Faithless in Death (In Death, #52)(88)

“Issue it, but I don’t want to use it yet. It’s going to be about timing. To take them down, to break the back of this fucked-up cult, we need to time it perfectly. Come into Central when you finish here, or at least tag me.”

“Count on it.” Reo smiled easily when Zoe came up the stairs. “And this must be Zoe. I’m APA Reo, Zoe.”

“Natalie said you needed to talk to me, and she’d watch the kids.”

“They’ll be fine with her.”

“I know.” Zoe nodded at Eve. “Everyone here wants to help. Everyone here is so kind. It’s like I was inside a terrible nightmare, and now I’ve woken up in such a nice dream.”

“We’re going to talk in here, okay?” Reo opened the office door.

“Tag me,” Eve repeated, then started back down. “Book a conference room,” she told Peabody. “We’re going to need the space. We’ll head in now, get it set up. Listen to the recordings. I need to think, and you need to catch up.”

Peabody used earbuds to give Eve quiet, and sat grim-faced as she listened.

When Eve pulled into Central’s garage, Peabody took out the earbuds. “I didn’t finish, it’s a lot. But I’m damn well caught up. They’ve been running this—I don’t have a name for it—for decades.”

“Probably didn’t start out this way. It grew. It got greedy. It got arrogant, and it started to believe, really believe, its own bullshit. How are you going to propagate the world without women, pregnant women? Each to their own race. You can’t have people of the same sex getting together—no organizational growth that way. You want young, healthy women with a lot of childbearing years in them. Not enough to make it profitable, to spread the word? You start ‘recruiting.’ ”

“Then you have, like, a pecking order,” Peabody continued as they got on the elevator. “Like we saw at the compound.”

“And you have someone valuable, like Gwen? Good genes, deep pockets, loyal members? You do what you have to do to keep her in the fold. Realignment. If that doesn’t work, you watch her, protect your investment, do what has to be done. You’ve just got to get her married and pregnant, and, affairs aside, she’s willing to go along with that for the money and status.”

“Piper’s a good choice for that. He’s violent, and he’s deep in the loop. Impulsive, like Mira said. He killed his pregnant wife because she talked to us. It had to be because she talked to us and told him, Dallas. Or someone else on the block told him.”

“Agreed. But I don’t think he killed Ariel. Company man, that’s what he is. They rarely act on their own. If he had orders to take her out, he’d have messed her up first. I see him as a fist guy. Could be wrong.”

Because she stayed in thinking mode, she managed the elevator clear up to Homicide.

“Start setting up. I need to do some check-ins. We got a room?”

“Conference room one.”

“Get plenty of chairs. I asked Whitney to bring in the feds. We’re going to want them. We’re crossing out of our jurisdiction for this.”

They split off, and Eve turned into the bullpen. Apparently rolling out Jenkinson early didn’t spare the tie.

Today’s was a sunburst of yellow with a multitude of fiery red squiggles.

She literally felt her eyes shake in their sockets.

“Got Santiago, Trueheart, and Reineke in the break room getting coffee. Rest on their way, boss.”

“Good, conference room one, twenty minutes.”

“We gonna bust some ass today?”

“That’s the plan.”

“My favorite plan in the world of plans.”

She couldn’t disagree.

She got coffee, started to tag Roarke. Her incoming signaled from him before she did.

“I’m at Central,” she said.

“As I am—in EDD. We have some work here, but you’d want to know Piper, the social media VP, has thousands of names, IPs. He has what appears to be the membership list—the global one. Or those who sign up for alerts. Only a handful of females there.”

“Including someone like Paula Huffman?”

“Including and like, yes. He has considerable correspondence as well. Some’s encrypted, but we’ll deal with that. We’ve found the social media is also segregated. That is, it’s designed for specific race groups and programmed to send to same. No mixing there, for the most part. It’s inclusive only when Whitney himself adds a message.”

“Get whatever you can get in the next fifteen. You all need to be at this briefing. Conference room one.”

“I’ll pass that along.”

“See you then.”

She pushed at the sweepers next, got an in-progress report from the head sweeper, and added it to her briefing list.

She put everything she needed together with minutes to spare.

In the conference room she saw Peabody had done her job, and well.

“EDD got a little fresh data, nothing earth-shattering, more part of the whole. The sweepers, on the other hand, got blood.”

“Marcia Piper’s.”

“Hers and his,” Eve confirmed. “It took a deep-level sweep—the order cleaned up really well, knew what chemicals would disguise or eliminate most of it, and they were pretty thorough. But the problem for them was the hole the vic’s head put in the wall that they needed to patch up. It looked all clean and shiny, but the sweepers knew where to look, and they got blood, some gray matter mixed with the compound they patched with.