Kindred in Death (In Death #29)(31)

“When it’s too much, bringing it home, you have to tell me.”

“Darling Eve.” He stepped to her, danced his fingertips over her messy cap of hair. “I wanted a home, and I wanted important. I managed the shell of it, didn’t I? An impressive shell for all that. But you? What you are, what you bring into it—even this, maybe due to this, you make it important. And for me, for what I might add to it? Well, it might balance the scales a bit.”

“Are you looking for balance?”

“I might be,” he murmured. “So.” He leaned down to brush a kiss over her brow. “Let’s have our meal.”

She lifted one of the silver tops and studied the plate below. A chunk of lightly grilled fish topped a colorful mix of vegetables with a spray of pretty pasta curls.

“It looks . . . healthy.”

He laughed, kissed her again. “I wager it’ll go down easy enough. Then you can wipe the healthy out with too much coffee and some of the cookies you’ve stashed in your office.”

She gave him a bland look as she sat down. “Stashed indicates concealed. They’re just put away in such a manner that certain people whose names rhyme with Treebody and McBlab can’t grab them and scarf them down.” She stabbed some fish, ate it. “It’s okay.”

“As an alternative to pizza.”

“There is no alternative to pizza. It stands alone.”

“Do you remember your first slice?”

“I remember my first New York pizza—the real deal. Out of school, of age. Shook myself out of the system and hit New York, applied to the Academy. I had a couple weeks, and I was walking the city, getting my bearings. I went into this little place downtown, West Side—Polumbi’s. I ordered a slice. They had a counter that ran along the front window, and I got a seat there. I bit in, and it was like, I don’t know, my own little miracle. I thought, I’m free, finally. And I’m here, where I want to be, and I’m eating this goddamn pizza and watching New York. It was the best day of my life.”

She shrugged, stabbed more of the delicately grilled fish. “Damn good pizza, too.”

It both broke his heart and lifted it.

For a time they spoke of inconsequential things, blessedly ordinary things. But he knew her, her mind, her moods.

“Tell me what Whitney said. It’s inside your head.”

“It can wait.”

“No need.”

She toyed with the vegetables. “He agrees there’s no point in showing MacMasters the disc, or—at this time—informing him of it. We’ll focus on MacMasters’s cases, current and prior, see if we can hook any of them to his threat file. But . . .”

“You’re thinking he’s too smart to have threatened outright.”

“He’s made one mistake, he’ll have made another. But I don’t think we’ll find him there. Baxter and Trueheart hit the one name MacMasters came up with, a dealer he’d helped bust. There’s nothing there,” she said with a shake of her head. “It doesn’t play. When you . . .”

He angled his head when she trailed off and scooped up more fish. “Finish it off.”

She looked into his eyes, already sorry she would take him—them—out of the shimmering night and into the blood and pain of the past. “Okay. The men who killed Marlena, who brutalized her and killed her to strike at you . . .”

“Did I let them know I intended to hunt them down and kill them?” he finished. “It makes you—what’s the most diplomatic word under the circumstances—uncomfortable to ask, or to delve too deep into the fact that I did hunt them down, and I did kill them. Everyone who’d tortured and raped and beaten and broken her.”

She picked up her wine while the raw edge of his tightly controlled anger stabbed at her. But she kept her eyes steady on his. “Comfort isn’t always a part of this, what I do, what we are.”

“What was done to that girl we watched on the screen upstairs was done to another, even younger girl. By more than one. Over and over, again and again. For the same reason, it seems. To strike out at someone else. With Marlena, it was me. She was family to me, and they ripped her to pieces.”

“I told you to tell me when bringing it home is too much. Why the hell don’t you?”

He sat back making an obvious—it was so rare for it to be obvious—effort to settle himself. “We’re too entwined for that, Eve. And I wouldn’t change it. But there are times, Christ Jesus, it’s like swallowing broken glass.”

It struck her suddenly, and made her want to spring up and punch him. “Goddamn it, I’m not comparing what you did to what this bastard’s done. You didn’t kill an innocent to punish the guilty. You didn’t act out of blind revenge, but—whether or not I agree—out of a sense of justice. I asked, you idiot, because you were young when it happened, and youth is often rash, impatient. But you countered that with patience, with focus until you’d . . . done what you’d set out to do. Which wasn’t, for Christ’s sake, raping and murdering a kid to get your rocks off.”

He said nothing for a moment, then gave an easy shrug. “Well, that’s certainly telling me.” Even as she scowled at him, candlelight flickering between them, he smiled. “The fact, the singular fact, that you can know what you do of me and accept is my great fortune.”