Survivor in Death (In Death 20)

Going with instinct, Eve hauled Nixie up, turned around. “It doesn’t help to see them like that. It doesn’t help them or you.”

“Why do you then?” Nixie pushed, shoved. Kicked. “Why do you have pictures of them? Why do you get to look at them?”

“Because it’s my job. That’s it. You have to deal with that. Stop it. I said stop! Look at me.” When Nixie went limp, Eve tightened her grip. She wished desperately for Roarke, for Peabody, even—God—for Summerset. Then she fell back on training. She knew how to handle the survivor of violent death.

“Look at me, Nixie.” She waited until the child lifted her head, until those drenched eyes met hers. “You want to be mad, be mad. They stole your family from you. Be pissed off. Be sad and sorry and outraged. They had no right. The bastards had no right to do this.”

Nixie trembled a little. “But they did.”

“But they did. And last night, they killed two men I knew, men who worked for me. So I’m pissed off, too.”

“Will you kill them now? When you find them, will you kill the bastards because they killed your friends?”

“I’ll want to. Part of me will want to, but that’s not the job. Unless my life or someone else’s life is in danger, if I kill them because I’m just pissed off and sad and sorry, it puts me in the same place as them. You have to leave this to me.”

“If they try to kill me, will you kill them first?”

“Yes.”

Nixie looked into Eve’s eyes, nodded gravely. “I can do the coffee. I know how.”

“That’d be good. I take mine black.”

When Nixie went into the kitchen, Eve grabbed the blanket off her sleep chair, tossed it over the board. Then she pressed her hands to her face.

The day, she thought, was already sucking large.

13

“THAT WAS JUST WEIRD.” EVE WENT STRAIGHT to her desk to check any incomings the minute Summerset led Nixie out of the office.

Roarke poured the last of the coffee from the pot into his cup before he rose. “Spending twenty minutes over breakfast is considered fairly normal in some primitive societies.”

“And now I’m behind.” She scanned the ME reports on Knight and Preston, the preliminaries on the security and electronics on the safe house. “I’ve got to get out of here.”

“Let me see what I’ve got for you first.”

“Roarke? She saw the board.”

“Bloody hell. When—”

“I told Summerset to send her up, so I can’t even blame him. I wasn’t thinking—was just a little annoyed that I was going to have to deal with her before I got to work. And then—” She shook her head. “By the time I thought of it, hauled ass up here, it was too late.”

He set the coffee down, forgot it. “How did she handle it?”

“She’s got more spine than you’d expect from a kid. But she’s not going to forget it—ever. I’ll need to tell Mira.” With no other target handy, she kicked her desk. “Shit, shit, shit! How could I be that stupid?”

No need to ask how Eve was handling it, he thought. “It’s not your fault, or not exclusively. It’s on all of us. We’re not used to having a child in the house. I didn’t think of it either. She might have wandered in here last night when she was coming up to see me. I never gave it a thought.”

“We’re supposed to be smarter than this, aren’t we? You know, responsible?”

“I suppose we are.” And he wondered just how hard he’d be kicking himself if Nixie had come through Eve’s office to come to him the night before. “Still it is a bit like diving straight into the pool without learning first how to swim a bloody stroke.”

“We need to get her with the Dysons, with people who know what they’re doing with a nine-year-old girl. She’s already got a cargo ship of issues she’ll have to work through. I don’t want to add to them.”

“You’ll want them here and that’s fine,” he said before she could speak. “The sooner the better, I’d say, for her sake.”

“I’ll put a call through to them, ask them to meet me at Central.”