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“You can push it. You know the buttons.”
She looked away from him a moment because knowing she’d try for the deal made her sick. The greater good, she told herself. Sometimes justice couldn’t sweep clean.
“I’ll push for immunity. But you’re off the job, and so’s she—”
“You can’t—”
“Shut up, Dwier. Just shut up, because what I’m going to lay down here is as good as you’re ever going to get. And the offer is one-time only. I put my weight for immunity. Make the case for the P.A. that your information, and Price’s, was key to my investigation. If it isn’t key, Dwier, this conversation is moot. You and Price walk, no cage time. But you put in for retirement, and she resigns from Child Services. It’s up to the P.A. and the brass as to whether you keep your benefits. That’s out of my hands. But you walk.”
She shoved her plate aside. “You refuse this deal and I give you a vow to hunt you, both of you, until I have enough to put you both over. I’ll push for multiple charges, first-degree, conspiracy murder. I’ll push for the murder of a police officer. I’ll push hard and the two of you will spend the rest of your lives behind bars. The last breath you take will be in a cage. I’ll make it my personal mission.”
His eyes glittered—temper, terror, alcohol. And, Eve thought with a dull amazement, with insult.
“I got sixteen years in. Sixteen years busting my hump.”
“And now you’ve got five minutes to decide.” She pushed up from the table. “Be gone or be ready to talk when I get back.”
As she strode across the club, Peabody started to rise. Eve simply shook her head and kept going.
She slammed into what the Squirrel called their rest room. Five narrow stalls and two shallow pits for sinks. She ran the water cold, splashed it on her face again and again until the heat of her anger and disgust chilled.
Face dripping, she lifted her head and stared at herself in the black-flecked mirror. Seven people dead, she thought. Seven. And she was about to help two of the ones responsible ride free so she could stop the others.
Is this what it took to speak for Kevin Halloway, for Hannah Wade? Is this what it took?
Shades of right, Tibble had said. And just now she felt smeared by the shadows.
She scrubbed her face dry, then pulled out her communicator.
“Commander. I need a deal for Thomas Dwier and Clarissa Price.”
Dwier was still at the table when she returned and starting on his third bottle. She wondered how long ago he’d drowned his conscience.
“Talk,” she said.
“I gotta have some assurances.”
“I laid it out for you once, I’m not laying it out again. Talk or walk.”
“I want you to understand we did what we had to do. You work to get scum off the street and before you write up your fives, they’re back out. The system’s gone soft. All this shit about civil rights jammed down our throat, lawyers sliding through the grease, you can’t do the job,”
“I don’t want the lecture, Dwier. I want data. Who’s running the show?”
“I’m gonna tell it my way.” He swiped the back of his hand over his mouth, hunched in over the table. “Me and Clarissa, we got close. She’s dedicated her life to helping kids, only to see half of them, maybe more, get screwed over by the system. We started going out, mostly just to blow off some steam, and we got close. After what happened with the Dukes kid, she was thinking about packing it in. That one almost broke her. She took a couple weeks’ leave to decide what she wanted to do. And . . . Don came to see her.”
“Don? Would that be Donald Dukes?”
“Yeah. She was in a rough spot. A rough spot. And he told her about this group who was looking for answers, who was working to find a better way. An underground group.”
“Purity?”
“The Purity Seekers. He said a lot of people had gotten together, people like him, like her, other concerned citizens. He asked if she’d come to a meeting.”
“Where?”
“Church basement. Downtown. Church of The Savior.”
“A church basement?” She didn’t know why it offended her sensibilities. She wasn’t, never had been, religious. But it appalled something deep inside her. “This runs out of a church?”
