What would it have been like to have been raised in a pretty, settled community? Would it make you secure, confident, the way being dragged from filthy room to filthy room, from stinking street to stinking street made her jittery, moody?
Maybe there were fathers here who snuck into their little girls’ bedrooms, too. But it was hard to believe it. The fathers here couldn’t smell of bad liquor and sour sweat and have thick fingers that pushed themselves into innocent flesh.
Eve caught herself rocking in the seat and choked back a sob.
She wouldn’t do it. She wouldn’t remember. She wouldn’t let herself conjure up that face looming over her in the dark, or the taste of that hand clamping over her mouth to smother her screams.
She wouldn’t do it. It had all happened to someone else, some little girl whose name she couldn’t even remember. If she tried to, if she let herself remember it all, she would become that helpless child again and lose Eve.
She laid her head back on the seat and concentrated on calming herself. If she hadn’t been wallowing in self-pity, she would have seen the woman breaking the window at the side of the modified rancher across the street before the first shard fell.
As it was, Eve scowled, asked herself why she’d had to pull over at just this spot. And did she really want the hassle of dealing with intra-jurisdiction paperwork?
Then she thought about the nice family who would come home that night and find their valuables gone.
With a long-suffering sigh, she got out of the car.
The woman was half in and half out of the window when Eve reached her. The security shield had been deactivated by a cheap jammer, available at any electronic outlet. With a shake of her head for the naïveté of suburbanites, Eve tapped the thief smartly on the butt that was struggling to wiggle through the opening.
“Forget your code, ma’am?”
Her answer was a hard donkey-style kick to the left shoulder. Eve considered herself lucky it had missed her face. Still, she went down, crushing some early tulips. The perp popped out of the window like a cork and bolted across the lawn.
If her shoulder hadn’t been aching, Eve might have let her go. She caught her quarry in a flying tackle that sent them both sprawling into a bed of sunny-faced pansies.
“Get your fucking hands off me, or I’ll kill you.”
Eve thought briefly that it was a possibility. The woman outweighed her by a good twenty pounds. To ensure it didn’t happen, she jammed an elbow against the woman’s windpipe and dug for her badge.
“You’re busted.”
The woman’s dark eyes rolled in disgust. “What the hell’s a city cop doing here? Don’t you know where Manhattan is, asshole?”
“Looks like I’m lost.” Eve kept her elbow in place, adding just a little more pressure for her own satisfaction while she pulled out her communicator and requested the closest ’burb cruiser.
chapter six
By the next morning, her shoulder was singing as fiercely as Mavis on a final set. Eve admitted the extra hours she’d put in with Feeney and a night tossing alone in bed hadn’t helped it any. She was leery of anything but the mildest painkillers, and took a single stingy dose before she dressed for the memorial service.
She and Feeney had come across one tasty little tidbit. David Angelini had withdrawn three large payments from his accounts over the last six months, to a grand total of one million six hundred and thirty-two dollars, American.
That was more than three-quarters of his personal savings, and he’d drawn it in anonymous credit tokens and cash.
They were still digging on Randall Slade and Mirina, but so far, they were both clean. Just a happy young couple on the brink of matrimony.
God knew how anybody could be happy on the brink, Eve thought as she located her gray suit.
The damn button on the jacket was still missing, she realized as she started to fasten it. And she remembered Roarke had it, carried it like some sort of superstitious talisman. She’d been wearing the suit the first time she’d seen him—at a memorial for the dead.
She ran a hasty comb through her hair and escaped the apartment and the memories.
St. Patrick’s was bulging by the time she arrived. Uniforms in the best dress blues flanked the perimeter for a full three blocks on Fifth. A kind of honor guard, Eve mused, for a lawyer who cops had respected. Both street and air traffic had been diverted from the usually choked avenue, and the media was thronged like a busy parade across the wide street.
After the third uniform stopped her, Eve attached her badge to her jacket and moved unhampered into the ancient cathedral and the sounds of the dirge.
She didn’t care for churches much. They made her feel guilty for reasons she didn’t care to explore. The scent of candle wax and incense was ripe. Some rituals, she thought as she slipped into a side pew, were as timeless as the moon. She gave up any hope of speaking directly with Cicely Towers’s family that morning and settled down to watch the show.
Catholic rites had gone back to Latin some time in the last decade. Eve supposed it added a kind of mysticism and a unity. The ancient language certainly seemed appropriate to her in the Mass for the Dead.