Connections in Death (In Death #48)(87)

“Yes, I’ll get it.”

“In addition, the NYPSD recovered items stolen from Lyle Pickering’s apartment. Items taken when he was murdered. These items were on the persons of Denby Washington, age eighteen, and Burke Chesterfield, age seventeen. We’ll push to have Chesterfield interviewed, tried, and treated as an adult, and I don’t expect we’ll have any trouble there.”

“Have you interviewed them?”

“Tomorrow. And tomorrow I’m going to tell you we’ve charged a third individual, Kenneth Jorgenson, age twenty-three, as well as Washington and Chesterfield for the murders of Pickering, Dinnie Duff—who was an accessory in Pickering’s murder, and in the murder of Barry Aimes, who along with the others named murdered Pickering and Duff. A fourth man will be charged as accessory before and after the fact: Samuel Cohen.”

“The raids were to dig these people out? Why? Why did all these people conspire to kill Rochelle’s brother?”

“I’m going to find out. I need you to . . . I need you to—”

“Ask and it’s done.”

“No, no, it’s not personal. The hell it isn’t,” Eve said on a breath. “The hell it isn’t. Lyle Pickering was a confidential informant.”

“Yours?”

“No. I need you to do what you do, Nadine. I need you to report his story. I need you to report the way he’d turned his life around, how he doing everything right, working to earn back his family’s trust. Risking his physical safety to work with the police. You know how to do all that.”

“Yes, I do. And I will.”

Yes, Eve thought. Yes, she would.

“I don’t know how long we’ll be at this tomorrow before I can give you the go.”

“We’ve got plenty to report on. I want to share this with my researchers—you know you can trust them. I want as much on Lyle Pickering as we can get—before we talk to his family. After your go,” Nadine added. “And I need what I can get on the people who killed him.”

“Add Marcus Jones. I don’t think he was in on the murders, but he’s going down. That’s it for now. I’m going home.”

“Good. Put some ice on that face.”

“People keep telling me that.”

She clicked off, sat back. She should go up to EDD, see what they’d pulled out for herself. But she’d just run out, run down, been run through.

So she got her things, texted Roarke she’d meet him in the garage.

She got there ahead of him, took the passenger seat, put her head back, closed her eyes. If she could have, she’d have willed herself to sleep, into oblivion for a few hours. Then she could wake up and do what needed to be done without having her mind crowded with it all.

Because the fatigue she felt wasn’t physical.

She kept her eyes closed when she heard Roarke open the driver’s-side door. “Awake,” she said. “Did you get anything I can use?”

He studied her a moment, and from what he saw—clearly—she hadn’t used the ice patches. Well, he’d deal with that once they got home, but for now.

He took out his case. “Take a blocker now. Don’t argue about it.”

She considered it, just for spite, then realized how stupid that would be. She took the blocker, swallowed it. “What did you get?”

“All manner of data—and I have no doubt the FBI will want in on it. There’s more to find, but we were just calling it for the night when you texted. Feeney and the rest will get back to it in the morning.”

He glanced at her again as he drove. “It wasn’t even a challenge, none of it. Some rudimentary IT knowledge and not much skill to marry with it. Like the false walls and keypads, child’s play. The fact is, most children are better at such things.”

He laid a hand over hers. “Tell me what’s wrong.”

She just shook her head. “Did you get more data from Jones’s unit?”

“As you already believed, he had his records on the one hidden in his room. His profits and expenses with his Cohen partnership. How much he skimmed, Cohen’s percentage of it. And he kept records on the gang’s business as well. Illegals deals, their protection racket, who handled break-ins, burnings, beatings. All of it, Eve. And it looks like he was planning to relocate. To Aruba. He had searches on property there.”

“So he’s cheating his own gang with the goal of getting enough together to buy himself a place in the tropics. Fucking hypocrite.”

“Well, yes, but I think hypocrisy is the least of his sins.”

“Is it? Is it really? Isn’t it all part of it? All fucking part of it?

She shifted, so much anger rising up. “You ran with a gang in Dublin.”

“I wouldn’t say we thought of ourselves as a gang, but all right, loosely, yes.”

“Would you have betrayed them for money, cheated any one of them for profit?”

“No, nor they me. But that may be a difference between a gang and mates.”

“They pledge loyalty.”

“And friends don’t need a pledge, do they?”

She shook her head, sat back again. “What Jones was doing under it all laid the groundwork for all of this. His leadership sucked—and maybe we should be grateful for that because they weren’t as powerful as they once were. He’s skimming, so there’s not as much for the whole to split. He’s avoiding confrontation with rival gangs, isn’t pushing for more territory, which is how they gain power and reputation. He’s not because he’s more interested in banking profits and dreaming of freaking Aruba.”