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“I’m not interested in your pitiful dreams. I’m pursuing another line. I need to know if any of Coltraine’s squad’s under, or was under, IAB watch.”
“You want me to violate the privacy of an entire squad so you can pursue a line?”
Eve nearly made a snide comment about IAB and privacy, but decided against it. “I have to consider the victim didn’t leave the house with her weapon and clutch piece to have a drink with friends. I have to consider she considered herself on duty at that time. I have to consider, from her profile, she wasn’t going on duty alone.”
“Consider’s just a fancier word for guess.”
“She was a team player, Webster. She was part of a squad. I have to consider one or more members of that squad killed her, or set her up for it. If so, I have to consider that individual or individuals may have caught the interest of IAB in the past.”
“You could go through channels on this, Dallas. It’s a legitimate line of inquiry.”
“I’m not even going to dignify that one.”
“Shit. I’ll have to get back to you.”
“Use privacy mode if and when,” she told him, then cut him off. Her next move was to contact Whitney’s office and request an appointment to brief and update her commander.
Once she arrived at Central, she went straight to her office, intending to pick her way through new theories. She wanted to run several probabilities—hopefully with information pried out of Webster—before her meeting with Whitney. A second consult with Mira, she thought, pushing on the in-squad connection could add weight.
She got coffee first, then saw the report disc from Baxter on her desk.
She plugged it in, ran it while she drank her coffee. And weighing the information, sat back and mulled it over with more coffee.
She’d started the probabilities without Webster when Peabody came in.
“They announced Coltraine’s memorial,” Peabody told her. “Today at fourteen hundred, in Central’s bereavement facilities.”
“Yeah, I got that from Morris. Get a divisional memo out, will you? Anyone not actively in the field or prevented from attending by duty needs to put in an appearance. No time lost. Dress blues preferred.”
“Sure. I’ll just—”
“Hold on. Question. What would you say to the fact that Alex Ricker paid one visit, and one only, to his father on Omega eight months ago. And there’s been no correspondence of any kind recorded between them during the father’s incarceration?”
“Well . . . It could lean a couple of directions. Ricker might not want his son to go there, to see him in prison, powerless. He may have forbidden it after the first visit, and told his son to move on, not to contact him, but to focus on his own life.”
“Do little pink fairies sing and dance in your world, Peabody?”
“Sometimes, when it’s very quiet and no one else can see. But, I was going to say it’s more likely that the father-son relationship here isn’t a close one. May in fact be strained, even antagonistic.”
“Yeah, if what Baxter dug up from the supervisors at Omega is fact, I’d go with option two—with the addendum being Alex Ricker’s chosen to distance himself from his father. For his own reasons. Wonder what they are.”
“Bad for business.”
“Why? Your old man’s a renowned, successful, badass bad guy. Yeah, he got that badass handed to him, but he had one hell of a run first. Built his criminal empire, and so on. People in that business are going to respect and fear the Ricker name,” Eve concluded, “the Ricker connection. The blood tie.”
“Okay, maybe. Let’s back up a minute. You think maybe the data Baxter got is wrong?”
“I think it’s very odd that there are virtually no communications listed to or from Max Ricker since he took up residence at Omega.”
“None? As in zero? I know they’re strict up there, but inmates get a certain amount of communication allowance each month, right?”
“They do,” Eve confirmed. “But with Ricker? Nobody calls, nobody writes. Bullshit. No visitors other than the single one documented from Alex. No, even in a world with dancing fairies, I don’t buy it.”
Frowning, Peabody leaned on the doorjamb. “Then you’d have to ask why he—Max Ricker—would want to hide communications and visitors, keep them off the record. And how the hell he’d manage it at a place like Omega.”
“Tune out those fairies, Peabody. Bribes are universal. He could manage it, and we’ll be looking into that. As to why? To conceal communication and connections with the aforesaid criminal empire. Maybe the son’s covering for the father, or happy to take the top spot in a figurehead mode, while Dad continues to pull the strings.”
“The name stays strong,” Peabody calculated, “and the son gets the glory while Daddy still gets to play. It’s good.”
