Promises in Death (In Death #28)(26)

Eve sat back, tapped her fingers on her thighs. Thinking, thinking. “Max Ricker had a lot of cops in his pocket. A lot of officials, a lot of politicians. We dug some of them out last year, but it’s unlikely we dug them all. Would Ricker have passed them to his son?”

“I can’t say for sure—yet. But who else?”

“Yeah. And his businesses, too—what we didn’t find and shut down. Certainly, his contacts, his power points, and there’d be finances. Coltraine meets the son of a notorious criminal, now doing life—well, several terms of life—she’d have run him. She’d run the owner of the business that got hit. It’s routine. Make sure it doesn’t come up an insurance fraud, at the very least. When she did, she’d have made the connection to his father. She’d ask him about it. Have to.”

She pushed up, walked to her board to study Coltraine’s ID shot. “She’d have to ask. Three years ago Ricker was still at large, still slithering through the loopholes, but any standing background check on the son would have coughed out the data on the father.”

“I don’t know if it has any bearing on your case, but . . .”

“Yeah, but.” She looked back at Roarke. “Did she close it? The case?”

“In a manner of speaking. She narrowed it down to three suspects. In each case when she secured a search warrant and went to serve it, she found the suspects gone and several items from the antique shop on the premises. Within two days, the bodies of the three men were found floating in the Chattahoochee River—chained together.”

“The what river? Did you make that up?”

“I suppose I could have, but no. I suspect some Native Americans did that a few centuries ago.”

“I think it’d be embarrassing to be dead in the Hoochie-Coochie River.”

“Chattahoochee.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Quite a bit, I’d think, to Atlantans.” He moved to her, laid a hand on her cheek. “And now that you’ve finished lightening the mood until you can get a handle on this . . .”

After a while, Eve thought, marriage turned walls into clear glass so both of you could see right through each other. “Okay. Okay, so maybe it’s like father, like son? Ricker’s a killer. He didn’t think twice about snapping necks or slitting them. The son gets ripped off, hunts down the ripper-offers—or follows Coltraine’s dots to same—and does them. Or has them done. She’d have to look there.”

“According to the file, Alex Ricker was attending a charity event, in Miami, with a few hundred witnesses at the time of death of the three suspects.”

“Didn’t want to get his hands dirty, ordered the hit when he was covered.”

“Possibly. If so, he proved as elusive as his father did. Oh, and I accessed the ME reports on the dead thieves.” He watched her start to speak—to object, no doubt—then swallow it. “They’d been beaten over the course of several hours, incurred numerous broken bones before their throats were slit. That’s the Ricker touch, in my opinion.”

“She had to know it.” Eve studied Coltraine again, tried to see into her head. “Everyone says she was thorough, detail-oriented. She wouldn’t have missed the link.”

“The files note a follow-up interview with Alex after the bodies were recovered, and the verification of his alibi. While the homicide case went cold, all of Ricker’s property was recovered.”

Eve rubbed the back of her neck. “Three years ago. She didn’t put in for transfer here until just under a year ago. As much as I’d like to burn another Ricker for pretty much anything, I can’t see the connection between her murder and a trio of payback homicides three years ago.”

“Maybe there isn’t. But Alex Ricker is in New York, and has been for the last week.”

“Is that so?” Eve stuck her hands in her pockets, rocked on her heels. “Now, see, that’s just too much coincidence. Where is he?”

“He has a pied-à-terre on Park Avenue.”

“Convenient. I’ll have to pay him a visit in the morning.”

“I’ll be going with you.” He held up a hand before she could speak. “Anything that involves Ricker, his son, his second cousin, his bloody pet poodle, I’m in it, too.”

“They don’t allow dogs on the Omega Penal Colony. Okay. I’m not going to argue about Ricker—either of them. We did enough of that a year ago.”

“A year ago,” Roarke pointed out. “A kind of anniversary. And here we have another dead cop—and you were littered with them last spring—as well as another Ricker. Oh, aye, far too many coincidences here.”

She’d already followed that path. “We need to do a deep background on Alex Ricker. When did he buy the Park Avenue property, what other businesses does he have, and how many of them are in New York? How often does his name pop up in conjunction with an investigation? And what has he been doing for the past year? Has he contacted his father? A lot of questions.”

“You won’t find the answers to all of them on these units. Not with the privacy laws and CompuGuard. Believe me, he’ll be protected under several layers.”

“Then we’ll use your unregistered.”

He angled his head. “That’s a quick leap for you, Lieutenant.”