Secrets in Death (In Death #45)(87)

“Stop it.” He brought her hand to his lips, kissed it. “Stop now.”

“I should’ve told you, but—”

“No. You did exactly the right thing.”

“How? How is it the right thing? You have to be able to trust me. The Marriage Rules—”

A half laugh escaped him. “Oh, bugger the Marriage Rules over this.”

“If you bugger them over one thing, you start buggering them over the next.”

Because he understood her genuine distress, he pushed away all amusement, shook his head. “The world’s not so black-and-white, as both of us know well. We’ve lived in the gray. You didn’t tell me even though it would’ve unburdened you because it would be a betrayal, and because it may have burdened me. So I’m telling you it doesn’t. And it wouldn’t even if I didn’t know the whole of it now. I’d like to tell you why.”

“I know why. It doesn’t take a cop to understand he was protecting you and his daughter. It’s clear. I want to say he should have gone to the police, but they were corrupt, careless, cruel.”

“And a lot of them were in Patrick Roarke’s pocket. And still, for you, one who stands for the dead, whoever they were, it’s very hard. I hope to make it a little easier. He’d found me,” Roarke began.

He told her all, letting her go when she pushed up to pace.

“Would the cops have been complicit in this?” she demanded. “Would they have looked away while two children were sexually and physically abused?”

“There may have been some good or at least decent cops in that area back then, but the ones he had, the ones he knew? Not just looked away, Eve. They’d have participated.”

“In the brutalization of children.”

“Homeland looked away when a child was being brutalized by her father because it didn’t fit their agenda,” Roarke reminded her. “In my world then, the garda lined their pockets and did dark deeds more often than not.”

It sickened, and somehow steadied. “If what I did was self-defense, what he did was in defense of the defenseless.”

“And can you let it go? I don’t mean legally. I mean inside you. Can you breathe out what you’ve surely been holding in since you came to know?”

“Patrick Roarke killed your mother because she was inconvenient. He nearly beat you to death. He threatened you and an innocent girl. I can’t say what Summerset did was right. But I can believe it was just.”

She walked back, sat. “I saw him in my dream, dead on the ground of an alley. With Richard Troy and Big Rod Keith.”

So now she told him all.

“I believe I know who killed Keith.”

More weight she carried, Roarke thought. “What will you do?”

“It’s not for me to judge, to decide. I believe I know who, I believe I know why. It’s possible I could prove it. But it isn’t my investigation, and unless it crosses clearly into mine, I’m not going to pursue it. That’s the gray, and I’m not altogether comfortable there, but I can live with it. I’m not sure I could live with destroying the lives of good people to walk the straight line.”

She picked up her coffee, stared into it. “If it does cross clearly, if that changes, I will pursue, and I will prove it. I can’t do otherwise. Mars is my dead, and has to get my best. Or I don’t deserve the badge.”

“You’re right, all the way down the line. Black or white or gray, you’re right.” Gently, he stroked a hand over her hair. “And I’m with you.”

As she had in the night, she shifted, pressed her face to his shoulder. He wrapped his arms around her.

“There now, we’re fine, aren’t we?”

She held on, then realized she’d done just what he’d asked. She’d breathed it out. “We’re okay.”

She lifted her face, met his lips with hers, lingered there.

When she eased back, he started to run a hand down her hair again, then his eyes narrowed.

“Oh, that’s well beyond the pale.”

At the snap in his voice she jerked a little, glanced back in time to see Galahad leap off the table, bound over to the bed, leap up, and sprawl out as though exhausted.

“What?”

“Well, he was trying to get under the warming domes, wasn’t he? Sneaking his paw under the edge.”

“For oatmeal? Seriously?”

Galahad merely rolled over, giving them his back. Switching his tail.

“There’s bacon as well.” Roarke lifted off the domes again. “So have at it.”

She thought it too bad the cat hadn’t been quicker, but doctored her oatmeal up enough that she could claim it wasn’t all that bad.

Plus, bacon.

“I’m heading out a little early,” Eve began. “I want to go by the lab, give DeWinter and team another push. I want that face. Who she was is going to be important. I need to do a quick check on your search, on the names and locations, see if we hit anything that rings.”

“We hit a few that might.”

“What? You already looked?”

“Well, since I didn’t buy Uruguay, I had a moment or two to spare.”

“Have you got a list? I need to run them. I need to—”