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“I loved the sport, the training, the discipline. The feeling I’d get when I stepped into the ring. I dreamed of seeing big cities and fame and fortune.”
“What changed your mind?”
“There was a woman. A girl. I loved her, and she loved me. She was beautiful, and so unspoiled. We were to be married. I was saving money, nearly every penny I could from the matches I won. So we could marry and have a place of our own. One day, when I was training, she walked from her parents’ home toward town, to see me, to bring me lunch. Men—three men—saw her, and they took her. We searched for two days before we found her. They left her by the river. Strangled her. They’d raped her first, and beaten her, and left her naked by the river.”
“I’m very sorry.”
“I’d never known hate like that. Even bigger than the grief, was the hate, the rage, the thirst to avenge her. Or myself. How can we be sure? I lived on that hate for two years—that and drink and drugs, and whatever dulled the grief so the hate could stay ripe.
“I lost myself in it. Then they found them, after they had done the same to another young girl. I planned to kill them. I planned it, plotted it, dreamed of it. I had the knife—though I doubt I could have gotten near enough to them to use it, I believed I could. I would. Then she came to me. My Annamaria. Do you believe in such things, Lieutenant? In visitations, in miracles, in faith?”
“I don’t know. But I believe in the power of believing in them.”
“She told me I had to let her go, that it was a sin to lose myself for what was already gone. She asked that I go, alone, on a pilgrimage, to the shrine of Our Lady of San Juan de los Lagos. To draw—I had some little talent—a picture of the Blessed Mother as an offering. And there I would find the rest of my life.”
“Did you?”
“I did. I loved her, so I did what she asked. I walked, a long, long way. Over many months. Stopping along the way to find work, to eat, to sleep, I think to heal, and to find faith again. I drew the portrait, though it had Annamaria’s face. And I understood as I knelt at the shrine, as I wept, that my life was now for God. I traveled home—many months, and worked to save money to enter the seminary. I found my life. And still there are some nights when I dream she’s beside me, and our children are sleeping safe in their beds. I often wonder if that’s God’s blessing for accepting His will, or penance for testing it.”
“What happened to the men?”
“They were tried, convicted, and were executed. There were still executions in Mexico at that time. Their deaths didn’
t bring Annamaria back, or the other girl, or the one it was found had come before my Annamaria.”
“No. But no more girls were raped, terrorized, beaten, and strangled by their hands. Maybe that’s God’s will, too.”
“I can’t say, but their deaths didn’t bring me pleasure.” He rose, put the empty mug neatly beside her AutoChef. “You’ve killed.”
“Yes.”
“It didn’t bring you pleasure.”
“No.”
He nodded. “I’ll get you the names. Maybe together we can find justice and God’s will, on the same path.”
Maybe, she thought when she was alone. But as long as she wore a badge, justice had to take priority.
7
SHE FELT PISSY. EVE COULDN’T QUITE FIGURE out why, but the pissiness stayed full-blown through the drive home. The floods of tourists cavorting in New York’s spring like a bunch of chickens before the plucking couldn’t shift the mood into mildly irritated or cynically amused. Even the animated billboards announcing everything from summer fashions—shoes this summer would apparently be clear to show off pedicured feet—to butt enhancers didn’t make a dent. She tried to imagine the city full of invisible shoes, painted toes, and padded asses, but it didn’t cheer her up.
The ad blimps cruising overhead and tying up air traffic didn’t cut through the cloud of irritation as they blasted their litany of Sale! Sale! Sale! (in English this time) at the Sky Mall.
She couldn’t find her appreciation for the chaos, the cacophony, the innate craziness of the city she loved, and so when she finally turned into the gates, couldn’t find her pleasure in being out of it. In being home.
What the hell was she doing here? She should’ve stayed at work where she could turn a pissy mood to her advantage. Should’ve locked her office door, programmed a pot of black coffee, and dug in. To the evidence, the facts, the tangibles.
Why the hell had she asked López what he’d done before wrapping that collar around his neck?
It wasn’t relevant. It didn’t matter. What difference did it make to the case that some bastards had beaten, raped, and strangled the love of his life? It wasn’t connected.
Identifying the victim was connected. Finding the killer mattered. The job didn’t include imagining some girl in Mexico left naked and dead by a river. She had enough blood and death crowded in her brain without adding more—more that didn’t apply to her or the work.
She slammed out of her vehicle, strode into the house. And with that pissiness tangled with a depression she hadn’t acknowledged, barely spared a snarl for Summerset.
“Kiss my unenhanced ass,” she said before he could speak, and kept walking. “Or I’ll plant my visibly shod foot up yours.” She stormed straight into the elevator, ordered the gym. What she needed, she thought, was a good, sweaty workout.
