“Yeah, I circled around that. It doesn’t feel like motive. I know, tried and true,” she said before he could disagree, “I’ll get to why I don’t think it’s going to weigh in, or not much.”
First she wanted to get the rest out, get it off her chest. “The thing is . . . Once I get Soto in the box, putting some pressure on, pissing her off, it comes out of her that her father . . .”
“Ah.” He didn’t need the rest, didn’t need it for his stomach to tighten.
“She’s snapping and snarling it at me, how her old man started on her when she was about twelve, how her useless mother was a junkie, how he beat her and molested her for two years before she joined the Soldados. They were her way out, the escape hatch. And there’s a part of me that gets it, that feels for her, that’s trying not to look at her and see me. To see . . .”
She pressed a hand to her belly, used the pressure to finish it. “Because when she was fourteen, after she’d joined the Soldados, her father was stabbed to death—hacked to bloody death. It went down as a bad illegals deal, since that was his business. But I know, I know when I’m looking at her, and seeing myself, that she had the knife in her hand. That she rammed it in him, again and again. Probably her and Lino together—first kill, lovers’ bond. And no matter what I know, part of me’s saying you did the same as she did. How can you blame her? You did the same.”
“No, you didn’t. No, Eve,” he said before she could speak, “you didn’t do the same. I don’t have to hear the rest to know it. To know that while fourteen is still a child, it’s six years and a world beyond what you were. And you were in prison, not able to get out as she was, and as she did. No escape hatch for you, no friends, no family, not of any kind. She did it for revenge, not for survival.”
She rose to go to the bag she’d dropped on the way to the bed, and took out a photo. She laid it on the bed. “I see him when I look at that. I see my father and what I did.”
He picked it up, studied the harsh crime scene still of the man sprawled on a filthy, littered floor, swimming in his own blood. “No child did this,” Roarke said. “Even a terrified, desperate child couldn’t, not in self-defense, not alone.”
She let out a breath. It probably wasn’t the time to mention he’d make a good cop. “No, there were two attackers. They established that as the wounds were from two different knives. Different blade types and sizes, different force, different angles. I expect one of them lured him there, and the other laid in wait. They came at him from the front and from behind. The sexual mutilation was post-mortem. She probably did that. But—”
“It amazes me,” he said quietly. “It astounds me that you can look at this kind of thing, every day. You can look every day and continue to care, every day. Don’t stand there and tell me you did the same. Don’t stand there and tell me you see yourself in her.”
He let the photo fall to the bed as he rose. “She wears the tattoo?”
“Yeah.”
“With a kill mark.”
“Yeah.”
“She’s proud of it, proud she’s killed. Tell me, Eve, can you tell me you have pride in any of the lives you’ve had to take?”
She shook her head. “It made me sick—no, made me want to be sick. And I couldn’t be. Wouldn’t be. I couldn’t think about it, not really think about it, until I got home. I could think about it here, in case I fell apart. I know we’re not the same. I know it. But there’s a parallel.”
“As there is between me and your victim.” He laid his hands on her shoulders. “And yet here we are, you and me. Here we are because somewhere along the line, those parallels verged, and took markedly different paths.”
She turned, picked up the photo to put it back in her bag. She’d look again. She would look again. “Two years ago—a little more—I wouldn’t have had anyone to say these things to. Even if I’d remembered what happened when I was eight, and before. Nobody, not even Mavis, and I can tell her anything. But I couldn’t show her a photo like that, I couldn’t ask her to look at that, and see what I see. I don’t know how long I could’ve kept looking, kept caring, if I didn’t have someone to come home to who’d look with me when I needed it.”
She sat on the bed again, sighed. “Jesus, it’s been a day. Penny knows more than she’s saying, and she’s hard. She’s got layers and layers of hard on her, slapped right over mean and possibly psychotic. I have to find the way through.”
“Do you think she killed him? Martinez?”
“No, but I think she made sure she was alibied tight because she knew it was going down. I think the asshole loved her, and she loves no one. Maybe she used that against him. I need to think. I saw López, and Mira hit the target there. Lino’s killer confessed to his priest, and there’s nothing I can do. I look at this guy, Roarke, at López and I see another victim.”
“Do you think the killer will go after him?”
“I don’t know. I put him under surveillance. I could bring him in, legally, I could bring him in and wind him up for a few days, until the lawyers cut through it. But I need to leave him out, need to hope the killer will go back to him. And I look at him and I see he’s sick in his heart. I know he’s got this fist pounding on his conscience. There’s nothing I can do,” she repeated. “Just like there’s nothing López can do. We’re stuck, both of us, stuck with our duty.”
She flopped back on the bed. “I need to clear my head, come at it again. It winds all over hell and back. Flores—why him, and where did his path cross with Lino? Where the hell is Chávez? Dead? Hiding? What was Lino waiting for? Was he killed for that, or does it go back to the past? The bombings? He did both of them, I’m damn well sure, so—”
“You’re losing me.”
She pushed up again. “Sorry. I need to lay it out, reorganize, look at the time lines, change up my board. I need to do runs on a whole shitload of people and look at all that from various angles.”
“Then we’d best get started.” He took her hand, pulled her to her feet.
“Thanks.”
“Well, I owe you one for the call from Sinead.”
“Huh?”