J. Robb - Kindred In Death

“Frisco trained me. He was a good man, solid cop.”

“I have a copy of the file. Looking through it might jump your memory.”

“Use my desk,” Whitney told him, and plugged in the disc Eve offered. “Meanwhile, Lieutenant.” He gestured her a few feet away. “You’ll have the file on the Illya Schooner murder this morning. A Lieutenant Pulliti, retired, was primary on that investigation. He’ll contact you. I have the name and contact data for a Kim Sung, who was a guard assigned to Irene Schultz’s cell block during her incarceration.”

“Thank you, sir. The information should be helpful.”

“I remember a few tricks.”

“I know this,” MacMasters murmured. “I remember this. I was still in uniform, hadn’t taken the detective’s exam yet. Frisco let me take the lead on it. We got a tip from one of our weasels on this woman running scams. She’d solicit a john, then she’d copy his ID, his credit card. Next thing he knew, he’d have all these bogus charges, or he’d find his bank account lighter by a few thousand. A lot of marks don’t report that, especially if they’re married or involved, or have something more to lose.”

MacMasters studied the screen, nodding slowly. “Yeah, I remember this. I remember her. She had, apparently, been targeting the type least likely to make noise. But she scammed the weasel’s brother, and that rolled it out to us. Frisco and I set up a sting. I posed as the mark and we trolled the area where she was known to work.”

“And she bit,” Eve prompted when MacMasters fell silent.

“Sorry, it takes me back. Before Deena was born, when Carol and I were just beginning, when Frisco was alive. He was a tough bastard. Sorry,” he repeated, bringing himself back. “Yes, she bit the second night. It was clean and simple. We busted her on the solicitation without a license, found illegals on her, and a cloner.”

His eyes narrowed as if he worked to see clearly back through two decades. “Yeah, that little cloner. It was slick, I remember that, too. Barely the size of her palm. Pretty damn slick considering it was twenty years back. She had my ID on her, too. I’d never felt her lift it. She was stoned, and she still pulled the civilian ID I’d put in my pocket without me feeling the grab, even though I’d been waiting for it.”

“She’d been using?” Eve asked.

“Yeah. She didn’t have the look of a longtimer, of the street, but she was high. She had ups and Exotica on her, and both in her system. Maybe she needed them to have sex with the marks.”

“How’d she play it?” Eve asked him. “Did she try to barter, work a deal, bitch, cry?”

“No, none of the usual. She-the impression I’m remembering is she seemed shaken, a little scared. That’s what I’m remembering, and that she wanted her call right off. You see that here in the notes. She wouldn’t say anything about anything until she’d made her call. But she didn’t call a lawyer, like we figured she would. She cried then. That’s right,” he mumbled. “She started crying during the call. I could see her through the glass, the tears running down her face, and I felt…”

“Go ahead,” Eve prompted.

“It’s not important, not relevant. I remember I felt bad for her, sitting there, crying, looking so tired and defeated. I guess I said something like it to Frisco, and he told me to toughen up. In more colorful la nguage.”

MacMasters smiled, very faintly. “He could be a hard-ass. We stood by, and when she finished, she asked for a court-appointed.”

“You went to see the man going by Patterson.”

“She wouldn’t talk until she’d talked to the lawyer, and it was late, middle of the night by then, so we didn’t think we’d get a go with her until morning. And we figured she’d contacted this guy, the one listed as her husband, as her kid’s father.”

“Contacting him so he’d have time to get rid of or conceal anything in criminating.”

“Had to be,” MacMasters agreed. “What the hell did the guy think she was doing all night? Playing bridge? So while she was in the tank, we went over to her residence. You could see, ten seconds in you could see he was wrong. He was wrong, Patterson. But the apartment was clean. No illegals, no evidence of fraud. Child services took the kid, and we took him in for questioning.”

“That night?” Eve prompted.

“Yeah. Frisco and I both wanted to get him in the box, push him. But he played it innocent, and he never came off that. He claimed to believe she worked nights at some dive off Broad. He was sweating,” MacMasters added as he looked back. “I can still see the sweat rolling down his face, like the tears had with hers. Maybe if we’d had more time to work him. But her lawyer told us to get the APA, her client wanted to deal.”

He took a breath, working it out in his head. “We figured she was going to roll on the husband, implicate him to deal down. We pulled off him, went in to talk to her. She confessed.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that. Her lawyer wasn’t happy, you could see that. The APA hadn’t even gotten there yet, but she insisted she wanted to get it done. Claimed an addiction to Exotica, and that it had caused her to prostitute. Took the full rap. Claimed she bought the cloner on the black market. She wouldn’t flip on Patterson. We pushed there, and when the APA got into it, he offered her a better deal if she pulled the husband in. But she wouldn’t. They dealt her eighteen months, and he walked. They gave him back the kid.

“Frisco used to say, ‘Sometimes slime slides.’ This was one of those times.”

“Was she afraid of him?”

“Hell, no.” MacMasters let out a half-laugh. “She loved him. It was all over her. She loved the son of a bitch, and he knew it. He let her take the fall. More we figured, when Frisco and I talked about it, we figured during that call, when she started crying, the bastard talked her into taking the fall.”

“It fits,” Eve said quietly. “It runs true.”

“You can know something without being able to prove it, without being able to make a case.” Even now, twenty years later, the frustration flashed clearly on MacMasters’s face. “We made the case on her, we closed the case. She did the time, and she earned it, but…”

MacMasters shook his head. “It was the law, but it wasn’t right. Not through to the core of it. Patterson let her go down, alone, and he played the shocked husband, the desperate father. We did their financials, you can see here in the file. They didn’t have much more than two months’ rent in their account. Where did the thousands she’d scammed go? She said to her illegals habit and gambling, but she couldn’t tell us where she’d gambled it away. It was bullshit. They had it squirreled, but she never shook off that stand. She stuck firm that she’d spent the money, and he hadn’t been any part of it. Hadn’t known. And he comes to her sentencing with tears in his eyes, holding the little boy, with the boy crying for his mother. It was-”

He broke off, got slowly to his feet. In place of frustration, a cop’s memory of a case that hadn’t gone down quite right, came shock. “The boy. It’s the boy you think killed Deena?”

“It’s leaning that way, yes.”

“But, for God’s sake, he would do that, he would do that to an innocent girl because I once arrested his mother? Because she did less than two years?”

“Irene Schultz aka Illya Schooner was beaten, raped, and murdered by strangulation in Chicago in May of 2041.”

He slid back into the chair as if his legs dissolved. “Patterson?”

“No, he was alibied. I’ll have the full file later this morning, and will reach out to the primary on the investigation, but he looks clear on it.”