She started coughing again. He lifted her, held a tissue to her lips until she cleared the shit that was sitting in her lungs, cleaned her mouth after. He fed her sips of water, laid her gently back down. Wiped the sweat of effort from her brow with another tissue, waited while her breathing stabilised again.
He leaned in closer. ‘So who’d you want to kill?’
‘Amy fucking Westhoff,’ she said bitterly. ‘Fucking bitch that killed Ethan.’
‘You told me the SWATs took Ethan down.’
‘Yeah. But someone had to leak this shit, someone had to find out what Ethan was and notify UNGLA liaison up at city hall. You remember I told you in Istanbul, Ethan was seeing this cheerleader blonde in datacrime?’
‘Vaguely.’
‘That was Westhoff. She showed up in the corridor outside my office the week Ethan moved in with me, screaming abuse, telling me I didn’t know what I was getting into. Saying she’d fuck with my life and Ethan’s if I didn’t back off.’
‘You think she knew what he was?’
‘I don’t know. Not then, I don’t think. If she’d known, I think she would have used it on him when he tried to move out.’
‘Maybe she did, and he didn’t tell you.’
That stopped her, pinned her to a long pause while she thought about it. He tilted his head, trying to work a kink out of his neck.
‘I don’t believe she knew back then,’ Sevgi said finally. ‘Maybe she had her suspicions on and off. I think I did too if I’m honest about it, even before Keegan showed up and blew the whole thing. You know, if you’re a woman, it’s one of those things you can’t help thinking about sometimes. I mean, there’s so much scare stuff out there. All the warnings, all the sexy panic every time someone gets out of Cimarron or Tanana. The Truth About Thirteens, how to recognise one, what you guys are supposed to be like, how you’d act that’s different from a regular guy. Warning signs, freephone snitch numbers, public information postings, and then the fucking media aftermath every time. You know, I saw a woman’s magazine article once while I was waiting to see my lawyer. Are you Sleeping with a Thirteen? – thirteen tell-tale signs that let you know. Fucking bullshit like that.’
She twitched about in the bed with the force of her frustration. Her breath came hoarse and agitated. Voice impatient.
‘Anyway, whether she knew then or not, I know damn well she was keeping tabs on Ethan. And then, when we fucked up, when we got complacent after Keegan, she had her chance.’
‘She knew about the pregnancy?’
‘Yeah, well, we weren’t hiding that. I started showing seriously at three months, went on reduced duties at four. Of course she knew, everybody knew by then.’ Sevgi stopped, waited until her breathing evened out again. ‘That wasn’t it. When we got pregnant, something in Ethan shifted. That was when he started trying to track down his genetic mother. He’d always talked about doing it, all this stuff about wanting to know who his real mother was, but with the baby—’
‘So, not his surrogate then?’
‘No. That was finished business, as far as he was concerned. He never wanted to see her again. Never talked about her to me. But he was hung up about finding Patti. The baby really kicked him into action.’
Carl saw the link. ‘You think he went to Westhoff to do the searches?’
‘I don’t know. But he went to datacrime, I know that much because he told me he was going to. They’ve got the best machines in the city for that kind of work, and he knew quite a few people there, not just Amy.’ He saw the way her fists clenched where they lay on he bed. ‘But Amy knew. She came up to me on the street, congratulated me on the baby, said something about how it was great Ethan was getting back in touch with his family. I told Ethan that, but,’ she rolled her head back and forth on the pillow, ‘like I said, we got so fucking complacent about everything.’
‘Is there any actual evidence Westhoff tipped off UNGLA?’
‘Enough to make a case?’ He thought she smiled in the dimness. ‘No. But you remember I told you someone in the department tipped Ethan off that they were coming for him?’
‘Yeah, you said a downtown number.’
‘Yeah.’ She was smiling, bleakly. ‘Datacrime is downtown. I talked to a datacrime sergeant said Amy Westhoff was acting weird all that day. Upset about something, in and out of the office all the time. The call went out from another floor in the building, an empty office up on fifth, but she could have got there easily enough.’
‘Could have. You said he had a lot of friends in datacrime.’
‘No one knew about the SWAT deployment. No one except whoever it was that tipped them off in the first place.’
‘Did Ethan have any friends in the SWAT chain of command? Or in city hall, maybe?’
‘Sure, and they waited until the morning it was due to go down before they called. And they went all the way across the city to do it, to a downtown NYPD precinct house and a fifth-floor office that they just happened to know would be empty. Come on, Carl. Give me a fucking break.’
‘And no one else picked up on this?’
Another weak smile. ‘No one wanted to. First off, it’s not a crime to turn in a thirteen to the authorities. You still see screen ads encouraging good citizens to do exactly that, every time someone gets out of Cimarron or Tanana. And then there’s the fact that Ethan was a cop, and to all appearances it looks like another cop ratted him out. That’s the kind of thing most people in the department would rather just forget ever happened.’
He nodded. He thought it might be starting to get light outside.
‘So you planned to kill her. Have her killed. What stopped you?’
‘I don’t know.’ She closed her eyes. Voice small and weary with the effort she’d been making. ‘In the end, I couldn’t make myself go through with it, you know. I’ve killed people in the line of duty, had to, to stay alive myself. But this is different. It’s cold. You’ve got to be so fucking cold.’
Beyond the window, the night was definitely beginning to bleach out. Carl saw Sevgi’s face more clearly now, saw the desolation in it. He leaned over and kissed her gently on the forehead.
‘Try to get some rest now,’ he said.
‘I couldn’t,’ she muttered, as if trying to explain herself before a judge, or maybe to Ethan Conrad. ‘I just couldn’t do it.’
Rovayo showed up, off-duty, with flowers. Sevgi was barely polite. The jokes she made about casual fucking, in a hoarse whisper of a voice, weren’t funny and no one laughed. Rovayo toughed it out, spent the time there she’d announced she could, promised awkwardly to return. The look in Sevgi’s eyes suggested she didn’t much care or way or the other. Outside in the corridor afterwards, the Rim cop grimaced at Carl.
‘Bad idea, huh?’
‘It was a nice thought.’ He sought other matters, shielding from the coming truth behind the door at their backs. ‘You get anything from the crime scene?’
Rovayo shook her head. ‘Nothing that doesn’t belong to you, the dead guys or a dozen irrelevant Bayview low-lifes. This Onbekend must have been greased up pretty good.’
‘Yeah, he was.’ Carl brought recall to life, surprised himself with the stab of fury that accompanied the man’s half-familiar face. ‘You could see it in the light, shining in his hair pretty fucking thick as well. No way he was going to be leaving trace material for the CSI guys.’
‘Right. Makes you wonder why Merrin didn’t do the same thing. Instead of leaving his fucking trace all over everything for us to track him with.’