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He dug on working with Feeney, that was for sure. Uncle Feen was the total e-cop, with all kinds of stories about shit that went on before there was an EDD.
And McNab was totally iced. He talked a lot of trash, but he knew his ’tronics. Jamie thought he was pure hero stuff now that he’d been wounded in the line. Here he was half-frozen and pushing on with the job.
That’s what cops did.
That’s what Dallas did. Nothing stopped her. No matter what, she stood up. Like she had for his grandfather, and for Alice.
It still hurt, thinking about his sister. He knew his mother was never going to get over it, not all the way over it. Maybe you weren’t supposed to.
Sometimes when he looked back to everything that had happened last fall, it was like a dream. Especially the end of it. All the smoke and the fire in that horrible room where that bastard Alban had taken Dallas after he’d drugged her.
Smoke and fire and blood, and the bitch Selina lying dead on the floor. Roarke and Alban fighting like wild dogs, and Dallas yelling at him to get the knife, get the knife to cut her loose from where Alban had strapped her naked to some kind of altar.
He’d cut the bonds, but he’d felt cold. Cold all over in spite of the smoke. And naked, still groggy from the drugs, Dallas had leaped right off the slab onto Alban’s back.
Dreamy, it was all so weird and dreamy. He’d seen Roarke’s fist fly up, knock Alban
unconscious. He’d heard the sirens coming, he’d heard Roarke and Dallas talking—not words, just sounds. The fire crackling, the smoke stinging.
And the knife in his hand.
She’d shouted when she’d seen what he was going to do. But it was too late. She couldn’t have stopped him. He couldn’t have stopped himself.
The bastard who had killed his family was dead, and his blood hot on Jamie’s hands.
He couldn’t remember actually doing it. Not the moment, not the instant when he’d plunged the blade into Alban’s heart. It was like some time blip, and he couldn’t remember.
But it had happened. It hadn’t been a dream. And Dallas had told Feeney and Peabody and the other cops who burst in that Alban had been killed during the struggle. She’d grabbed the ritual knife from him, put her own prints on the handle, and lied.
Because she’d stood for him, too.
“Jamie. Stay focused.”
He blinked, blushed, and hunched his shoulders at Roarke’s brisk order. “Yeah, sure. Right.”
He was working on a virus simulation, his third since they’d started.
“These sims aren’t going to generate hard data without results of a diagnostic on one of the infected units.”
“So you’ve said, in a variety of ways, six or eight times already.”
Jamie swiveled away from his workstation. Behind him Roarke worked on filter construction. He was doing most of the programming manually, with fast flicks and taps of his fingers. In Jamie’s estimation, any e-man worth his chips had to be able to do manual as well as voice and should know when one method suited the job better than the other.
Roarke was the ultra mag e-man.
“It’d take me five minutes, tops, to run a diagnostic,” Jamie continued.
“No.”
“Give me ten and I can locate and isolate the virus.”
“No.”
“Without an identification on—”
He broke off when Roarke held up a hand and shut his mouth.
He finished the sim, input the resulting data, then started the next program. He let it run on auto as he got up to dig out a tube of Pepsi from the full-sized cooler.
