J. Robb - Delusion in Death

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

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.

“He wanted something else for you. You’re his, and he wanted something—someone else for you. He deals with me now, we deal with each other. But he had a kind of vision for you. That’s what parents do, right?”

“Whatever he envisioned, under it he wanted me happy. He knows I am. And he knows, as he told me before I came upstairs, you’ve made me a better man.”

For an instant she was, sincerely, speechless. “He must really be feeling off.”

When Roarke simply shook his head, sipped at his wine, she wound pasta around her fork. “It just made me think, wind it through my head.” She held up her fork. “Like pasta.” She ate, wound again. “The abductees. They wanted kids under a certain age, when it’s likely they’re more malleable, more defenseless. Most of Red Horse would be, by the popular term, bat-shit crazy. But not all. It’s never all. There’d be kids there, too—sucked in or swept along. And women who felt they had no choice—scared. Men too weak-spined or weak-minded to do anything but go along.”

“Add the world was going to hell in a handbasket.”

“What does that mean? What’s a handbasket? If it’s a basket, you need your hands to carry it, so it’s a given.”

“It might be a bushel basket. You’d need your arms.”

“How much is a bushel?”

“Four pecks.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Now you’re messing with me. Peck’s what chickens do.”

He laughed. “I stand corrected.”

“What I was saying, before handbaskets, is some people would, given human nature, feel protective of the kids. And maybe bond with them, especially kids who were kept for a good chunk of time. They’d have to assign people to take care of them. The babies, say.”

“And there’d be that bonding. Yes, I can see that.”

“With the bonding comes the vision, the wants for the kid. The kid has to depend on you, for food, shelter, protection. Mira asked me questions today that made me think about that. I was afraid of Troy, and even as a kid, hated him on some level. But I depended on him. Not on her. I never depended on her.”

Was there a twinge of pain there? Eve wondered. Maybe—maybe just a twinge.

“I think that’s one of the reasons I remember him much more clearly. It’s not just that he had me longer, but that he was the one who brought in the food, that sort of thing. He couldn’t turn me. Maybe I was stronger than either of us knew, or he wasn’t as smart as he thought he was. But it’s not hard to turn a kid—even an adult—pain and reward, pain and reward, deprivation, fear, repetition. You can even turn them with kindness, if you’re smart about it.”

“I agree, but as you said, Callaway’s too young to have been an abductee.”

“If his father was, Callaway might’ve been raised in the doctrine. Or he could know someone who was. I’m going to fine-tune those lists of abductees.”

“Why Callaway? Specifically.”

“It’s little things. They start to add up. He’s the first to come forward—with Weaver. Come in, show concern for their pal and coworker. He admits to being at the bar, and that’s the ground zero area, from what I can piece together. Vann left too early. Weaver’s already in charge, and like I said, she’d have used a man.”

“Then why not go after Weaver, or Vann for that matter? Weaver’s a woman, in charge. Vann’s got the family connections, the shine.”

“Maybe he’s working his way up. Eliminating direct competition first. Maybe he’s just hitting indiscriminately, and he got lucky. In ratio, his office lost more than any other in the two attacks. Relationships. He lives and works in that sector. Weaver and Vann live on the edges of it, but Callaway’s right in the middle. Geography. And he’s pushing, and pushing Weaver to push for information.

“He’s single,” she went on. “Has no long-term relationships that I’ve found.”

“And Vann’s been married, has a child. Weaver’s had two engagements.”

“You could say Weaver and Vann don’t ace it on commitment, but they each gave it a shot. Nothing shows where Callaway did. And though it was kind of a toss out, Weaver mentioned her mother, Vann his son. Callaway?”

“No one,” Roarke finished.

“It adds up,” she repeated. “He lives alone, and he’s spinning in middle management. Of the three of them he was the most controlled tonight. Careful what he said. It felt as if he took his lead from them—didn’t want to stand out, not in this situation. He wanted to let me think about the other two, respond primarily to them. Until closer to the end of it. He wasn’t getting everything he wanted, so he had to insert himself instead of relying on the other two to pull out the information he was after.”