Treachery in Death (In Death 32)

“I’ve given some thought to what happens next. And since I know what I’d like that to be, I’ll be asking you into my room tonight.”

He smiled back at her. “I was hoping you would.”

With the data Webster passed to her, Eve ran an analysis of Accounting for Renee’s squad. Then an analysis of the analysis. The flood of numbers, the puzzlement of percentages gave her a headache. And still she couldn’t see a clear pattern. She couldn’t see enough to point a finger at anyone in charge of the accounts.

She toggled away from that—maybe if she let the numbers rest they’d make more sense to her—and took another sweep through Renee’s squad. There she believed she saw a pattern, where Detective Lilah Strong, a rookie uniform, and two other detectives stood as abnormalities.

She needs clean cops, Eve calculated. To handle the piddly stuff, to turn in legit reports—and as fall guys when she needs or wants them. Use them, then lose them. One way or another.

She thought of Gail Devin, glanced at Peabody.

Her partner was in it deep and would stick, Eve knew, no matter how long it took, no matter how many layers needed to be shifted through.

She looked at her board.

On one side, Rickie Keener. Loser, criminal, junkie, low-life pig. But he was hers now.

On the other, Detective Gail Devin, by all reports a good cop with good instincts—and with the moral code to talk to an older, experienced cop she respected about her concerns over her boss.

Two sides of the scale, Eve decided, but she knew—she knew that while Renee may not have plunged the syringe or snapped the neck, she’d killed them both.

Added to one side of that scale, Detective Harold Strumb—stabbed to death in an alley while his partner and a squad mate walked away unharmed.

They wouldn’t be the only ones. And unless Renee went down, they wouldn’t be the last.

She opened Allo’s case notes, began to read.

She liked his style—terse, even pithy, but thorough. She noted he’d questioned Sergeant Runch’s invoices regularly. And when she correlated with Allo’s file under Renee’s command she found the lieutenant’s notations citing him as malingering or conflicting with fellow officers.

Eve started her own file on Allo’s cases during the seven-month period, the invoices, the evals. Not wanting to disturb Peabody, she sent her a memo to do the same on Devin, and to follow it, as she was with Allo, with a probability analysis.

While it ran, she began to study the Geraldi files she’d forced Renee to send her.

She put it on hold when Webster came in.

“You’ve got something?” she demanded.

“Nothing major. Why?”

“You look like you’ve got something. You look happy.”

“I’m a happy guy.”

She waved that away. “What have you got that’s minor then?”

“Marcell—partner of Strumb, the one who went down. IAB’s got a file on him.”

“Over Strumb?”

“No. Deals with before that. They interviewed and investigated him over a questionable termination—five years ago. There were witness reports claiming Marcell fired on full, twice, after the suspect had dropped his weapon and surrendered.”

“The determination?”

“Cleared him. The witnesses were two other dealers, so their statements were given the fish-eye. The suspect did have an illegal weapon and had discharged it. Marcell stuck to his story. The suspect remained armed and was again preparing to discharge. Reconstruction couldn’t disprove. However, there’s a note in the file—the one I had to slide out without notification. A big, fat question mark. Updated after both wits met violent ends.”

“Like Strumb and those wits.”

“Yeah. Marcell had an alibi in both cases. Solid.”