Risky, Eve calculated. Last ditch. “What pulls you toward men like him? What’s the draw? He’s not your first. You can change your name, your looks, but it’s all the same. Richard Troy, he was the same. Stella.”
Her mother’s eyes narrowed, then cut away. “Fuck off.”
“You remember him. Long time ago, but you remember. It didn’t end well, did it? It never does. Who screwed who over that time?”
“You think I’m stupid? I get my share and I walk when I’m ready to walk. You got Rich to say any different, he’s a liar, too. I took what was mine and walked.”
“Left something behind, didn’t you?”
Her lips twisted into an ugly smile. “Nothing I wanted. Rich is nothing but a fuckup with big dreams. Isaac knows how to get things done, and how to treat me right. Nothing you can do’ll make me roll over on him.”
“Yeah, I can see that.” Love, she thought, even perverted love could be unassailable. “We’ll get him without you. We’ll get Melinda and Darlie back to their families without you. And we’ll do you the favor of keeping you alive so you can spend the rest of the life we saved for you in a concrete cage.”
“He’ll get me out.”
“He won’t give you another thought.” But I will, Eve admitted to herself. I’ll think about you for a very long time. “You’ve got until the doctors put you back together to change your mind.”
She walked to the door, stopped, turned around. “You had a kid once.” The medical exam would show that, and the data would be on her chart. “What happened to it?”
“How the fuck should I know?”
Cold inside, colder and steadier than she’d have believed possible, Eve nodded. “That’s what I figured. You’re just what you seem to be, Stella,” she said, using the name she remembered from glimmers of her childhood. “Exactly what you seem.”
She walked out.
“Anything.” Bree grabbed at Eve’s arm. “Did you get anything?”
“She won’t budge.”
“We’ll take a pass at her.” Nikos stared at the porthole in the door.
“Be my guest. I don’t think we need her. Roarke’s got the accounts, and he’s tracking them back. We’ve got a better shot at McQueen’s location through that than through her.”
“We didn’t get that information,” Nikos began.
“I got it right before I went in there, and you’re getting it now. Let him fucking work it for an hour.” Okay, not as steady as she’d thought. “Listen, Roarke’s better at this than anybody you’ve got. Give him some room. McQueen’s got to make contact, has to play the game with me. We need to be ready for that. Go ahead and take a whack at her.” She shrugged toward the door. “But I’d give her a few minutes to settle in, think about things. The doctors have some fiddling to do with her.”
“We’ll let them have her first,” Laurence decided, “go at her after they’ve finished. She may be ready to talk a deal by then.”
“Good luck. Where’s your LT?” she asked Bree.
“He went back to the house. We have to issue a media statement. Too much has gotten out, and he has to tamp down any possible leaks. If McQueen’s monitoring the media, we don’t want him getting wind we’ve got his partner.”
“He will be. I want a man on the prisoner, wherever they take her, whatever they do. I need to coordinate with EDD. When McQueen contacts, I need him sent to my ’link. I have to be mobile.”
“I’ll sit on her.”
“Not you. She knows who you are, and she’ll use it to shake you. Believe me,” Eve said when Bree’s face went stony, “if I wasn’t sure you’re the last person she’d spill to, you’d be in there working her now. Keeping a plug in leaks not only through the house but here is priority.”
“Ricchio has Annalyn laying it on that she’s a suspect in a series of robberies, injured during a chase after a botched B-and-E.”
“That should work for now.”
“I’ll coordinate with EDD. The lieutenant said Annalyn and I should be at your disposal.”
“How many men has Ricchio stationed here, discounting you and your partner?”
“Three, on three-hour shifts.”
“That should cover it. You and your partner head in. Start working the area around the duplex. We’re looking for an apartment, at least two bedrooms. Mid-range, remember, in a building with a garage. Good neighborhood. It won’t be ground level. It’ll have been rented within the last year. Follow up on the soundproofing. It’s going to be within a thirty-minute drive. More than five or ten, less than thirty. He doesn’t want her too close, but close enough.”
“Duplex, town house, condo?”
“Apartment,” Eve repeated. She’d gotten a good sense of how the split building worked that day. “A setup like she had? It’s too intimate. Too many people to see your comings and goings. And he needs parking for his other vehicle. Roarke said he made a personal in-bank withdrawal of funds from Prairie Bank and Trust, Davis Street branch. Use that for triangulation. I’m going by the bank, check out the security discs.”
“Roarke relayed that information. Ricchio had EDD pick up the discs.”
“Good. Have them sent to my unit at the hotel. I’ll head there with Roarke. I have a couple things to take care of from there, then I’ll be in.”
“If she gives us McQueen’s location—”
Like Bree, Eve glanced at the door of the treatment room. “She won’t. Your sister and the girl, they’re less than nothing to her. The only things that matter are herself and him, and he’s another drug to her. She’s hooked. If I’m wrong, the feds will get it out of her. But for now, work the search.”
She turned away from the hope and despair Bree struggled to keep off her face. She got Roarke on the ’link, kept her own face schooled.
“Did you get new transpo?”
“I did, yes.”
“I need to go back to the hotel, work some angles there before I bounce back to Ricchio’s house.”
“I’ll pick you up where we spoke earlier.”
The minute she got in the car, she put her head back, closed her eyes. “Just a minute, okay?”
“Take what you need.”
It hurt, she realized, now that she let it, everything hurt. Her head, her gut, her chest. Raw, wet wounds that throbbed with every heartbeat.
“I don’t know if I did the right thing, talking to her. I don’t know if I did it for me or the vics.”
“You never forget the victims, Eve.”
“She wouldn’t flip. And she won’t. She knows me—not the connection to her, but to McQueen. She knows he hates me, needs to teach me a lesson. So that’s what she wants, even more than any sort of deal we’d offer. It’s what she does, I think. Becomes addicted to a certain type of man, then puts him in control. Until she finishes, for whatever reason. She had a child she didn’t want because Richard Troy wanted the investment. Now she’s doing what McQueen wants. There have probably been others between.
“Doesn’t matter,” she added, “except as a pattern. But she’s a dead end. If there’s any chance I’m wrong and she can be flipped, it can’t be me. I’m the mark, that’s how she sees it. The mark, and worse, a cop. I’m the enemy and the mark. Or we are. It’s for money. Still looking to make money off me. It’s ironic, I guess.”
“Ransom?”
“Yeah. That’s what he’s told her. They get me—and he gets to punish me, play with me, and extort big piles of money from you. There may even be some truth in it, though he doesn’t intend to share any of the take with her. It’s a job for her. A labor of love. Melinda and Darlie, they’re just incidental.”
“The withdrawal means he’s on the clock.”
“Yeah, yeah.” She rubbed her hands over her face, shoved them back into her hair. “He hopes to have me within a couple of days. Sooner if he can. He’d need her for that. A decoy, a lure. So we’ve fucked that up for him.”
She drew a breath, turned to study him. “I’d be really pissed off if he’d made this work and you’d paid.”
“Would you now?”
