Kindred in Death (In Death #29)(76)

It didn’t fit, it didn’t play, Eve thought.

“And the solicitation? Those are stupid risks for these kind of grifters. Stupid, and it doesn’t come off she’d been stupid. The woman played Vinnie for a year. She knows—knew—how to run a game, long and short. Then, boom, she goes down not just for fraud, but possession and solicitation? It’s off.”

“Sex and drugs are quick money if you need it,” Roarke commented. “And big money if you know how to play them. That’s telling.”

Eve paused on the stairs, considered. Quick and big. “It might fit Pauley. Greed, impatience. It might.”

“And it’s telling,” Roarke added, “that when she made this deal for the eighteen, she didn’t roll on Pauley. It would be SOP, wouldn’t it, to offer her a still lighter sentence if she implicated her partner?”

“Yeah, it would. And there would have been some sympathy for her. Young mother, clean record—or so it appeared. She went with a public defender.” She moved into her office, straight to her computer. “I’ve got the name, and the name of the APA from MacMasters’s case notes. But he wouldn’t have the negotiations in here. I need his memory on this.”

“She didn’t die in prison.”

“No, she didn’t die in prison. Why is MacMasters to blame for her death, whenever and wherever and however it happened? It’s illogical, and in his twisted way, he’s logical.”

She paced to the board, around it. “Something not in the case files, the notes, something not on record? But he’s a kid, hell almost a baby really, right? So how does he know what happened, how does he know MacMasters has to pay?”

She pinned up Irene’s mug shot.

“Because Pauley tells him,” she concluded, studying the photograph, the harsh and weary eyes of the woman. “Pauley tells him how it went down, from his point of view anyway. Or how he wants it to play. It can’t be, yeah, I let your mother take the full rap while I walked. No, it can’t be that.”

As she circled, spoke, talked it out, Roarke eased a hip onto the corner of her desk. He loved watching her work, watching her re-create, dig down.

“What kind of man lets the mother of his child take the hit? How can you stand back, let her fall while you walk?”

She thought of Risso Banks. “I looked at this guy, had to check him out. Young guy. His older brother made him an addict, played him into the sex game, then when the bust came, left the kid and tried to save himself. And that’s how he remembers his brother, leaving him and trying to save his own ass.”

“Darrin Pauley would have been too young to remember.”

“Yeah.” Eve nodded. “Yeah, so Vance Pauley can write the story however he wants. They worked together, no question, but she goes down alone. He can’t let it come off like that to his son, or he’s a coward, a user. MacMasters railroaded her? You can make that play, you can always make it play that the cops screwed with you. And still . . .”

“A year and a half in prison against the rape and murder of the cop’s child twenty years later?” Roarke looked at the photos, the stark differences, on her board. “Very imbalanced.”

“Symbols. Mira said it was all symbolic. So there’s more, has to be. Something between her release and her death, something that Pauley can point back to? Something about her arrest, her time in that led to her death?”

She pushed at her hair, tried to put herself in Darrin Pauley’s place. “If Darrin told Vinnie the truth about when she died—and why lie about that—it was about two years after the arrest, about six months after her release. What happened during that six months? I need to find her dead, that’s what I need to find, and track back from there.”

“You have considerably more data on her now. You’d be able to streamline the search you’ve already done.”

“Exactly.”

“Allow me. Computer access results of search of female victims of rape-murder by strangulation and suffocation and refine with DOD 2041. Victims with initials I, S.”

Acknowledged . . .

“Computer,” Eve added, “input victim’s age as between twenty and twenty-eight, and as having given birth to at least one child.”

“Right you are,” Roarke commented.

She had to smile at him. “You did okay, for a civilian.”

Acknowledged . . . File accessed, search commenced. Working . . .

“No,” Roarke said when she turned toward the kitchen. “No more coffee, not at this hour. You’ll never sleep. And while the answers you hope to get with this search are vital, they won’t help you catch your man tonight.”

It was hard to argue, even though she wanted the damn coffee. She stuck her hands in her pockets. It wasn’t just the comp that could give her answers. “He’s got to have another ID, has to be using one. Why isn’t it popping? Why do we only get Darrin Pauley?”

“Change your hair and eye color, even skin tone, some features. All perfectly legal, and even fashionable. While he may have elected to use the same basic look for the student ID he used with Deena and his Darrin Pauley ID, he’s likely to have a half-dozen others, with enough variation to slip by a search. More hair, or less, a variance of coloring and some subtle shift in features to pass for mixed race. And with some skill, and some money, it’s very easy to keep an ID off the grid entirely.”