“I don’t care. A good cop is dead, so believe me, I don’t care about your pitiful trade. You’ve got nothing I want half as much as I want you living out your life in a cage.”
Eve paused a moment as if considering. “But I’ll give you the chance for retribution on Max Ricker. I’ll give you the chance to drop the hammer on him.”
She watched the interest, and the rage kindle. And played on it. “He says it doesn’t matter, but you know better. Another life sentence, no more holes to slither through to push buttons down here. Strip him of whatever power he has left. I’ll give you a shot at that, right here and now. I walk out, and you lose even that. Pay him back, Cleo. Pay him back for tossing you out like garbage.”
“It was his idea. Coltraine. He wanted her dead, so he set it up. She’s not the only one.”
Eve came back to sit. “Let’s start with her.”
“He’s still got some pull, and some connections in Atlanta. He used them when she started talking transfer, to clear the way to New York, to my squad. If she didn’t bite, I’d have transferred to wherever she went. But she made it easy.”
“He targeted her because of Alex?”
“He and Alex had words, before Max went down and right after. Yeah, he thought about payback there for a long time—hell, he promised Alex he’d pay. Coltraine was the payment.”
“You contacted her that night.”
“Max set it up. Had Sandy persuade Alex they needed to come to New York for a while, deal with some business here. Sandy knew Alex had some regrets about Coltraine, and he played on them—nudged him into contacting her, asking her over. After that, it was easy. Sandy talked Alex into going out, taking a walk. I tagged her, told her I had a solid on the Chinatown case, needed her to come. Max told me how he wanted it to go down, and I did exactly what he wanted.”
“You waited for her in the stairway.”
“Just a stun there. Max wanted it done a certain way, so it was done a certain way. I carried her down to the basement, brought her back so I could give her Max’s message. ‘Alex is killing you, bitch. Alex is taking your own goddamn weapon and pressing it to your throat. Feel it? You don’t walk away from a Ricker and live.’ He wanted her to die thinking Alex ordered the hit. If Alex went down for it, so much the better. Either way, it was payback. And the kicker was it would happen on your turf. A little needle in your arm.
“He thinks about you a lot.”
“So will you,” Eve said.
EPILOGUE
WHEN it WAS DONE, WHEN EVE Felt As MUCH DISGUST As satisfaction, she ordered the uniforms to take Cleo to booking.
“Do you want to walk it through?” Peabody asked her.
“No, I really don’t.”
“I’ll take care of it,” Peabody offered. “It leaves you a little bit raw. She killed over a dozen people for him. Just because he said to.”
“No, not just because. That’s only part of it. The rest? It’s just in her. God knows why.”
“I’ll write it up. I’d like to,” she added before Eve could speak. “For Coltraine.”
“Okay.”
Alone, Eve simply sat down in the conference room. Too many things churning, she realized. Too many thoughts buzzing.
Morris came in quietly, sat across from her. “Thank you.”
For reasons Eve couldn’t name she braced her elbows on the table and pressed her fingers to eyes that stung.
“You feel some sympathy for her.”
“I don’t know what I feel,” she managed.
“Some small seed of sympathy for a woman whose father could have such contempt for her. I saw her face when he spoke to you about her. His words cut her to pieces. I was glad of it, and still I felt it, too. That small seed of sympathy.”
Eve dropped her hands. “She deserved it. All of it. More of it.”
“Yes. And still. T