Promises in Death by J. D. Robb

Germany or something?”
    “He was raised there, and his father kept him insulated. When Ricker and I had . . . business together, Alex was kept back. I never met him. I’m not sure any of Ricker’s associates did—not then.”
    Yes, she had her balance back now, and walked it through. “You worked with Ricker, back in the bad old days. Went out on your own, did a hell of a lot better. Years later, you help me take Ricker down, way down, so he’s spending the rest of his miserable life in a concrete cage off-planet. I wonder what his baby boy thinks of that.”
    “I don’t know anything of their relationship, but I do know that Ricker’s connected to me—to my father, to yours. I know he went to a lot of trouble to take me down, and failed. And to end you, and failed. Now his son may very well be connected to your victim.”
    Eve sat back, tapped her fingers on her thighs. Thinking, thinking. “Max Ricker had a lot of cops in his pocket. A lot of officials, a lot of politicians. We dug some of them out last year, but it’s unlikely we dug them all. Would Ricker have passed them to his son?”
    “I can’t say for sure—yet. But who else?”
    “Yeah. And his businesses, too—what we didn’t find and shut down. Certainly, his contacts, his power points, and there’d be finances. Coltraine meets the son of a notorious criminal, now doing life—well, several terms of life—she’d have run him. She’d run the owner of the business that got hit. It’s routine. Make sure it doesn’t come up an insurance fraud, at the very least. When she did, she’d have made the connection to his father. She’d ask him about it. Have to.”
    She pushed up, walked to her board to study Coltraine’s ID shot. “She’d have to ask. Three years ago Ricker was still at large, still slithering through the loopholes, but any standing background check on the son would have coughed out the data on the father.”
    “I don’t know if it has any bearing on your case, but . . .”
    “Yeah, but.” She looked back at Roarke. “Did she close it? The case?”
    “In a manner of speaking. She narrowed it down to three suspects. In each case when she secured a search warrant and went to serve it, she found the suspects gone and several items from the antique shop on the premises. Within two days, the bodies of the three men were found floating in the Chattahoochee River—chained together.”
    “The what river? Did you make that up?”
    “I suppose I could have, but no. I suspect some Native Americans did that a few centuries ago.”
    “I think it’d be embarrassing to be dead in the Hoochie-Coochie River.”
    “Chattahoochee.”
    “What’s the difference?”
    “Quite a bit, I’d think, to Atlantans.” He moved to her, laid a hand on her cheek. “And now that you’ve finished lightening the mood until you can get a handle on this . . .”
    After a while, Eve thought, marriage turned walls into clear glass so both of you could see right through each other. “Okay. Okay, so maybe it’s like father, like son? Ricker’s a killer. He didn’t think twice about snapping necks or slitting them. The son gets ripped off, hunts down the ripper-offers—or follows Coltraine’s dots to same—and does them. Or has them done. She’d have to look there.”
    “According to the file, Alex Ricker was attending a charity event, in Miami, with a few hundred witnesses at the time of death of the three suspects.”
    “Didn’t want to get his hands dirty, ordered the hit when he was covered.”
    “Possibly. If so, he proved as elusive as his father did. Oh, and I accessed the ME reports on the dead thieves.” He watched her start to speak—to object, no doubt—then swallow it. “They’d been beaten over the course of several hours, incurred numerous broken bones before their throats were slit. That’s the Ricker touch, in my opinion.”
    “She had to know it.” Eve studied Coltraine again, tried to see into her head. “Everyone