by J. D. Robb
“Bless you,” he said and drank again.
“Have you seen this before?” She took the print out of the tattoo, offered it.
“Oh yes. It’s a gang tattoo; the gang’s long disbanded. Some of my parishioners were members and still have the tattoo. Some wear it with pride, some with shame.”
“Lino had one. He had it removed before he came here.”
Understanding darkened López’s eyes. “So. This was his place. His home.”
“I could use the names of the people you know who have this tattoo.” When he closed his eyes, Eve said lightly, “There could be more coffee.”
“No, but thank you. Lieutenant, those who lived through those times and aren’t in prison are now older, and have work, and families, have built lives.”
“I’m not looking to change that. Unless one of them killed Lino.”
“I’ll get you the names, the ones I know or can learn. I’d like to have until tomorrow. It’s difficult to go against the authority I believe in.”
“Tomorrow’s fine.”
“You think he was a bad man. Lino. You believe he may have killed Flores to put on his collar—taken his name, his life. And yet you work like this to find the one who took Lino’s life. I understand that. I believe in that. So I’ll do what I can.”
As he started to rise, Eve spoke. “What did you do before you became a priest?”
“I worked in my father’s cantina, and boxed. I boxed for a time, professionally.”
“Yeah, I looked that up. You won your share.”
“I loved the sport, the training, the discipline. The feeling I’d get when I stepped into the ring. I dreamed of seeing big cities and fame and fortune.”
“What changed your mind?”
“There was a woman. A girl. I loved her, and she loved me. She was beautiful, and so unspoiled. We were to be married. I was saving money, nearly every penny I could from the matches I won. So we could marry and have a place of our own. One day, when I was training, she walked from her parents’ home toward town, to see me, to bring me lunch. Men—three men—saw her, and they took her. We searched for two days before we found her. They left her by the river. Strangled her. They’d raped her first, and beaten her, and left her naked by the river.”
“I’m very sorry.”
“I’d never known hate like that. Even bigger than the grief, was the hate, the rage, the thirst to avenge her. Or myself. How can we be sure? I lived on that hate for two years—that and drink and drugs, and whatever dulled the grief so the hate could stay ripe.
“I lost myself in it. Then they found them, after they had done the same to another young girl. I planned to kill them. I planned it, plotted it, dreamed of it. I had the knife—though I doubt I could have gotten near enough to them to use it, I believed I could. I would. Then she came to me. My Annamaria. Do you believe in such things, Lieutenant? In visitations, in miracles, in faith?”
“I don’t know. But I believe in the power of believing in them.”
“She told me I had to let her go, that it was a sin to lose myself for what was already gone. She asked that I go, alone, on a pilgrimage, to the shrine of Our Lady of San Juan de los Lagos. To draw—I had some little talent—a picture of the Blessed Mother as an offering. And there I would find the rest of my life.”
“Did you?”
“I did. I loved her, so I did what she asked. I walked, a long, long way. Over many months. Stopping along the way to find work, to eat, to sleep, I think to heal, and to find faith again. I drew the portrait, though it had Annamaria’s face. And I understood as I knelt at the shrine, as I wept, that my life was now for God. I traveled home—many months, and worked to save money to enter the seminary. I found my life. And still there are some nights when I dream she’s beside me, and our children are sleeping safe in their beds. I often wonder if that’s God’s blessing for accepting His will, or penance for testing it.”
“What happened to the men?”
“They were tried, convicted, and were executed. There were still executions in Mexico at that time. Their deaths didn’t bring Annamaria back, or the other girl, or the one it was found had come before my Annamaria.”
“No. But no more girls were raped, terrorized, beaten, and strangled by their hands. Maybe that’s God’s will, too.”
“I can’t say, but their deaths didn’t bring me pleasure.” He rose, put the empty mug neatly beside her AutoChef. “You’ve killed.”
“Yes.”
“It didn’t bring you pleasure.”
“No.”
He nodded. “I’ll get you the names. Maybe together we can find justice and God’s will, on the same path.”
Maybe, she thought when she was alone. But as long as she wore a badge, justice had to take priority.
7
SHE FELT PISSY. EVE COULDN’T QUITE FIGURE out why, but the pissiness stayed full-blown through the drive home. The floods of tourists cavorting in New York’s spring like a bunch of chickens before the plucking couldn’t shift the mood into mildly irritated or cynically amused. Even the animated billboards announcing everything from summer fashions—shoes this summer would apparently be clear to show off pedicured feet—to butt enhancers didn’t make a dent. She tried to imagine the city full of invisible shoes, painted toes, and padded asses, but it didn’t cheer her up.
The ad blimps cruising overhead and tying up air traffic didn’t cut through the cloud of irritation as they blasted their litany of Sale! Sale! Sale! (in English this time) at the Sky Mall.
She couldn’t find her appreciation for the chaos, the cacophony, the innate craziness of the city she loved, and so when she finally turned into the gates, couldn’t find her pleasure in being out of it. In being home.
What the hell was she doing here? She should’ve stayed at work where she could turn a pissy mood to her advantage. Should’ve locked her office door, programmed a pot of black coffee, and dug in. To the evidence, the facts, the tangibles.
Why the hell had she asked López what he’d done before wrapping that collar around his neck?
It wasn’t relevant. It didn’t matter. What difference did it make to the case that some bastards had beaten, raped, and strangled the love of his life? It wasn’t connected.
Identifying the victim was connected. Finding the killer mattered. The job didn’t include imagining some girl in Mexico left naked and dead by a river. She had enough blood and death crowded in her brain without adding more—more that didn’t apply to her or the work.
She slammed out of her vehicle, strode into the house. And with that pissiness tangled with a depression she hadn’t acknowledged, barely spared a snarl for Summerset.
“Kiss my unenhanced ass,” she said before he could speak, and kept walking. “Or I’ll plant my visibly shod foot up yours.” She stormed straight into the elevator, ordered the gym. What she needed, she thought, was a good, sweaty workout.
In the foyer, Summerset merely cocked an eyebrow at the pensive Galahad, then stepped to the house ’link to contact Roarke up in his office.
“Something’s disturbing the lieutenant—more than usual. She’s gone down to the gym.”
“I’ll take care of it. Thanks.”
He gave her an hour, though he checked on her by house screen once or twice. She’d hit the virtual run first, and it was telling, Roarke supposed, that she’d chosen New York’s streets rather than her usual beach canvas. Then she hit the weights, worked up a solid sweat. Roarke found it mildly disappointing when she didn’t activate the sparring droid and beat it senseless.
When she’d moved into the pool house and dived in, he shut down his work. By the time he got down, she was out of the pool and drying off. Not a good sign, he decided. Swimming generally relaxed her, and she tended to draw out her laps.
Still, he smiled. “And how are you?”
“Okay. Didn’t know you were home.” She pulled on a robe. “I wanted a workout before I went up.”
“Then it must
be time to go up.” He took her hand, brushed her lips with his. Summerset’s barometer was, as usual, accurate, Roarke thought. Something was disturbing the lieutenant.
“I’ve got to put a couple hours in.”
He nodded, led the way to the elevator.
“The case is a bitch.”
“They’re rarely otherwise.” He watched her as they rode to the bedroom.
“I don’t even know who the vic was.”
“It’s not your first John Doe.”
“No. It’s not my first anything.”
He said nothing, only moved to the wall panel to open it and select a wine while she grabbed pants and a shirt from her drawer.
“I’m going to stick with coffee.”
Roarke set her wine down, sipped his own.
“And I’m just going to grab a sandwich or something. I need to do a search on the records I just got, do some cross-references.”
“That’s fine. You can have your coffee, your sandwich, your records. As soon as you tell me what’s wrong.”
“I just told you the case is a bitch.”
“You’ve had worse. Much worse. Do you think I can’t see you’ve got something knotted inside you? What happened today?”
“Nothing. Nothing.” She scooped her fingers through the messy cap of hair she hadn’t bothered to dry. “We’ve confirmed the vic isn’t Flores, followed a lead that didn’t pan, have a couple of others that may.” She picked up the wine she’d said she didn’t want, and drank as she paced the bedroom. “Spent a lot of time talking to people who worked with or knew the vic, and watched the various degrees of meltdown when I informed them he wasn’t Flores, or a priest.”
“That’s not it. What else?”
“There is no it.”
“There is, yes.” Casually, he leaned back on the dresser, took another sip of his wine. “But I’ve time to wait until you stop being a martyr and let it out.”
“Can’t you ever mind your own business? Do you always have to stick your fingers in mine?”
Pissing her off, he knew, was a shortcut to getting to the core. His lips curved, very deliberately. “My wife is my business.”
If her eyes had been weapons, he’d be dead. “You can stick that ‘my wife’ crap. I’m a cop; I’ve got a case. One to which, for a change, you have no connection. So butt out.”
“How’s this? No.”
She slammed down her wine, started to storm for the door. When he simply stepped into her path, her fists bunched. “Go ahead,” he invited, as if amused. “Take a shot.”
“I ought to. You’re obstructing justice, pal.”
In challenge, he leaned in a little more. “Arrest me.”
“This isn’t about you, goddamn it, so just move and let me work.”
“And again, no.” He caught her chin in his hand, kissed her with more force. Drew back. “I love you.”
She spun away from him, but not before he saw both the fury and frustration on her face. “Low blow. Fucking low blow.”
“It was, yes. Sod me, I’m a bastard.”
She rubbed her hands over her face, raked them back through her damp hair. Kicked the dresser. Coming around now, he thought. He picked up her wine, crossed over to hand it back to her.
“It doesn’t have anything to do with the case, okay? I’m just pissed off it has a hook in me.”
“Then take the hook out. Otherwise, aren’t you the one obstructing justice?”
She took a slow sip, watching him over the rim. “You may be a bastard, but you’re a cagey one. Okay. Okay. We followed through on some information,” she began, and told him about Solas.
“So I find myself thinking, this Lino or whoever the hell he is, he may have killed Flores. Murdered him in cold blood for all I know. He was a killer.”
“You established that?”
“He was Soldados. Badasses in El Barrio. He had the gang tat, had it removed before the ID. They were a New York gang back in the day, and his tat indicates he was high up the chain. He had the Soldados kill mark on the tattoo, so he killed, at least once.”
“Harder, isn’t it, when your victim had made victims?”
“Maybe it is. Maybe. But at least he did something about this, about this kid. He beat the shit out of Solas, protected the kid, when nobody else did, would. He got her out, got her away.”
No one got you out, Roarke thought. No one got you away. Until you did it yourself.
“So we go to see the mother, get a gauge on whether she or the kidfucker might’ve done Lino.” Eve dug her hands into her pockets as she wandered the bedroom. “No chance on her, no way in hell. I can see it as soon as I see her, shaking and shuddering at the thought the husband got out of Rikers. I wanted to slap her.” Eve stopped, closed her eyes. “A slap’s more humiliating than a punch. I wanted to slap her—and I guess I did, verbally.”
He said nothing, waited for her to finish digging it out.
“She was there, goddamn it.” Her voice rang with it, with the anger, the misery, the bitterness. “She was right there when that son of a bitch was raping the kid, over and over. She let him beat her, and that’s her business, but she did nothing to help her own kid. Not a damn thing. Didn’t know, didn’t see, oh my poor baby. And I don’t get it. How can you not see, how can you not know?”
“I don’t know. Maybe some don’t see, refuse to know what they can’t stand.”
“It’s no excuse.”
“It’s not, no.”
“And I know it’s not like me, it’s not the same. My mother hated me, hated the fact of me. That’s something I remember, one of the few things I remember about her. If she’d been there when he raped me, I don’t think she’d have cared one way or the other. It’s not the same, but . . .” She stopped, pressed her fingers to her eyes.
“It pushed it back into your face,” Roarke finished. “It made it now again, instead of then.”
“I guess.”
“And wasn’t it worse, isn’t that what you think? Worse for this girl because there was someone there who should have seen, should have known, should have stopped it?”
“Yes, yes.” She dropped her hands. “And I found myself detesting this pitiful, sad, terrified woman and giving props to a dead man I strongly suspect—hell, I know—was a murderer.”
“Giving him props for doing the right thing for a child isn’t excusing the rest, Eve.”
Calmer, she picked up her wine again. “It got a hook in me,” she repeated. “Later, the priest came back to see me. The real one. López. There’s something about him.”
“Suspicious?”
“No, no. Interesting. King of . . . compelling. He . . .” It struck her, shot out of far left and beaned her with insight. “He reminds me of you.”
If she’d fielded the ball and winged it straight into his face, he’d have been no less shocked. “Me?”
“He knows exactly who and what he is, and accepts it. He’s tough and he gets your measure pretty damn quick. Lino slipped by him, and that’s in his craw. He takes responsibility, and he blurred the lines to do what he saw was right.”
“All that?” Roarke asked.
“Yeah. He brought me information I needed, even though his superiors wanted to debate and stall on it. He went around them, followed his own code. Then I asked him—it didn’t apply, I don’t know why I asked him—what he did before he became a priest.”
She sat now, had to sit now, and told him about López and Annamaria.
“You thought of yourself again, of being trapped and defenseless all those years when your father beat you, raped you. And more, you thought of Marlena,” Roarke added, speaking of Summerset’s daughter.
“God.” Her eye swam with the memories, the nightmares. “When he was telling me, I could see it. And I could see myself, that last time, in the room when he broke my arm, and was raping me, when I went crazy and killed him. I could see Marlena, and how it must have been when those men took her to get at you, when they torture
d and raped and killed her.”
She rubbed away tears, but couldn’t stop them. “And he’s talking about visitations and miracles, and I’m thinking: But what about before? What about the terror and the pain and the horrible helplessness? What about that? Because I’m not dead, and I can still feel it. Do you have to be dead not to feel it anymore?”
Her voice broke. Roarke felt the crack in his own heart.
“And he asks me if I’ve killed, and he knows the answer is yes because he asked me before. But then, he asks if I got pleasure from it. I said no, automatically. I’ve never taken a life in the line, I’ve never used my weapon as a cop for pleasure. But I wondered, for a minute, I had to wonder, did I feel it that night? That night when I was eight and I put the knife in him, when I kept putting it in him, did I get pleasure from that?”
“No.” He sat beside her now, took her face in his hands. “You know better. You killed to live. No more, no less.” He touched his lips to her forehead. “You know better. What you’re wondering, what you need to know, is did I find pleasure in killing the men who murdered Marlena.”
“There’d have been no justice for her. They killed her—brutalized and killed her to strike at you—and they were powerful men in a corrupt time. No one stood for her. No one but you.”
“That’s not the point.”
She laid her hands over his, joined them. “The cop can’t condone vigilantism, can’t condone going outside the law to hunt down and execute murderers. But the victim inside the cop, the person inside the cop understands, and more, believes it was the only justice an innocent girl would ever get.”
“And still you won’t ask what you need to know. Are you afraid you won’t be able to stand the answer, and would rather not see? Rather not know?”
Her breath shuddered out. “Nothing you could say will change the way I feel about you. Nothing. So okay, I’m asking. Did you get pleasure from killing them?”
His eyes stayed level on hers, so clear, so desperately blue. “I wanted to feel it, more than anything, I wanted to revel in it. I wanted to fucking celebrate their deaths—their pain, their end. For every second of pain and fear she’d had. For every second of life they’d taken from her, I wanted it. And I didn’t. It was duty, when it came to it. Not revenge, but duty, if you can understand that.”