Salvation in death

20

THE LAWYER DIDN’T APPRECIATE THE MIDNIGHT call, but she snagged his interest.

“Mr. Aldo and I are in contact regularly, and have been since Mr. Ortega’s disappearance.”

“You’ve met Mr. Aldo.”

“Not in a personal sense. We correspond via e-mail most usually. He lives in New Mexico, and has a secondary residence in Cancún. He travels extensively.”

“I bet. Mr. Ortega owns a number of properties in New York, businesses, his residence, rental properties. How are those finances handled?”

“I really don’t see how that’s relevant, or how it warrants being disturbed at this time of night.”

“The investigation into Mr. Ortega’s disappearance may be cold, but it’s still open. As his spouse and only beneficiary on record, Mr. Aldo stands to inherit a big, fat bundle if and when Mr. Ortega is declared legally dead. You ever wonder about that, Mr. Feinburg?”

It was hard for a guy with a sleep crease across his cheek to look snooty, but Feinburg gave it his best shot. “Mr. Aldo has handled every aspect of this matter by means both legal and aboveboard.”

“I have evidence that Ken Aldo is an alias for one Lino Martinez, a violent criminal who I suspect duped and disposed of your former client. I can and will get a warrant, within the hour, to access the financials on the Ortega properties, or you can answer the question and get back to sleep a lot sooner.”

“You can’t possibly expect me to believe-”

“And as Lino Martinez is currently cooling it down at the morgue, I don’t believe you have a client left alive in this matter. Do you want me to wake up a judge, Feinburg?”

Feinburg blinked like an owl blasted with sudden sunlight. “I’d require verification before-”

“Let me ask you this,” Eve said, and played another hunch. “Did Aldo contact you recently? Say in the last few weeks, to inform you that he had a beneficiary? A female. He’d want her listed as his legal partner, with full power of attorney.”

There was a long silence. “Why would you ask that?”

“Because I believe the con got himself conned. Your client’s dead, Feinburg, and his killer will continue to correspond with you under his name, and whatever name she’s opted to use. Answer yes or no: The profits from the Ortega properties go into some kind of escrow or trust, and will-once Ortega is declared legally dead at the end of another year-become Aldo’s assets.”

“That would be the usual procedure, yes.”

“When did you last hear from Aldo?”

“About six weeks ago. I did, however, hear from his… new partner only yesterday. It’s my understanding that Mr. Aldo plans to travel for several months.”

“I can pretty much guarantee he’s doing his traveling in hell.”

“Lieutenant.” Feinburg shifted, tugged on the robe she assumed he’d pulled on before unblocking video. “What you’re outlining is very disturbing.”

“You think?”

“But at this time, I’m bound by client-attorney confidentiality. I can’t give you information.”

“We’ll work around that. You can do this. Do not correspond or contact your clients until I clear it. If the woman claiming to be Aldo’s partner contacts you, don’t respond. Contact me. I don’t think she will, not yet, but-and trust me on this-I will find a way to tangle you up in obstruction and accessory after the fact if you give my suspect the smallest clue she’s on my screen. Understood?”

Unable to pull off snooty again, Feinburg just looked aggrieved. “I’m a property and tax lawyer, for God’s sake. I’ve done nothing to earn threats from the police.”

“Good. Keep it that way. I’ll be in touch.”

She ended transmission, then frowned at the bowl Roarke set in front of her. “What’s this?”

“Food. We had cake for dinner, if you recall. And since you show no signs of winding down for the night, we’re going to eat.”

She sniffed at the soup. She’d bet a month’s pay there were vegetables lurking around under the surface, but it smelled good. “Okay. Thanks. You don’t have to stick.”

“You couldn’t peel me off with dermalaser.” He sat across from her, sampled his own soup. “Do you think Lino opened himself to all this by making Penny his legal partner and heir?”

Eve ate. She’d been right about the vegetables. “Do you?”

“You said he loved her. Love blinds and binds and often makes bloody gits out of us. So, yes. She likely nudged him along that route, using sex or withholding it-as sex makes bloody gits of us even more often than love. He’d have told her all of it, every detail. A bit at a time maybe, but over these five years? He’d have laid it all out for her. How smart is she?”

“Not very, I’d say. More hotheaded. But he was, yeah, I think Lino was pretty smart. And all she had to do was springboard off the game he’d already laid out. He’d have gotten away with it,” she added. “Another few months, the properties and trust transfer to Aldo-all legalschmegal. Aldo sells out to Martinez. Martinez gets his face back, and comes home rich and important. Yeah, he was smart enough, but Penny Soto was his athlete’s heel.”

“Achilles’.” Roarke paused, studied her face. “Do you do that on purpose? The misnomers?”

“Maybe. Sometimes. Anyway, she’ll know what happened to Flores.”

Roarke smiled at her. “How much will you bargain with her for the information?”

“I won’t. Can’t. But I’ll get it.” She scooped up soup. The vegetables weren’t such a bad deal when they were disguised in noodles and a thick, zingy broth. “Yeah, he told her all of it. Pillow talk, bragging, puffing himself up. And she has to figure, what does she need him for? She can have it all if she works it right. She’s waited almost as long as he has, right? Why does she have to share it with this loser?”

“Left her once, didn’t he?” Roarke pointed out. “What’s to stop him from tossing her aside once he’s riding the money train. So she tosses him first. Permanently.”

“Plays the right tune for me. She gets him to hook her up first. If you loved me, you’d respect me. If you loved me, we’d be partners. If you loved me, you’d make sure I had security. Don’t you trust me, Lino, don’t you love me-all while probably giving him a blow job.” Eve wagged her spoon at Roarke. “Men are dicks so often because they have one.”

“I can use mine without thinking with it.”

Eve grinned over another spoonful of soup. “If I went down on you right now, you’d give me anything I asked for.”

“Try me.”

Now she laughed. “You’re just trying for a bj, and I’m working.”

Saying nothing, he took out his memo book, keyed something in. Then smiled when she cocked her head in question. “I’m just making a note that you owe me a blow job to prove your theory.”

Amused, she finished off the soup. “Okay then, if you’re going to stick, the next step is to check out the families and close ties to the fatalities and injured at the two bombings back in ’43. I’m working on the theory that Lino was behind both. I’m starting with the ³rties second, because of the eye-for-an-eye thing.”

“Because most, if not all, would have no reason to think Martinez set the boomer, on his own turf.”

“But the second,” Eve agreed. “People knew, or strongly suspected he had something to do with it. He made sure that buzz got around. Plus, the single fatality in the school bombing has no close friends or relatives left in the area. Her family moved to Barcelona three years after her death.”

“So you study the fatalities on the second, as death has more weight.”

“Your kid, brother, father, best pal, whatever, gets hurt seventeen years ago and you have a chance for payback, you find a way to hurt them back. Exposure, a good ass-whooping. But death? It’s final. Payback needs to be final, too.”

“Yes. And the law is often transitory.”

She knew he thought of Marlena again, what had been done, what he had done. His eyes came to hers.

“If I’d stepped away, if I’d never exacted payment from those who tortured, raped, murdered an innocent girl, Jenny would be alive. It ripples, and you can never know how or where they’ll spread.”

“Sometimes the law is transitory, and sometimes, even with it, those ripples spread out too far or in the wrong direction. But without the law, well, eventually, we’d all drown.”

“Some of us are excellent swimmers. I’m more inclined to believe in the face of the law, since I look at it every day, than I ever did before I saw it.” He reached in his pocket, took out the gray button that had fallen off her suit the first time they’d met. When she’d viewed him as a murder suspect. “And I have my talisman to remind me.”

It never failed to baffle her-and on a deeper level delight her-that he carried it with him, always. “What ever happened to that suit anyway?”

Humor flickered in his eyes. “It was hideous, and met the fate it deserved. This”-he held up the button-“was the best part of it.”

He was probably right. “Well. Break’s over,” she announced. “Computer, list fatalities in East 119th Street incident from Detective Stuben’s case file.”

Acknowledged. Working…

“There would have been others,” Roarke commented. “Other fatalities, on both sides of the war, while your victim was a captain. And therefore in charge.”

“Yeah, got that covered. Stuben’s going to get me the data by tomorrow. I don’t hit here, I’ll start looking there.”

Task complete.

“Display, screen one. Five fatalities,” Eve said. “There’s another whose injuries were severe enough I’ll need to look at. Guy lost an arm. Three of the fatalities were members of the Skulls. Of the other two, one was the manager and one was a part-time counter guy. All fatalities were minors, except the manager.”

“Four children dead.”

“Yeah. Well, two of the gang members, according to Stuben’s file, had done time in juvie, had been arrested for assault 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 scum will be scum. The manager… Computer, display data for adult victim. Kobie Smith, some bumps 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. “It 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. It’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. Damn. 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 assistant 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 relationship 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? It was quick, it was just a… Goddamn, goddamn, the youth center. She works at the youth center. Day-care manager, on-site medical. She wasn’t pissed 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 pass 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. It 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. It was her solution.”

“Murder doesn’t resolve murder. It 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 damn 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 damn 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.

“Damn 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 shifting line between us. I don’t know if it makes either of us right, either of us wrong. It 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.”

“It’s not the same, and you know it.”

“I crossed the line.”

“The line shifts.” Now he gave those shoulders a quick, impatient shake. “If the law, if justice has no compassion, 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 shifted the line.”

“Was it justice, Eve?”

“It 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 cocked 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 skank bitch. 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?”

“If 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. It’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 passenger seat, finally turned to Eve. “Maybe we get Penny on conspiracy, but it’s a stretch. It’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.”

Peabody put a hand on her heart, widened her eyes. “I swear, your honor and members of the jury, I didn’t know she’d do murder. How could I know?” Dropping her hand, she shook her head. “Juanita’s going to get hit with first degree, no way around it unless Reo wants to deal it down, but Penny? She’s likely to slither out of it.”

“That’s not up to us.”

“It just seems wrong. Juanita loses her son, her husband. And now, all these years later, she gets used. And she’s the one who’s going to go down the hardest.”

“You play, you pay. She killed a guy, Peabody,” McNab said from the back. “If Dallas has this right, and it sure fits nice and tight, she did the premeditated-cold-blooded killed his ass.”

“I know that. But she was set up to do it. Jesus, you ought to see the crime scene photos from that bombing. There wasn’t much left of her kid.”

“Vic was a downtown bastard, that’s coming crystal. And I give you she took the hardest of the hard knocks. But, come on, that gives her the go to poison him?”

“I didn’t say that, you ass, I’m just saying-”

“Shut up and stop arguing,” Eve ordered.

“I’m just pointing out,” Peabody said in the gooey tones of reason that told any detractors they were stupid, “that Juanita took some really mean hits, and Penny-who probably was in on them-used that. And-”

“I’m just pointing out, hello, murderer.”

Peabody swung around to glare at McNab. “You’re such a jerk.”

“Bleeding heart.”

“Shut up!” Eve’s sharp order had them both zipping it. “you’re both right. So stop bickering like w couple of idiots. I got rid of one headache this morning. If you bring one back, I’m booting Both of you to the curb and finishing this myself.

Peabody folded her arms, stuck her nose in the air. McNab slumped in the backseat. It was, in Eve’s mind, a sulkfest all the way over to the East Side.