Salvation in Death (In Death #27)(104)

“Now, I contact Peabody and have her meet me here, so I can brief her in the morning before we go pick up Juanita Turner for questioning. Contact her voice mail,” Eve said when she caught his look.

“And then?”

“We go to bed.” She glanced back toward the screen. “She’s not going anywhere.”

She slept poorly, dogged by dreams, images of a boy she’d never met who’d died simply because he’d been in the wrong place. The young, fresh face was torn and ruined, the clear eyes dull and dead.

She heard his mother weeping over his body. Mindless, keening sobs that echoed into forever.

As she watched, Marlena—bloodied, battered, broken as she’d been in the holo Roarke had once shown her—walked up to the mangled body of the dead boy.

“We were both so young,” Marlena said. “We’d barely begun to live. So young to be used as a tool. Used, destroyed, discarded.”

She held out a hand for Quinto Turner, and he took it. Even as his blood poured over the floor of the church, he took it and got to his feet.

“I’ll take him now,” Marlena said to Eve. “There’s a special place for the innocents. I’ll take him there. What was she to do?” She gestured to the grieving mother, covered with her son’s blood. “Can you stop it? Can you stop it all? You couldn’t stop what happened to you.”

“I can’t stop it all. But murder isn’t an end. Murder isn’t a solution.”

“She was his mother. It was her solution.”

“Murder doesn’t resolve murder. It perpetuates it.”

“What of us, then? What of us? No one stood for me. No one but Roarke.”

“And still it wasn’t an end. He lives with it.”

“And so do you. Now you’ll perpetuate her loss, her grief, for justice. You’ll live with that, too.” With her hand holding Quinto’s, Marlena led him away.

Eve stared at the pools of blood, the ripples in them.

And watched them spread.

She woke edgy, and with none of the energy the imminent closing of a case usually brought her. She knew the answers, or most of them, saw the pattern clearly, and understood, accepted, what she had to do.

But the acceptance and the restless few hours of sleep left her with a dull headache.

“Take a blocker,” Roarke ordered. “I can see the damn headache beating at your skull.”

“So, you’ve got X-ray vision now, Super-Roarke?”

“No point in taking slaps at me.” He rose, walked toward the bathroom. “I won’t slap back. You’ve got enough weighing on you.”

“I don’t want a damn blocker.”

He came back with one, walked up to her as she yanked on her weapon harness. “Take it, or I’ll make you take it.”

“Look, step back or—”

He cupped his hand on the back of her neck. She braced for him to try to force the pill down her throat. In fact, she welcomed the attempt and the battle. Instead, his mouth came down on hers.

The hands she’d lifted to fight dropped to her sides as lips simply defeated her with tenderness.

“Damn it,” she said when his lips left hers to brush her cheek.

“You hardly slept.”

“I’m okay. I just want to close it down, get it done.”

“Take the blocker.”

“Nag, nag, nag.” But she took it, swallowed it. “I can’t leave it open. I can’t pretend I don’t know. I can’t just let her do murder and turn away.”

“No. You can’t, no.”

“And even if I could, even if I could find some way to live with it, if I let her go, I let Penny Soto go. How can I?”

“Eve.” He rubbed at the knots of tension in her shoulders. “You don’t have to explain yourself, not to me. Not to anyone, but especially not to me. I could turn away. I could do that. I could do that and find some way outside the law to make sure the other paid. You never could. There’s that shifting line between us. I don’t know if it makes either of us right, either of us wrong. It just makes us who we are.”

“I went outside the law. Asked you to go outside it with Robert Lowell. I did that to make sure he paid for the women he’d tortured and killed. I did that because I’d given Ariel my word he’d pay.”

“It’s not the same, and you know it.”

“I crossed the line.”

“The line shifts.” Now he gave those shoulders a quick, impatient shake. “If the law, if justice has no compassion, no fluidity, no humanity, how is it justice?”

“I couldn’t live with it. I couldn’t live with letting him take the easy way out, letting the law give him the easy way. So I shifted the line.”

“Was it justice, Eve?”

“It felt like it.”

“Then go.” He lifted her hands, kissed them. “Do your job.”

“Yeah.” She started toward the door, stopped, and turned back. “I dreamed about Marlena. I dreamed about her and Quinto Turner. They were both the way they were after they’d been killed.”

“Eve.”

“But . . . she said she’d take him, and she did. She said there was a special place for the innocents, and she’d take him there. Do you think there is? A place for innocents.”