Eve stared at him for a full ten seconds, then sat heavily on the side of the bed. "Oh Christ, this is perfect. This is just perfect. I can't have the two of them working together like this if there's a thing there. Annoyance I can deal with; sexual shit, no way."
"Sometimes you have to let your children go, darling." He opened another box, chose an antique porcelain angel. "You put the first one on. It'll be our little tradition."
Eve stared at it. "If anything happens to her -- "
"You won't let anything happen to her."
"No." She let out a breath, and rose. "No, I won't. I'm going to need your help."
He reached out, stroked a fingertip over the shallow dent in her chin. "You have it."
She turned, picked her branch, and hung the angel. "I love you. I guess that's turning out to be our little tradition, too."
"It's my favorite."
* * *
Late, very late, when the tree lights were off and the fire burned low, she lay awake. Was he out there, now? Would her 'link beep, announcing another body, another soul lost because she was too many steps behind? Whom did he love now?
CHAPTER TEN
The snow started to spit out of the sky at dawn. No pretty postcard snow, but thin, mean needles that hissed nastily as they hit pavement. By the time Eve settled in her office at Cop Central, there was a slick layer of ugly gray over the city streets, sidewalks, and glides that would certainly keep the MTs and traffic cops busy.
Outside her window, two weather copters from rival channels dueled in a war to pass the bad news to viewers and report on the latest fender bender or pedestrian spill.
All they had to do, Eve thought bad-temperedly, was open their own fucking doors and see for themselves.
It was going to be a lousy day.
Keeping her back to the arrow-slit view of her window, she fed data into her computer with little hope that she'd get a decent probability match.
"Computer, probability program. Using known data, analyze and compute. List in order of probability which names most likely to be targeted by True Love killer."
Working. . .
"Yeah, you do that," she muttered. While her machine whined and clunked, she took copies of photos confiscated from Personally Yours and, rising, fixed them to a board over her desk.
Marianna Hawley, Sarabeth Greenbalm, Donnie Ray Michael. Faces smiling hopefully. Putting their best side forward. The lonely, looking for love.
The desk clerk, the stripper, and the sax blower. Different lifestyles, different goals, different needs. What else did they have in common? What was she missing that linked them all to a killer?
What did he see when he looked at them that attracted and enraged? Ordinary people, living ordinary lives.
Probability percentages even for all subjects.
Eve glanced over at her machine and snarled. "The hell with that. There has to be something."
Insufficient data for further analysis. Current pattern is random.
"How the hell am I supposed to protect two thousand people, for Christ's sake?" She closed her eyes, reeled in her temper. "Computer, eliminate all subjects who live with a companion or family member. Recalibrate remaining."
Working . . . Task complete.
"Okay." Rubbing her fingers over her eyes, she nodded. All three victims had been white, she thought. "Eliminate all subjects not Caucasian. Recalibrate remaining."
Working . . . Task complete.
"Number remaining?"