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“I think you should have some lunch. I have to go soon, but Lieutenant Dallas will be here, working upstairs in her office. Do you know where the kitchen is?”
“No, the house is too big.”
“Tell me about it,” Eve muttered.
Mira rose, held out a hand. “I’ll take you back, and maybe you can help Summerset for a little while. I’ll be back in a minute,” she said to Eve.
Alone, Eve paced to the windows, to the fireplace, back to the windows. She wanted to get to it, start the process. She needed to set up her board, do the runs, write her report and file it. Calls to make, people to see, she thought, jingling loose credits in her pocket.
Shit, how was she going to deal with this kid?
She wondered if the cops who’d had to interview her all those years ago had been equally unsure of their footing.
“She’s coping very well.” Mira came back into the room. “Better than most would. But you should expect mood swings, tears, anger, difficulty sleeping. She’s going to require counseling.”
“Can you handle that?”
&n
bsp; “For the moment, and we’ll see how it goes. She may require a specialist, someone trained primarily in children. I’ll look into it.”
“Thanks. I was thinking I should check the department, Youth Services, find a couple of officers who I can assign to her.”
“Take it slow. She’s dealing with a lot of strangers at once.” She touched Eve’s arm, then picked up her bag. “You’ll handle it.”
Maybe, Eve thought when Mira left. Hopefully. But at the moment, she had plenty of doubts. She headed upstairs, detoured into Roarke’s office.
He was at his desk, with three of his wall screens scrolling various data, and his desk unit humming. “Pause operations,” he said, and smiled. “Lieutenant, you look beat up.”
“Feel that way. Listen, I didn’t have a chance to really run all this by you. I know I just more or less dumped some strange kid on you and blew.”
“Is she awake?”
“Yeah. She’s with Summerset. I did a second interview with her, with Mira in attendance. She holds up pretty well. The kid, I mean.”
“I’ve had the news on. The names haven’t been released yet.”
“I’ve got that blocked—for the moment. It’s going to break soon.”
Knowing his wife, he went to the AutoChef, programmed two coffees, black. “Why don’t you run it for me now?”
“Quick version, because I’m behind.”
She gave him the details, brief and stark.
“Poor child. No evidence, as yet, that anyone in the household was into something that could bring down this kind of payback?”
“Not yet. But it’s early.”
“Professional, as I’m sure you’ve already concluded. Someone trained in wet work. The green light she saw was most likely the jammer—green for go—as the security had been bypassed.”
“Figured. On the surface, these people seem ordinary, ordinary family. Straight arrows. But we haven’t done much scratching on that surface yet.”
“Sophisticated electronics, special forces–type invasion, quick, clean hits.” Sipping coffee, he ignored the beep of his laser fax. “In and out . . . in, what, ten or fifteen minutes? It’s not something for nothing. Home terrorism would have left a mark, and the targets would have been higher profile. On the surface,” he added.
“You still have some contacts in organized crime.”
A smile ghosted around his mouth. “Do I?”
