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“An unfortunate acronym from the animal’s viewpoint, I imagine. Still, they do good work.”
“She struck me as solid. Gave me all her records on that weapon, even let me do a count of the bolts she has. And they add up. She also gave me a list of people she knows who use the same type. You don’t hunt.”
“No. It doesn’t appeal to me.”
“Mostly I don’t get why people want to tramp around the jungle or the woods, or wherever in the stone bitch of nature just to kill some stupid animal who’s just hanging around where it lives. You want meat, you can buy a dog on the street.”
“That’s not meat.”
“Not technically.”
“Not in any reasonable sense. I expect it’s the primal charge with hunting, the pitting yourself against the stone bitch of nature and so on.”
“Yeah, but you’d be the one with the weapon.” She frowned a moment. “Maybe this is kind of the same deal. Houston—or whoever might’ve been driving—is in his natural habitat, so to speak. You’re sitting in his space, maybe it’s the back of a fancy limo, but you’re hunting. Primal charge, maybe.”
“But hardly sporting,” Roarke pointed out. “He shot an unarmed man from behind. Most animals have what you could term a weapon at least. Tooth and fang—and the advantage, to some extent, of instinct and speed.”
“I don’t think he’s worried about being fair. Maybe a hunter, maybe, and maybe a little bored with shooting four-legged mammals. Trying for bigger game? Something to think about.”
She thought about it in her home office while she set up a second murder board. She programmed coffee, glanced at the door that joined her office with Roarke’s. He had work to catch up on, she knew, and it felt homey in their own strange way to be working in connecting rooms.
She set up her computer to start runs, and while it worked began to add to her case notes.
Hunter. Bigger game. Thrill kill. Unusual weapon, elaborate setup = attention. Attention = trophy? Who has access to Sweet’s data and hunts? Motive for involving Sweet?
She paused, glancing over at an incoming transmission. “Reo comes through,” she murmured, and called the incoming file, now unsealed, on-screen.
Vandalism, shoplifting, illegals possession, truancy, she read. Two stints in juvie, with another illegals pop for dealing and destruction of private property in between. Mandatory counseling, all before Houston hit sixteen.
Tipping back in her chair, she read social workers’ reports, counselors’ reports, judges’ opinions. Basically they’d labeled him a wild child, a troublemaker, a chronic offender with a taste for street drugs.
Until somebody’d bothered to dig a little deeper, somebody’d bothered to take a good look at his medicals.
Broken bones, blackened eyes, bruised kidneys—all attributed to accidents or fighting. Until just before his sevente
enth birthday he’d beaten his father unconscious and taken off.
Her stomach shuddered with memory, with sympathy. She knew what it was to be broken and battered, knew what it was to finally fight back.
“They went after you, didn’t they? Yeah, hunted you down, tossed you in a cage for a while. But somebody finally took a good, hard look.”
She read his mother’s statement, read the fear and the shame in it, but felt no sympathy there. A mother was meant to protect the child, wasn’t she? No matter what. This one had hidden all those breaks and bruises out of that shame and fear, until the right cop, the right moment, and they’d pulled it out of her.
Supervised halfway house, more counseling—that, she thought, and maybe the power of finally fighting back had turned a teenage boy around, and helped build him into a man.
And last night, someone had taken that from him.
“His juvenile record,” Roarke said from the doorway.
“Yeah.”
“The system worked for him, maybe not as soon as it should have, but it worked for him.” He came to her, kissed the top of her head. “And so will you. How can I help?”
“You said you had work.”
“I’ve caught up with some, and have a few things running that can go on their own for a bit.”
He thought of her, she understood, when he read the file. And he thought of himself, too—of being kicked and punched, broken and battered by his father.
