Shifting forward, he held the PPC between the front seats to show a still shot on his display.
Cobbe stood in the crowd, thumbs hooked in the front pockets of his pants. Smirking.
“He moves in and out of camera range. He sure as hell knows where the cams are and how to work the blind spots. Using his face or just the description of the jacket, the pants, I could track him when he moved into range. The last confirmed sighting’s at double-zero-thirty.”
“Good job. I’ll drop you at home. Peabody, if the vic’s family’s in New York, plan to meet me at their residence at eight. I’ll let you know. If they’re in Italy, I’ll handle it via ’link, and you’ll meet me at the morgue. Contact the housekeeper in the morning, have her come in. McNab, get anything you can off the vic’s ’link.”
“Dallas, I did a quick run on this Cobbe while doing the search. He’s all kinds of bad news.”
“Brief Peabody on same.”
“Tween’s bad news, too.” Peabody shifted to look back at McNab. “A different kind, but bad.”
“Brief McNab on same.”
She swung to the corner near their apartment. “Out. Eight sharp, Peabody, one place or the other.”
“On that.”
“Oh, you’ve got six varieties of chips in the AC,” McNab told Eve as he slid out.
“Great. Go.”
The minute the door slammed, she swung away from the curb. She glanced in the rearview, saw them hold hands as they walked.
And now her car smelled like salt and sugar. She opened the windows to blow it out, decided she could actually use some sugar. After ordering a tube of Pepsi from the in-dash AC, she ordered up a run on Lorcan Cobbe.
That kept her busy on the drive uptown. The man had an impressive collection of aliases and suspected bad acts running for a solid three decades.
He’d started young, testing murky waters with assaults, B and Es, muggings, animal abuse—the reddest of red flags. He’d slipped in and out of kid cages there until he got better at it.
A shaky time, she knew, in post–Urban War Dublin, where corruption in the police ran like life’s blood.
A couple of wrist slaps—eighteen months for possession of illegal weapons—a handful of forty-eight-hour detentions, but no court-appointed supervision she could find. No psych evals or mandatory counseling.
His mother, Morna Cobbe, did time of her own, primarily for unlicensed prostitution and illegals possession. No father on record. But high on the list of known associates sat one Patrick Roarke.
Cobbe found his groove in his twenties, and there the list lengthened, but with caveats. Suspected, insubstantial evidence, witnesses recanting. Or dying.
He’d either gotten considerably better at thievery or had given it up to focus on killing.
It hadn’t taken long, according to the opinion of numerous law enforcement agencies, for Cobbe to graduate to murder for profit.
Now he was on her turf. More, now he might very well attempt to settle a score—real or imagined—with her husband.
She turned through the gates, started up the drive of the elegant fortress built by a former Dublin street rat.
The towers and turrets, the parapets and grand expanse of stone made a fanciful silhouette in the night sky. Best of all, lights gleamed a welcome home in dozens of windows.
Love, the kind she firmly believed made a person stupid, had her wishing she could keep Roarke inside that fanciful fortress until she tracked down Cobbe and put him away.
And love—the kind she knew meant knowing, and, yeah, respecting, the person you’d joined your life with—understood Roarke not only would never hide but needed to be a part of putting Cobbe away.
Her go-to expert consultant, civilian, was about to get a serious workout.
After she parked, she grabbed the file bag. Putting her board and book together before she got some sleep hit priority. But so did having a conversation with Roarke.
At least quiet reigned when she walked into the house. No lurking Summerset slid like fog into the foyer. She supposed a conversation had to happen there, too, but she expected to leave that one to Roarke.
She walked upstairs, knowing she had another couple hours ahead of her before she could catch any rack time. But when she turned into her office, the quiet held, and Roarke’s adjoining office remained dark.
The idea of him crashing for the night hit high to absurd on the probability scale. In a moment of genuine, cold-sweat panic, she imagined Cobbe lying in wait, ambushing Roarke. She started to sprint to the house system, had reached for it when Roarke walked in.
“Fuck.” It might not have been physically possible for a heart to turn upside down, but now she knew what it would feel like. “Jesus.”
To compensate, she grabbed his face with both hands, kissed him hard.
“Hello to you as well.” He skimmed a hand over her hair before lowering his forehead to hers. “I’m glad you’re home.”
“Same goes. I need coffee.”
“I’d point out the lateness of the hour, but what would be the point? You spoke with the victim’s husband?”
“Yeah.” She walked to her command center, set down the file bag. Then hit the AutoChef for coffee. “It’s not all that often you find someone your gut says is guilty who looks and acts guilty right off.”
With the coffee, she paced. “Not a light on in the house, entrance door light’s off, too. He claimed he had a headache, took a blocker, went to bed right after she left to work out. Then claims we’re crazy because she’s sleeping upstairs. In one of the guest rooms because she wouldn’t have disturbed him due to convenient headache.
“Asshole can’t even work up the pretense of shock and grief. I think he tried, but it’s not in him. He’s insulted we’d claim she had an affair, orders us out. He never asked how, specifically, she died, where she was, when he could see her. Never talked about having to tell their son, her family.”
She leaned back against her console. “The guy she’d been banging’s an artist. She’s got one of his paintings in her parlor deal. The only real I saw was satisfaction—just an instant—when I said nice painting. I guarantee if I walk into that room now, that painting’s gone.
“He paid Cobbe to kill her. Now I have to prove it.” Watching him, she drank more coffee. “What you know should help me do that.”
“I like to think so. Despite the hour, you’ll want to set up your board and book. I’ll do the board—I know by now how you like it—and I’ll tell you what I can while we’re about it.”
“All right.” She opened operations on her command center.
As he knew she preferred the physical to the virtual, he sat at the auxiliary to print out photos.
“If there’s a law enforcement or intelligence agency on planet who isn’t aware of Lorcan Cobbe, I’ve never heard of it. While his choice of profession keeps him largely in Europe, he’s ventured afield a few times. He keeps no fixed address, not one they’ve found in any case. He’ll have holes to crawl into between jobs, and they’ll be on the lavish side. He always wanted the good life, and with his fees, he can afford it.”
She stopped to look over. “You tracked down his fees?”