Page 102 of Fury In Death

“Walk. Talk.”

She walked, she talked.

“Six years, he doesn’t say a word. Code of honor,” Whitney said, and Eve caught the respect in his tone. “Redman pays back the ten K. Code of honor. And we’ve got three bodies. Until we can connect Cruz to Banner-Wyst, we can’t go after them. Going after them might stop the body count.”

She wasn’t so sure, but kept that to herself.

“I met with Mira earlier, and will write the consult up as soon as possible. To sum up, sir, Redman is determined, disciplined, focused, and believes he’s doing his duty as a husband and father. Which corroborates Rosenthal’s statement that Redman told him he didn’t protect his family. She believes, and I agree, fulfilling that duty is not only what drives him to kill, it’s what’s keeping him alive.”

“Understood. Let’s try to keep whoever he’s got in his sights next alive.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Get me those reports,” he ordered before he walked away.

Eve stuck with the glides, found Peabody still at it.

“Peabody.”

“Nearly done.”

Eve paced, and paced in a way that had everyone in the bullpen keeping it shut, keeping heads down.

Peabody lifted both hands, flicked them as if tossing something aside. “Done, copied, sent.”

“With me. In the field, Jenkinson.”

Chapter Fifteen

“EDD?” Peabody asked as she hustled to the glides.

“They’re working it. It sounds like Cruz arbitrarily changed the codes whenever he had the whim. We need that connection to Banner-Wyst to get in there, to find out what Redman knew that was so big they’d blow up a residential building to take him out.”

“And besides the satisfaction of helping Feeney take them down—” She caught Eve’s quick glance. “I can follow the dots on that, Dallas. They’re good dots. Besides, finding that out could be another dot, a big one, to finding Redman.”

“Finding and stopping Redman is and has to be priority. But it doesn’t mean we’re so narrowed on that we don’t dig out the root. We’re not going to let justice delayed be justice denied. However long they got away with it stops now.”

“They never saw it coming,” Peabody commented. “Redman, or us. They couldn’t take him out back then after he survived the explosion.”

“Okay,” Eve said as they clattered down the steps to the garage. “Why not?”

“Because most cops tend to agree coincidence is bollocks. The guy who goes out for ice cream and therefore survives the explosion, is under medical treatment due to his mental state, is suddenly offed?”

Peabody lifted her shoulders. “That’s a big dot, and cops start questioning. The company killed hundreds so Redman would be one of many. They don’t want him to be one of one.”

Peabody got in the car, strapped in. “Plus, he didn’t survive intact, not really. He’s out of it, and so no longer a threat.”

“You can bet they kept a close eye on that for the first year or two, and sporadically at least thereafter.”

“Yeah, they did.” Peabody shook her head as Eve drove out. “I didn’t really connect those dots. They probably got to someone on staff, or placed someone on staff, to keep watch.”

“And if he’d showed signs of improvement, if he’d started to come out of it, time to risk coincidence. Likely with a staged suicide. As things were, no, he’s not a threat.”

“Dallas, they’d have screwed with the records—whatever they needed to do they would.”

“That’s right. But if it was big enough to do what they did that night, it was big enough to either implement or keep working on. Something’s there. We’ll find it. Whatever it is, Redman still knows.”

“Here’s a thought. He left the way he left because he still knows, because he’s smart enough to understand they’d do whatever it took to silence him again. And you’d already connected those dots.”