Salvation In Death Part 39

"Yeah. Well, two of the gang members, according to Stuben's file, had done time in juvie, had been arrested for a.s.sault with deadly-and released when the wits failed to identify-and had been suspects in the bludgeoning death of a Soldado."

"Boys will be boys."

"And sc.u.m will be sc.u.m. The manager ... Computer, display data for adult victim. Kobie Smith, some b.u.mps in his teens and early twenties. No time inside. Employed there for three years, manager for six months. Left a wife of eighteen months and a kid. Kid was two at the time of his father's death, making him about twenty now. Too young to fit Mira's profile, or my gut, but we look." She ordered the data.

"Well, well," Roarke commented as he read. "I t seems he's attending the Police Academy in Orlando, Florida. In the land of speculation, his father is killed in what is believed to be gang violence, and the son sets a goal to become a cop. To serve and protect."

Eve frowned thoughtfully at the data on-screen. "No criminal. Two half-sibs. Mother married again. Huh. Married a cop after relocating to Florida, three years after husband's death. Can't see Penny tracking her down, getting her hyped enough to come back and poison Lino. But the vic had parents, too, and a brother."

She ran their data, studying it, considering it. Parents divorced, she noted. Mother residing in Philadelphia, father in the Bronx, as was one brother.

The second brother in Trenton. "None of them stayed in the neighborhood. I t's going to be someone in the neighborhood."

"That's most likely, I agree, but it's very possible your bad Penny-"

"Ha-ha."

"That she went out of the neighborhood to add more distance between her and the murder. I would have."

"She's not as smart as you."

"Well now, billions aren't, but it's good strategy, and she had plenty of time to work on that strategy."

"Yeah. d.a.m.n. I see hikes to the Bronx and Trenton in my future. Possibly Philadelphia because it's poison, and poison skews most often as a female weapon. And look at that, the mother's never remarried, works as a medical a.s.sistant in a rehab facility. Medicals can access poisons easier than the rest of us."

"She lost not only a son, but a grandson, as the mother took him to Orlando, remarried. Of course, it may be there's been effort to maintain a relations.h.i.+p on all sides."

"And it may not be," Eve finished and blew out a breath. "Okay, top of the list goes Emmelee Smith. I may be able to work a warrant for checking her communications and travel over the past few weeks." She yawned. "I need coffee."

"You need bed."

She shook her head, rose. "I just want to run through the others. I can start looking into the ones that give me the buzz tomorrow."

She hit the kitchen and the AutoChef for both of them.

"I called up the data on the counter boy," Roarke told her when she returned. "He was barely sixteen."

"Quinto Turner. Quinto. That sounds like a Spanish name. Mother Juanita Rodrigez Turner. Hmmm. Father Joseph Turner. He was mixed race, Mexican and black, straddling a line between gangs, racially and geographically. No sibs. Father deceased. Look at that. Self-terminated by hanging, on the one-year anniversary of his son's death."

"So the woman lost two."

"Computer, all data on Juanita Rodrigez Turner, on-screen.""She lives three blocks from the church," Roarke began.

"Wait. Wait. I 've seen her. Computer, enlarge ID photo, twenty-five percent. I 've seen her," Eve repeated. "Where was it? I t was quick, it was just a .

. . G.o.dd.a.m.n, G.o.dd.a.m.n, the youth center. She works at the youth center. Day-care manager, on-site medical. She wasn't p.i.s.sed and irritated, she was nervous. That's why she kept her back to me. Magda didn't call her Juanita, but that's her. Nita," Eve remembered. "She called her Nita.

"She'd have seen him every day, nearly every day for those five years. She probably worked with him, joked with him, helped him counsel kids. She confessed her sins to him, and all the while, all the while, he killed her son, and that death had driven her husband to suicide. Every day for five years she gave him respect, because of his calling. And then she finds out who he is, what he is."

"What's that I hear?" Roarke wondered. "Ah, yes, it's buzzing."

"Put those trips to Trenton and beyond on hold," she said. "She'd pa.s.s the bodega where Penny works any time she went to church, and she's been going to that church-I 'll lay odds-for most of her life. One of the faithful," she murmured. "But for Penny, just a mark, just a means to an end. Now I have to bring this woman in, I have to put her in the box and make her confess to me. And when she does, I have to put her in a cage."

"Sometimes the law is transitory," Roarke repeated. "And sometimes it turns its back on real justice."

Eve shook her head. "She took a life, Roarke. Maybe it was a bad life, but it wasn't her right." She turned to him. "The cops did nothing about what happened to Marlena. They were wrong cops at a wrong time. But this woman could have come forward with what she'd been told, or what she knew. Detective Stuben? He'd have done what had to be done. He cared. He cares. Part of him's never stopped working the case, and none of him has ever forgotten the victims of the bombing, or their families."

"How many are there like him?"

"Never enough. She has to answer for Lino Martinez, whatever he was. She won't answer for Jimmy Jay Jenkins, but her act of revenge led to his death, too. I t planted the seed. Or ... tossed in the pebble. Ripples," she reminded him. "We can't be sure where they'll spread. Somebody's got to try to stop them."

"He was barely sixteen." He brought the ID photo back on-screen of the young, fresh-faced, clear-eyed boy. "The line's less defined on my side than it could ever be on yours. What now?"

"Now, I contact Peabody and have her meet me here, so I can brief her in the morning before we go pick up Juanita Turner for questioning. Contact her voice mail," Eve said when she caught his look.

"And then?"

"We go to bed." She glanced back toward the screen. "She's not going anywhere."

She slept poorly, dogged by dreams, images of a boy she'd never met who'd died simply because he'd been in the wrong place. The young, fresh face was torn and ruined, the clear eyes dull and dead.

She heard his mother weeping over his body. Mindless, keening sobs that echoed into forever.

As she watched, Marlena-bloodied, battered, broken as she'd been in the holo Roarke had once shown her-walked up to the mangled body of the dead boy.

"We were both so young," Marlena said. "We'd barely begun to live. So young to be used as a tool. Used, destroyed, discarded."

She held out a hand for Quinto Turner, and he took it. Even as his blood poured over the floor of the church, he took it and got to his feet.

"I 'll take him now," Marlena said to Eve. "There's a special place for the innocents. I 'll take him there. What was she to do?" She gestured to the grieving mother, covered with her son's blood. "Can you stop it? Can you stop it all? You couldn't stop what happened to you."

"I can't stop it all. But murder isn't an end. Murder isn't a solution."

"She was his mother. I t was her solution."

"Murder doesn't resolve murder. I t perpetuates it."

"What of us, then? What of us? No one stood for me. No one but Roarke."

"And still it wasn't an end. He lives with it."

"And so do you. Now you'll perpetuate her loss, her grief, for justice. You'll live with that, too." With her hand holding Quinto's, Marlena led him away.

Eve stared at the pools of blood, the ripples in them.

And watched them spread.

She woke edgy, and with none of the energy the imminent closing of a case usually brought her. She knew the answers, or most of them, saw the pattern clearly, and understood, accepted, what she had to do.

But the acceptance and the restless few hours of sleep left her with a dull headache."Take a blocker," Roarke ordered. "I can see the d.a.m.n headache beating at your skull."

"So, you've got X-ray vision now, Super-Roarke?"

"No point in taking slaps at me." He rose, walked toward the bathroom. "I won't slap back. You've got enough weighing on you."

"I don't want a d.a.m.n blocker."

He came back with one, walked up to her as she yanked on her weapon harness. "Take it, or I 'll make you take it."

"Look, step back or-"

He cupped his hand on the back of her neck. She braced for him to try to force the pill down her throat. In fact, she welcomed the attempt and the battle. Instead, his mouth came down on hers.

The hands she'd lifted to fight dropped to her sides as lips simply defeated her with tenderness.

"d.a.m.n it," she said when his lips left hers to brush her cheek.

"You hardly slept."

"I 'm okay. I just want to close it down, get it done."

"Take the blocker."

"Nag, nag, nag." But she took it, swallowed it. "I can't leave it open. I can't pretend I don't know. I can't just let her do murder and turn away."

"No. You can't, no."

"And even if I could, even if I could find some way to live with it, if I let her go, I let Penny Soto go. How can I?"

"Eve." He rubbed at the knots of tension in her shoulders. "You don't have to explain yourself, not to me. Not to anyone, but especially not to me. I could turn away. I could do that. I could do that and find some way outside the law to make sure the other paid. You never could. There's that s.h.i.+fting line between us. I don't know if it makes either of us right, either of us wrong. I t just makes us who we are."

"I went outside the law. Asked you to go outside it with Robert Lowell. I did that to make sure he paid for the women he'd tortured and killed. I did that because I 'd given Ariel my word he'd pay."

"I t's not the same, and you know it."

"I crossed the line."

"The line s.h.i.+fts." Now he gave those shoulders a quick, impatient shake. "I f the law, if justice has no compa.s.sion, no fluidity, no humanity, how is it justice?"

"I couldn't live with it. I couldn't live with letting him take the easy way out, letting the law give him the easy way. So I s.h.i.+fted the line."

"Was it justice, Eve?"

"I t felt like it."

"Then go." He lifted her hands, kissed them. "Do your job."

"Yeah." She started toward the door, stopped, and turned back. "I dreamed about Marlena. I dreamed about her and Quinto Turner. They were both the way they were after they'd been killed."

"Eve."

"But ... she said she'd take him, and she did. She said there was a special place for the innocents, and she'd take him there. Do you think there is? A place for innocents."

"I do, actually. Yes."

"I hope you're right."

She left him, went to her office to prepare for what had to be done.

When Peabody and McNab came in, she simply gestured toward the kitchen. There were twin hoots of joy as they scrambled for the treasure trove of her AutoChef. She stuck with coffee. The blocker had done the job-and maybe the conversation with Roarke had smoothed the rest, at least a little.

She c.o.c.ked her eyebrows when Peabody and McNab came back in with heaping plates and steaming mugs."Do you think you've got enough to hold you off from starvation during the briefing?"

"Belgian waffles, with seasonal berries." Peabody sat down, prepared to plow in. "This may hold me forever."

"As long as your ears stay as open as your mouths."

She began with Ortega, took them through her premise.

"At the end of the seven years, he'd stand to inherit, by spousal right, upward of six hundred and eighty-five million-not including personal property, and the profits from the real property and businesses over the seven."

"That's a lot of waffles," McNab commented.

"Set for life," Peabody agreed. "Well, if he'd lived."

"His bed buddy didn't want to split. She wanted it all. We're going to prove that, nail her for accessory after the fact on Ortega and Flores, fraud, conspiracy to murder on Lino, and being a basic s.k.a.n.k b.i.t.c.h. We'll meet with the lawyer later today, and set up a little sting."

"We lay down on her," Peabody added, "and get her to flip on her co-conspirator."

"Don't need it. Screen on," she ordered, and Juanita's data flashed on. "Juanita Turner. Her son was a victim in the second bombing."

"How did you . . ." Peabody paused, narrowed her eyes at the image. "She looks a little familiar. Did we interview her? Was she at the Ortiz funeral?"

"I f she was, and I think it's likely, she slipped in and out before the scene was secured. We saw her at the youth center. The medical."

"That's it! I didn't get much of a look at her there. Her son?"

"And her husband, a year later-to the day-by self-termination." Eve ran through it, flatly. "Penny needed a weapon," Eve concluded. "And Juanita fit the bill."

"Man, man, it had to be horrible for her to realize this guy she'd thought was ... that he was the one respons-ible for her son's death."

"Yeah. I t's rough." But it couldn't influence the work. "I 've contacted Reo," Eve said, referring to the APA she preferred working with. "We've got enough, in her opinion, to get the communications. Which is where e-boy here comes in. I want you to dig in, dig out," she told McNab as he gorged on waffles. "Anything that so much as sniffs like it's connected. We're picking up Juanita. While we have her in the box, you find us a communication with Penny. Find a memo, a journal, a receipt for the cyanide. Find something hard, and find it fast."

Peabody swallowed waffles and berries. "We're picking her up before Penny?"

"Penny orchestrated it. Juanita executed it. I 've contacted Baxter. He and Trueheart are keeping a tail on Penny. Now, if you've finished stuffing yourselves, let's get to work."

Peabody said nothing as they walked downstairs. She got into the pa.s.senger seat, finally turned to Eve. "Maybe we get Penny on conspiracy, but it's a stretch. I t's more likely we get accessory after the fact there. And that's a maybe. She can claim she let it slip out about Lino, or felt guilty and spilled it to Juanita Turner."