“Son of a bitch!”
The angry curse, the way Whitney shoved away from his desk, had Eve snapping to attention, and into silence. Whitney rarely lost his composure, and now, with his face thunderous, he paced in front of his glass wall and those shining towers.
“I know that goddamn name.” He strode to his office door, flung it open. “Get Captain Feeney in here. Now.” Slammed it shut.
“Home invasion, three dead. Adam and Ellen Solomen and their sixteen-year-old son, Thaddeus. The wife and son had their throats slit. Solomen was tortured, then gutted and left to bleed out. Feeney and I caught the case.”
“You and Feeney? When you were partners?”
“No, after. It was about twenty years ago. Feeney had Homicide, I had Organized Crime, and I’d turned Solomen. He worked for Colin Boswell—human trafficking, illegals, protection racket—New York, London, Dublin. Solomen was his accountant, and my confidential informant. I’d started building a case on Boswell’s racket in New York. Feeney and I worked it jointly.”
Calmer, he walked to his office friggie, took out two tubes of water. He tossed Eve one. “One of the assassins also suffered a wound. Left some blood behind. Come!” he called at the knock.
Feeney stepped in, gave Eve a nod. “Dallas. Commander.”
“Lorcan fucking Cobbe,” Whitney said, and gulped down water.
Eve watched Feeney’s droopy, basset-hound eyes scrunch up in puzzlement. He scratched fingers through his explosion of silver-threaded ginger hair.
And she saw the memory flash back. “Stabbing in Washington Square last night? McNab’s working the e’s, but I didn’t get the details yet. It was Cobbe?”
“Catch him up,” Whitney ordered before he went to his desk, swiveled to his comp, and began to work.
“Galla Modesto, professional hit,” Eve began, and ran through the details to the point she’d left off with Whitney.
She glanced at Whitney, who sat scanning the screen, scowling at it. He wound a finger through the air to signal her to continue.
“Roarke was with me on scene. We were at a play thing when I got the call. He ID’d Cobbe in the crowd. Cobbe made sure he did, then poofed. Roarke knew him in Dublin when they were boys. Cobbe’s a few years older, and claimed he was Patrick Roarke’s son. As far as Roarke knows, Patrick Roarke never acknowledged this connection, but Cobbe worked for his … organization. Easiest to say Cobbe had it in for Roarke because he was the acknowledged son, and due to an incident where Roarke ratted him out for slicing up a dog.”
“A dog?” Feeney repeated.
“Yeah, another kid’s dog that objected when Cobbe tried to beat the crap out of the kid for the change in his pocket. They had one other confrontation Roarke mentioned, years later.”
Feeney stuck his hands in the pockets of his rumpled brown jacket. “You figure he’ll go after your man?”
“I think he’ll try. He’s not stupid, but it’s a deep-seated grudge. He revered Patrick Roarke, and Roarke rejected him, or at least wouldn’t acknowledge paternity. I think he’ll also look toward getting even with the person who became Roarke’s father.”
“Summerset.” Feeney nodded. “And you.”
“Yeah, Roarke figures that. You want to pay back an enemy, kill what he loves. You end him after that, but he suffers first. I’m consulting with Mira shortly on the profile, but that fits what I know so far. What I didn’t know is you and the commander had your round with him. I hadn’t looked that far back yet.”
“What’s it, twenty goddamn years, Jack?”
“Yeah, it’s twenty goddamn years. Where’d I stop?” Whitney pinched the bridge of his nose. “The partner on the hit. Thomas Ivan.”
“Big Tom Ivan. Big as a freighter, dumb as a broken brick.”
“And dead as Moses,” Whitney finished. “We ID’d him from the blood he left on scene, tracked him. That wasn’t hard, as he was holed up in his flop, dying from the wound that had gone septic.”
He waved a hand for Feeney to take over.
“We got him to the hospital, and they did what they could, but the infection’d burned right through him. Asshole packed the wound with a sock, fixed it with duct tape. We got Cobbe’s name out of him though. He claimed Cobbe did all the killing, including giving him that jab in the liver. Claimed he punched Cobbe good for it, but the kid—he couldn’t’ve been more than twenty, twenty-couple—ran off laughing.”
“The nine-one-one on it came in less than thirty minutes after Sol-omen’s TOD,” Whitney added. “Anonymous tip. We figured Cobbe got himself clear and hoped we’d catch Ivan still on scene. Ivan said Cobbe must have picked his pocket when he jabbed him, because his wallet was gone.”
Feeney pointed toward the friggie. “Got anything sweet to drink in there?”
“Have you met my wife?”
“Ha. Right.” Settling, Feeney took Eve’s water tube, glugged some, passed it back. “Cobbe already had a sheet in Ireland, and we pushed on the Dublin cops. Sticking point? All we had was the word of a dead man with his own sheet. Ivan either didn’t know who hired him for the hit or just wouldn’t turn on Boswell. And we’re talking a bad time in Dublin, corruption, and plenty of cops on Boswell’s payroll or somebody like him. We couldn’t get extradition. No record of Cobbe traveling outside Ireland, witnesses who swore he was with them at the time of the murders.”
“We knew he’d killed three people, but we couldn’t touch him.” Whitney stared straight ahead. Looking back, Eve thought.
“I squeezed Solomen into weaseling for me. He paid for it. His wife and sixteen-year-old son paid for it. Big Tom Ivan paid for it. Cobbe never did.”
“You did the job, Jack,” Feeney reminded him. “Solomen knew what he was doing when he signed up with a shit like Boswell, and when he turned on him.”
“The kid played basketball and wanted to be an astronomer. He had a telescope in his room, models of the solar system.”
“You can’t carry that,” Feeney began.
“We always carry it, Ryan. We’re not worth the badge if we don’t. He’s been busy the last twenty years.” Whitney tapped his comp screen. “And now he’s on our turf again. What do you need?” he asked Eve.
“Whatever the agencies keeping files on him have.”
“I’ll make it so.”
“Permission to attach Roarke to this investigation, and to assign him a weapon.”
When Whitney raised his eyebrows, Eve stepped carefully. “Officially, sir. He will be a target and should, legally, have the means to defend himself.”
“I believe he already has plenty of means, but I’ll put that through.”
She turned to Feeney. “I could use all the time and assistance you can give me.”
“No question of that.”
“I’m bringing in Tween this afternoon, and will have a warrant and a search team at his home while he’s here. I could use quick work on any e’s, any communication between him and Cobbe, any leads as to how he found Cobbe and contacted him. Any—”
“You figure you have to tell me what to look for, kid?”