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Covering though. Covering his own ass while she was being raped.
He knew something was going to happen to her, something bad. Something that could involve the cops coming to the door. A deal. A setup. A trade.
But the boy grows up and goes after MacMasters, mirroring the crime against his mother on MacMasters’s daughter. Why? Because MacMasters was the arresting officer, in another city, two full years before his mother’s murder?
What kind of sense did that make, even for a sociopath? It didn’t fo llow . . .
She stopped, turned to stare at the board again. Unless . . .
“Dallas, I might have a line on—”
“Who’s the biggest influence in your life?” Eve interrupted. “I mean, who would you say gave you the foundation for what you are, how you think, what you believe?”
Peabody frowned over the question. “Well, I like to think I think for myself, and there are a variety of factors in my life experience—”
“Cut the crap.”
“Okay, at the base? My parents. Not that I go along with everything there, or I’d be in a commune raising goats or weaving flax, but—”
“The base is there. You’re a cop, but with Free-Ager tendencies.” She tapped Yancy’s sketch as Peabody’s frown deepened over the analysis.
“So, who most influenced this one? His mother’s murdered when he’s about four. Who’d be the biggest influence on what he believes, how he views the world?” She jabbed her finger into Pauley’s ID print. “This one. He’s a con artist, an operator. He taps his parents for money time and again, even though they know better. He’s grease, he slides. His own brother has to pretend he doesn’t exist to barricade himself. A smart and devious woman falls for him to the extent she takes an eighteen-month rap so he can skate—and she gets into prossing and illegals after they’re hooked. Not before, after.”
“The wrong guy,” Peabody offered. “Like Trueheart said.”
“Yeah, a really wrong guy. And if he tells the kid how his mother was lost, murdered, because the cops screwed with her, why wouldn’t he believe it?”
“Because they didn’t?”
“That doesn’t matter. The kid’s already predisposed to believe it. He’s lived his whole life believing it, and wanting to even the score. He’s lived his whole life targeting marks, taking what he wants, living on the other side. And liking it. Planning out the ultimate con. Pauley let the woman take the fall for him, but that’s not what the kid hears. Pauley covered his ass on the night she was killed, but that’s not what the kid hears. When you keep hearing the same thing from the person who has the power—and Pauley had the power for years—you believe.”
Her father had held the power, Eve thought. He’d told her she was nothing, told her the police would put her in a dark hole and leave her there to rot.
And for a long time, she’d believed him to the extent she was as terrified of the police, of anyone in the system as she was of the man who beat and raped her.
“Dallas?”
“It’s classic,” Eve concluded. “If you want to create something, someone, to obey, to believe, to become, you repeat, repeat. Punish or reward, that depends on your style, but you drill the message home. They killed your mother. They’re to blame. They need to pay.”
It struck like a hammer in the gut. “They, not he. It has to be they. The system, everyone who had a part in it. It’s the system he hates. Oh, goddamn it. We need a run, now, on every official connected to Irene Schultz’s arrest and incarceration. Her lawyer, the APA, the judge, the warden, the CS rep who removed the kid, the head of CS at the time, the foster home. We need whereabouts, family, family whereabouts.”
Peabody’s dark eyes went huge. “He’s going after someone else.”
“One cop isn’t enough.” Eve launched herself at her unit, ordered an immediate run. “He started it, but others are complicit. It’s their fault his mother went away, their fault she was murdered. Took her away from him, so he’s going to take something away from them. Frisco, the other cop, he went down. He’s out of play. Can’t punish the dead, can’t make the dead suffer.”
Peabody, already working it on her PPC, nodded. “Her lawyer’s still in the city, a partner in a law firm downtown. Divorced, one child. Male, age fifteen.”
“We inform, and get them covered. The APA’s in Denver now, married, two minor children. We contact, inform, inform local authorities.”
As she started down the line, her desk ’link signaled. She glanced, impatient, at the readout. Then her stomach sank.
“Dallas.”
Dispatch, Dallas, Lieutenant Eve.
Too late, Eve thought as she pulled up outside the SoHo loft. I’m too late. With Peabody she walked past the officers outside the building, and into the elevator.
“We’ll want all security, want to knock on all the doors. Contact Morris.”
