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“Breaking faith? Is that what you call it?” Eve planted her palms on the desk, leaned in. “And what do you call what Purity’s doing? Keeping the faith? I’ve just come from another of their executions, Ms. Price. The name Nick Greene ring a bell with you? Maybe you heard about him in the course of one of your trying days. Dealt in illegals, porn vids, sex brokering, party favors that aren’t in what you’d call the mainstream. A client wanted it, Nick provided. Some of those clients’ taste ran to minors. Most of us wouldn’t call Nick Greene a real swell guy, but I can guarantee he had a couple of trying days himself just lately.”
“If that’s your way of telling me someone else has died, that’s no business of this office. And if this person has ever come up in the course of the duties performed by Child Services, until I’m served with the proper papers, I can neither confirm nor deny.”
“Sooner or later, I’m going to roll over whoever’s blocking the warrants. That’s a promise. Here’s another name that might ring a bell with you. Hannah Wade. Sixteen-year-old mixed race female. Recurrent runaway. Parents gave up the last time she took a walk. My information is she’d been on the street this time about three months. Did some unlicensed hooking, petty dealing, petty theft. Hannah’s been in trouble on and off since she was twelve. But she’s not going to cause any trouble now. She’s dead.”
Eve pulled three fresh still photos out of her evidence bag, tossed them on the desk. “She was a lovely girl, according to her ID photo, according to witnesses who’d seen her. Can’t tell by these, can you? Nobody looks lovely after they’ve been stabbed fifty, sixty times.”
Her face sickly white, Price shoved at the photos. “I don’t know her. You’ve got no right—”
“Tough looking at the results, isn’t it? Not so fucking pure when you look it in the face. I just waded through her blood. That’s tough, too. There’s a lot of blood in a teenaged girl, Clarissa. A lot of blood to splash and splatter while she tries to run away from a guy with a knife whose brain’s trying to burst out of his skull. A lot of blood to pour and pool when she falls because she can’t get away from him.”
“She . . . Greene did this to her?”
“No. Purity did this to her.” Eve shoved the photos closer to Price. “Take a good look at what they did to her. Their research obviously didn’t clue in that she’d shacked with Greene the last week or two. It didn’t identify a teenaged runaway who was flopping at his place. Sleeping in his bed while the infection started to cook in his brain. Maybe in hers, too. Autopsy will check for that.”
“I don’t believe you. I want you to leave.”
“Nothing’s pure, Price, don’t you get it? Nothing comes in or goes out of the world without a blemish. No system’s foolproof. Only when this one fails, innocent people die. She was a child. You were supposed to protect her. But you can’t protect them all. Nobody can protect them all.
“Was it your idea?” Eve asked. “Or were you recruited? Who’s in charge of Purity?”
“I don’t have to talk to you.” Price was white around the lips now, and her voice far from steady. “I don’t want to talk to you.”
“Dukes helped create the virus. Who else? Did Dwier pull you into it, or did you pull him?”
Price shoved back from her desk, pushed to her feet. Eve could see her hands were trembling. “Get out.”
“I’m bringing this down, and you’ll go under with it. You and Dwier. Who the hell do you think you are? Standing in judgment, executing by remote control. Then brushing off the bystanders’ deaths as victims of the blight on society. You’re the fucking blight, Clarissa. All of you self-righteous, self-appointed guardians.”
Eve snatched up Hannah Wade’s death photos. “You killed this child. And you’ll pay for it.”
“I’m—I’m calling a lawyer.” But tears were swimming in her eyes, gathering in the corners, ready to spill. “This is harassment.”
“You call this harassment?” There was no humor in Eve’s smile. It sliced like a thin-bladed axe. “Don’t get me started. You’ve got twenty-four hours to turn yourself in. You come in, you turn evidence, and I’ll push for an on planet rehabilitation facility. I come after you in twenty-four hours and one minute, you go into a concrete cage off planet. You’ll never see real daylight again.”
Eve looked at the time. “Five-twelve tomorrow. Not a minute more.”
Chapter 17
Eve knew she’d shaken Clarissa Price, and shaken her hard. She also knew Price wouldn’t be calling any lawyer unless he was Purity approved. But she would call Dwier.
She’d seen the horror on Price’s face when Price had looked at the crime scene photos of Hannah Wade. There had been shock and disbelief along with it, but it was the horror that would continue to surface. That would eat at Price until she woke screaming in the night.
To keep herself from doing the same, Eve knew she had to do what came next, take the next steps. Focus on the work. That’s what she told herself when she pinned the latest photos to the case board in her office.
She couldn’t allow her own horror to surface again, to have it slam into her belly as it had when she’d stepped into Greene’s Park Avenue condo. The horror that had taken her back, for an instant, to a small, freezing room in Dallas, where the blood had reeked and the knife, covered with it, was clutched in her hand.
Roarke came in, closed the door. Locked it.
“I need the whole team in here, except for Jamie, to update them on the latest homicides.”
“In a minute.” He crossed to her, took her shoulders, turned her to face him. Her eyes were shadowed. Some was fatigue, he knew. But most of it was the nightmare.
“I can see it in you.” He pressed his lips to her brow. “The pain from it.”
“It’s not getting in my way.”
“No, can’t have that, can we? Hold on for a minute, Eve. Just for a minute.”
