“If she did, she didn’t tell me. We had a—I guess I want to say a kind of relationship where she’d talk a case through with me.” The grief showed now. He stared down at the table, but Eve saw it working over his face. “She had dinner at my place a few times. My wife liked her, a lot. We all did. Maybe it was Morris.”
“Excuse me?”
“Something he was working on, or had. Somebody who wanted to pay him back. Where do you hit? She was in love with the guy. It showed. The few times he came in, to hook up with her at end-of-shift? It was all over both of them. I don’t know. I’m reaching. I can’t see anything she was on, anything she was connected to that she’d die for.”
“Would you mind telling me why you transferred out of Major Case?”
He shrugged. “The job’s a good part of the reason my first marriage went south. I got another chance. Got married, and had this kid. A little girl. I figure, I’m not going to risk it again, so I transferred. It’s a good squad. We do good work here, and plenty of it. But I don’t get many calls in the middle of the night, and most nights, I’m home for dinner with my family. So you don’t have to ask, that’s where I was last night. My kid—the oldest—she’s fourteen now. She had a friend over for a study date. Mostly bullshit,” he said with a hint of a smile. “Around midnight, I was giving them both a raft of grief for giggling like a couple of mental patients when they should’ve been asleep.”
“Detective Grady mentioned a weasel, Stu Bollimer.”
“Yeah, Ammy cultivated him. He’s from Macon so she used the old home connect. The guy was born a weasel. I can’t see him setting her up, not for this. He’s small change.”
“All right. I appreciate it, Detective.”
“Are you going to keep the boss in the loop?”
“That’s my intention.”
“He’s a good boss.” He pushed back from the table. “If she’d felt anything coming, anything to worry about, she’d have gone to him, or to me.”
“How were her instincts?”
For the first time, he hesitated. “Maybe not as tuned as they could’ve been. She was still feeling her way here, a little bit. Like I said, she was hell on details, and she was good with people. Put wits and vics at ease. But I guess I wouldn’t say she had the gut. The head, yeah, but maybe not the gut. Doesn’t make her less of a cop.”
“No, it doesn’t. She’s going to get our best, Detective O’Brian.”
“Can’t ask for more.”
“Who should we talk to next?”
“Newman maybe. He’s not going to get dick done today anyway.”
“Would you send him up?”
Peabody waited until the door shut. “Touchstone,” she said again. “He’ll take this the hardest. The boss is the boss, but he’s the team leader.”
“She didn’t have a cop’s gut. He didn’t want to say it because it seems disrespectful. But he knew it might help the investigation. She didn’t have the gut. Got the call, went out. Probably never felt any twinge. She’d been set up—and it doesn’t feel like impulse, but something planned out. But she didn’t feel it. It’s good to know.”
She reviewed her data on Detective Josh Newman.
CHAPTER FOUR
EVE FOUND JOSH NEWMAN SAD, STEADY, AND talkative. The easygoing type, she decided. The sort that did his job, did it competently, then went home after shift and left the job on the job.
Average, was how she thought of him. The family man who just happened to be a cop, who would unlikely make it to detective second grade. And who gave her no new insights on Coltraine.
She moved on and took Dak Clifton. Though he was the squad’s youngest member at twenty-nine, he’d been a cop for eight years, and held his detective’s shield for nearly four of them. She thought of him, within minutes, as the Hot Shot.
His strong, good looks—the warm gold skin, the steel blue eyes and tumbling sun-tipped brown hair—probably served him well with female wits. Just as his aggressive, kick-your-ass interview style might have given some suspects the shakes.
Eve didn’t care to have it directed at her.
He leaned in, pushing into her space, with his eyes hot and bright. “We don’t need outside brass on this. This investigation needs to be handled in this house, in this squad. We take care of our own here.”
“It’s not up to you to say who handles this investigation. It’s done. If you’re going to take care of your own, Detective, you can start by easing back.”
“We worked with her. You didn’t. She’s just another case to you.”
Since his words echoed Cleo Grady’s, Eve gave him the same response. “You don’t know what she is to me. You want to bitch, bitch to somebody else. Now you’ll answer my questions.”
“Or what? You’ll haul me down to Central? Big fucking deal. You’re in here jacking us up when you should be out there hunting down the one who killed her.”
“I’ll tell you what the big fucking deal is, Clifton. Detective Coltraine is dead. You’re here wasting my time and pissing me off when you should be doing everything you can to aid the investigation of a fellow officer.”
Now Eve pushed into his space. “And that makes me wonder. Are you just an asshole? Or is there some reason you don’t want to answer my questions? Let’s assume you’re just an asshole, and start with your whereabouts yesterday from twenty-two hundred to twenty-four hundred hours.”
The gold skin went hot as he showed his teeth. “You’re no better than the IAB rats.”
“Consider me worse. Whereabouts, Detective, or yeah, we will continue this at Central, in a box.”
“I was home, with a woman I’m seeing.” Sneering, he sat back, deliberately rubbed his crotch. “Want to know what we were doing, and how many times we did it?”
“Peabody?” she said with her eyes on Clifton’s. “Are either of us interested in what this asshole did or didn’t do with his cock between the hours of twenty-two and twenty-four hundred last night?”
“We couldn’t be less.”
“Name the woman, Clifton, and consider yourself lucky I have more important things to do right now than write you up.”
“Kiss my ass.”
“I’m no more interested in your ass than I am your dick. Name, Clifton, or I’ll find the time to write you up, and you’ll take a thirty-day rip for it. You’ll start the rip sweating in a box in my house if you don’t stop screwing with me. Name.”
“Sherri Loper. She’s upstairs in Communications.”
“Tell me about your relationship with Detective Coltraine.”
“We worked together.”
“I’m aware of that. Were you friendly, unfriendly?”
“We got along fine.”
“And occasionally worked cases together?”
He shrugged, stared up at the ceiling. “Some of us actually do the job.”
Eve sat back. “If you keep trying to bust my balls here, Clifton, I’m going to bust yours. Believe me, I’m better at it. I’m rank, and don’t you forget it. Now show some respect for the rank and for your dead squadmate.”
“I said we got along fine, and we did. Hell, Ammy got along fine with everybody. She had that way. She was good with people. You think I don’t want to know who took her down? We all want to know. It doesn’t make any sense.” Some of the bravado cracked as he dragged his fingers through his hair. “Why the hell aren’t you hammering at the people in her building? It had to be somebody in there. She lived in a secure building, and she was careful.”
“Have you been to her building, her apartment?”
He closed up again. “Sure, a couple of times. Picked her up, dropped her off when we worked a case together. I have a ride, she doesn’t. So what?”
“Did you and Detective Coltraine have a personal relationship?”