As her partner started up the steps, Eve moved out of the foyer and to the elevator. There she paused. “I need them alive,” she said to Summerset. “Best-case scenario.”
“One of them alive would do.”
She turned back. “She will be protected. Extreme measures, including termination, will be employed if necessary. But consider this before you get your juices up. Two men grabbed Meredith Newman off the street—and one to drive, so that makes three. There may be more. I don’t get one healthy, that I can sweat, she may never be safe. The more of them I get healthy, the better chance I have to get them all. To get the why. Without the why, she may never
be safe. And she’ll never know. You don’t know the why, you don’t always heal.”
Though his face remained unreadable, Summerset nodded. “You’re quite right, Lieutenant.”
She stepped into the elevator, ordered Roarke’s private office.
He knew when she came through the gates, and that she’d come up before much longer. So he closed the file, went back to evaluating his security.
He didn’t think it was appropriate right at the moment to tell her one of the tasks he’d chosen for the unregisters was in-depth—and technically illegal—background checks on all of Nixie’s family connections.
The grandmother was out. She’d had a few misdemeaner illegals charges, any number of cohabs, and had a part-time licensed companion standing.
Perhaps the moral judgment was ironic as he was currently an official guardian for the child and had done worse. Considerably worse.
But he was making it nonetheless. He wouldn’t see a child turned over to a woman of that sort. She deserved better.
He’d found Grant Swisher’s biological father. It had taken a bit of time, but the moral judgment there had come swiftly.
The man was rarely employed, had done a short stint for petty theft, and another for jacking vehicles.
The step-sister looked more promising. She was married, a corporate lawyer out of Philadelphia. Childless. No criminal on record, and financially solvent. She’d been married, to another lawyer, for seven years.
The child could have a home with her, temporarily, even permanently should it become necessary. A good home, he thought, with someone who’d known her parents, who felt some connection.
He sat back, tipped back in the chair. It was none of his business. Not a bit of it.
The hell it wasn’t. He was responsible for that child now, whether he’d chosen to be or not. Whether he wanted to be or not.
He had stood outside her bedroom, had seen what had nearly been done to her.
He had stood outside her brother’s room, had seen what had been done. A young boy’s blood drying to rust on the sheets, the walls.
Why was it that seeing it made him see his own? He didn’t think of those days, or so rarely it didn’t count. He wasn’t—wouldn’t be—haunted by nightmares as Eve was. He was done with those days, and what had been.
But he thought of them now, had thought of them too many times since he’d been inside the Swisher home.
He remembered seeing his own blood. Coming to, barely. Obscene pain swimming through him as he stared at his own blood on the filthy ground of the alley after his father had beaten him half to death.
More than half, come to that.
Had he meant to kill him? Why hadn’t he ever wondered that before? He’d killed before.
Roarke looked at the photo of his mother, of himself as a baby. Such a young, pretty face she’d had, he thought. Even bruised by the bastard’s fists, she’d had a pretty face.
Until Patrick Roarke had smashed it, until he’d murdered her with his own hands and tossed her in the river like sewage. And now her son couldn’t remember her. He’d never remember her voice, or her scent. And there was nothing to be done about it.
She’d wanted him, this pretty girl with the bruised face. She’d died because she’d wanted to give her son family.
Those few years later, had Patrick Roarke, God rot him, meant to leave his own son for dead, or had he simply used his fists and feet as usual?
A lesson for you, boy-o. Life’s full of hard lessons.
Roarke dragged his hands through his hair, pressed them to his temples. Christ, he could hear the cocksucker’s voice, and that would never do. He wanted a drink, and nearly rose to pour himself a whiskey, just to take off the edge.