The in Death Collection Books 11-15 - J. D. Robb [37]
“These types don’t roll easy.”
“It wouldn’t take much. I want Ricker inside. He skated on the illegals bust. He shouldn’t have. I’ve studied the reports and transcripts. It looked like textbook, every angle covered. Then there were all these screw-ups. The mix in the chain of evidence, one of the primary witnesses disappearing when he was supposed to be under protection, some clerk in the PA’s office misfiles a statement. Little holes make bigger holes, and he slides through.”
“I agree, and there’s no one who’d like to nail Ricker more than I would. But his connection to Kohli is tenuous at best. I can’t see your angle on it.”
“I’m working it” was all she would say. She thought of Webster, the hints, but she wasn’t ready to talk about it.
“Dallas, Ricker can’t be your personal vendetta.”
“He’s not. Let me work it through, Commander.”
“It’s your investigation. But watch your step. If Ricker was the trigger on Kohli, he won’t hesitate to point at you. From what you’ve told me, he has more reason to.”
“I get in his face enough, he’ll make a mistake. I won’t make one.”
She went around with the lawyers, one for each of the men she’d brought in. They were, she thought, slime in five-thousand-dollar suits. They knew every trick. But they were going to have a hard time weaseling around the fact she had everything on record.
“Records,” the head slime named Canarde said, with a lift of his perfectly manicured fingers, “you alone had possession of. You have no corroboration that the discs were not manufactured or tampered with for the purpose of harassing my client.”
“What was your client doing riding my back bumper from Connecticut to New York?”
“It isn’t against the law to drive a public road, Lieutenant.”
She simply flipped back, tapped her finger on the file. “Carrying concealed and banned weapons.”
“My client claims you planted those weapons.”
Eve shifted her gaze toward the client, a man of about two hundred and fifty pounds with hands like hams and a face only a mother could love—if she were seriously near-sighted. As yet, he hadn’t opened his mouth.
“I must’ve been pretty busy. So your client, who apparently has been struck mute, proports that I just happened to be carrying four self-charging hand lasers and a couple of long-scoped flame rifles in my police unit, with the hopes that some innocent civilian might come along and I could frame him. Seeing as, what, I didn’t like his face?”
“My client has no knowledge of your motives.”
“Your client is a piece of shit who’s been down this road before. Assault and battery, carrying concealeds, assault with a deadly, possession with intent. You’re not standing for some choirboy, Canarde. With what we’ve got on him, he goes in, and he stays in. My best guess is twenty-five, hard time with no parole option, off-planet penal colony. Never been on an off-planet facility, have you, pal?”
Eve showed her teeth in a smile. “They make the cages here look like suites at The Palace.”
“Police harassment and intimidation is expected,” Canarde said smoothly. “My client has nothing more to say.”
“Yeah, he’s been a real chatterbox up till now. You going to let Ricker make you the sacrificial lamb here? You think he’s worried about the twenty-five you’ll do in a cage?”
“Lieutenant Dallas,” Canarde interrupted, but Eve kept her eyes on the man, saw the faintest shadow of worry in his eyes.
“I don’t want you, Lewis. You want to save yourself, you want to deal with me. Who sent you after me today? Say the name, and I cut you out of the herd.”
“This interview is over.” Canarde got to his feet.
“Is it over, Lewis? You want it over? You want to start your first night of twenty-five in a cage? Does he pay you enough, can anyone pay you enough to make you swallow sitting in a hole twenty hours every day for twenty-five years, with a slab for a bed, with security cams watching you piss in a steel toilet? No luxuries off-planet, Lewis. The idea isn’t rehabilitation,