“Yes.”
“Good.”
She went directly to the bedroom. Roake was probably home, she thought-Summerset would’ve said if her wasn’t. And he was probably in his office, so ahe should’ve gone there, connected with him.
But she wasn’t ready, just not ready for the connection. That war continued, beefing up now that she’d made it home. Where she knew she was safe, where she knew she could let go, just a little. Home, where she could acknowledge her belly was raw, the back of her neck tight knots of stress.
She laid back, closed her eyes. When she felt the thump beside her, Eve reached out, let her arm curl around the cat.
Stupid, she thought, it was stupid to feel sick, to have to fight against being sick. To feel anything but suspicion and disgust for a woman like Penny Soto.
She didn’t realize Roarke had come into the room until his hand brushed her cheek. He moved so quietly, she thought, barely stirred the air if he didn’t choose. No wonder he’d been such a successful thief.
“What hurts?” he asked her.
“Nothing. Nothing really.” But she turned to him, turned into him when he lay beside her. And pressed her face into his shoulder. “I needed to be home. I needed to be home first. I was right about that. But I thought I needed to be alone, just be alone until I got level. I was wrong. Can we just stay here awhile?”
“My favorite place.”
“Tell me stuff. Stuff you did today. I don’t care if I don’t understand it.”
“I had a ’link conference here shortly after you left this morning regarding some R amp;D at Euroco, one of my arms in Europe that deals primarily with transportation. We have a very interesting sea-road-air personal sports vehicle coming out early next year. I had meetings in midtown, but Sinead called from Ireland before I left. It was nice to hear from her. They’ve acquired a new puppy and named it Mac, who she claims is more trouble than triplet toddlers. She sounds madly in love with him.”
She listened to his voice, more than the words. Something about a meeting with team leaders on a project called Optimum, and a holoconference dealing with his Olympus Resort, a lunch session with key members of one of his interests in Bejing. A merger, an acquisition, conceptual drawings.
How did he keep it all straight?
“You did all that, and still had time to get petunias?”
His hand trailed up and down her back, up and down. “Did you like them?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I liked them.”
“It’s been nearly two years since we were married.” He kissed the top of her head, then turned his to rest his cheek there. “And with Louise and Charles about to have their wedding here, it made me think of the petunias. How the simple-a flower, a few minutes to talk to a relation-makes the complicated worthwhile.”
“Is that why we have tulips and daffodils? They are tulips, right?”
“They are. It’s good to be reminded that things come around again, fresh and new. And some things remain, steady and solid. The call from Sinead brought both back to me. Are you ready to tell me what’s the matter?”
“Sometimes things come around again that are old and hard.” She sat up, shoved at her hair. “I brought Penny Soto in for questioning today. Actually, I baited her into taking a pop at me so I could charge her with assault and resisting.”
He took her chin, tracing his thumb in its dent as he turned her face right and left. “You don’t appear to be popped.”
“The assault was mostly technical. She was Lino’s main lay when they were teenagers. Works in the bodega right next to the church, the bodega he frequented, pretty much daily.”
“So they reconnected.”
“She was the one who knew him,” she said, remembering Roarke’s words from the morning. “The one he needed to tell. Yeah, they reconnected, and in the biblical sense-according to her. I buy that. You’d have to buy that. So she knew who he was, and some of what he was up to-maybe all, but I couldn’t get that out of her. Yet.
“She claims he blackmailed some of the people who came in to confess. Plays, but I can’t quite figure it all.”
“Hobby. More,” Roarke continued, “habit. The masquerade didn’t change who and what he was under it, and what was under it would need the hit. The buzz.”
“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£sca st 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.”