Apprentice in Death (In Death #43)(78)

“Yeah, it matters. Sixteen at this time. A couple more aren’t likely to make it, but sixteen confirmed dead on scene.”

“Jesus.” Jake stared down the corridor. “My band’s piled up in dressing rooms, and we’ve got roadies flopped out like puppies. They’re all safe. All of them are safe, but . . . I’ve got names of some people we got tickets for, about a dozen people. Can you check to see . . .”

Eve pulled out her notebook. “Give me the names.”

She checked as he reeled them off from memory.

“None of them are on the dead or seriously injured list. I don’t have all the names, yet, of minor injuries.”

“That’s good enough. More than. Thanks. They, hell, they won this contest, got to hang with us at rehearsal, come backstage before the performance.”

“It’s been eating at him that any of them got hurt,” Nadine said. “Or worse.”

“I’m going to clear it so you can go home, all of you. It may take about thirty to have someone come down, escort you out.”

“I’m not going anywhere without a one-on-one,” Nadine insisted. “They can do it by remote.”

“Go get ’em, Lois,” Jake murmured, and had Nadine shooting him a sparkling look.

“The city’s going to be waking up,” Nadine continued, checked her glittering wrist unit. “In fact is. People need to know, Dallas. It’s their city, and last night was important. Someone smeared that with a lot of blood. It’s your job to stop them. It’s mine to let people know, not only what happened here, but that you’re doing whatever it takes to stop them.”

“She’s good.” Jake hooked his thumbs in his front pockets. “She says you’re good, too.”

“I’ll give you five—it’s all I can spare,” Eve said before Nadine could protest. “But I need to . . .” She glanced toward Mavis’s dressing room door.

“I’ll get it set up.”

“I’m going to get the band up and moving.”

When Jake moved down the corridor, Eve turned to Nadine. “‘Lois’?”

“As in Lane, ace reporter for the Daily Planet. Superman, Dallas, you’ve probably heard of him.”

“Yeah, where is he now?” She opened the door quietly.

Inside, Leonardo slept in a chair, Mavis curled like a fanciful cat in his lap. Trina—likely there for hair and makeup—stretched out on the floor, a colorful rug. Eve recognized Summerset’s old friend Ivanna Liski, asleep on a sofa.

But her eyes returned to Mavis, hair a tumbled rainbow, pretty fairy face relaxed in sleep, with Leonardo’s big arms wrapped around her.

Because her eyes stung, her stomach jittered, Eve rested her head on the doorjamb, just let herself breathe.

In comfort, Nadine rubbed a hand on her back. “Whenever you’re ready.”

With a nod, Eve straightened, shut the door to give them a few more minutes. “Let’s get this done.”





15


While he worked, once again aligning himself with cops, worry sat heavy in the back of Roarke’s mind. Though he was a man who’d trained himself to remain cool and clearheaded in crises—else the hothead who lived inside him would have spent most of his years in a cage of one sort or another—that worry stiffened and tightened his shoulders to dull aches.

His wife—the center of his world—was running straight into exhaustion, had barely recovered from an ugly dream inside the scant two hours of sleep she’d managed.

He’d read it on her face when she’d come to check their progress, that pale and shadowed look, the one of nearly translucent skin and bruised eyes.

He could feel much the same from the good cops who worked with him, that drawn-tight-as-a-spring fatigue under their gut-deep determination to push on. And push on.

And there was little he could do to fix it. Not the time, the place, to order in gallons of good coffee or platters of food. Neither the money nor the power he’d worked all his life to attain could help.

So he applied his skill, his creativity with tech, and felt it wasn’t nearly enough.

How did one catch a killer by knowing where they’d been, and where they surely weren’t any longer?

She would say, his cop, every detail mattered. So he applied himself to finding those details.

Worry for Eve mixed and melded with worry for Summerset.

What help was he there?

The look on Summerset’s face, the grief and horror, the blood on his hands, and more, the slight quaver in his voice haunted.

It jolted, always jolted, those rare glimpses of frailty in the man who had essentially raised him, who had saved him from the alleys, the beatings, the hunger, and the miseries. Who had helped him develop that clearheaded control and bank the furies that raged under it.

Where would he be, who would he be, without these two complicated and opposing forces? He couldn’t say, would never know, but surely not where and who he was now, working alongside cops he’d once reviled.

Eve tracked a killer, prepared to face down the one who’d trained his own child to kill. Summerset tended the wounded.

And he . . . Well, he’d done all he could do here to narrow down locations, positions, possibilities.

He rose, looked toward Feeney. A father figure for Eve. It was all father figures, wasn’t it? Feeney, Summerset, Mackie. Those who trained and schooled, for good or for ill.