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“Tell me what Whitney said. It’s inside your head.”
“It can wait.”
“No need.”
She toyed with the vegetables. “He agrees there’s no point in showing MacMasters the disc, or—at this time—informing him of it. We’ll focus on MacMasters’s cases, current and prior, see if we can hook any of them to his threat file. But . . .”
“You’re thinking he’s too smart to have threatened outright.”
“He’s made one mistake, he’ll have made another. But I don’t think we’ll find him there. Baxter and Trueheart hit the one name MacMasters came up with, a dealer he’d helped bust. There’s nothing there,” she said with a shake of her head. “It doesn’t play. When you . . .”
He angled his head when she trailed off and scooped up more fish. “Finish it off.”
She looked into his eyes, already sorry she would take him—them—out of the shimmering night and into the blood and pain of the past. “Okay. The men who killed Marlena, who brutalized her and killed her to strike at you . . .”
“Did I let them know I intended to hunt them down and kill them?” he finished. “It makes you—what’s the most diplomatic word under the circumstances—uncomfortable to ask, or to delve too deep into the fact that I did hunt them down, and I did kill them. Everyone who’d tortured and raped and beaten and broken her.”
She picked up her wine while the raw edge of his tightly controlled anger stabbed at her. But she kept her eyes steady on his. “Comfort isn’t always a part of this, what I do, what we are.”
“What was done to that girl we watched on the screen upstairs was done to another, even younger girl. By more than one. Over and over, again and again. For the same reason, it seems. To strike out at someone else. With Marlena, it was me. She was family to me, and they ripped her to pieces.”
“I told you to tell me when bringing it home is too much. Why the hell don’t you?”
He sat back making an obvious—it was so rare for it to be obvious—effort to settle himself. “We’re too entwined for that, Eve. And I wouldn’t change it. But there are times, Christ Jesus, it’s like swallowing broken glass.”
It struck her suddenly, and made her want to spring up and punch him. “Goddamn it, I’m not comparing what you did to what this bastard’s done. You didn’t kill an innocent to punish the guilty. You didn’t act out of blind revenge, but—whether or not I agree—out of a sense of justice. I asked, you idiot, because you were young when it happened, and youth is often rash, impatient. But you countered that with patience, with focus until you’d . . . done what you’d set out to do. Which wasn’t, for Christ’s sake, raping and murdering a kid to get your rocks off.”
He said nothing for a moment, then gave an easy shrug. “Well, that’s certainly telling me.” Even as she scowled at him, candlelight flickering between them, he smiled. “The fact, the singular fact, that you can know what you do of me and accept is my great fortune.”
“Bollocks,” she muttered, and made him laugh over her co-opting one of his oaths.
“I adore you, every day. And I realize I needed more than the meal and the break. I needed to get that out of my system. So, to your question, Lieutenant.”
“What the hell was the question?” she asked.
“Did I threaten or boast or transmit to the men who’d killed Marlena that I intended to make them pay for it? No. Nor did I leave any trace so any of those involved would know the why of it.”
“That’s what I thought.” Calmer, she nodded. “But then, it wasn’t like this. It wasn’t revenge. That’s part of the difference, and part of the need here. The reason for the video, the message.”
“Aye. I’d agree. That kind of revenge? It’s thirsty.”
“Thirsty,” she murmured, and ran the message back through her head. “Yeah. That’s a good word for it.”
“Generally you’d leave enough so the target of that revenge knew which quiver the arrow came from. Otherwise, there’s no point in that victory dance.”
“Yeah, but we have to check it out. We’ll need to comb through the university, that’s an angle. And we’ll analyze the disc. Feeney needs to take that.”
“Am I being demoted?” Roarke asked lightly.
She arched her brows. “We’re too entwined for that,” she said. “But it’s a cop’s kid. We need to be careful. I want the head of EDD in charge of that piece of evidence. We’ve got an unlimited budget, unlimited manpower—and there will be those, in the media, even in the department, who question that.”
A faint line of annoyance rode between her eyes. “How come this case gets so much time and effort? Why didn’t Civilian Joe get the same treatment? The answers are simple. You come after a cop or a cop’s family, we come after you. And it’s more complex. You come after a cop or a cop’s family, it puts us all in the crosshairs and makes it goddamn hard to do the job for Civilian Joe. We live with that, but this intensifies. MacMasters had partners through the years, and as a boss, men under his command. How many of them might be vulnerable? And more, when we catch this bastard, every piece of evidence, every point of procedure has to be above reproach. We can’t have anything questionable in court, nothing some defense attorney can hang us on.”
She ate a bite. “That said, if you had the time and the inclination to work with the copy, nobody’s stopping you. As expert consultant, civilian, assigned to EDD, you report to Feeney.”
“Which isn’t nearly as fun as reporting to you. But message received.”
“One of the most valuable things you do is let me bounce stuff off you. Listen, give opinions. Just talking it through opens up angles for me. That’s why I asked the question.”
