“They ended up having to go back-to-back. Probably wasn’t their first choice, but to cash in on both, they had to go with the one, two. Still stupid.”
When Roarke took the coffee from her hand to drink it himself, she only scowled a little. She figured she owed him.
“You know the smarter, easier, more direct way to blow up the artist and most of his work? You send Denby to his studio, not to the Salon.”
“Hmm. You know, you’re right about that,” Roarke agreed. “Except, of course, they wouldn’t have been able to steal several canvases.”
“That tells me they don’t, or didn’t, have enough scratch to buy up paintings. They had it for the stocks, but not for the paintings. And they could—what you called—do the margin thing on the stocks. They didn’t have a big hunk of money for stocks and paintings, so they had to do it the stupid way.”
“Stupid, but effective,” he pointed out.
“It still tells me they don’t just want money. They need it. Not saying it’s not down to basic greed, but to gamble on these deals, they had a relatively small stake. They had to steal the paintings. And they knew they were going to weeks before the opening. Weeks before the meeting at Quantum was set in stone.”
She frowned back at the board. “It’s not a lot, but it’s more.”
“And you have more here. Your interviews?”
“Low probability on the left. The three higher on the right. I’m not sold on the three. Except this one.” She tapped a face. “He has a brother-in-law who’s retired Army, and a sister—not the one married to Army—who’s an art broker, based in Florence. And when we interviewed him, he came off nervy and evasive. Something shady there.”
“William O’Donnell.” Roarke studied the ID shot, sipped more coffee. Said, “Hmm.”
“What?” Instantly, she swung around, eyes narrowed and focused. “What kind of hmm was that? That was a, you know, some kind of hmm.”
“Obviously, I’ll need to guard my hmms in the future.”
Eve drilled a finger into Roarke’s chest. “You know this guy?”
“I don’t know William O’Donnell, but I knew a Liam Donnelly. Back in Dublin in the bad old days, and here and there a few times since.”
“He’s got fake ID? Son of a bitch.”
Even as she swung again toward her command center, Roarke took her arm. “Hold on a minute.”
“He may be a friend of yours, but—”
“Not a friend so much as a former colleague, we’ll say. He was a decent B and E man. Had some years on me when we both ran in Dublin. We had a few . . . enterprises in common over the years. Where did you find him?”
“As William O’Donnell he’s a mechanical engineer at Econo.”
“Is he now? He always did have a hand for mechanics as I recall. I’d heard he’d retired from those other enterprises. Or for the most part.”
“Decent enough at B and E to get through security at Rogan’s, at Denby’s? A one-eyed moron could get through the security at Richie’s building.”
“He’d have improved considerably to have gotten through my system at the Rogan’s house, but it’s not impossible he did. What is? He’d never be a part of murder. In tormenting women and children. It’s not Liam, not at all.”
“People change.”
“So they do, as you and I illustrate very well. But the core rarely does. It’s not Liam, Eve. He had a mother and three sisters he adored. I’d wager he still does. The only time I ever saw him use violence was when a . . . compatriot slapped a bar girl. Liam stood, lifted his chair, and slammed it into the idiot’s face. Broke several teeth, as I recall. Then he hauled the man up, ordered him to apologize. No one strikes a woman when Liam Donnelly’s about, he said. He never carried a weapon other than a pocket knife.”
“I need him in the box.”
Roarke sighed. “Give me his contact information to speed it up, and let me speak with him.”
“So he can rabbit before—”
“Bloody hell.”
She saw the flash of hot temper before he turned, paced away. And her own rose to meet it.
“Eighteen dead. Your old pal’s a suspect. I’ll have him in the box.”
“You know, sometimes the fucking cop is a keen pain in the arse.”
“I’m always the fucking cop.”
The flash of heat had cooled, she noted, and gone brutally cold when he turned back to her.
“And that I know very bloody well. Do you think a man I haven’t seen in a fecking decade matters more to me than the eighteen blown to bits? Is that what you think? How do you live with a man such as me?”
“I think old ties can squeeze tight.”
“So tight I’d betray you?”
“Don’t put that on me.” The insult boiled under her skin. “I didn’t say anything about betraying.”
“But that’s what it would be. If you don’t trust me to stand with you for those eighteen, then what the bloody hell are we doing?”
“Back on me,” she said, bitterly.
“And if you put him in the box, a man with a past and false papers, what will happen to him? If he’s innocent of the rest, as I know he is, what will happen? Deportation at best, prison at worst, because you won’t trust me to hold up my end.”
“If he rabbits?”
“He may have already, but it won’t be because he had any part in this. I’ll talk to him, and while I do, you run Liam Donnelly. See if you find anything more than I’ve told you. See if you find a man who’d beat women, frighten children, or drive a father to kill and die.”
“If you’re wrong.”
“I’ll use every resource I have, and I’ve more than he, believe me, to hunt him down and put him in your bleeding box with my own hands.”
“Make it fast,” she snapped and, still fuming, went to her command center to do the run.
She had to use Feeney’s baby, the IRCCA, as she needed the international run. She found Donnelly easily enough, and his spotty juvenile record. Petty theft, some car boosts. Then it appeared he’d gotten better at his work. Only suspicions of burglary or theft, and always in empty houses or businesses. No muggings, no person-to-person crimes. One arrest tossed for lack of evidence. And one conviction in his late twenties.
He did three years for that one, and then poofed.
But she found not a single citing of violence, of weapon possession.
She pushed on his family, saw his mother lived in Queens near the sister and the retired Army. Another sister lived in New Jersey—also married with family—and the third currently lived and worked in Italy.
Nothing criminal on any of them. She couldn’t decide if that equaled relief or annoyance.
Then Roarke came back, and she found the annoyance easily.
“He was nervy,” Roarke said as he moved to the cabinet for wine, “and evasive, as he knew your reputation. He was frightened. He knew about the bombing, of course. He works at Econo, as you know.”
Roarke poured wine while she sat and said nothing.
“He never thought the cops would give him more than a cursory glance as he had no connection to the meeting or anyone in it. When you interviewed him this evening, he was shaken. He has a wife and three children, as you also know. He met his wife as William O’Donnell, twelve years ago. After he’d come to New York—before he was . . . retired. He retired after their first child was born—that’s nearly eleven years now. And before they married, he told his wife about Liam and the time he’d spent in prison and the rest. She married him anyway. But they haven’t told the children, you see.”
He looked at her now as he sipped the wine. “And he was afraid you’d push deep enough to see through the identification he’s used all these years, the life he’s built. He was afraid he’d have to leave his family, or decide to uproot them all and run.
“You can contact his sister in Italy. He says if Richie was becoming important, his Colleen would know, and would help you in any way she could. He hopes you wouldn’t need to speak with his brother-in-law, who knows nothing of his life before, as it could cause friction in the family, but he won’t run. He trusts me enough not to, as I told him I trusted you weren’t interested in uprooting three children or punishing him for false papers.
“He’s terrified,” Roarke finished. “But he’s putting the life he’s built in your hands because I asked him to.”
He crossed to her. “So where does that leave us, Lieutenant?”
“You say you understand the job comes first, then you slap at me when it does.”
“And you ask me to work with you when it suits, but yank back when my way of doing the job veers from yours. Even,” he said before she could speak, “if both ways put those who’ve died first and foremost. Pushing at Liam would have eaten up your time and energies—as it already has more than it needed to.”
“Chasing him down if he was part of this would’ve eaten more.”
“True enough, but he’s not. And you’re too good a cop to have looked into his past and thought otherwise. We both know there are ways of doing the job other than pulling a man out of his house and grilling him in the box. And both of us, Eve, skirt our particular lines when we have to, or when the other needs it.”
“It’s easier for you.”
He angled his head. “Do you think so?”
She let out a breath. “I like to think so. I don’t like thinking how many times you’ve compromised or moved your line. It makes the scales too uneven.”
“They’re level enough from where I stand. What I can’t tolerate is thinking your trust in me has limits.”
“It doesn’t. Fuck.” She had to put her head—throbbing again—in her hands. “It wasn’t not trusting you. It was not trusting some guy you acknowledged was a thief—a guy who checked off several boxes—just because you have some fond memories.”