I go up, look for what rooms have the privacy light on that time of day, and I find it – 1408. It’s in the log.”

“Did anyone see you? Did you talk to anybody?”

“The whole point is nobody sees me, and doesn’t remember me. I sat on her for two hours solid, down in the lobby, watching the elevator. She comes out, but not alone. She’s with somebody, and they tickle tonsils on the way down, then she goes one way, he goes the other. I stayed on her until she walked back in her own door. I was on her last night, too. I was just writing the report, because I identified the guy she’s rolling with. It’s her fucking brother-in-law. Her sister’s husband.”

“Classy.”

“Wait!” Tortelli threw up a hand. “I got a receipt from the lobby bar. I nursed two club sodas so I could sit there. I got a receipt for it, and it’s got the date. I got the pictures I took, and we use time stamps. I can prove I was where I say I was.

“Lay off my mother.”

“December twenty-ninth between five and six hundred hours.”

“I was home, in bed, alone. Asleep. Alone because the guy I’d been with three years and I split after I got demoted, and the shit hit. My life went down the toilet, okay? Happy? I got this crapper of a job because I’m marked. But I’m not going to stay in the toilet. Once I get some distance and some backing, I’m going to start my own agency. Lay off my ma, goddamn it. You got your pound of flesh already. I was fourth-generation police. I’d’ve made lieutenant in a few years. Now I’m in this shithole.”

“If you were fourth-generation, you sure as hell should’ve known better.”

“Easy for you to say, married to money.”

Before she realized her temper snapped, Eve slapped her hands on the desk, hard enough to make it shudder. “I was ten years on the job before I set eyes on him. You think it’s about money for me? You think it’s about money for any cop worth the badge? You’re a fucking disgrace.”

“You don’t know what it was. You don’t know anything. Everybody did it, a little here and there. It’s right there, and where’s it going? You think, what does it hurt? You think, I risk my life every damn day. You think that because it’s easy. You think I haven’t asked myself every damn day why I didn’t walk away from it? I knew Taj. I knew him.”

Tortelli drew a shuddering breath as she spoke of a dead cop, a good cop. “I didn’t have anything to do with what happened to him. None of that. Just took some here and there. It’s why I only got demoted. I only got demoted because I spilled my guts to IAB after it went down. And I couldn’t live with that, either, so I’m in this shithole.”

Tears wanted to come. Eve could see them fighting behind the anger. “You think I blame you for it? Yeah, on good days I can talk myself into that. On bad days I can barely look at myself in the mirror. I didn’t kill anybody. You’ve got no cause to drag me into this, drag my family through this again.”

“Show me the receipt, from the lobby bar.”

Tortelli opened a file already on the desk, took it out.

“Okay.” Eve handed it back. “You’re clear.”

“It was only five or six thousand over a couple years,” Tortelli said as Eve started out with Peabody. “Six grand tops.”

Eve glanced back. “Your badge should’ve been worth more.” And kept walking before she said something else.

“I feel sorry for her.”

Eve stopped on the steps, the cold snatching at the hem of her coat, to burn a stare back at Peabody.

“Okay, don’t toss me off the stairs. Everything you said to her was right. Everything. And you could’ve said more and worse and been right. But I feel sorry for her because she knows it, and she’s living with it.”

“You’re wasting your sympathy.”

“What I’m saying is she was good enough to get her detective’s shield, to close cases, maybe make a difference. And she tossed it, all of it, for a few thousand dollars.”

“Double that, minimum. She’s still lying, still justifying.”

On the street, Eve jammed her hands in her pockets because she actively wanted to punch something, someone – and her partner didn’t deserve it.

“And it’s not the money, it’s never just the money. It’s the idea you’re entitled to it. Some DB had a wad of cash on him, what’s he going to do with it? Hey, that’s a nice wrist unit, and he’s got no pulse, so I might as well have it. Shit, that was a big illegals bust, and I got a little bloody on it. The department’s just going to light it up, so what’s the harm if I take a chunk, sell it to some mope? I bust my ass, risk my ass, I deserve it. The first time you think that, do that, pocket something from a crime scene, dip into the pockets of a DB, you’re done. You’re finished, and rolling on cops as dirty as you won’t make you clean again.”