Apprentice in Death

  “I appreciate it.”

  “Peabody, I want you to check that all the civilians we brought in are now secure. And it’s that needle-in-the-hay-pile thing—”

  “Stack.”

  “Whatever. Run the initials of the yet to be identified against every fricking lawyer in the city. Start with ones who advertise, who specialize in personal injury and wrongful-death suits.”

  “That’s a teeny little needle in a lot of haystacks, but I’m on it.”

  With only Eve and Roarke left in the room, Whitney rose. “Lieutenant, HSO is inquiring about your investigation.”

  She actually felt her spine turn to a rod of steel at the mention of the Homeland Security Organization. “Inquiring, sir, or looking to take it over?”

  “Inquiring with the concept, we’ll say, of taking it over.”

  “It’s a murder investigation, Commander.”

  “That could be considered domestic terrorism. And, in fact, is being labeled that by much of the media.”

  Part of her brain might have been raging Politics, fucking politics, but her tone held cool and even. “That may be, sir, but the evidence clearly indicates the motive here is murder, and targeted murder. The rest is, or was, nothing but an attempt to cover the specific target.”

  “It may be possible to tap some HSO resources without them taking the lead.”

  “Respectfully, sir, I feel we don’t have time to jump through those hoops. If I come to believe those resources are more valuable than that time, or that we are unable to move the investigation forward, I would welcome the assistance.”

  “Agreed. It’s your case, Lieutenant. And you’re clear for as much overtime as you deem necessary. The proper paperwork on same will have to be submitted in a timely manner.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Shut them down, Dallas. Shut them down.”

  When he walked out, Eve pressed her fingers to her eyes. “Fucking HSO. Fucking paperwork. Fucking fuck.”

  “Have you eaten anything since this morning?”

  “For Christ’s sake.”

  He pulled a nutribar out of his pocket. “Eat this and I won’t add fucking nagging to your list.”

  “Fine, fine.” She ripped off the wrapper, took an annoyed bite. Maybe the fact that something that bland tasted delicious meant she needed the damn nutri part of it.

  “And since you won’t actually want cop coffee, you could drink a bottle of water during this next meeting. I’m with Feeney, but I’d like to know if you go into the field.”

  He caught her face in his hands, kissed her, firm and hard, then left her.

  On a sigh, she polished off the nutribar—half wished she had another—as she gave the board one more study.

  In the lounge, she saw Lowenbaum at one of the tables with another cop.

  Vince Patroni—mid-forties, dark hair cut high and tight over a sharp-boned face—brooded into a cup of cop coffee. Since Roarke had it right, she went for water, and was almost disappointed when Vending burped out the bottle without a hitch.

  “Lieutenant Dallas,” Lowenbaum began as Eve and Patroni eyed each other. “Tactical Officer Patroni.”

  “The lieutenant says you’re sure, a hundred percent, on Mac.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And his kid, his girl.”

  “Right again. Do you need me to run it down for you?”

  “No.” Patroni lifted a hand, rubbed his fingers over his eyes. “We were both Army, me and Mac, both weapons specialists, trained at the one-nine-seven. We didn’t train at the same time, but we knew some of the same people from back then.”

  “You connected.”

  “Yeah. I got a boy, ten, from a busted relationship, and he had Will. We’d have a brew a couple times a week, catch a game, hit the range. He’d bring Will whenever he had her—to the range, I mean. Girl’s got some serious skill, I mean she’s a killer on the . . .”

  Obviously he heard his own words. “Jesus.”

  “Let it go,” Eve told him. “You went with them to the practice range regularly.”

  “Yeah, not for the last year or so, but before. I brought my own kid a few times, but he’s not interested much. Wants to be a scientist. And anyway, our kids didn’t much hit it off.”

  “Age difference?”

  “Not really. Owen, he gets on with everybody, old, young, whatever, but he didn’t like her. He told me after the couple of times I took him along that he didn’t want to hang with Mac when she was around. He didn’t like the way she looked. I was surprised, because like I said he gets along with people. I said how he couldn’t judge people by how they look. But he said it wasn’t the way she looks. It was how she looked. At him, at people,” Patroni explained. “She had too much mean in her eyes. He said when she shot at a target, she saw people, and liked imagining them dead.”

  “That’s pretty perceptive for a kid.”

  “Yeah, well, he’s got that, you know, extra. We think. We haven’t had him tested yet, both his mother and I think he’s too young for it. But he’s got that extra, so when he said he didn’t want to hang with her, I stopped taking him. Mostly, I put it down to Will not liking anybody pulling her dad’s attention off her, and Mac really likes Owen. Mac’s crazy about Will, don’t get me wrong, but he wanted a son. I guess he sort of thinks of Will that way. Not much girlie about her, you know?”

  “He got married again.”

  “Yeah, Susann was the love of his life, no question. He said Will loved her, too.”

  “He said?” Eve prompted.

  “Yeah, well . . .” After shifting in his seat, Patroni frowned into his coffee. “My perspective, Will was okay with Susann. From what I could see Susann never got between Mac and Will, encouraged them to have time together. And he was looser, happier, with Susann. Over the moon when she got pregnant. When she died . . . Broke him to pieces, took him down into the dark, man, deep down. Drinking till he blacked out, every night. I couldn’t talk to him. He shut out everything and everybody but Will. I hauled him out of bars a few times, but then he started just drinking at home, locked in.”

  “You didn’t report that behavior to me, Patroni.”

  Patroni looked up, met Lowenbaum’s eyes. “It got bad after you had him take the hardship leave, LT. I didn’t see what good it would do to report he was drinking himself sick on leave. And I honestly didn’t think he’d come back on the job. He wasn’t ready to come back on the roll, LT, you knew it. He’d pulled it together some. He was careful there, but we all knew it. You gave him desk work because you knew it, and nobody was surprised when he took his twenty and stepped out. But after that, after he put in his papers, I think he did more than drink himself blind.”

  His ex-wife thought the same, Eve remembered. “What more?”

  “I went over a few times. He’d lost a lot of weight, looked sick. He had hand tremors, and his eyes . . . Even in the early stages, even when it’s just a little use, you can start to see it in the eyes.”

  “You think he went on the funk,” Eve said.

  “Goddamn it, Patroni, why didn’t you tell me?”

  “He was retired,” Patroni said to Lowenbaum. “You weren’t his lieutenant anymore. And I couldn’t prove it. I knew it in my gut, but I couldn’t prove it. When I tried to talk to him about it, he denied it. I went back a couple times after that, but Will was there, said he was sleeping, said he was doing better, was pulling out, how she’d talked him into taking some time away with her, out west.”

  “She talked him into it.”

  “Camping, she said, fresh air, change of scene. She had it all worked out. The fact is, he’d taken her out to Montana, maybe up to Canada a couple of times before, and Alaska maybe more than a couple.”

  “When’s the last time you saw him?”

  “A while now, maybe three or four
months. He made it pretty damn clear he didn’t like me dropping by, and I couldn’t say, ‘Hey, let’s go have a brew.’ I tagged him a couple times about catching a game, or hitting the range, but he put me off, always had something going with Will. Or she’d answer his ’link, tell me he was busy, he’d get back to me, but he wouldn’t.”

  “Did he ever talk about payback, for Susann?”

  “Not in the I’m-going-to-kill-a-bunch-of-people sort of way. He’s my friend, Lieutenant Dallas, but I’m a police officer, and I know my duty. If he’d made serious threats or if I’d suspected—”

  “I get that, Patroni.”

  “Right.” He scrubbed a hand over his hair. “When he was still talking to me, drinking heavy, he’d talk about how somebody had to pay. I think he hired a lawyer.”

  “What lawyer?”

  “He never said. But he talked about hiring one. He’d say stuff like his wife and baby had been murdered, and where was the justice? How he’d served his country, served this city, but nobody gave a shit about his wife and baby being murdered. I could talk him down. Hell, I combed over the accident report, the reconstruction. I even talked to Russo and the wits myself. It was an accident—a goddamn tragedy, but an accident. When he was sober, I talked to him straight about it. He didn’t much want to talk to me after that.”

  “Do you know when he moved?”

  “I didn’t know he had, but I thought, the way he put me off, the way Will blocked me, he’d just moved on. He didn’t want the contact with me, with things or people who reminded him of what he’d lost.”

  “Did he ever talk about moving?”

  “Sure, he did. He had this thing about Alaska, talked about heading there when Will was eighteen—this was before Susann. After Susann, it was a farm somewhere. Always some dream about getting out of the city, living off the land.”

  “But nothing about moving within the city? He had a wife and a baby on the way.”

  “Right, right.” Patroni closed his eyes as he thought back. “Yeah, yeah, they were saving up. Yeah, yeah, I remember about this. Susann was going the professional mother’s route. In fact, she really wanted to quit her job and start nesting or whatever. But he said they needed her income over the next few months so they could get a bigger place. They’d looked at some townhouses, low-end, places that needed work. East Side—I remember that because it would keep Will in the same school, keep them sort of in the same neighborhood. And Mac was making noises about pushing for full custody of her. Around on Third, maybe. Or Lex. I think that’s the area, in the Twenties or south of there—one of those old post-Urban places that got tossed up. Crap mostly, but you can get them pretty cheap. Ah, they wanted something where they could walk the baby to a park or playground. That was where they were looking.”

  “Buy or rent?”

  “They wanted to buy, or try one of those rent with option deals. You can do that with those post-Urbans, or he said you could. I figured yeah, because they’re prefab boxes, mostly falling apart unless somebody’s gone in and put a lot of money and time into it. I lived in one myself—Lower West—when I was in my twenties. I swear the place swayed in a strong wind. But yeah, that’s what they wanted. An investment until they fixed it up, until he could put in his papers, and they moved to that farm. Pipe dreams, I figured, but a guy’s got to have them.”

  “Anything else, something he said, someone else he blamed? These initials JR and MJ, do they mean anything to you? JR, MJ,” she repeated. “These two names are on his list, and as yet unidentified.”

  “He stopped talking to me about the accident after I looked into it and talked to him, he didn’t want to talk to me about it. There’s nobody I can—wait, ‘MJ’? I don’t see how it could, he could . . .”

  “Who?”

  “Maybe Marian. Marian Jacoby. She has a son who goes to Will’s school. Divorced. Susann fixed us up once, we dated a couple times, just didn’t click that way. She works at the lab. She’s an evidence tech at the lab.”

  “Hold on.” She yanked out her ’link. “Peabody, Marian Jacoby, evidence tech. Find her, get her covered and brought in. She’s a potential.”

  “I don’t know why he’d go after her,” Patroni began.

  “Maybe he went to her, maybe she tried to do him a favor, ran a reconstruction on her own time, studied the evidence, the reports, and told him what he didn’t want to hear.”

  12

  Eve rushed up to EDD, tagging Berenski as she pushed her way on the glides.

  “Marian Jacoby. Where is she?”

  “Hey, I’m putting in extra hours on your deal. How the hell do—”

  “Is she in the lab?”

  “Repeat, how the hell do—”

  “Find out. Now.”

  “Jesus, she’s on swing this month, so she oughta be here. If she’s in the field—”

  “No, right the fuck now.”

  His face, one large scowl, filled her screen as he ran his counter length on his rolling stool. “Yeah, yeah, she’s around. What the fuck?”

  “Get off your ass, go get her, take her to a secured location. I’ve got cops coming in for her.”

  “You think you’re going to come in here and arrest one of my—”

  “She may be a target, Berenski. She knows Mackie, and she may be one of his targets. Get her safe and secured until my cops get there.”

  “Done.” The scowl turned to a snarl, and his face blurred as he shoved to his feet. “Nobody screws with one of my people.”

  He cut her off, and with her ’link still in hand, Eve bypassed the noise and color of EDD central and shot toward its glass-walled lab.

  “Marian Jacoby—potential target. Being secured now. That leaves one. Apartments, condos, townhouses, East Side, likely in the Twenties or below—the post-Urban toss-ups. Probably Third, possibly Lex.”

  She caught her breath as Feeney immediately started a search and scan. “Finances,” she said to Roarke. “They were saving to buy.”

  “I can tell you he all but emptied his account September eighteenth, and took the lump sum on his pension only last week. He had a two- hundred-fifty-thousand-dollar life insurance policy on his wife, doubled with accidental death, and prior savings of two hundred thousand and change. With the lump sum, he has more than enough for a downpayment, but wouldn’t that be foolish?”

  “He may not be thinking straight, but I agree and lean toward rental. Even if he’s not thinking straight, it’s becoming clear the daughter is, in her own twisted way. Other accounts, he must have put the money somewhere.”

  “Working on that.”

  “We’ve already eliminated some buildings and locations.” As he worked, Feeney gestured to a screen where Eve saw numerous buildings blacked out. “We zero in on the post-Urban prefabs, we eliminate more.”

  Nodding, she answered her ’link, looked at Dickhead.

  “I’ve got her, in my office. She’s scared shitless.”

  “Put her on. Jacoby.”

  “Lieu—Lieu—Lieutenant, I—”

  “Pull it together. You’re safe, you’re going to stay safe. You know Reginald Mackie.”

  “Lieutenant, please, my son. My boy’s home alone, just the house droid. My boy.”

  “We’ll take care of it. MacNab, dispatch protection detail to Jacoby’s residence. Jacoby, the minute we’re done, contact your kid, tell him to expect officers. Tell him to ask to see identification before admitting them.”

  “He knows that, he knows that already. He wouldn’t—”

  “Good. You know Reginald Mackie.”

  “Yes, my son and his daughter have some classes together. I knew his wife, Susann. I—”

  “Did he come to you, ask you to investigate her accident?”

  “He was desperate, grieving. He—”

  Before Eve could shut down the excuses, she hear
d Berenski’s voice. “Yes or no, Jacoby. Nobody’s going to burn you over it. Truth and brief. Now.”

  “Yes, he came to me, asked me. I did the reconstruction on my own time, and I ran the evidence, analyzed the reports, everything. I had to tell him it just wasn’t anyone’s fault. I didn’t tell him it was Susann’s, but that’s the truth. He was angry, accused me of covering up. Then he apologized. He didn’t mean it, but he apologized. I haven’t seen or spoken to him since.”

  “Okay. You’re safe, your boy’s safe. McNab, officers’ names?”

  “Task and Newman dispatched. ETA two minutes.”

  “Task and Newman—make sure he verifies those officers. They’ll be at your door in two minutes.”

  “Thank you. Thank you.”

  “Use your own ’link,” Berenski said, snatching back his own. “So your kid recognizes it. Bag this crazy son of a bitch, Dallas, before he targets somebody else in my house. Shit, before he targets me.”

  “We’re closing in.”

  She clicked off, dragged a hand through her hair.

  Swing shift, she thought. Dickhead was putting in overtime, too. She made a mental note to cut him at least a sliver of a break the next time he exhibited Dickheaded behavior.

  “Working on possibles on Second,” Feeney announced.

  “Still eliminating on Lex,” McNab bounced back.

  “Feed me the data.” Roarke worked a keyboard with one hand, a swipe screen with another. “I’ll fold it into financials and ID.”

  When her ’link signaled again, Eve stepped back from their chatter.

  “Jacoby’s secured, and being transported to a safe house. Officers are with her son now,” Peabody announced. “Nobody’s hit on the nest, as yet.”

  “Get me a consult with Mira.”

  “If you mean now, Dallas, it’s nearly twenty-hundred hours. She’s not in her office. Do you want me to contact her at home?”

  “It can wait.” She already had a good picture of the Mackie dynamics. “Anybody who hasn’t had a dinner break takes one—thirty minutes. We pull the search for the nest at twenty-two-hundred. All officers and detectives report for full briefing at oh-seven-thirty. Until that time, everyone’s on standby.”