J. Robb - Kindred In Death

“All right then.” Roarke gestured to the screen. “You won’t show this to the father.”

“No.” She drank because her throat was dry. “He doesn’t need to see this.”

Because he needed to, needed the contact, Roarke took her hand in his as they studied the screen together. “It seems revenge, your payback, holds as motive.”

“It had to. I couldn’t see it any other way.” Again, and again, she read the final text, that ugly message from the killer.

“It’s boasting,” she said quietly. “He couldn’t resist digging in the knife. Leaving the music disc wasn’t the mistake. But adding this, that’s a big one. He doesn’t care about that, but it’s a mistake.”

“It wasn’t enough even to torture that child, to force her to say those words-her last-to her father. He had to add his own.”

“Exactly right. That’s a crack in control, in logic, even in patience.”

“The kill,” Roarke suggested. “For some it’s a spike, a rush.”

“That’s right. He was so damn pleased with himself. All those weeks, those months of preparation coming to a head here, in what he sees as his victory. So he has to do his little dance. It’s a mistake, a weakness,” she said with a nod. “He put too much of himself in there, couldn’t resist claiming that much responsibility for her. It’s the kind of thing that gives us a handle.”

Personal, she thought. Deeply personal. “He needed MacMasters to know, and to suffer for the knowing. It gives us a focus. We concentrate on MacMasters, his case files, his career. Who has he taken down, what cops has he kicked over the years. Everything he did up to that was cold, controlled. This part? It’s cocky, and even while it’s smug, it’s really pissed off. It helps.”

Because he’d had enough, maybe too much, Roarke turned away from the screen. “I hope to God it does.”

“We’ll take a break.”

“Which you’re doing now for me.”

“About half.” She ordered the screen off, ordered a copy of the disc. “You’re right, it hits really close to home. I need it out of my head for a little while.”

He went back to her wondering why he hadn’t seen how pale she’d gone, how dark her eyes. “We’ll have a meal. Not in here. We’ll step away from this. We’ll have a meal outside, in the air.”

“Okay. Yeah.” She let out a breath that eased some of the constriction in her chest. “That’d be good. I need to inform Whitney, and the team. I have to do that now.”

“Do that, and I’ll take care of the meal.”

When she came down, stepped out on the terrace, he stood with his glass of wine on the border between stone and lawn. He’d switched on lights that illuminated the trees, the shrubs, the gardens so they glimmered under the moon. The table was set-he had a way-with flickering candles and dishes under silver covers.

Two worlds, she supposed. What they’d closed away inside for a while, and what was here, sparkling in the night.

“When I built this house, this place,” he began, still looking out into the shimmering dark, “I wanted a home, and I wanted important. Secure, of course. But I think it wasn’t until you I put secure in the same bed as safe. Safe wasn’t a particular priority. I liked the edge. When you love, safe becomes paramount. And still with what we are, what we do, there’s the edge. We know it. Maybe we need it.”

He turned to her now, and he was both shadow and light.

“Earlier I said I didn’t know how you could bear doing what you do, seeing what you see. I expect I’ll wonder that a thousand times in a thousand ways through our life together. But tonight, I know. I don’t have the words, no clever phrases or lofty philosophy. I simply know.”

“When it’s too much, bringing it home, you have to tell me.”

“Darling Eve.” He stepped to her, danced his fingertips over her messy cap of hair. “I wanted a home, and I wanted important. I managed the shell of it, didn’t I? An impressive shell for all that. But you? What you are, what you bring into it-even this, maybe due to this, you make it important. And for me, for what I might add to it? Well, it might balance the scales a bit.”

“Are you looking for balance?”

“I might be,” he murmured. “So.” He leaned down to brush a kiss over her brow. “Let’s have our meal.”

She lifted one of the silver tops and studied the plate below. A chunk of lightly grilled fish topped a colorful mix of vegetables with a spray of pretty pasta curls.

“It looks… healthy.”

He laughed, kissed her again. “I wager it’ll go down easy enough. Then you can wipe the healthy out with too much coffee and some of the cookies you’ve stashed in your office.”

She gave him a bland look as she sat down. “Stashed indicates concealed. They’re just put away in such a manner that certain people whose names rhyme with Treebody and McBlab can’t grab them and scarf them down.” She stabbed some fish, ate it. “It’s okay.”

“As an alternative to pizza.”

“There is no alternative to pizza. It stands alone.”

“Do you remember your first slice?”

“I remember my first New York pizza-the real deal. Out of school, of age. Shook myself out of the system and hit New York, applied to the Academy. I had a couple weeks, and I was walking the city, getting my bearings. I went into this little place downtown, West Side-Polumbi’s. I ordered a slice. They had a counter that ran along the front window, and I got a seat there. I bit in, and it was like, I don’t know, my own little miracle. I thought, I’m free, finally. And I’m here, where I want to be, and I’m eating this goddamn pizza and watching New York. It was the best day of my life.”

She shrugged, stabbed more of the delicately grilled fish. “Damn good pizza, too.”

It both broke his heart and lifted it.

For a time they spoke of inconsequential things, blessedly ordinary things. But he knew her, her mind, her moods.

“Tell me what Whitney said. It’s inside your head.”

“It can wait.”

“No need.”

She toyed with the vegetables. “He agrees there’s no point in showing MacMasters the disc, or-at this time-informing him of it. We’ll focus on MacMasters’s cases, current and prior, see if we can hook any of them to his threat file. But…”

“You’re thinking he’s too smart to have threatened outright.”

“He’s made one mistake, he’ll have made another. But I don’t think we’ll find him there. Baxter and Trueheart hit the one name MacMasters came up with, a dealer he’d helped bust. There’s nothing there,” she said with a shake of her head. “It doesn’t play. When you…”

He angled his head when she trailed off and scooped up more fish. “Finish it off.”

She looked into his eyes, already sorry she would take him-them-out of the shimmering night and into the blood and pain of the past. “Okay. The men who killed Marlena, who brutalized her and killed her to strike at you…”

“Did I let them know I intended to hunt them down and kill them?” he finished. “It makes you-what’s the most diplomatic word under the circumstances-uncomfortable to ask, or to delve too deep into the fact that I did hunt them down, and I did kill them. Everyone who’d tortured and raped and beaten and broken her.”

She picked up her wine while the raw edge of his tightly controlled anger stabbed at her. But she kept her eyes steady on his. “Comfort isn’t always a part of this, what I do, what we are.”

“What was done to that girl we watched on the screen upstairs was done to another, even younger girl. By more than one. Over and over, again and again. For the same reason, it seems. To strike out at someone else. With Marlena, it was me. She was family to me, and they ripped her to pieces.”