Salvation in death

He drew a deep breath when Eve said nothing. “I waited until the stage water was in place. I prayed, and prayed, even as I added the poison to the third bottle. Part of me still hoped that I would see him come back to the light before he reached for that bottle. That there would be another sign. But there was nothing.”

“Was anyone else aware of what you pla

“Only God. I believed I was doing God’s work, following His will. But last night, I had terrible dreams. Dreams of hellfire and horrible suffering. Now I think the Devil came into me. I was misled.”

“Your defense is you were misled by Satan,” Eve concluded. “Not as original an excuse as you might think. And your feelings for Jolene Jenkins didn’t play into you spiking her husband’s water with poison?”

A dull flush rose into Billy’s pale cheeks. “I hoped to spare Jolene from the pain and humiliation of her husband’s betrayal.”

“With the potential side benefit of stepping into his shoes or marital bed?”

“Lieutenant,” Luke interrupted. “He’s confessed to his sins, to his crimes. Is there need for more? He’s prepared to accept his punishment in this world, and the next.”

“And you’re satisfied?”

“It isn’t for me.” Luke reached over, laid his hand over Billy’s. “I’ll pray for you.”

And Billy laid his head down on the table to give in to the tears.

As he wept, Eve rose. “Billy Crocker, you’re under arrest for the premeditated murder of one James Jay Jenkins, a human being. The charge is murder in the first degree.” She walked around to cuff him, to lift him to his feet. “Peabody.”

“Yes, sir, I’ll take him. Come with me, Mr. Crocker. You can meet your client after he’s booked,” she told Samuel.

“Record off,” Eve ordered when Peabody took him out. “I appreciate you seeing he came in,” Eve said to Luke. “Record’s off,” she added when he shook his head. “I admire your faith, and your restraint,” she said to Samuel. “And your loyalty.”

“A good man is dead,” Luke said softly. “Another is ruined. Lives are shattered.”

“Murder does that. He coveted another man’s wife, isn’t that how it goes? You know it; I know it. We all know that was part of it, however he justified it.”

“Isn’t it enough he’ll answer to God for that?”

Eve studied Luke. “He’ll be answering for plenty in the here and now, so I’ll give you the rest. Will you continue to represent him?” she asked Samuel.

“Until more experienced criminal defense counsel can be secured. We want to go home. We want to get the family home as soon as possible.”

“I believe I can clear that by tomorrow. If the more experienced defense counsel opts for trial, the circumstances of motive will come out. Something to consider.” Eve opened the door. “I’ll show you where you can wait.”

She went back to her office, wrote and filed the report, requested a media block on the details. No point, she thought, in subjecting Jolene and her daughters to the victim’s transgressions. At least not yet.

She looked up as Peabody came in. “He’s done,” Peabody told her. “I put him on suicide watch. I just had this feeling.”

“I don’t think he’ll take the easy way, but you get a feeling, you go with it.”

“You sure had one on this, from the jump. Do you think they’ll deal it down?”

“Yeah, I think they’ll deal it to Murder Two, and put him in mental defect. Faith as psychosis. He’ll spend the next twenty-five repenting.”

“That seems mostly right.”

“Mostly right’s generally enough.” She checked the time, saw she had to let Baxter off the hook. “We’re coming up to end of shift. I want you to follow up with McNab, keep working on the Lino angle. And since the two of you will kissy-face and eat junk food while doing same, I don’t want to see any overtime logged.”

“I thought we were going to Brooklyn.”

“I’ll take that, see if I can hook Roarke into playing backup.”

“Will you play kissy-face and eat junk food?”

Eve sent her a withering look. “Unless I contact you to tell you otherwise, meet me at St. Cristóbal’s tomorrow morning. Six A.M.”

“Ouch? Why so early?”

“We’re going to Mass.”

Eve picked up her ’link to buzz Roarke.

13

BECAUSE IT GAVE HER TIME TO CONTINUE THE backgrounds she’d begun in her office, Eve asked Roarke to take the wheel for the drive to Brooklyn. As neither of them had finished in their respective offices until after six, traffic was expectedly hideous. Occasionally, she glanced up from her PPC as Roarke maneuvered around, through, and over the horn-blasting, vicious bumper-to-bumper. And wondered why, not for the first or last time, people who worked in Brooklyn didn’t live in Brooklyn, and people who worked in Manhattan didn’t just live the hell there.

“Do they actually like it?” she wondered. “Get off on the rage, consider it a daily challenge? Are they doing some kind of twisted penance?”

“You’ve been working faith-based cases too long.”

“Well, there has to be a point to subjecting yourselves and others to this insanity every day.”

“Finances, lack of housing.” He flicked a glance in the mirror, then arrowed into the breath of space between a Mini and an all-terrain. “Or the desire to live outside the city in a more neighborhood sort of environment while earning city salaries-while others want the energy and benefits of the city for living, and find work in one of the other boroughs.”

In a slick move, he changed lanes again, a dodge and weave that gained them maybe a dozen feet. “Or they’re simply going over the bloody overcrowded bridge for some sort of business. Which, I’m forced to point out, we are at this moment. At a shagging crawl.”

“We’re going to check out a woman who appears to live sensibly, moving across the bloody, overcrowded bridge and securing employment where she lives. She has what’s probably a ten-minute commute-by foot-to work. Less if she takes the subway. If she turns out to be my Lino’s mother, I wonder if he fought his way over to Brooklyn, at a shagging crawl, to visit.”

Accepting he was well and truly stuck now-bugger it-Roarke sat back and waited for his chance. “Would you, in his place?”

“Hard to put myself there as what little I remember of my relationship with my mother wasn’t cookies and milk. But… you come back home, hiding out for five to six years, and your mother-your only living blood relative as far as I can ascertain, excepting the half-sibling she’s had since you took off-is living across the bridge-bloody overcrowded or not. It seems you’d be compelled to see her. To check it out.”

“Might be it wasn’t cookies and milk with his ma either.”

“He kept the medal she gave him, so there was something there, some bond. If there’s a bond, that something, you’d want to see her, see how she was, what she was doing, who this guy is she’d married, see the half-brother. Something.”

“If this is your Lino.”

“Yeah, if.” She frowned over that, wondering if a hunch was worth the trip to Brooklyn during the inaccurately termed rush hour. “First big one. If we get over that one, and he did make contact, did go see her, then she has to know, with all the media coverage, that her son’s dead. How would she handle that? No one’s contacted the morgue on Lino, except for Father López. I checked. No inquiries, no requests for viewing.”

Roarke said nothing for a moment. “I considered, spent some time considering actually, not making direct contact with my family in Ireland. Just… checking them out, doing a background on my mother’s sister, the others. Maybe observing, you could say, from a distance. Not making the co

She’d wondered about that. She knew he’d gotten drunk the night before he’d gone to see his aunt. And he wasn’t a man to drink himself drunk.