In Death 29 - Kindred in Death

They had upmarket electronics. He was working in e-repair, consulting sort of deal, and she was—according to him—a professional mother. But he hardly put in any time on the job, and did most of the looking after the kid, according to the neighbors. I asked him about the wrist unit. Said it was a birthday present from his wife.
    “He was off,” Pulliti said. “My gut said he was off, but the evidence said he was clean.”
     
    When Chicago had given her all it could, Eve sat back, closed her eyes. He was off, but came away clean. There was a pattern.
    He let the woman take the fall for him—just as he’d let the woman sleep with, live with his own brother, and like he may have let her scoop up johns and marks in gang territory.
    Sex, she thought. Did he like her to use sex to scam? Was that part of a thrill?
    When had the illegals come into it? When had she started using?
    MacMasters said she might have needed them to have sex with her marks.
    Maybe so. Not with the brother. It’s kinship in a twisted way. They’d looked alike, and she’d lived the con of making a family.
    She pushed up, paced to the window and back. Paced to her board and away.
    No, he hadn’t knocked on a neighbor’s door out of sheer coincidence the night of her murder. No way in hell. But it wouldn’t have been just a cover for the cops. Couldn’t be. They’d never have put him at the scene of the murder.
    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