“You want me to cut your client a deal, before he tells me jackshit—and I should do that to spare myself and the NYPSD a little media heat?” She leaned forward. “You know what, Sam? I like the heat, and I haven’t even broken a sweat yet. I’ll have your client tied up and dunked within twenty-four, without his statement. So if that’s all—”
She started to rise, and Peabody stepped up. “Lieutenant, maybe we should take a minute.”
“Maybe you’ve got more time to waste than I do.”
“Lieutenant, come on. I mean, Mr. Crocker did come in, and if two of the victim’s sons-in-law are willing to stand with him, I think we need to hear what he has to say. The circumstances.” She sent Billy a sympathetic look. “None of this could be easy, for anyone. I know you and Mr. Jenkins were friends, good friends, for a long, long time. Whatever happened, it has to be rough. It has to be really hard.”
“We were friends,” Billy managed. “As close as brothers.”
“I get that. We can’t cut deals here. We don’t even know what you’re going to tell us. But that doesn’t mean we can’t, and won’t, listen with an open mind.”
“You can take Murder One off the table,” Samuel argued. “You can contact the prosecutor’s office and arrange for that before this goes any further.”
“No.” Eve spoke flatly.
“The PA wouldn’t do it,” Peabody continued in that same reasonable, wish-I-could-help tone. “Even if we—”
“I won’t do it.” Eve spared Peabody a glare. “I don’t need the statement to close this. Maybe it ties it sooner, and with a bow on it, but I’m not much on the fancy work. Make a statement, or don’t. Your choice. And you?” She lifted her chin toward Billy. “You play make a deal with the PA on your own time. This is mine, and you’re wasting it.”
“Billy,” Luke said softly. “You need to do this. Sam—” He simply held up a hand to stop Samuel from arguing. “Not just for man’s law. You need to do this to begin to make it right with God. You need to do this for your soul. There can be no salvation without the admission of sin.”
Silence fell. It ticked, ticked, ticked. Eve waited it out.
“I believed it was the right thing to do.” Billy gulped in a breath. “The only thing. Maybe it was the Devil working through me, but I believed I was acting on the behalf of God.”
Billy lifted his hands, a supplicant. “Jimmy Jay had strayed, and was straying farther and farther off the path. The drink, he couldn’t see the sin in it, or how his weakness for it corroded his soul. He deceived his wife, his followers, and didn’t see it as deception, but a kind of joke. An amusement. He became less cautious, drinking more, and often writing his sermons, even preaching under the influence of drink.”
“You killed him because he knocked back too much vodka?” Eve demanded. “Hell, why not just hit any given bar or club on a Friday night and get the group-kill rate?”
“Lieutenant.” Peabody murmured it, cocked her head at Billy. “You couldn’t convince him to stop?”
“He enjoyed it, and believed every man was entitled, even required to have flaws and weaknesses. To seek perfection was to seek to take the place of God. But . . . he even brought his children into the deception, having Josie—especially Josie—provide the drink. This isn’t the loving act of a father, is it? He’d lost his way. The drink corroded him, and made him weak so he fell to the temptations of the flesh.”
“And screwed around on his wife.”
“That’s an unpleasant term.” Luke shook his head.
“It’s unpleasant behavior,” Eve countered. “You knew about his affairs.”
“Yes. Five times before he’d committed adultery, broken this commandment. But he repented. He came to me so we could pray together, so he could ask for forgiveness, and the strength to resist temptation.”
“You covered for him.”
“Yes. For too long, yes, I did. He knew what he risked by falling into such sin. His soul, his wife and family, the church itself. And he fought it.”
Tears glimmered in Billy’s eyes as he swiped at them with the back of his hand. “He was a good man, a great man, with deep weaknesses, with the pull of good and evil inside him. And this time, this last time, he didn’t resist, he didn’t repent. He refused to see it as sinful. He’d twisted God’s word, you see, to suit his own base needs. He claimed that with this woman, and with the drink, he gained more light, more insight, more truth.”
“And still, you covered for him.”
“It was becoming more difficult, for my conscience. The weight . . . and knowing I was a party to it, he’d made me a party to it. His betrayal of God, of his good wife. And as with the drink, he became less cautious. It was only a matter of time before his sins were discovered. Sins that could have irreparably damaged all the work that came before. All he’d done, all he’d built, now at risk as he was caught in this cycle of sin.”
“So you stopped the cycle.”
“There was no choice.” His gaze met Eve’s, beseeched her to understand that single point. “The church, you must see, the church is bigger than any one of us. And must be protected. I prayed for him, I counseled him, argued with him. He wouldn’t see. He was blind to
it. We’re all just men, Lieutenant. Even Jimmy Jay. He stood as the head of the church, as a representative of the Lord on Earth, but he was only a man. The man had to be stopped to save his soul, and to preserve the work of the Eternal Light.”
“You killed him to save him.”