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“What?” Roarke asked when he followed her.
She kept her voice down. “If they’d found her, they’d have killed her. No way around it. She was right about that.”
“It must have been brutal, being trapped as she was.”
“We had this scuffle with these three assholes today, and one of them gives her a couple pretty good knocks. I told her she had heavy feet, needed to work on her technique, so what does she do? She goes down to that empty shithole of a gym. If it had tipped the other way, that’s where they’d have found her body. She takes a punch in the ear, and I can’t just say everybody takes a knock? I’ve got to tell her to work on it, to do better.”
“Because the next time she might take a knife in the ear. You’re not just her partner, Eve, you’re still training her. And you’ve done a damn brilliant job of it so far, in my opinion. She went down because she wants to improve, and yes, because she wants to meet your standards. It didn’t tip the other way,” he reminded her. “And if it had, though it makes me just as sick as you to think that, it would be on the heads of those bollocks excuse for cops. You know that.”
She sucked in a breath. “You’re still mad at me.”
“I am, and you’re still mad at me. But we both understand there are more important things just at the moment.”
They could count on each other for that, she thought. Count on each other to hold the line when it needed to be held. “So, truce.”
“Agreed. She’s precious to me, too.”
Because her eyes stung, Eve pressed her fingers to them. “Don’t pet me,” she said, anticipating him. “I need to hold it together.” Eve dropped her hands. “She’s counting on me to hold it together.”
“So you will.” He petted her anyway, just sleeking a hand down her hair. Then he gripped one of the short strands, gave it a hard tug.
“Hey. Truce.”
“See, you’re a little pissed again. You’ll work better.” He strolled back into the office.
She held it together, and in short order it took no effort. She simply fell into the rhythm of the work.
“We can’t look at their financials, even first-level, without sending up a flag. Much less go digging around for buried accounts and real estate.”
She caught Roarke’s glance, knew he was considering his illegal and unregistered equipment. No flags there. But she sent him a subtle shake of the head. She had to toe every inch of the line on this.
“If we go to IAB with this,” Peabody began, “with what we have, which when I look at it all laid out, isn’t really that much, it could bust open. It could give Renee—I can’t call her Oberman because it makes me think of her father. It could give her and the others time to rabbit, or cover, or ditch. They must have contingency plans, escape routes.”
“I can work that. I’m going to reach out to Webster.” Again she caught Roarke’s glance, the cock of his eyebrow. She supposed it was impossible for Webster’s name to come up in this particular room without both of them seeing Roarke beat the hell out of him.
“I’ll feed this to him, but with conditions,” she continued. “I can work that, especially if Whitney adds his weight. We want to keep this narrow for as long as we can.”
“Keener!” McNab punched a fist in the air, did a little spin in Eve’s chair that had his long, blond ponytail flying. Then he pointed the index fingers of both hands at her computer. “Found him. I did some crosses on some of her closed cases, mixed in others from here and there for cover, skimming wit lists and suspects like a standard search for—”
“Just give me Keener, McNab.”
“Keener, Rickie. Street name Juicy. I can’t dig to see if he’s listed as a weasel without the flag, but he’s got a long sheet. Possession, possession with intent to distribute, other petty shit, and he got busted for selling a primo case of variety packs to a couple of undercovers. One of them, listed as the arresting officer, is our girl Renee.”
“Put the data on-screen,” Eve ordered, and scanned it. “Look there, he gets probation, community service, mandatory counseling. That’s a deal happening there, that’s her turning him weasel as a get-out-of-jail card. With his priors, he should’ve done at least three solid. But he gets time served? Six years ago.”
“That’s how long she said she’d been running the business,” Peabody put in.
“So, this Keener could’ve been her springboard. Her way in.”
She paced in front of the screen. “He knows something. He has more, offers it. Hey, I can give you this and that, but you gotta get me out of this. Alternately, she’s already looking, already getting it off the ground and sees him as an asset. Either way, this is the turn.”
“He’s dead. She was really clear about that,” Peabody added.
“So, we find the body. If ‘her boy’ found him alive, we can find him dead.”
She paced a bit more. “Not in his flop. He was fixing to rabbit, with the money. He had another hole he thought was safe, secret. Take the locations of his busts, his flop, locations of his varied and bullshit employment. According to Peabody’s statement Renee said he hadn’t gotten far. Let’s map out his territory, run some probabilities on most likely locations for his hole.”
“We want to find the body,” Peabody began, “because you think the guy she set on Keener might’ve left some evidence?”
