Home > Connections in Death (In Death #48)(8)

Connections in Death (In Death #48)(8)
Author: J.D. Robb

* * *

Eve nearly ignored the signal from her ’link. Dispatch would use the comm, and she really had nothing to say to anybody else. Especially since Roarke accepted her shooting-range challenge.

She was going to take him down.

But she glanced at the readout, saw Crack’s name. She figured in all the time she’d known him he’d tagged her maybe once, so something must be up.

She said, “Yo.”

And Roarke, just unbuttoning his shirt to change for the challenge, saw the cop take over in the next fingersnap.

“Don’t touch anything. Don’t approach the body. Go out, lock up. Wait for me outside the scene. I’m on my way.”

Roarke had already buttoned his shirt again, and now handed her the weapon harness she’d taken off. “Who’s dead?”

“Rochelle Pickering’s brother, in their apartment. Looks like an OD.”

“Ah, Christ.” He thought of the woman who’d glowed as they’d toured An Didean, and felt sick at heart for her. “I’ll drive. I have the address.”

“Did she talk about him today?” Eve asked as they jogged downstairs.

“She did, yes.” As they moved, he remoted her vehicle from the garage. “She was very open about him, the trouble he’d been in, his time in prison, in rehab.”

He got the coats Summerset had tucked away, handed hers over. “He asked to live with her after this bout and his time in a halfway house, asked her to help him stay straight, to give him a year.”

The car rolled up as they went out into the wind.

“She told me he got a job, hasn’t missed a day of work. In fact, was given a raise just last month. He’d cut off all ties with the Bangers, goes regularly to meetings, mended fences with his brothers and the friends he’d had before he started using.”

She could check the record on the way, but she knew Roarke would have researched Lyle Pickering already. She’d use him as her data source for now.

“Give me a sense of him.”

Roarke rattled off the address to the in-dash as he drove to the gates. “If memory serves, he’s about twenty-six. His trouble started in his early teens. Truancy, petty theft, tagging buildings. Then the illegals, the gang. A bust for possession and malicious mischief while still a minor. A stint in juvie, rehab, community service. He lived in one of the gang flops for a couple years. I think you’ll find your Illegals division has considerable on him.”

“Yeah.” She’d be checking that.

“He took the last bust as an adult, in a fight with a rival gang member. Both had knives over the legal limit, and he had possession of Zeus, Erotica, and other substances with a street value of around six thousand on him.”

“Which is likely what the fight was about.”

“He went down harder for that one, and that hard time appeared to slap him straight. He completed rehab, got a cooking certificate and parole—the halfway-house bridge, then the condition that he live with a family member for a year, sought gainful employment and so on. For the last year, he’s met all the parole provisions, submitted to the random drug tests, and apparently, through his own initiative, meets the prison therapist about once a month over coffee.”

“So on the surface, textbook rehabilitation. And now he’s dead, with his works and vomit in his lap.”

“So the cop thinks, beneath the surface: once a user—of illegals and people—always a user?”

“My closest friend was a grifter,” she reminded him. “The cop thinks people can change. It’s just, they don’t more often than they do. Almost never do. And the cop has to see the DB, the scene before making any conclusions.”

“You haven’t pulled in Peabody.”

“If, after observing the scene, examining the DB, establishing the timeline, my conclusions are he slipped, fell back, and OD’d, there’s no need to. Otherwise, I’m going to spoil her night.

“Rough neighborhood,” she added as she looked around the shadowy streets lined with tat parlors, sex clubs, prefab walk-ups tossed up after the Urban Wars.

“Yes. Between them, they make a decent living, but there are expenses. The younger brother’s in law school, partial scholarship, part-time job, but Rochelle and her older brother are supplementing the tuition and dorm fees. It’s considerable.”

She spotted Crack—you couldn’t miss a man his size—and Rochelle outside a five-story prefab. Roarke squeezed between a couple of junkers at the curb. In a neighborhood like this, she thought, the choice was junkers or mass-trans.

Most couldn’t afford the junker.

Crack opened her door, reached for her hand. “Thanks for this.”

She met his eyes, the sorrow in them, nodded.

Roarke went directly to Rochelle and, because it was his way, put his arms around her. “I’m sorry. I’m so very sorry.”

She fell to weeping. “He wouldn’t do this. He wouldn’t do this to himself, to us. He’d never—”

Because it was her way, Eve stepped forward. “This is hard for you, but I need to ask you a couple of questions. When did you last see your brother?”

“It was right before I left to meet Wilson for dinner. It was right after the contract came through. I think about seven. I think.”

“Yes, I sent the contract about seven,” Roarke confirmed.

“He’d just gotten home. He’d worked the lunch shift and the happy hour. He had his first night off in eight nights. He was tired and happy. He was happy. He was happy for me. And he said he was going to clean up, go to a meeting, then over to mooch leftovers from Gram, bunk there tonight. He wouldn’t do this.”

“Okay. I need you to go somewhere and wait. Crack, your place isn’t far. Why don’t you take Rochelle there?”

“No. Please. I need to be here. I can’t leave him alone.”

“You need to get out of the cold,” Eve told her, “and wait. I’m going to look after Lyle. He won’t be alone.”

“You need to trust her, Ro. You come on home with me, then Dallas is going to come over in a little while. I’ve got the keys here.” Crack pulled them out of his pocket, handed them to Eve.

Between her master and her master thief, she didn’t need them, but she took them.

“I need to tell my brothers, my grandmother.”

“Why don’t you hold off on that? You’ll be able to tell them more when I’ve finished here.”

With visible effort, Rochelle pulled herself together, and her eyes went fierce as they met Eve’s. “I know one thing I’ll tell them. He didn’t do this to himself. I know the signs like I know my own name. Depression, evasion, withdrawal, agitation, anger. I know what I saw in my brother, and he wasn’t using again. Don’t you go up there looking at him like he was some loser. Don’t you do that.”

“He’s a victim, one way or the other. And he’s mine now. I’ll do my best for him.”

“Come on now, Ro, we’re going to walk awhile. It’ll do you good to walk awhile.” With an arm wrapped around her waist, Crack led her away.

Eve let out a breath, took the field kit Roarke had already retrieved from the trunk. “Whatever I find up there, it isn’t going to be easy for her.”

“You’ll find the truth, and that’s all she can ask for.”

She studied the building. A squatting piece of crap with no cameras, no visible security, and what she assumed would be a couple of half-assed locks on the exterior doors. A buzz-in system to make even the half-assed locks useless.

A basement unit where litter scattered over the pad of concrete, and the streetlights left deep shadows.

The perfect place for dark deeds.

She noted a street LC picking up a john near the east corner, and the guy hovering in a doorway toward the west corner who was practically wearing a sign announcing: Illegals Dealer Waiting for a Mark.

A couple of boys trying to look tough swaggered by across the street, hoods up, hands in pockets. Aiming for the dealer, she concluded.

Might as well gum up those works.

“Hey!” She held up her badge. “NYPSD!”

The boys took off in a non-tough trot. The dealer melted away.

“You know they’ll be back inside the hour.”

“Sure.” She shrugged that off. “But those assholes have to go change out of the pants they just pissed in first.”

She walked to the building, shook her head at the locks. “Why bother?”

Before she could try one of the three keys, Roarke took out a tool, went through the locks in seconds.

The entranceway—small, dark, smelling of old piss—had a stairway straight up, and a chain over the skinny door of an elevator that likely hadn’t operated since they’d thrown up the building.

“She’s on the second floor,” Roarke said as they started up a stairway just as dark and smelly as the entrance.

Someone had cared enough to try to paint over the graffiti tagging the walls, and she caught a whiff of something like bleach, so maybe the same somebody had tried to eradicate the stewing germs.

As they moved above the first floor she heard music banging, a screen show muttering, an argument in midstream.

On the second, she heard someone laughing in what sounded like genuine enjoyment, a buzz of voices.

She studied the locks on the Pickering door.

“They’re decent.” She engaged her recorder. “Dallas, Lieutenant Eve, and Roarke, entering the premises with the permission of the tenant to investigate a suspicious death.”

For the record, she used the keys, opened the door.

It smelled of lemon-scented cleaner and death.

The lights were on full. The living area held a sofa, two chairs, a couple of tables, some photos, and dust catchers. It stretched—barely—to include a tiny eating area off what she assumed was a kitchen.

Lyle Pickering slumped in one of the chairs and, as Crack had told her, had a syringe in his lap, a homemade tourniquet on his left arm where the sleeve of his sweatshirt had been shoved up.

   
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