Brotherhood in Death (In Death #42)(93)

As they walked, Eve took out her own ’link, contacted Baxter, brought him up to date.

“So when your relief gets there, go back to Central. Once EDD nails the key swipes, we’ll move there. And maybe the lab will hit a miracle with the old keys. Meanwhile, we start digging deeper on the three women we know. You and Trueheart take MacKensie. I want to know what her first fucking word was, what her mother eats for breakfast, where she shops, banks, plays. Everywhere she’s lived since before she was freaking born.”

“Got that, LT. We’ll review with the relief and we’re all over it.”

She grunted, clicked off. When they got in the car, it released a new blast of resentment from other drivers. Eve mentally flicked them the bird, turned off her On Duty light, pulled out.

“But,” she continued as if there had been no pause in the conversation, “it wasn’t going to be enough. I had to believe it would be, but it wasn’t going to be enough to keep getting me through. Mira saw that, and, God, I resented the hell out of her back then because she saw what I didn’t want her to see. What I didn’t want to see. Just stay the fuck out of my head, I’m fine.

“There was an incident—asshole flying on Zeus, and a kid—just a baby. And I couldn’t get there in time. Just too late to stop it. I don’t know why that one came so close to breaking me, but it did. Maybe I’d hit some threshold, maybe it was—What do you call it?—cumulative, but it knocked me hard, and this was just as the DeBlass case landed on me. I’m fine, I can handle it. Handle seeing that baby cut to pieces, handle Testing because I’d had to terminate the asshole who cut the baby to pieces, handle the DeBlass case with its Code Five.”

She paused at a light, scrubbed her hands over her face, wishing she could will away the fatigue and the raw feeling in her gut. “And then there was Roarke. I still remember doing the first run on him, having his face come on my screen. And thinking: Well, look at him. Rich guy—stupidly rich guy. Mr. Mystery with no first name and a face that just took your breath. I shouldn’t have gotten involved with him. And I couldn’t stop—it was there right from the first second, and I couldn’t stop. It wasn’t physical.”

Then she laughed, took off at the green. “Hell yeah, it was physical, but I mean it wasn’t just.”

“I know what you mean. I get that.”

“It was like something out there said, ‘Hell, let’s give these two a break. It’s time they found each other.’ And it broke, those first cracks on what I’d locked away. I could start facing it because I could trust him to stand for me. Trust him to let me stand for myself. There was no way to lock away what I felt for him. I couldn’t make it stop or go back, and somewhere along the line I stopped wanting it to. I think, without that, I’d have lost myself. Somewhere down the line the victims would stop mattering so much, the job would just be the job. Maybe I’d have gotten the bars first, who knows, but I’d have stopped being the kind of cop I needed to be.”

And that, she knew absolutely, that would have ended her.

“I’d have stopped surviving without what I let in, with him. Without what letting that in let me let in otherwise. I might have pulled you in, like maybe I’ll pull in Shelby, but we wouldn’t be partners. I wouldn’t have had the chops for it.”

She made the turn into the garage at Central.

“So I found that peace. Cases like this, they can shake it. Sometimes I can lose it, like water dripping through your fingers. But I know where to find it again, and with who. You’re part of that. Part of the where and the who.”

She pulled into her slot, glanced over. “Stop that!” she ordered as tears streamed silently down Peabody’s cheeks. “No blubbering. We’re in a cop-shop garage. There’s no blubbering in a cop shop—when you’re a cop.”

“I’m not blubbering.” But Peabody blubbered a little as she dug in her pockets for a tissue. “And I’m not giving you a really big hug right now, like I really want to do. I just want to say that anytime that peace gets shaken, you can count on me. You can count on me,” she repeated and, blowing her nose, shoved out of the car.

Eve sat in the car another moment. “I know it,” she murmured, and got out to get back to the job.





17


Eve went straight to EDD, hoping the e-geeks would give her something solid.

She found the e-lab packed with them.

McNab stood—hips jiving in his neon pants, hoops sparkling around his ear—at a station peering through some sort of scope. Feeney sat in his wrinkled brown suit, his hair standing up as if he’d been electrocuted while he swiped at two screens simultaneously.

The well-endowed Callendar seemed to dance between two stations, shoulders bouncing, which made the well-endowed portion—where for some unknown reason a monkey rode a unicycle across her spangled red shirt—bounce in turn.

Yet another geek Eve only vaguely recognized sat, bopping in his stool with comp guts spread out over his station. He had hair as red as Callendar’s shirt worn in long dreads with tips as bright and yellow as an exploding sun. The tips matched his bibbed baggies.

Eve vaguely wished she had sunshades as she pushed into the lab.

Spotting them, McNab wiggled his eyebrows at Peabody. “Yo, Captain, Dead Squad’s here.”