Delusion in Death (In Death 35)

“I believe I do. I’ll get both shortly. I believe I’ll have the cat as well for a while. I could use his company. Go, see that your wife eats a meal. I’m surprised she didn’t starve to death before she had you putting food under her nose.”

“It pleases me to do it.”

“I know it does. You were an interesting boy, always so bright and clever, so thirsty for more—of everything. You made yourself an interesting and clever man. She’s made you a better one.”

“She’s made me more than I ever thought I could be.”

“Go feed her. I expect the pair of you will work late tonight.”

Alone, he sat with the cat sprawled over his feet, the wine in his hand. A fire simmered in the hearth of the beautiful room of gleaming wood, sparkling crystal, rich fabrics, and art. The room where the pain, the loss, the fear of long ago tried to haunt him.

Macie Snyder, he thought, Jeni Curve. Yes, he’d remember those names. The lieutenant was right. The innocent mattered.

13

Roarke found Eve in her office, circling her board.

“Nadine’s pretty damn good,” she told him. “She came up with some of the same data Summerset gave us. Not as much detail—she’s not that good—but enough I’ll have two sources when I hit Teasdale with questions on Menzini. And between Nadine, Callendar, and Teasdale, I’ve got a good long list of abductees from back in the day. Separated into recovered, and not recovered.”

“What does that tell you?”

“Can’t be sure. Callaway’s too young to have been taken during the Urbans. But one of his parents? Grandparents somehow involved? Possible. Gotta dig into that. Fucker’s not a scientist so there has to be a connection, a way he got his hands on the formula.”

Roarke handed her the wine she’d left downstairs. “You never had this.”

“Right.”

“Or food.”

She looked back at her board.

“You can talk it through while we eat. I’m under orders to feed my wife.”

Her shoulders hunched, then released again. “He’s okay?”

“It’s hard—as you’d know better than most—to go back, look close at traumatic past events. He said more tonight about the horrors of his experiences than he has to me in all the years we’ve been together. I don’t know, not really, who he was before he saved me, took me in.”

“You never looked. You never looked at my past either, until I asked you to.”

“No. Love without trust? It’s not love at all.”

It upset him, she knew, worried him to see Summerset so frail, so tired. “I’ll get the food. We’ll eat.”

He ran a hand down her hair, brushed a kiss on her lips. “I’ll get it. Orders.”

She looked at the board again, sighed, then walked to the kitchen while Roarke programmed the meal. “Roarke? Whoever he was before, he was the kind of man who’d take in a young boy, tend to him, give him what he needed. He’s still a pain in the ass, but that matters.”

“I’m not sure, not at all, I’d have lived to be a man without him. I expect my father might have done for me, as he did for my mother, however slippery and clever I might have been. I’m not sure, had I lived, what manner of man I’d have been without him. So it matters, yes. It matters.”

She sat with him by the window at the little table, the spaghetti and meatballs she had a weakness for heaped on her plate like comfort.

Would they be here now, together like this, if Summerset had made another choice the day he’d found the young boy, beaten half to death by his own father? If he’d walked on, as some would, or had dumped Roarke in an ER, would they be here, sharing wine and pasta?

Roarke would say yes, they were meant to be. But she didn’t have his faith in fate and destiny.

All the steps and choices made life an intricate maze with endless solutions and endings.

“You’re quiet,” Roarke commented.