“Yes, I did. The Blue Line.”
“Being retired doesn’t shift the line.”
“From where I stand that line breaks for a wrong cop, or it means nothing. For a cop who uses her badge, her authority to fill her own pockets, and worse, the line breaks.”
He kept his gaze hard on her face. “And if I say hell, yeah, you’re going to believe me after everything I just told you?”
“Yes, I am. I came to you because I believe you’re a good cop—fuck retirement, Allo, you’re still a cop. You’ll always be a cop. I came to you because I believe you respect the badge, and because I believe I can take your word, even your opinion, to the bank.”
He took a long drink, let out a long breath. “I’m going to say hell, yeah, but I couldn’t prove it, couldn’t give you one solid piece of evidence. Not then, not now. She liked her closed-door meetings with her chosen few. And I know damn well with a couple of the busts I managed to stick on, somebody skimmed. No way I underestimate junk by the amounts it came back to after weigh-in. My mistake there was going to her on just that. Telling the boss I suspected somebody’d skimmed some off the top. That’s when things got bad for me. Or worse, I guess you’d say.”
He shrugged. “Coincidence? Maybe if you believe in coincidence. I never did.”
“Neither do I. I bet you still have your notebooks. I bet you still have your records of the investigations and busts you took part in under Lieutenant Oberman.”
“You’d win that bet.”
“I’m trusting you, Allo, to keep everything said here to yourself. Not to share it, at this time, with the friends you talk to, hook up with. I’m not going to insult you by saying if you do that, if you trust me with those records I’ll see that rip is expunged from your record. But I will tell you, either way you go, I’m going to look into that.”
“I’m not asking for a favor, but I won’t turn this one down.” He sat another minute. “She’s done murder, too?”
“Her hands are bloody.”
“I’m sorry to hear it, sorry because of her old man. You’re going to take her down.”
It wasn’t a question, but Eve answered anyway. “To the ground.”
He nodded, rose. “I’ll get my books.”
He paused at the door, turned back. “There was an officer—female officer—who went down in the line under Oberman.”
“Detective Gail Devin.”
He nodded. “She was a good cop. She was the daughter of an old friend of mine. My oldest friend. We went to school together in the old neighborhood. She had some concerns about Oberman and came to me with them.”
“What concerns?”
“How Oberman tended to have regular closed-door meets with certain members of the squad. How invoices for confiscated illegals and cash were usually under the estimate. Same as me. I looked into it after it happened, as best I could. It looked clean, but I always wondered. I had this place in me that wondered, and it still does. If you look into that, Lieutenant, if you look into what happened to Gail, you can forget about the rip.”
“I’ll be looking into both.”
Driving back to Manhattan, Eve considered angles, approaches, timing.
“I want you to take the lead on Devin.”
“Take the lead?”
“Approaching it like a cold case, an unsolved. Dig into the files. Have McNab and/or Webster help you if you need to shovel anywhere that might send Renee a flag. She’s not thinking about Devin—that’s old, settled business to her.”
“You think Renee had Detective Devin killed?”
“Fact: Devin wasn’t one of Renee’s handpicks. She was a newly minted detective, and according to our source—DS Allo, who strikes me as very grounded—she was solid. In my scan of her records, her evals were the same. Solid. Until assigned to Renee where they took a dip.”
“And that’s pattern with Renee.”
“Add in Mira’s profile, which says Renee has a problem with females. Conclude with another fact. Less than a year under Renee’s command, Devin goes down in a raid. The only officer to go down.”
“How did she go down?”