Kindred in Death (In Death #29)(83)

Pulliti tapped the side of his nose. “It didn’t smell right.”

“You couldn’t tie him in, the husband?”

“Alibied right and tight. Had the kid at home. About the time she was getting the shit raped out of her, he was knocking on a neighbor’s door to ask for help since the kid was sick, and his wife was—he said—at work. Neighbor verified.”

“Yeah, I see that.”

“But it didn’t smell right. We’re knocking on doors and everybody says how he keeps to himself, hardly says boo, stays with the kid at night, takes him off during the day while the woman sleeps, or goes off on his own. But that night, the night he needs an alibi, he knocks on somebody’s door. Sure was convenient.”

“You think he set her up?”

“Thought it, felt it. See, the Stallions, back then, they’d initiate a member, or a business partner. Beat-down or gangbang, take your choice. You take the beating or the banging, then you give them their cut of your business.”

Sex and drugs, she thought. Quick money, big money.

“You think she went with them for that voluntarily?”

“Maybe, or maybe he gave her over. They’d take a trade, especially a woman. I’ll tell you, that’s the way it smelled to me, but there wasn’t one shred of evidence pointing that way. She was the meal ticket from what I can find, not that they had anything much to show for it.”

“Just a couple months’ rent in the financials,” Eve interrupted. “Not hefty chunks.”

“That’s right. Not a hand-to-mouth kind of thing, but not your caviar and bubble wine either.”

“Under the radar,” Eve voiced.

“You could say. So, maybe he gave her over to the Stallions, and things got out of hand. I don’t know, but it was just too damn pat with him. He comes up with the line about how they were having marital problems, and she was having trouble with illegals. But the neighbors said they never heard them fighting. And they looked like a nice little family any time they went out together, except the woman looked kinda worn down.”

As she talked to him, Eve made her own notes, formed her own theories.

“This address, where she and the man and boy lived. What kind of neighborhood was that?”

“Solid middle. Working families, a lot of kids. They had a good apartment in a nice building. Nothing flashy, but nice. The husband, he had some flash.”

“Did he?”

“Expensive wrist unit, shoes. The boy had plenty of trendy toys. They had upmarket electronics. He was working in e-repair, consulting sort of deal, and she was—according to him—a professional mother. But he hardly put in any time on the job, and did most of the looking after the kid, according to the neighbors. I asked him about the wrist unit. Said it was a birthday present from his wife.

“He was off,” Pulliti said. “My gut said he was off, but the evidence said he was clean.”

When Chicago had given her all it could, Eve sat back, closed her eyes. He was off, but came away clean. There was a pattern.

He let the woman take the fall for him—just as he’d let the woman sleep with, live with his own brother, and like he may have let her scoop up johns and marks in gang territory.

Sex, she thought. Did he like her to use sex to scam? Was that part of a thrill?

When had the illegals come into it? When had she started using?

MacMasters said she might have needed them to have sex with her marks.

Maybe so. Not with the brother. It’s kinship in a twisted way. They’d looked alike, and she’d lived the con of making a family.

She pushed up, paced to the window and back. Paced to her board and away.

No, he hadn’t knocked on a neighbor’s door out of sheer coincidence the night of her murder. No way in hell. But it wouldn’t have been just a cover for the cops. Couldn’t be. They’d never have put him at the scene of the murder.

Covering though. Covering his own ass while she was being raped.

He knew something was going to happen to her, something bad. Something that could involve the cops coming to the door. A deal. A setup. A trade.

But the boy grows up and goes after MacMasters, mirroring the crime against his mother on MacMasters’s daughter. Why? Because MacMasters was the arresting officer, in another city, two full years before his mother’s murder?

What kind of sense did that make, even for a sociopath? It didn’t fo llow . . .

She stopped, turned to stare at the board again. Unless . . .

“Dallas, I might have a line on—”

“Who’s the biggest influence in your life?” Eve interrupted. “I mean, who would you say gave you the foundation for what you are, how you think, what you believe?”

Peabody frowned over the question. “Well, I like to think I think for myself, and there are a variety of factors in my life experience—”

“Cut the crap.”

“Okay, at the base? My parents. Not that I go along with everything there, or I’d be in a commune raising goats or weaving flax, but—”

“The base is there. You’re a cop, but with Free-Ager tendencies.” She tapped Yancy’s sketch as Peabody’s frown deepened over the analysis.

“So, who most influenced this one? His mother’s murdered when he’s about four. Who’d be the biggest influence on what he believes, how he views the world?” She jabbed her finger into Pauley’s ID print. “This one. He’s a con artist, an operator. He taps his parents for money time and again, even though they know better. He’s grease, he slides. His own brother has to pretend he doesn’t exist to barricade himself. A smart and devious woman falls for him to the extent she takes an eighteen-month rap so he can skate—and she gets into prossing and illegals after they’re hooked. Not before, after.”