“It’s all on you.”
“So I deserved to die?”
“No. That’s on your killer.”
Hands on hips now, Mars gave an exaggerated look around the alley. “Well, my killer’s not here, is he? So why are you?”
Eve studied the bodies. “Sometimes old business crawls up over the new.”
“What bullshit!” Anger now, the fierce lash of it skinned with disgust. “You’re wallowing. You’d kill him again, wouldn’t you? Stick that knife in him a thousand times again to save yourself. Go to the police, my ass. You made your choice.”
“He was raping me.”
“Oh, boo hoo! And that dead Irish bastard? You wouldn’t have minded a shot at him. You didn’t get one, but you’re protecting the man who got one, and took it. That’s personal, sister. Murder’s murder, but you let it ride. And that last one, the little boy diddler? Same goes. You feel for the man who bashed his head in, broke his bones. Go to the cops?”
She snarled it as blood began to run down her arm.
“You were there, right there, and you let me die. What good are you?”
Truth, Eve thought, enough truth mixed in with the accusations and dismissals, she wouldn’t deny it.
But she could answer it with truth.
“Good enough to look at you,” she said, “to know you were a stone bitch and still work my ass off to find who killed you, to gather the evidence to put them away for it. Just the way I’d have put you away for screwing with people’s lives.”
“You’re not so pure, Lieutenant. Three dead men at your feet, and two of them are yours. I kept secrets—for a price, but I kept them. Not everybody can, not everybody will. Think about that. Secrets have a way of crawling their way out no matter how deep you bury them.
“I’m not going to die in this stinking alley even in your stupid dream. The dead don’t always rest,” Larinda said as she walked back into the shadows. “I can promise you that.”
As she spoke Patrick Roarke’s eyes blinked, fixed on Eve’s. Richard Troy turned his head, grinned at her. Big Rod’s fingers crawled over the littered ground toward her ankle.
Dread crawled into her heart.
“Call a cop,” Eve said coolly, drawing her weapon.
“That’s enough now,” Roarke murmured as he held her close and the cat bumped his head between her shoulder blades. “Enough.”
“I’m all right.” She pressed her face into Roarke’s shoulder as the dream broke. “I’m okay.”
At the sound of her voice, Galahad climbed onto her hip, stared at her until she stroked a hand over him. “I’m okay,” she repeated. “It wasn’t a nightmare. Just … a lot of weird.”
Roarke tipped her face up toward his, studied her as the cat had done. “Tell me.”
Couldn’t, she thought. Just couldn’t. So she hedged instead. “A conversation with Larinda Mars. She’s a little pissed off at me.” On a sigh, Eve closed her eyes. “I can live with that. Arguing with a dead woman’s annoying and useless. Sorry it woke you up.”
Not a lie, Eve decided as Roarke rubbed her back and the cat settled down again. Just not a full disclosure.
She shoved it away, willfully shoved it all away, and concentrated on Roarke’s scent, Galahad’s breathing, the simmer of the bedroom fire.
And, willfully, pushed herself into dreamless sleep.
Roarke lay awake even after he felt her slip off. Lay with his arm around her and his thoughts circling.
Not a lie, he thought in nearly a mirror of her own. But not altogether the truth.
And why was that?
Considering the whys, he backtracked over the evening as he would over a negotiation before its next round. Picking at details, tones, body language.