Brotherhood in Death (23 page)

He looked back in the box at the keys. Studied them with his basset-hound eyes, rubbed his chin. “Those? That’s a whole different kettle. Lab might be able to tell you what kind of lock, give you the age. But location’s on you.”

“Yeah. I’ve got some ideas on that.”

She pulled Baxter and Trueheart in, continued to search the house while she waited for them. But her gut told her they’d already hit the mother lode.

She let them in herself. “Give me what you’ve got.”

“It’s not much. Lots of shock, and a few tears at Wymann’s offices. We got the warrant and Callendar and another e-geek came in to take the electronics. The admin says she thinks the biographer approached Wymann, maybe at a party. He made the follow-up appointment himself, had the admin put it in his schedule. She herself never saw the woman or spoke with her. It seems spur-of-the-moment.”

“Any sense he was dipping in the office pool?”

“Nope. But Trueheart turned his earnest young detective’s face on the admin and eased a couple names out of her. No cross with your first vic’s ladies. We talked to both of them, and the alibis look solid.”

He looked around. “Is that a koi pond? Who has a koi pond twelve steps inside their front door? Then again, who has a fat baby orgy on their front door?”

“You haven’t seen half of it. Here’s where we stand.”

She gave him the progress.

“I’ve
got
to see this bathroom.”

“You’ll have time. The two of you need to sit on the house in case the killers decide to bring him back and hang him over the koi pond. I
need to get back in the field, check out a couple leads. Most likely is they bring him back in after dark, but you sit on it, and I’m getting backup on the off chance they come before I can get back.”

She held up a finger when her ’link sounded. “Dallas,” she began, pacing away.

When she paced back, she shouted, “Peabody!”

“I don’t get having fish in the house.” Baxter stood looking down at koi. “It’s unnatural.”

“I used to win a goldfish every summer at the county fair. Ringtoss,” Trueheart said. “It never made it through the fall.”

“See, unnatural.”

“You want unnatural? There’s a room full of dolls on the second floor.”

“Well, don’t they have a little girl?” Trueheart began.

“If a kid walked in that room, her screams would be heard from here to Queens, and she’d be traumatized for life. I’m saying hundreds of dolls. Staring dolls. Staring-at-the-door dolls. Waiting dolls.”

“Jesus, Dallas.” Muttering it, Baxter shuddered.

“They’re up there. We’re heading out,” she said as Peabody came down the stairs. “Detective Bennet cleared the path to the social worker.”

“Mike Bennet? Nice guy,” Baxter said.

“Sit on the house. Maybe feed those fish something. Nobody’s been here since yesterday. Maybe they’ll start eating each other.”

“Staring dolls, cannibal fish. What the hell kind of place is this?”

“Sit tight. Stay alert. We don’t want to add dead guy swinging over the cannibal fish.”

“Did she give Mike any names?” Peabody asked, winding her long, long scarf as they started to the car.

“No, and he doesn’t think she will. But she might give us a yes or no when we show her photos.”

“That’s a fine line.”

“What I get is she likes him—that nice-guy vibe. And she really respects his future mothers-in-law. We push on how these people used Anson to kill Wymann, and if we don’t stop them, will kill Betz, we’ve got a decent shot at getting a nod if we show her the right face.”

The minute she was in the car, Peabody ordered the seat warmer. “Reo says hey, and that she’ll have a warrant for us when we get the locations on the swipes. You never said what ideas you had about the old keys.”

“Old keys, old doors. These guys go back to old times. Group house. Maybe they’ve still got it. Or another. A place they get together, as brothers.”

“If so, and Betz went to all that trouble to hide the keys, it follows they go there, as brothers, to do stuff he doesn’t want his wife to know about.”

“If the senator had keys, he wouldn’t bother hiding them. We’ll get another warrant to go through his apartment, since it’s easy money his wife won’t cooperate. If Wymann had keys, we didn’t look in the right place, with the right eye. We’re going to need to have this Ethan MacNamee picked up, arrange a ’link or holo interview.”

“Senator Fordham?”

“Not one of them, but we’ll leave his security detail to watch him, in case he’s just a late entry. And let’s get the file on the suicide: William Stevenson.”

She answered the dash ’link when she noted Roarke’s display. “Hey.”

“I thought you’d want to know, security did the run-through at the hotel. Wymann has never registered, and doesn’t show up on any feed in the last year.”

“Okay. How about Frederick Betz?”

Roarke gave her a quiet stare. “Why don’t you contact Lloyd
Kowalski, at the Palace, and ask him whatever you like. Your middleman on this is a bit busy today.”

“Sure, thanks. Just so you know, I didn’t tap you when we were after a hidey-hole, or when we had a locked box. Peabody found the hole, I picked the lock.”

“I’m so proud of both of you. Don’t skip lunch again, and if you need me I’ll be much more free after three.”

“Okay. Might need a copter and a pilot.”

“Now, that’s so much more fun than talking to Kowalski. Let me know. Later,” he added and clicked off.

“Copter? Pilot?”

“Group house—if it’s still standing, I want a look at it once we find it. Maybe those keys fit a door there, maybe they don’t. But I’d like to see it either way. Once we find out where the hell it is.”

“I can dig it up—it’ll take some time unless one of them owned or owns it. Maybe Mr. Mira knows.”

Eve let out a sigh, and once again went on the hunt for a parking space. “Yeah. He might know. We’ll ask before we dig.”

—

S
uzanne Lipski had a cramped little office space in a dilapidated building that housed a rape crisis center. The center did its best, Eve imagined, with whatever funding it could scrape up, to offer support, information, medical and emotional assistance to victims. The walls of that space—one smaller than her division at Central—held soothing and uplifting posters. Calm water, misty forests, sunny beaches. And a bulletin board full of emergency numbers, counseling information, support group information.

Eve stopped, studied a flyer—a pretty summer meadow under a perfect blue sky—for Inner Peace.

“Bang,” she murmured.

Lipski sat at a battered, overburdened metal desk on a squeaky swivel chair. She had no window, but a pot of greenery thrived on an ancient file cabinet under some sort of grow light.

She was a bone-thin woman of about sixty, with a messily curling mop of stone-gray hair. Her face was long, narrow, and brown as a cashew. She had dark eyes that told Eve the woman had seen it all, and was fully expecting to see it all again before she was done.

“We appreciate you seeing us,” Eve began.

“Mike’s persuasive. You’re doing your job, and I don’t fault you for it. In fact, thanks for your service, sincerely. But I have to do mine. The women who come here, to the support groups I head, to the shelters I endorse, they’re my priority and my responsibility. They’ve been raped, beaten, abused, had their security stripped from them. And too often, the law and society strips them all over again.”

Eve wasn’t going to argue, as too often it held true.

“The women I’m looking for have beaten, tortured, sodomized, and murdered two men. I believe they have another, and will end him by tonight. Whatever happened to them doesn’t justify these actions.”

“You don’t know what might have happened to them.”

Eve set photographs of the two victims on the desk. “This isn’t justice served.”

Lipski sat back, sighed. “These men. Powerful, influential, wealthy. Does it matter to you what they might have done to engender this sort of rage?”

“It matters. And if they raped their murderers, I would have done everything within the law to bring them to justice.”

“‘Within the law.’” Lipski pointed a long, bony finger. “I believe in the law, Lieutenant, Detective. I couldn’t sit here if I didn’t. But there are times, and too many, when I believe the law is cold and hard and blind. And still, if I knew who’d done this I would try to convince them to stop, to turn themselves in.”

“The first thing I’m going to tell you, and look at me,” Eve demanded. “Look at me and hear what I’m telling you. If you know, or you figure out who’s doing this, you do
not
contact them, do
not
approach them. What they’re doing is done with a rage so cold it would turn on you. I believe they have three more targets, and they won’t stop until they’re finished, they won’t stop because you reason with them, sympathize with them.”

With her jaw set, Lipski peered up at Eve. “And what of those targets? If you stop them, if you lock them up for what they’ve done, what of the men they targeted?”

“If these men raped the women I lock up? If they abused and raped them, I don’t care if they’re as powerful, influential, and wealthy as God, I will bring them down.”

Eve set her hands on the battered desk, leaned in. “But these women will kill again, and again. Now that they’ve gotten a taste for retribution, what’s to stop them from targeting other men? This one raped, this one tuned up his girlfriend, this one
might
have raped. Is that what you serve here? You get raped, go after the rapist and kill him?”

“No, that’s not what we serve here. But I believe in violence.”

“Hey. Me, too.”

For the first time the faintest smile cracked the stern, thin face. “Despite what we do, you and I, seeing, dealing with, living with violence every day of our lives, we believe in using it to protect and defend.”

“This isn’t for protection. This isn’t for defense.”

“If these men raped the women who killed them, their deaths protect women they would have raped.”

“Are we condemning people for crimes not yet committed? I’m not here to debate with you over what rape does to the body, to the mind, to the spirit. I’m here about murder.

“Charity Downing, Lydia Su, Carlee MacKensie, Allyson Byson, Asha Coppola, Lauren Canford. Do you know any of these women?”

Lipski’s chin jutted up while her arms folded over her bony chest. “I can’t and won’t disclose any confidential information about any woman who has come into this center.”

“The support groups. Cecily Anson and Anne Vine volunteer in some of the groups you’re associated with. Ms. Anson’s name was used to lure this man.” Eve jabbed a finger on the crime scene photo of Wymann.

“Her time, her compassion, her generosity have been twisted into a tool for someone’s revenge.”

“And I’m appalled.” Lipski pressed her thin lips together, and genuine anger flared in her eyes. “I’m talking to you now because using them pisses me off. CeCe and Annie are two of the kindest people I know. And still, if one of these women attended one of their groups, they’re under no obligation to give their name, and even when names are used, we only use the first name. Anonymity is an essential brick in the wall, Lieutenant. Added to it, I simply don’t know everyone who attends the groups. There aren’t enough hours in the day to tend to all.”

Eve glanced at Peabody.

“Maybe you’d recognize a face,” Peabody began, and took out photos. “Um. I’m a Free-Ager.”

Lipski lifted her brows, smiled more fully. “A Free-Ager cop. Rare.”

“I walk a line, I guess. But one thing I know from how I was raised, and from the job. Cold-blooded revenge? It doesn’t heal, Ms. Lipski. It only deepens the wound. The women who are doing this aren’t going to find peace. They aren’t going to erase the pain they may have endured by ending lives. If they’re not stopped, they’re never going to get over what was done to them. So . . .”

She held up Lauren Canford’s photo, then Asha Coppola’s.

Eve saw a kind of relief settle into Lipski’s face, which remained when Peabody offered Allyson Byson.

“I don’t believe I’ve seen any of those women before.”

“I have a few more.”

Peabody held up Lydia Su’s ID shot.

Eve figured Lipski probably played a solid game of poker. But her skills weren’t good enough to completely mask the quick awareness. She waited, saw something similar come with Charity Downing.

She started to speak, then saw something else when Peabody offered Carlee MacKensie. That was both an instant of puzzlement, and, Eve thought, deep sorrow.

“You recognized the last three,” Eve said.

“I can’t discuss this with you.” But that acknowledgment remained in the dark eyes as she spoke. “Even if you get a warrant.”

“I’m not going to get a warrant. I could threaten to arrest you for obstruction. I could threaten to charge you with accessory after the fact if you contact any of these women. I’m not going to do that, either. But I’m going to tell you, again, if you do contact them, they’ll kill the man they have immediately, and very likely flee. You’ll live with that death on your hands. What I intend to do is to bring them in, to prevent them from killing again, and to listen to their story.”

“I don’t and won’t condone murder.” Lipski stared down at the dead. “I don’t and won’t condone this level of retribution. But the crimes committed will carry a hard, long punishment. Victims victimized—by their own actions—yes, by their own. But also by the law.”

“The law may be hard and cold—and I can be the same. It may be blind. I’m not. I need to hear them out. You know, and I know, my Free-Ager partner’s right. What they’re doing will only spread the wound until the wound is all they have. Let me do my job.”

“I’ll contact no one, my word on that—because I do know what’s right. This, what was done, this isn’t right. But when and if you arrest anyone, I want you to contact me. I want to be there for them. To do whatever I can for them.”

“My word on that.”

—

E
ve moved fast, pulling out her ’link as they wound through the crowded space and out to the hall, down the stairwell. “Baxter, I’ve got three names verified. Downing, MacKensie, Su—be on the lookout for any or all of them.”