Kindred in Death (In Death #29)(115)

Darrin bared his teeth in a vicious smile. “You can tell MacMasters his precious daughter was the whore. I’ve been f**king her for weeks.”

Eve glanced at Peabody. “Did we actually think this moron had some smarts?”

“We did. He’s sure proving us wrong since we know, conclusively, the only way he could get his pathetic dick into Deena was to drug her, restrain her, and rape her.”

“All you had to do with his mother was pay her.”

“Shut the f**k up. You don’t know anything.”

“Enlighten me. Explain to me why the people involved in your mother’s bust in New York twenty-one years ago are responsible for her death in Chicago nineteen years ago? Help me make that leap, Darrin.”

“It was that f**king cop who ruined her. Set her up.”

“MacMasters set her up?”

“Planted the illegals on her, blackmailed her into having sex with him, the same as rape. Then he covers it up, says she’s whoring. My mother was the best shifter on the grift there was.”

Eve changed her tone, put a touch of admiration into it. “She had the ID skills.”

“She could be anybody she wanted to be, take anything she wanted to take. And so what? Nobody got hurt.”

“How about the people she swindled? How about Vincent Pauley?”

“Marks.” He shrugged again. “They’re lame enough to get taken, they get taken. Vinnie? He’s always been a dick, always been jealous of my father, always came in second best to him. My mother needed somewhere to stay when she was pregnant with me and my father got railroaded into prison. She only slept with that ass**le for my sake.”

“Is that what she told you?”

“She never talked about it, any of it. What happened to her ruined her. Took the life out of her before those cops set her up with the Stallions in Chicago. Before they killed her.”

“Interesting.” Eve furrowed her brow, flipped through the papers in the file on the table. “None of that’s in my file. Where did you get this information?”

“My father told me everything. How they tore the life out of her before they killed her, how they ripped our family apart because the cops blackmailed her into trying to get the goods on them.”

“So . . . the Chicago cops blackmailed your mother to infiltrate the Stallions.”

“MacMasters set it up. She was worn out when she got out of prison, and he used that. He had an in with that crooked judge, and made her weasel for him or he’d send her back in.”

“But she was killed in Chicago.”

“She tried to get away, take me away, but he tracked her, and set her up with the Chicago cops.”

“He must’ve been pretty obsessed with her to go to all that trouble.”

“That’s the way it was.”

“Your father gave you all this information.”

“He had to raise me on his own, because they killed her. They humiliated her, locked her away, raped her. She was beautiful, and they killed her.”

“And she loved you,” Peabody said, with a hint of sympathy. “She sacrificed for you.”

“She lived for me. We had a good life. We didn’t have to play by anyone else’s rules.” Darrin balled his hands into fists on the table. “She was free, and beautiful. That’s why MacMasters wanted her, why he forced her. Then he had to cover it up. They had that bitch take me away.”

“Jaynie Robins.”

“In MacMasters’s pocket, like the rest of them. They tried to keep me from my father, but he fought to get me back. He promised my mother he’d take care of me.”

“And Robins’s supervisor, the APA, the judge, the rest?”

His face went cold again, blank again. “They were all responsible, one way or the other.”

“So you and your father worked out how you’d avenge your mother, how you’d make those who’d hurt her pay.”

“Why should they get away with it? Why should they have their lives, their families?”

“So your father—Vance—picked the order. He picked Deena as the first target, the first kill.”

“We decided together. We’re a team, we’ve always been a team.”

“So he could do some of the research, the stalking on one target while you worked another. Very efficient.”

“We’re a team,” Darrin repeated. “We’ve always been a team.”

“Plus he could go to Colorado to research the APA while you stayed here to work Deena. How did he decide you’d plan to kill the sister there, and not the mother, for instance?”

“For Christ’s sake, the sister’s in New Jersey. It’s basic geography.”

“He did the preliminary stalking there then, right? Until the contact.”

“Didn’t I say we’re a team? He’d start the field- and e-work, gather the data, then I . . .” His face tightened. “I’m not saying anything else about my father.”

“Fine. Protect him like your mother did. You go down, he walks. There’s déjà vu. Only you don’t go away for a year and a half like she did. You’re going away for two life terms, no possibility of parole, with the extra twenty-five for intent on Mrs. Mimoto.”