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“None taken, as I have a mirror. Will you do something for me?”
“Sure, if I can.”
“When this is finished, and we both get some sleep, will you come to dinner? You and Roarke. Come to dinner. Dennis will make his chocolate trifle, and you haven’t lived until you’ve tasted it.”
“I’m not sure what it is.”
“Amazing.” She kissed Eve’s cheek. Then, maybe because she needed it just as much, left her cheek pressed against Eve’s. “I’m going to cook you and Roarke a lovely meal, followed by Dennis’s amazing trifle. And we won’t talk about any of this.”
She drew back now. “Will you do that for me?”
“Yeah. Yeah, it sounds good.”
“Go finish it, because you must.”
Eve went to where Peabody waited discreetly outside the door. “Let’s take Downing next, once her lawyer’s here. She’s the one closest to the edge.”
“I’ll have her brought up. She’s contacted the lawyer. She can wait in the box. They should have trusted us. Trusted cops like us to find the proof, to work for justice.”
“Yeah. But they didn’t.”
—
Hours later, what felt like days later, she sat in the cockpit of the copter, winging toward Connecticut.
“They all told basically the same story, but not so exact that it felt rehearsed. I think, yeah, they talked it all through before. If we get caught, we have to say this and that. But they’re not lying.”
“Easterday?”
“Took the deal. Contacted his wife. My intel is she came in, and within thirty minutes, walked out of his hospital room. She kept walking.”
“And the last one?”
“MacNamee. He took Reo’s deal. Both of them are smart enough to know a trial would slaughter them. The recordings—of which there are forty-eight more locked in a safe in the basement of the house—would slaughter them. They don’t want the public humiliation. They don’t know real humiliation. Just how to inflict it.”
He laid a hand over hers. “And you?”
“I’m holding. I had to talk to Edward Mira’s son and daughter. And that slaughtered them. No way around it. Same with Wymann’s family.”
She closed her eyes. “And Harvo’s ID’d more than half of the women. I ran them. Two are dead—self-termination. Another death by misadventure. Two are street LCs. One’s doing time for assault—illegals junkie. Two more have done a revolving door in and out of rehab. But a few of them seem to have reasonably stable lives. Mira says they need to know.”
“Some part of them does know, as some part of you always did. Bringing it to light may help them in ways you can’t see.”
“Maybe. God, I hope so. That road down there? That’s the one Betz racked up speeding tickets on. I wonder how many times he drove up here to watch those tapes. That’s the campus?”
She looked down at it—snow-covered and elegant, spires and dignity.
“Monsters can grow anywhere,” he said. “We both know it. It wasn’t the place or the time. It was the men.”
“Dennis Mira went here, same time, same place. That’s good enough for me.”
When Roarke touched down, with snow shooting up like a storm, she sat, studying the house.
Large, old, dignified, beautifully kept. Even now the walks were cleared of snow, the trees glistened with it.
She saw the Celtic symbol for brotherhood carved into the center of the main door.
It sickened her.
