Rachel Caine: Devil's Due

"Good plan."

They moved out into the hall, and he suddenly stopped walking. She looked back at him with eyebrows raised. He surveyed the corridor, the people coming and going as the day began to come alive. The glow of dawn outside the courthouse windows.

His eyes had a wet shine to them. Tears.

"McCarthy?" she asked gently.

He took in a breath. "Yeah. Freedom. Kind of took me by surprise," he said. "Give me a second."

"Take your time," she murmured. She knew how it felt. There had been a dark time in her life—pitch-black, in fact—when she hadn't been sure she'd ever see daylight again. The emotional impact of realizing that the trauma was over, that you were free…it could be overwhelming. It wasn't relief. It was terror.

When you get used to the dark, the light can burn you.

He blinked, and smiled slightly. "Sorry," he said, and cleared his throat. "So. Want to have breakfast with an ex-con? I mean, it's not like we're not acquainted already. Fifteen hours of interviews has to count for something."

First, second and third dates, most likely. She cleared her own throat, banishing the thought. "I'd love to."

"Got to confess, I'm low on funds."

"They confiscated your ill-gotten gains?" She made it an ironic question, not quite accusatory. He met her eyes without shame.

"I asked them to," he said. "Wanted to start out fresh."

"Ah. My treat, then.”

He offered her the crook of his elbow. She put a hand in it, and they resumed their walk down the long paneled hallway, to the free world.

Over breakfast at the restaurant in the Raphael Hotel, which was a good deal fancier than his suit jacket warranted, McCarthy wolfed down a Hangover Omelet stuffed with chili, chorizo and potatoes; Lucia stuck to a large fruit cup and dry toast. She enjoyed watching him eat. He seemed enchanted with everything he tasted, but then, she supposed nearly two years of prison chow would do that. She suspected he was always a bit of a sensualist. Something about his eyes, his smile, the clever exact movements of his hands…

She pulled herself back from the dizzy edge of that thought, and said, "Do you have any idea who could have used your gun to commit the murders?" Because the circumstantial evidence had been convincing. McCarthy's gun had been matched to the bullets in the bodies. There had been footprint evidence at the scene, too, and an eyewitness who'd seen McCarthy with the victims half an hour before their murders, although Lucia doubted the authenticity of that. Eyewitnesses were often wrong.

"Oh, I know who did it," McCarthy mumbled around a mouthful of eggs and cheese. "Stewart."

"He didn't."

"Crazy enough."

"Jazz checked it out. Stewart had an alibi."

"So did I. Funny how that is."

"Stewart was booking a carjacker downtown at the time of the killings, in front of twenty other cops."

McCarthy studied her with those intense blue eyes as he chewed and swallowed, wiped salsa from his lips, and for a second she thought he was going to argue the point. Instead he said, "So what's your story?"

"Excuse me?"

"Fifteen hours of talking, and I don't think you said boo about yourself. Name, rank and serial number, but you didn't exactly meet me halfway. So tell me how you got mixed up in all this—and why the hell you care about a guy like me."

Lucia was, for an instant, thrown. She disliked talking about herself, especially when faced with someone like McCarthy, who was certainly a damn good investigator. She chose her words carefully. "Did Jazz tell you how we came to be partners?"

"Yeah. A letter to each of you, offering to put up the money to open a detective agency. Some kind of nonprofit agency. I get why Jazz took the deal. Why did you?"

"I didn't," she said, and speared a slice of electric-green honeydew. "I turned it down." She enjoyed the look on his face as he assimilated that. "I was leaving when Jazz got shot in a drive-by attack—you know about that?"

He nodded shortly, face set.

"I had my doubts about her as a partner," Lucia continued. "But I don't like people shooting at me, and I don't like people shooting my friends. Even new ones. So I decided that it might be a good idea to stick around. One thing led to another, cases came up, we solved them. And here we are."

She nibbled the fruit. He watched her, concentrating on her mouth, and she felt a surge of self-consciousness that surprised her. Something about McCarthy threw her off stride. He made her hyperaware of how her clothes fit, of the tiny imperfections in the way the sleeves hugged her arms, the way the lapels didn't quite lay straight.

The way her skin shivered into gooseflesh when he stared at her.

McCarthy tilted his head. "Jazz is a walking disaster, but somehow, she does okay. She's also a pretty good judge of character. Me notwithstanding." He continued to watch as Lucia chewed and swallowed. "I know what you mean about sticking around her, though. I wasn't going to be her partner—I was just saddled with her for a week. But she grows on you. You want to protect her from herself. Doesn't generally work, though. She ends up saving your ass more than you save hers, and before too long you're joined at the hip. And then you realize that's not a bad thing."

"Regarding ass-saving, I believe the score's just about even between us now," Lucia replied.

"That tells me something about you ."

"What?"

He surprised her with a wicked grin. "You're damn good at what you do. Whatever it is."

"Obviously, I'm a private investigator."

"And I'm your maiden aunt Sally," he snorted. "I've known a lot of P.I.s over the years, and none of them ever came looking or sounding like you. You avoided the question. What's your story?"

"I'm avoiding the question because I don't want to answer it."

"Because…?"

"Because it's none of your business, Mr. McCarthy," she said evenly, and took another bite. Pineapple, fresh and sweet and pulpy. She savored the juice on her tongue and the look of surprise on his face. "I helped Jazz get you out of prison, that's all. I don't owe you any information, any conversation, or anything else."

"Yeah? So what's this?"

"I said I don't owe it. I can still give it of my own free will."

He'd demolished the omelet, and now he set his fork on the plate with a clink and took a drag of coffee from the heavy white cup. Around them, the well-groomed breakfast crowd in their expensive suits and trendy casual wear chatted and smiled. We're both out of place here , Lucia thought, even though she seemed to fit seamlessly into the crowd. There was something different about McCarthy that spoke to the wildness at her core. It wasn't his prison-roughened image.

McCarthy smiled at her. "Okay, so you don't owe me. I was hoping you liked me enough to want to answer, anyway."

"I don't like anybody that well."

"Harsh."

"Pragmatic," she countered. "I hardly know you, except that you might not be guilty of murder, but you're surely guilty of other things. Add that to the fact that your friends and relatives were hardly crowding the gallery today—"

His face shut down even further, hiding emotion. Lids drifted lower to hood his expressive eyes. "Let's leave them out of it," he said. "I was a cop, and my buddies were all cops. Cops stay away, times like these, until they feel better about the facts. Stewart's not the only one who still, deep down, thinks I pulled the trigger on those people." McCarthy stared at his coffee and took another deep swallow. "My brother would have been here, but he's on a tuna boat this season. My parents—" He shook his head.

She took pity on him. "I doubt they could have made the trip," she said. "Your mother is ill, isn't she?"