“You’d think, but the PA’s just chomping to challenge that, and given the fact you were neither arrested nor charged for that crime before or during the Clemency period, you’re fair game.”
“What kind of shit is this? It’s bull.” She looked to her lawyer. “It’s bull. I was a minor.”
“Just don’t say anything. Lieutenant,” Montoya began, in a tone of outrage, “my client—”
“Not done yet. You’ll also find on the menu conspiracy to murder Lino Martinez. She didn’t toss the ’link, Penny. And now that she knows your finger was on the button, she’s cooperating fully.”
“That bitch Juanita killed Lino.” Penny shoved to her feet, stabbing a finger in the air. “I never touched him. I was never in that goddamn church. Juanita Turner did Lino, and she can’t pin it on me.”
“I never said who she was,” Eve commented.
“I don’t give a shit what you said. Juanita poisoned Lino, over her kid. You can’t pin that on me. I wasn’t fucking there.”
“That’s why it’s called conspiracy to murder.”
“I want a deal. I want a deal and I’ll tell you just how she did it. Shut the fuck up!” she screamed at Montoya when he tried to silence her. “Listen, just listen.” She sat back down. “The bitch went psycho when she found out Lino was back, that he’d been back, using the priest cover.”
“How’d she find that out?”
“Look, so I let it slip one day, that’s all. I let it slip. It’s not a crime. She’s the one who did it. She used Old Man Ortiz’s funeral for cover, got the keys out of the rectory. She poisoned the wine. She did it because her son got blown to hell, and her old man offed himself.”
“Thanks for confirming it, on record—which is, again, why it’s called conspiracy to murder. There’s also accessory after the fact in the matter of the murders of Miguel Flores and José Ortega and Steven Chávez.”
“What the fuck! What the fuck! Why don’t you say something?” she demanded of the lawyer.
“I think he’s struck dumb.”
“We had a deal. On record—”
“For the fraud, for the assault with intent on a police officer. No deal on the rest.” Now it was Eve who tipped back in her chair. “I could afford to let those slide, seeing as you’ll be in for, oh, a couple lifetimes. Off-planet, concrete cage, no possibility of parole. And even though those words sing to me, that’s not everything you deserve. Detectives.”
At her word, Stuben and Kohn came in. “The charges are murder in the first,” Stuben began, “in the deaths of . . .”
He spoke all the names, all the dead from 2043. When Penny leaped up, Eve simply wrenched her arms behind her back and cuffed her.
“I thought you’d like to take her down, book her,” she said to the detectives. “On all the charges.”
“It’d be a nice cap on it. Thanks, Lieutenant. Thanks.”
She listened to Penny scream obscenities as they hauled her out. “Record off. This is probably a lot more than you bargained for,” she said, casually to the lawyer. “If I were you? I’d run.”
She turned, walked out. Roarke stepped out of observation.
“Would we be leaving for Nevada tonight?” he asked.
Hardly a wonder she was raving nuts about the man. “Yeah, that’d be best. I’m going to want to take someone along, if that’s okay with you.”
• • •