“Oh, don’t even start that crap with me. People like me risk everything to put people like her in a cage. Then you deal it down to nothing so they walk out and do it all again. She does under three years, and you call that a win.”
“It’s not about winning, it’s about doing our jobs. We both did our jobs, and this is where we stand. If you convince her to confess, we can save the taxpayers’ money, avoid a trial, and move on. Now do you want to tie this up so we can both go home, or do you want to stand here and bitch at me about how the system works?”
“The system sucks.”
“Are we ready?” Peabody asked as she came back, fizzy in hand.
“We’re ready. I don’t need you in there, Reo.”
“Not your call. We’re on the same side, Dallas, so suck it up.”
Peabody pushed open the door.
Face set, eyes still flashing with anger, Eve walked in. “Record on. Dallas, Lieutenant Eve; Peabody, Detective Delia; Reo, Assistant Prosecuting Attorney Cher, entering Interview with Mackie, Willow.”
She reeled off the rest of the data as Peabody set the fizzy on the table. Willow picked it up, held it in her restrained hands, and sipped with a smirk on her face.
“Have you been read your rights, Miss Mackie?”
“Yeah. And sure, I understand them fine. Banged you up pretty good. Too bad your hand got in the way of my knife.”
“Don’t be disrespectful.” Peabody sent her a disapproving scowl. “You’re in deep enough.”
“Could’ve taken you,” Willow shot back. “And you’d be as dead as that idiot who played you in the vid.”
“Back-talking adults isn’t going to help you,” Peabody warned. “You’re in serious trouble, Willow.”
“You busted into my house. I defended myself.”
“We entered your mother’s house duly warranted,” Eve corrected. “And found you in possession of numerous illegal weapons. You utilized those weapons to attack police officers.”
Willow smiled. She might have been an attractive young woman, despite the bruises and scrapes a few passes with the healing wand and some ice packs hadn’t soothed away. But there was ugliness in that smile.
She lifted her middle finger, scratched her cheek with it as she looked at Eve. “Not my weapons. I used them to defend myself.”
“You fired on police officers,” Eve reminded her.
“How the fuck was I supposed to know you were cops?”
“Because we identified ourselves as same.”
“Like that means dick.”
“You saw the vid? The Icove Agenda?”
“Sure. Every time I watch it, I root for you to get blown up in the Icove lab.” Smiling, Willow rolled her eyes toward the ceiling. “Maybe one day.”
“But you didn’t recognize me?”
“Only saw you for a second.”
“That would be the second before you tossed a flash grenade in a bid to escape.”
“Defense.” Willow shrugged again. “Doesn’t matter if I knew or not. I was defending myself and my home. I’ve got a right.”
“Willow, you knew who we were.” Peabody shook her head—the disapproving teacher. “This disrespect isn’t helping. Maybe you were taken by surprise, maybe you acted on impulse, instinct, but—”
“Yeah, maybe.”
“What were you doing with all those weapons?” Eve demanded.
“Keeping them secure.”
“Where did you get them?”
“Not mine, remember? I’m too young to buy or own weapons. Fifteen.” She grinned wide. “Remember?”
Teeth set, Eve shot a hard glance at Reo. “You were in possession of the weapons. You used several of the weapons.”
“I know how to take care of myself.”
“How did you learn to use the weapons, the laser rifles, the flash grenades, the handhelds?”
“My father taught me. He’s twice the cop you ever thought about being.”
“I guess that’s why I put him in a cage, where he’s going to stay for the rest of his life.”
“You only have him because he let you.”
“Is that so?”
“Fucking A, it’s so.”
“If you think I can’t bring a funky-junkie down, you didn’t pay attention to the vid.”
“Vid’s bullshit anyway. Just Hollywood crap.”
“Your father’s a junkie, and that’s no bullshit.”
“So he couldn’t hack it.” Lip curled, Willow jabbed out a finger. “See how you’d handle it if some fucker smeared your sugar daddy all over the pavement.”
“And the way to handle it was the funk for him, and planning how to kill everyone he blamed. Or having you do it because he can’t even hold a weapon steady these days.”
“So you say.”
“So I do. Do you want to deny it?”
Willow yawned, kicked back some to stare at the ceiling. “This is boring. You’re boring. Dallas,” she said, shifting her gaze to meet Eve’s. “Dallas, Lieutenant Eve. One of these days you’re not going to be wearing body armor. One of these days maybe you’ll just be walking down the street, and out of nowhere— Bang! You’re dead. Bet they won’t make a vid out of that.”
Eve kept her gaze steady, and she saw, clearly, what Zoe Younger had feared. She saw the killer inside. “You want me dead, Will?”
“I’d rather you were dead than me sitting here bored out of my mind.”
“Bored? Then let’s move it along. Stop wasting time. Let’s go back to Central Park. Three dead there. How did you pick them?”
“Who says I did?”
“Your father. He’s confessed. He called you his eyes, his hands. You made those strikes, Willow. He couldn’t pull it off.”
“I got my eyes and hands from him.”
“He ruined his own by going on the funk.”
Willow shrugged, then studied her fingernails. “That’s his deal, not mine. The way I look at it, drugs, alcohol, all that shit is bogus. They don’t keep it real.”
“You like it real.”
“What’s the point if you’re not feeling it? You’re not knowing it? You’re not doing it?”
Eve opened the file, took out photos of the first three victims. “How did you feel when you did this?”
Willow shifted forward, gave the photos a good, long study. What Eve saw in her eyes wasn’t curiousity or interest. It certainly wasn’t shock.
It was glee.
Not bored, Eve realized. Enthralled, excited, and stringing the process out. Because it kept her at the center.
“Those are primo strikes.” Willow paused to take a swig of her fizzy. “Anyone who can make strikes like that? They’re the elite.”
“Are you the elite?”
“No such thing as second best.” Smug, she tipped her fizzy side to side. “That’s just a wuss term for loser. It’s first, or it’s nothing.”
“So making strikes like this puts you in first, makes you elite.”
“Could you do it?”
“Can’t say.” Now Eve shrugged. “Never tried. Then again, I’m not interested in killing somebody a mile away while they skate around on an ice rink.”
“You couldn’t, and that’s bottom line. I’m guessing you can barely hit the mark at anything over ten yards with your sidearm, much less handle a long-range weapon with any accuracy. You’d’ve missed by that mile, zipped some asshole bopping down Fifty-Second Street.”
“But then I wouldn’t have, what is it, about ten years of training, instruction, practice. Wouldn’t have a former Army sniper and SWAT officer indulging my hobby.”
“Hobby, my ass!” Teeth bared, Willow shoved forward. “And it takes more than training, instruction, takes more than practice. All that’s important, sure, but it takes talent, it takes
innate skill.”
“So you were born to kill.”
Easing back, Willow smiled again. “I was born to hit what I aim at.”
“Why aim at her?” Eve tapped Ellissa Wyman.
“Why not her?”
“Just random, just because?” Eve angled her head, shook it. “I don’t think so. Come on, Willow, she was a type, just the type you can’t stand. Out there showing off, day after day, like it mattered she could do a few spins and jumps on a pair of blades. Like being pretty made her somebody.”
“Now she’s just a body.”
“How did it feel to make her just a body? To cut off her life with one pull of the trigger with her out there in her show-off red suit? I think it got you off. It got you juiced so your aim was off with the main target, with Michaelson.”
“Bullshit.” Insult, rage, a wash of disgust skimmed over Willow’s face. “He went down the way I wanted him to go down. Gut shot, bleeding out on the ice. Feeling it, knowing it.”
“You wanted him to suffer?”
“He did, didn’t he? I don’t miss, got that? Do you got that? I gave him time for pain, time to know he’d never get up again. If the old bastard had put us first, my father would still have his eyes and hands.”
“Then he wouldn’t need you to do his work. He wouldn’t need you.”
“I’m his. I’m his first. His only.”
“You wouldn’t have been his only if Susann hadn’t run into traffic.”
“She was an idiot.”
Eve widened her eyes. “You killed all these people over an idiot?”
In her default gesture, Willow shrugged, looked up at the ceiling.
“I know you must have loved her.” Peabody infused her voice with just enough pity. “To do all this, I know you must have loved her, thought the world of her.”
“Oh please.” Derision dripped through the two words. “She could barely remember how to put her own shoes on every morning. Totally loserville. Sooner or later my old man would’ve walked away from that. Winners walk away. But he didn’t get the chance.”
“These people are dead because your father couldn’t walk away a winner.” Eve considered it. “Maybe that’s part of it. You killed Wyman fast, aimed so Michaelson could suffer, then—what about Alan Markum?”
“Don’t know him.”
“Your third.” Eve nudged the photo closer.
“Right. Didn’t like his face. Laughing and smiling while he stumbled around the ice with the bitch. I could’ve taken her out, too. Two for one, but I didn’t want to push my father right off. We’d agreed on three.”
“Lay it out for me.” Eve gestured. “How the two of you planned it, picked the nest, stalked Michaelson.”
“Seriously? What’s the point?”
“The record. You’ve got nothing better to do.”
“Anything’s better.”
But with a huge sigh, Willow laid it out.
She spoke of her father drinking, starting on illegals after Susann died. His anger, depression.
“Just sitting around the apartment most of the time, half-drunk, half-stoned, especially after that fuckhead lawyer told him no chance for a suit, for his day in court. I pulled him out.” Fiercely, Willow jabbed her fingers at her own chest. “I got him out of that hole.”
“How did you do that?”
“Crying’s for losers. He needed to get pissed. Take action. They fucked with us? We fuck with them, and we fuck harder.”
Eve leaned back. “You’re trying to tell us it was your idea? This mission? Killing Michaelson, Officer Russo, Jonah Rothstein, and the others on the hit list—including innocent bystanders of your choice—was your idea?”
“Is something wrong with your hearing? Do you need me to speak louder?”
“Watch your tone.”
Willow merely flicked a sneer at Peabody’s order. “Oh, fuck you and your tone. You want me to lay it out because you’re all too stupid to see it. I’m laying it out.”
“Why not start with Fine?” Eve demanded. “He’s the one who killed Susann. He was driving the vehicle that struck her.”
“What, are you brain dead? We hit Fine, even an asshole cop could make a connection to Dad. We end with Fine.”
“He wanted to save Fine until last.”
Once again Willow leaned forward, sneering. “Did you get the part where I said he was drunk and stoned most of the time? Crying into his brew the other half? I figured the who and where and when. You think he could come up with a mission? He couldn’t get out of his own way until I pulled him out of it.”
“You pulled him out by suggesting you kill the people you felt were culpable in Susann’s death.”
“You could say I laid it out for him—and put conditions on it.” Picking up her fizzy again, she gestured with it. “He had to cut back on the booze and the funk, pull himself to-fucking-gether. He mostly stopped drinking altogether. Funk’s harder, but he throttled back a little. And when my old man’s himself, he knows how to plan ops.
“He came up with adding to the range, so we took a few more trips out west, and I worked on my skills. He’s a damn good instructor when he’s on.”
“You stalked your targets, got their routines, and/or researched where they’d be at certain times. Like Jonah Rothstein. You knew he’d be at Madison Square for the concert.”
“The guy was a raging fan-o-holic. Counting down the days, then the hours till he saw that old, totally over rocker. My dad, he did most of the research, but I helped when I could get away from Zoe—that’s the bio-tube where I incubated. And I picked the nests. He wanted closer initially, but then he saw I could do it.”
“How long did you work on the plan, on the details?”
“A good, solid year. He needed to clean up, at least some. We needed to stockpile weapons, the IDs, walk through the strategies and tactics.”
“You moved out of his apartment.”
“We needed a secure HQ, so yeah, bit by bit we moved what we needed to the new place. We knew we’d have to move fast when we started, hit targets daily, keep the chaos going. You got lucky, nailing down our ID.”
“Is that what you call it when somebody’s better than you, smarter than you? Luck?”
“Give me half a break. If you were so good, so smart, I wouldn’t have to sit here spoon-feeding you every detail. You’d already know.”
“Got me there,” Eve said, because she did. She saw it all, in hideous detail. “Don’t stop now. Educate me.”
20
Willow Mackie overflowed with details, smirks, and insults. Eve gave her the center spot she craved, and basking in the attention, she rolled.
For three hours Eve listened, probed, nudged, with the occasional question or comment from Reo or Peabody.
Pushing wasn’t necessary, not as Willow warmed up to the idea of being important.
At one point she demanded another fizzy, and around hour three demanded a bathroom break.
“Peabody, have two uniformed officers, female, accompany Willow to the bathroom.”
On a hard laugh, Willow sneered at Eve. “You’ve been listening to all I can do, and you think I can’t take a couple of girl cops?”
You couldn’t take me, Eve thought, but nodded. “Make it four, Peabody.”
“That’s more like it.”
“Interview paused,” Eve said, and strode out.
Reo caught up with her just outside the bullpen. “Jesus Christ, Eve.”
“You were expecting a sulky teenager?”
“I was expecting a stone killer. I guess I wasn’t expecting a raging, showboating psychopath inside a teenager. I need to update my boss, and I want to talk to Mira. I want to make dead certain this girl is legally sane.”
“She’s as legally sane as you and me. And she’s a vicious little bug tha
t needs squashing.”
“I’m with you on part two. Let me make part one absolutely solid.”
“Take fifteen.” Rocking back on her heels, Eve tried to decide if she felt disgusted or satisfied. Realized she could feel both. “I want her sitting in there again, waiting, getting worked up about telling us the rest.”
“We’ve got enough to put her away for countless lifetimes already. But yeah, I want the rest, too. Fifteen,” Reo said, then hurried off.
Eve stepped into the bullpen, surprised how many of her team remained. “I’m not done, but I can promise you she is. She’s confessed to all of it, and I’m wrapping her up. For God’s sake, anybody not on the roll, go home.”
“How’s the eye, LT?” Jenkinson called out.
“It stings like a bitch, but that’s from looking at that tie. Go home.”
She walked into her office to see Roarke sitting at her desk, working his own PPC and her comp at the same time.
“Done?”
She shook her head. “What’s that?” She pointed at her own screen and what looked like some sort of ancient castle surrounded by some kind of cage.
“Ah, that’s progress on the projected hotel in Italy. I’ll have it off your unit before I leave. Coffee?”
“No. No, I need something cold.” She glanced back out. “I should’ve hit Vending—probably literally—for a Pepsi.”
“They’re stocked in your AC now.”
“They are?”
“To save you the frustration of Vending.”
She surprised herself by being absurdly touched. And needing to sit down. She dropped into the ass-biting visitor’s chair.
“That bad, is it?” Roarke rose, ordered the tube himself.
“She’s told us everything up to and including Madison Square. I didn’t expect her to feel remorse, to feel anything for the victims. And I did expect her to feel pride. But . . . It’s the glee. The goddamn jubilation. I didn’t expect the extent of that, how her ego rules all.
“It was all her idea. Part of me knew that, all of me wondered. You had to consider Mackie’s state of mind. He’d never have been able to do all this, think of it all. But she did. He was paying too much attention to his grief, and not enough to her. She didn’t say it, but it came across clear. She had no respect for her stepmother, called her an idiot. She used her father’s grief, his weakness—it wasn’t him using her, but her using him—to realize her greatest ambition. To take lives.”