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“Maybe, but she found a way to make it work for her. I wonder …”
“What?”
“Sometimes I wonder what kind of family or environment Stella came from. Was she born bent—selfish, violent, heartless? Or did she get caught up in the cycle? I don’t excuse what she did or was either way. Cycles have to be broken.”
“I’m sure you know Roarke could find out.”
“What I’m not sure of is if I really want to know. Maybe. Eventually. He’s worried about me. I know he wants me to talk to you.”
“Should he be worried?”
“I don’t want him to worry.”
“That didn’t answer the question.”
Eve sighed. She found, for once, she didn’t want coffee, and got them both a bottle of water. “I dream about her. Not nightmares, not really. But strange, lucid dreams. She blames me, which would fit with the way she thought, was.”
“Do you blame you?”
Eve took a moment before answering. “Harris’s brother? Part of him feels guilty because he couldn’t love his sister, and part of him grieves for her. I don’t know if it’s guilt or just acknowledgment that part of me feels. There’s no grief. I told you that before, and it hasn’t changed. I know I’m not responsible for what happened to her. She is. McQueen is. Even my father holds more of the blame than me. But I started the chain when I took her down in Dallas, before I ever knew who she was.”
Eve studied her water bottle even as that moment flashed through her mind. That defining moment when she’d yanked a suspect around, and looked into her mother’s face.
“I started the chain when I pushed her to flip on McQueen. The chain McQueen broke when he slit her throat. I can’t and won’t pretend otherwise. I was doing my job. And other lives, innocent lives were on the line. But doing my job was a factor in her death.”
“Doing your job saved those innocent lives. The choices she made ended hers.”
“I know that. I believe that. But, I’m involved in the death of both my parents. Directly with my father as my hand held the knife. A child, self-defense, yes, all true, all logical. But …” She fisted her hand, as if around a hilt. “My hand held the knife. With her, I started the chain. It’s hard knowing that, no matter what they did to me, no matter what he’d have continued to do to me. It’s hard knowing I ended, or had a part in ending, the two people who made me.”
“They didn’t make you. They performed an act that resulted in conception, and did so with the purpose of investment and profit. They weren’t your parents, and were your mother and father only in the strictest biological terms.”
“I know that.”
“Do you? You’ve begun to call her Stella, that’s an emotional distance. But you continue to call him your father. Why is that?”
Eve stared, fumbled. “I … I don’t know.”
“It’s something to think about, something we might talk about again.” Mira rose from the visitor’s chair, laid a hand briefly on Eve’s shoulder. “Tell Roarke we talked. He may worry less.”
“Okay.”
Alone, Eve frowned at her board. Only her mother and father in the strictest biological terms. By that same benchmark, K.T. Harris was only a daughter, a sister in those same terms.
By choice, Eve decided, Harris had died no man’s child.
16
RETURN TO THE SCENE OF THE CRIME, EVE DEcided, and revisited all three locations on her way home. Where, she’d determined, she’d attack the case fresh.
At Asner’s apartment building, she talked to the gym buddy neighbor again. Shaken, but cooperative, the man couldn’t add anything relevant to his earlier statements.
She knocked on some doors. Everybody liked A, and nobody had seen anyone entering or exiting his apartment or skulking around the building the night before.
She toured his apartment, the search team’s report fresh in her mind. They hadn’t found so much as a stray data disc. Prints, yes. The victim’s, the gym buddy’s, another neighbor’s who checked out, and a licensed companion named Della McGrue. Eve intended to make another stop and have a chat with Della.
She imagined the apartment before it had been tossed.
Spare, she thought. Inexpe
