Connections in Death (In Death #48)(14)

“I believe you. Look at me now. Just at me.” When she did, tears streaming, he kept rocking, but kept his eyes on hers. “We need the cops. I’m going to get somebody you can trust. I’m going to get Dallas.”

*

Eve nearly ignored the signal from her ’link. Dispatch would use the comm, and she really had nothing to say to anybody else. Especially since Roarke accepted her shooting-range challenge.

She was going to take him down.

But she glanced at the readout, saw Crack’s name. She figured in all the time she’d known him he’d tagged her maybe once, so something must be up.

She said, “Yo.”

And Roarke, just unbuttoning his shirt to change for the challenge, saw the cop take over in the next fingersnap.

“Don’t touch anything. Don’t approach the body. Go out, lock up. Wait for me outside the scene. I’m on my way.”

Roarke had already buttoned his shirt again, and now handed her the weapon harness she’d taken off. “Who’s dead?”

“Rochelle Pickering’s brother, in their apartment. Looks like an OD.”

“Ah, Christ.” He thought of the woman who’d glowed as they’d toured An Didean, and felt sick at heart for her. “I’ll drive. I have the address.”

“Did she talk about him today?” Eve asked as they jogged downstairs.

“She did, yes.” As they moved, he remoted her vehicle from the garage. “She was very open about him, the trouble he’d been in, his time in prison, in rehab.”

He got the coats Summerset had tucked away, handed hers over. “He asked to live with her after this bout and his time in a halfway house, asked her to help him stay straight, to give him a year.”

The car rolled up as they went out into the wind.

“She told me he got a job, hasn’t missed a day of work. In fact, was given a raise just last month. He’d cut off all ties with the Bangers, goes regularly to meetings, mended fences with his brothers and the friends he’d had before he started using.”

She could check the record on the way, but she knew Roarke would have researched Lyle Pickering already. She’d use him as her data source for now.

“Give me a sense of him.”

Roarke rattled off the address to the in-dash as he drove to the gates. “If memory serves, he’s about twenty-six. His trouble started in his early teens. Truancy, petty theft, tagging buildings. Then the illegals, the gang. A bust for possession and malicious mischief while still a minor. A stint in juvie, rehab, community service. He lived in one of the gang flops for a couple years. I think you’ll find your Illegals division has considerable on him.”

“Yeah.” She’d be checking that.

“He took the last bust as an adult, in a fight with a rival gang member. Both had knives over the legal limit, and he had possession of Zeus, Erotica, and other substances with a street value of around six thousand on him.”

“Which is likely what the fight was about.”

“He went down harder for that one, and that hard time appeared to slap him straight. He completed rehab, got a cooking certificate and parole—the halfway-house bridge, then the condition that he live with a family member for a year, sought gainful employment and so on. For the last year, he’s met all the parole provisions, submitted to the random drug tests, and apparently, through his own initiative, meets the prison therapist about once a month over coffee.”

“So on the surface, textbook rehabilitation. And now he’s dead, with his works and vomit in his lap.”

“So the cop thinks, beneath the surface: once a user—of illegals and people—always a user?”

“My closest friend was a grifter,” she reminded him. “The cop thinks people can change. It’s just, they don’t more often than they do. Almost never do. And the cop has to see the DB, the scene before making any conclusions.”

“You haven’t pulled in Peabody.”

“If, after observing the scene, examining the DB, establishing the timeline, my conclusions are he slipped, fell back, and OD’d, there’s no need to. Otherwise, I’m going to spoil her night.

“Rough neighborhood,” she added as she looked around the shadowy streets lined with tat parlors, sex clubs, prefab walk-ups tossed up after the Urban Wars.

“Yes. Between them, they make a decent living, but there are expenses. The younger brother’s in law school, partial scholarship, part-time job, but Rochelle and her older brother are supplementing the tuition and dorm fees. It’s considerable.”

She spotted Crack—you couldn’t miss a man his size—and Rochelle outside a five-story prefab. Roarke squeezed between a couple of junkers at the curb. In a neighborhood like this, she thought, the choice was junkers or mass-trans.

Most couldn’t afford the junker.

Crack opened her door, reached for her hand. “Thanks for this.”

She met his eyes, the sorrow in them, nodded.

Roarke went directly to Rochelle and, because it was his way, put his arms around her. “I’m sorry. I’m so very sorry.”

She fell to weeping. “He wouldn’t do this. He wouldn’t do this to himself, to us. He’d never—”

Because it was her way, Eve stepped forward. “This is hard for you, but I need to ask you a couple of questions. When did you last see your brother?”