Salvation In Death Part 25

He drew a deep breath when Eve said nothing. "I waited until the stage water was in place. I prayed, and prayed, even as I added the poison to the third bottle. Part of me still hoped that I would see him come back to the light before he reached for that bottle. That there would be another sign. But there was nothing."

"Was anyone else aware of what you planned to do, what you did? Did you take anyone else into your confidence?"

"Only G.o.d. I believed I was doing G.o.d's work, following His will. But last night, I had terrible dreams. Dreams of h.e.l.lfire and horrible suffering. Now I think the Devil came into me. I was misled."

"Your defense is you were misled by Satan," Eve concluded. "Not as original an excuse as you might think. And your feelings for Jolene Jenkins didn't play into you spiking her husband's water with poison?"

A dull flush rose into Billy's pale cheeks. "I hoped to spare Jolene from the pain and humiliation of her husband's betrayal."

"With the potential side benefit of stepping into his shoes or marital bed?"

"Lieutenant," Luke interrupted. "He's confessed to his sins, to his crimes. Is there need for more? He's prepared to accept his punishment in this world, and the next."

"And you're satisfied?"

"I t isn't for me." Luke reached over, laid his hand over Billy's. "I 'll pray for you."

And Billy laid his head down on the table to give in to the tears.

As he wept, Eve rose. "Billy Crocker, you're under arrest for the premeditated murder of one James Jay Jenkins, a human being. The charge is murder in the first degree." She walked around to cuff him, to lift him to his feet. "Peabody."

"Yes, sir, I 'll take him. Come with me, Mr. Crocker. You can meet your client after he's booked," she told Samuel.

"Record off," Eve ordered when Peabody took him out. "I appreciate you seeing he came in," Eve said to Luke. "Record's off," she added when he shook his head. "I admire your faith, and your restraint," she said to Samuel. "And your loyalty."

"A good man is dead," Luke said softly. "Another is ruined. Lives are shattered."

"Murder does that. He coveted another man's wife, isn't that how it goes? You know it; I know it. We all know that was part of it, however he justified it."

"Isn't it enough he'll answer to G.o.d for that?"

Eve studied Luke. "He'll be answering for plenty in the here and now, so I 'll give you the rest. Will you continue to represent him?" she asked Samuel.

"Until more experienced criminal defense counsel can be secured. We want to go home. We want to get the family home as soon as possible."

"I believe I can clear that by tomorrow. I f the more experienced defense counsel opts for trial, the circ.u.mstances of motive will come out. Something to consider." Eve opened the door. "I 'll show you where you can wait."

She went back to her office, wrote and filed the report, requested a media block on the details. No point, she thought, in subjecting Jolene and her daughters to the victim's transgressions. At least not yet.

She looked up as Peabody came in. "He's done," Peabody told her. "I put him on suicide watch. I just had this feeling."

"I don't think he'll take the easy way, but you get a feeling, you go with it."

"You sure had one on this, from the jump. Do you think they'll deal it down?"

"Yeah, I think they'll deal it to Murder Two, and put him in mental defect. Faith as psychosis. He'll spend the next twenty-five repenting.""That seems mostly right."

"Mostly right's generally enough." She checked the time, saw she had to let Baxter off the hook. "We're coming up to end of s.h.i.+ft. I want you to follow up with McNab, keep working on the Lino angle. And since the two of you will kissy-face and eat junk food while doing same, I don't want to see any overtime logged."

"I thought we were going to Brooklyn."

"I 'll take that, see if I can hook Roarke into playing backup."

"Will you play kissy-face and eat junk food?"

Eve sent her a withering look. "Unless I contact you to tell you otherwise, meet me at St. Cristobal's tomorrow morning. Six A.M."

"Ouch? Why so early?"

"We're going to Ma.s.s."

Eve picked up her 'link to buzz Roarke.

CHAPTER 13

BECAUSE IT GAVE HER TIME TO CONTINUE THE backgrounds she'd begun in her office, Eve asked Roarke to take the wheel for the drive to Brooklyn. As neither of them had finished in their respective offices until after six, traffic was expectedly hideous. Occasionally, she glanced up from her PPC as Roarke maneuvered around, through, and over the horn-blasting, vicious b.u.mper-to-b.u.mper. And wondered why, not for the first or last time, people who worked in Brooklyn didn't live in Brooklyn, and people who worked in Manhattan didn't just live the h.e.l.l there.

"Do they actually like it?" she wondered. "Get off on the rage, consider it a daily challenge? Are they doing some kind of twisted penance?"

"You've been working faith-based cases too long."

"Well, there has to be a point to subjecting yourselves and others to this insanity every day."

"Finances, lack of housing." He flicked a glance in the mirror, then arrowed into the breath of s.p.a.ce between a Mini and an all-terrain. "Or the desire to live outside the city in a more neighborhood sort of environment while earning city salaries-while others want the energy and benefits of the city for living, and find work in one of the other boroughs."

In a slick move, he changed lanes again, a dodge and weave that gained them maybe a dozen feet. "Or they're simply going over the b.l.o.o.d.y overcrowded bridge for some sort of business. Which, I 'm forced to point out, we are at this moment. At a s.h.a.gging crawl."

"We're going to check out a woman who appears to live sensibly, moving across the b.l.o.o.d.y, overcrowded bridge and securing employment where she lives. She has what's probably a ten-minute commute-by foot-to work. Less if she takes the subway. I f she turns out to be my Lino's mother, I wonder if he fought his way over to Brooklyn, at a s.h.a.gging crawl, to visit."

Accepting he was well and truly stuck now-b.u.g.g.e.r it-Roarke sat back and waited for his chance. "Would you, in his place?"

"Hard to put myself there as what little I remember of my relations.h.i.+p with my mother wasn't cookies and milk. But ... you come back home, hiding out for five to six years, and your mother-your only living blood relative as far as I can ascertain, excepting the half-sibling she's had since you took off-is living across the bridge-b.l.o.o.d.y overcrowded or not. I t seems you'd be compelled to see her. To check it out."

"Might be it wasn't cookies and milk with his ma either."

"He kept the medal she gave him, so there was something there, some bond. I f there's a bond, that something, you'd want to see her, see how she was, what she was doing, who this guy is she'd married, see the half-brother. Something."

"I f this is your Lino."

"Yeah, if." She frowned over that, wondering if a hunch was worth the trip to Brooklyn during the inaccurately termed rush hour. "First big one. I f we get over that one, and he did make contact, did go see her, then she has to know, with all the media coverage, that her son's dead. How would she handle that? No one's contacted the morgue on Lino, except for Father Lopez. I checked. No inquiries, no requests for viewing."

Roarke said nothing for a moment. "I considered, spent some time considering actually, not making direct contact with my family in I reland. Just ...

checking them out, doing a background on my mother's sister, the others. Maybe observing, you could say, from a distance. Not making the connection."

She'd wondered about that. She knew he'd gotten drunk the night before he'd gone to see his aunt. And he wasn't a man to drink himself drunk.

"Why?"

"A dozen reasons. More, a great deal more against it than the single one for making myself knock on that cottage door. I needed to see them, speak to them, hear their voices. Hers, especially. Sinead. My mother's twin. And I would have rather faced torture than knock."He could remember the moment still, the sweaty panic of it. "I t was hideously hard to do. What would they think of me? Would they look at me and see him? And if they did, would I? Would they look at me, see only my sins-which are plentiful-and none of her, the mother I never knew existed?

The prodigal son's a hard role to carry."

"But you knocked on the door. That's who you are." She was silent as she considered. "I t may not be who he was. Someone who could do what he did, live as someone else, something else for years. Hard to explain that to Mommy, unless Mommy's the kind who wouldn't give a s.h.i.+t what her baby boy's done. And kills the fat cow anyway."

"That would be fatted, and calf."

"What's the difference?"

"A couple of hundred pounds, I 'd say. But, to the point, finding out is why we're going to Brooklyn in this bleeding traffic."

"Partly. But, you know, I could've kept Peabody on the clock. I figured since we're going to check out T eresa at work, and work happens to be her I talian brother-in-law's pizzeria, we could have a nice meal together."

He spared her a glance. "Meaning you can put a check in the column that reads: Went out to dinner with Roarke, and consider that a wifely duty dispensed."

She s.h.i.+fted, started to deny. Didn't bother. "Maybe, but we're still getting all this time together, and what's billed as really mag Brooklyn-style pizza."

"With this traffic, it better be the best s.h.a.gging pizza in all five boroughs."

"At least I 'm not asking you to go to six o'clock Ma.s.s with me in the morning."

"Darling Eve, to get me to do that the amount and variety of the s.e.xual favors required are so many and myriad even my imagination boggles."

"I don't think you can exchange s.e.xual favors for Ma.s.s attendance. But if I decide to go check it out, and I get the chance, I 'll ask the priest."

She went back to her PPC while Roarke battled through the traffic.

By Eve's calculations, it took about as long to travel from downtown Manhattan to Cobble Hill in Brooklyn as it would to take a shuttle from New York to Rome. The pizzeria stood on the corner of a shopping district on the edge of a neighborhood of old row houses with decorated stoops where residents sat to watch their world go by.

"She's on tonight," Eve told Roarke once they'd parked. "But if for some reason she's not at work, she lives a few blocks down, two over."

"Meaning if she's not at work, I 'll be whistling for my dinner?"

"I don't know about the whistling, but it might be postponed for the time it takes me to track her down and talk to her."

She stepped into the restaurant and was immediately surrounded by scents that told her if the best pizza in the five boroughs wasn't to be had here, it would be d.a.m.n close.

Murals of various I talian scenes decorated walls the color of toasted I talian bread. Booths, two-tops, four-tops cheerfully crowded together under iron ceiling fans that whisked those scents everywhere.

Behind the counter in the open kitchen, a young guy in a stained ap.r.o.n tossed pizza dough high, made the catch, tossed, all to the thrilled giggles of kids wedged into a booth with what she supposed were their parents. The waitstaff wore bright red s.h.i.+rts while they carted trays and weaved and threaded between tables to serve. Music played, and someone sang about "amore" in a rich and liquid baritone.

At a quick scan, Eve saw babies, kids, teens, and right on up to elderly chowing down, chatting, drinking wine, or studying the old-fas.h.i.+oned paper menus.

"That's her." Eve nodded toward the woman setting heaping bowls of pasta on a table. She laughed as she served, a good-looking woman in her early fifties, trim, graceful at her work. Her dark hair, pinned at the nape, framed her face and set off wide, brown eyes.

"Doesn't much look like a woman who recently learned her son had been poisoned," Eve observed.

Another woman hurried up, one older than Teresa, rounder, and with a welcoming smile. "Good evening. Would you like a table for two?"

"We would, yes." Roarke answered the smile. "That section, there"-he gestured to what he'd calculated comprised T eresa's station-"would be perfect."

"I t may take a few minutes. I f you'd care to wait in the bar, just over there?"

"Thank you."

"I 'll come for you when we have a table available."

The bar lay through an arch, and was as lively as the restaurant. Eve took a stool, angled it to keep an eye on the restaurant while Roarke ordered a bottle of Chianti."Place does a good business," she commented. "I t's been in this spot for nearly forty years. Brother-in-law's second generation to run it. She married the owner's brother about a dozen years ago. Her husband took off-or went missing-when this Lino was about five. He'd be thirty-four now-Lino Martinez. With the records wiped, I can't find out if he had a record."

"Or that he was ever Soldados."

"No. I can confirm he's gone to a lot of trouble over the last half of his life to stay under the radar. Changing locations, ident.i.ties. I f he's not my Lino, he's still wrong."

"Did you look into her finances?" Roarke asked, and tested the wine the bartender poured into his gla.s.s. "Very nice," he said.

"As much as I could without legal cause. No b.u.mps or spikes, not on the surface. She lives well within her means, and she works as a waitress, has for a long time."

"For the Ortiz family, you said, when she lived on our side of the bridge."

"Yeah, and that's a connection you want to pick up and look over. Got remarried, moved here. She's got a nine-year-old kid, and went the professional mother route for the first two years of that, then went back to work here. Kid's in public school-no trouble there-and she has a small savings account. Nothing over the top. Husband's an MT with no criminal. They've got a mortgage, a vehicle payment, the usual. Everything runs normal."

The hostess came over. "Your table's ready. I f you'll just follow me, we'll bring your wine over. A very nice choice," she added. "I hope you're enjoying it."

Once they were seated, a busboy brought their wine and gla.s.ses on a tray. "Teresa will be your waitress tonight. She'll be right with you."

"How's the pizza?" Eve asked him, and he beamed. "You won't get better. My brother's making it tonight."

"Funny," Eve mused when they were alone. "Family restaurants. Another connection. She worked for the Ortiz family in theirs, then comes here to work in another well-established family business."

"I t's what she knows, and maybe what she needs. Her first husband deserted her, and you said there were domestic disturbance reports prior to that. She had her first child very young, and he, too, left her. Or left in any case. Now she's part of a family again, a link in that chain. She looks content," he added as Teresa started toward their table.

"Good evening. Would you like something to start? The roasted artichoke is wonderful tonight."

"We'll just head straight for the pizza. Pepperoni." Roarke ordered quickly, knowing if he hesitated, Eve might head straight into interrogation.

"I 'll get the order right in for you."

She started for the kitchen, stopping when a diner patted her arm. So she paused long enough to have a quick and lively exchange that told Eve the table was filled with regulars.