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“No, you’re a cop who wants to make detective.” He moved the bag out of her reach. “And you’re scared.”
“I’m not scared; I’m understandably anxious about the testing process and proving myself ready to . . .” She hissed out a breath as he merely studied her with patient green eyes. “I’m terrified.” Because his arm came around her, she snuggled into his bony shoulder. “I’m terrified I’ll blow it, and I’ll let Dallas down. And you, and Feeney, the commander, my family. Jesus.”
“You’re not going to blow it, and you won’t let anyone down. This isn’t about Dallas, or anybody else. It’s all about you.”
“She trained me, she put me up for it.”
“So she must figure you’re ready. It ain’t no snap, She-Body.” He gave her cheek a quick nuzzle. “It’s not supposed to be. But you’ve got the training, you’ve got the field time, the instincts, the brains. And, honey, you’ve got the guts and heart, too.”
She turned her head to look up at him. “That’s so damn sweet.”
“It’s a fact, and here’s another one, here’s what you don’t have right now. You don’t have the balls.”
Her gooey affection toward him transformed into brittle insult. “Hey.”
“And because you don’t have the balls,” he continued calmly, “you’re not trusting your gut, or your training. You’re second-guessing yourself. Instead of going with what you know, you keep wondering what you don’t know, and that’s why you keep missing up on the sims.”
She’d pulled away from him. Her breath hissed out. “I hate you for being right.”
“Nah. You love me because I’m so damn good looking.”
“Asshole.”
“ ’Fraidy cat.”
“ ’Fraidy cat.” Her lips twitched into a reluctant smile. “Jeez. Okay, set up another one. Make it tough. And when I nail it, I not only get the chips, but . . .” Her smile widened. “You wear the hat.”
“You’re on.”
She rose to pace and clear out her head while he programmed the sim. She’d been afraid, she admitted. Afraid she wanted it too much. So she hadn’t used the hunger, but had let it eat away at her confidence. That had to stop. Even if her palms were damp and her stomach in knots it had to stop.
Dallas never let nerves get in the way, she thought. And she had them, nerves and something deeper, darker. It had peeked through on the Gregg scene, for just a moment that afternoon. Now and again on a sexual homicide, it peeked through. It turned her lieutenant’s cheeks pale. Took her back, Peabody was sure, to something horrible. Something personal.
Rape, Peabody was sure, just as she was sure it had to have been brutal. And she’d have been young. Before the job. Peabody had studied Eve’s career with the NYPSD like a template, but there’d been no report of a sexual assault on Dallas.
So it had been before, before the Academy. When she was a teenager, or possibly younger. In automatic sympathy, Peabody’s stomach roiled. It would take guts, and balls, to face that, to revisit whatever had happened every time you walked into a scene that reverberated with sexual violence.
But to use it, instead of being used by it, that took more, Peabody determined. It took what she could only define as valor.
“Ready here,” McNab told her. “And it’s a doozy.”
She sucked in a breath, squared her shoulders. “I’m ready, too. Go in the bedroom or something, okay? I want to do it on my own.”
He looked at her face, saw what he’d hoped to see, and nodded. “Sure. Nail
the bad guy, She-Body.”
“Damn right.”
She sweated through it, but stayed focused. She stopped asking herself what Dallas would want her to do, even after a point what Dallas would do, and just concentrated on what needed to be done. Preserve and observe, collect and identify. Question, report, investigate. It began to click for her, the pattern emerging. She waded her way through conflicting witness statements, shaky memories, facts and lies, forensics and procedure.
She built, she realized with rising excitement, a case.
Though she wanted to hesitate on the final stage, the arrest, she bore down and selected. And was rewarded with the graphic of a prosecuting attorney.
Pick him up. Murder One.
“Yes!” She popped up from the chair, did her little victory dance. “I got an arrest. Nailed the murdering bastard. Hey, McNab, bring me those damn potato chips.”
