J. Robb - Vengeance in Death

The picture popped, joining mother and son. "That's him, from the painting." She stared hard into the older and no less angelic face, the bright and brilliant green eyes. "Got you, bastard," she murmured, then shot back into traffic.

The doorman from their first visit paled when he saw them. It only took a jerk of Eve's thumb to have him moving aside.

"They must have planned this for years, starting with her." Eve stepped to the center of the glass elevator. "He'd have been about five when his father died."

"Before the age of reason," Peabody commented.

"Right. And she'd have given him the reason. She gave him the mission, the motive. She turned him into a killer. Her only son. Maybe the tendencies were there, heredity and genetics, but she exploited them, used them. Dominated him. That's what Mira said. A dominating female authority figure. Toss in religion and lean it toward vengeance, add in a good brain for electronics, and the training, you can make yourself a monster."

Eve rang the bell, then laid a hand on the butt of her weapon. Audrey opened the door, offered a hesitant smile. "Lieutenant. I thought we'd agreed on tomorrow morning. Have I mixed up times again?"

"No, change of plan." She stepped in, careful to block the door as she scanned the living area. "We have some questions for you, Widow Calhoun."

Audrey's eyes flickered, then went dead cold, but her voice remained smooth. "I beg your pardon?"

"This round's mine. We made you, and your only begotten son."

"What have you done to Liam?" Audrey curled her hands into claws and leaped forward, aiming for the eyes. Eve dipped under the swipe, pivoted, and wrapped an arm tight around Audrey's neck. She was half Eve's size and no match for a choke hold.

"Her Irish is up, Peabody? Did you hear it? Connecticut, my butt." With her free hand, Eve reached into her back pocket for her restraints. "It's a musical accent, isn't it?"

"My personal favorite." She took Audrey's arm once Eve had clapped on the cuffs.

"We're going to have a nice long chat, Mary Pat, about murder, about mutilation, about motherhood. The three M's, you know?"

"If you've harmed a hair on my boy's head, I'll pull out your heart and eat it."

"If I've harmed him." Eve lifted her brows, and beneath them her eyes were iced. "You doomed him the first time you tucked him in with a bedtime story of revenge."

Disgusted, she turned away, pulled out her communicator. "Commander, there's been a break in the case. I require a search and seizure warrant for the premises and personal effects of Audrey Morrell." She paused. "Also known as Mary Patricia Calhoun."

They found Liam's hole behind a false wall in a converted pantry. Along with the equipment was a small table covered with a cloth of white Irish lace. Candles sat on it, surrounding a beautifully sculpted marble statue of the Mother of God. Above her, her Son hung from the golden cross.

Is that how she'd wanted Liam to see themselves? Eve wondered. As saints and sufferers? As divine mother and sanctified child? And Audrey herself as the untouched, the wise, the chosen.

"I bet she'd bring him a nice cup of tea and a sandwich with the crusts cut off while he was baiting traps in here. Then pray with him before she sent him off to kill."

Feeney barely heard Eve's comment as he ran reverent hands over the equipment. "Have you ever seen the like of this, Ian McNab? This oscillator? What a beauty. And the cross-transmitter with multitask options. Nothing like this on the market."

"There will be, by next spring," McNab told him. "I saw this unit down at Roarke's R and D division. More than half of these components are his, and nearly half of them aren't on the market yet."

Eve grabbed his arm. "Who'd you talk to down at Roarke's? Who'd you work with. Every name, McNab."

"Only three techs. Roarke kept it low-key, didn't want the whole department to know there was a cop sniffing around. Suwan-Lee, Billings Nibb, and A. A. Dillard."

"Suwan, female?"

"Yeah, tidy little Oriental dish. She was – "

"Nibb?"

"E-lifer. Knows everything. The teams joke that he was around when Bell called Watson."

"Dillard?"

"Smart. I told you about him. Got great hands."

"Fair, green eyes, about twenty, five-ten, a hundred sixty?"

"Yeah, how did you – "

"Christ, Roarke's been paying the son of a bitch. Feeney can you get this equipment up and running, fully analyzed?"

"You bet."

"Let's go, Peabody."

"Are we going to interview Mary Calhoun?"

"Soon enough. Right now we're going to give A. A. Dillard his fucking pink slip."

A. A. had missed his shift. It was the first such incident, she was told by Nibb, the department manager. A. A. was a model employee, prompt, efficient, cooperative, and creative.

"I need to see all his files, personnel, works completed, works in progress, status reports, the whole shot."

Nibb – who wasn't quite old enough to have known A. G. Bell, but who had celebrated his centennial the past summer, crossed his arms. Behind a thick white moustache, his mouth went hard.

"A great deal of those records include confidential material. Research and development in the electronics field is highly competitive. Cutthroat. One leak and – "

"This is a murder investigation, Nibb. And I'm hardly going to sell data to my husband's competitors."

"Nonetheless, Lieutenant, I can't give you files on works in progress without the boss's personal consent."

"You have it," Roarke said as he walked up.

"What are you doing here?" Eve demanded.

"Following my nose – correctly, I see. Nibb, get the lieutenant everything she requested," he added, then drew Eve aside. "I reviewed the recording of the dustup in the lobby of the Arms again, then ran it through an analysis procedure we're working on here. Not to be technical, it assessed angles, distances, and so forth. The probability quotient that the killer was focused on McNab rather than the cop outside was very high."

"So you asked yourself who might be connected to you, on some level, who would make McNab as a cop."

"And the answer was someone in this department. I've just run a personnel scan. A. A. most closely fits the physical description."

"You'd make a halfway decent cop."

"I see no reason to insult me. I'd just accessed A. A.'s home address when the word came through we had cops sniffing. I assume our noses had caught the same scent."

"What's the address? I want some uniforms to pick him up."

"Saint Patrick's Cathedral. I doubt you'll find him nibbling his lunch there."

"That's sloppy of your personnel department, Roarke."

His smile was not amused. "Believe me, they'll be so informed. What have you got?"

"He's Liam Calhoun, the son. And I've got his queen, Roarke. I've got his mama." She filled him in, watching as his eyes grew darker, colder. "Feeney and McNab are working on the equipment we found in Audrey's apartment. And they'll analyze the bugs we took from Summerset's quarters. Where is he now? Summerset."

"Home. Bail was set and paid." His jaw set. "They put a bracelet on him."

"The charges will be dropped – and it'll come off. I'll take care of it as soon as I get to Central. Whitney's meeting me to observe the interview with the mother."

"I believe you'll find we manufacture the bugs here, and we're testing a new shield coat that protects them from detection from currently marketed scanners. I've been bankrolling his game all along. Wonderfully ironic."

"We've got him pinned, Roarke. Even if he's been tipped somehow and he's running, we'll have him. We've got his mother. Every indication is he can't and won't function without her. He'll stay close. I'll take the data from here back to Central and key it in under my name and Feeney's only. You have a right to that protection under the law." She blew out a breath. "I'm going straight into Interview, and odds are it's going to be a long haul. I'll be home late."