by J. D. Robb
“Nightmare?”
“Worse, really. She said she dreamed they were all still alive. Woke up, and they weren’t.” He opened his eyes now, heavy and blue. “She sat with me awhile, but was so worried about going back to her room, I put her here. She asked if I’d sit with her. Apparently we both nodded off. I’ve had the searches going on silent, haven’t been able to check them.”
“Morning’s good enough, since it’s only a couple hours away. What do we do with her? Can’t leave her here.”
“Well . . .” He looked over, studied Nixie. “I could try carrying her back. If she wakes up, it’s your turn.”
“Shit. Make sure she doesn’t wake up.”
He slid off the bed. “This usually works with you.” He tucked his hands under her, lifted. Nixie gave a moan, stirred, and had them looking at each other in mild panic. Then her head dropped on his shoulder.
“Don’t breathe,” Eve said in a whisper. “Don’t talk. And maybe you could sort of glide instead of walk.”
He merely cocked his head, then inclined it toward the elevator.
She used manual instead of voice, held her own breath until they’d completed the trip and he was easing Nixie into bed. They backed out of the room together as if the bed contained a homemade boomer.
“When does Summerset take over?”
“Six.”
“Three hours. We should be okay then.”
“I sincerely hope so. I need to sleep and so do you.” He rubbed a thumb on the smudges under her eyes. “Anything new?”
“Yancy’s working on a sketch, but he wants to get back to it in the morning.” In their bedroom, she shed her jacket, then her harness. “I need a few hours down myself. Brain’s mushy. I want to be back at Central around oh-seven hundred. You get any names that look good, you can shoot them to me there.”
She peeled out of her boots, her clothes. “You tired enough not to argue if I ask you to work from here tomorrow?”
“At the moment. But I may revive by sunup.”
“We’ll argue then.”
They crawled into bed, his arm came around her, snuggled her back against him. “That’s a date.”
He didn’t wake before her—another surprise. The low beep from the monitor across the room woke her, and a check of her wrist unit confirmed it was six hundred hours.
The room was still dark, but she could see him, the shape of him. The line of cheek and jaw, the sweep of hair. She’d turned to face him sometime during that short rest. Seeking . . . what, she wondered. Connection, solace, warmth.
For a moment she wished she could simply close her eyes again, curl closer, escape everything but him in the silence of sleep. Her body, her brain, felt so heavy with fatigue. She’d have to dig in, dig deep to find the energy and purpose she’d need to face the day.
As her eyes adjusted to the dark, she could see more of him. The plane of his nose, his cheek, the curve of his mouth. Beautiful. And every plane, every line, every inch was hers.
It made her feel lighter, body and mind, just to look at him.
“I can feel you staring.” His voice was a sleepy murmur, but the thumb and finger of the hand resting on her butt gave her a sharp pinch.
“How come you’re not up making another million and generally laying waste to the business world?”
“Because I’m sleeping. I’ll make another million later, and let someone else start the day laying waste.”
Yes, she thought, lighter and lighter.
“Why are you tired?”
“Because someone won’t shut up and let me sleep.”
“Batteries run down, huh? Maybe you need a recharge.” She wrapped her fingers around him, squeezed, and grinned when he hardened. “Apparently, not running too low.”
“Reserves. You know what happens to sexual predators?”
“You bet. I’m a cop.” She rolled on top of him. “My bats are on low, too. Need a jolt. You know how sex can rev you up?”
“I’ve heard rumors.” His hand stroked over her hair as she worked her way down—and his body flashed fully awake when her mouth replaced her fingers. “I don’t think that’s playing quite fair, but keep it up.”
She laughed, bit his thigh. “Keeping it up’s never been your problem.”
“You’ve got a smart mouth.” His breath caught when she used it again. “Make that brilliant.”
She worked her way up, shifted to straddle him. And from across the room a child’s voice demanded, “Where is Dallas?”
“Shit! Shit a brick!” Eve sprang around, instinctively reaching for her weapon and slapping her own naked side. On the monitor she saw Nixie standing in the guest room by the house scanner. “Jesus, does she ever sleep?”
“Summerset will go settle her down.” But he sat in the warm bed with his naked wife and watched the child.
“We can’t have juicy sex with a kid right there. It’s . . . perverted.”
“I don’t mind perverted. What it is, is intimidating. It’s not like she can see or hear or . . . it’s just that there she is. And now there’s Summerset.” He sighed, pushed back his hair as he watched his majordomo go into Nixie’s room. “Bugger it. Let’s try the shower. It could work in the shower, you know, with the door closed, the water running.”
“It’s weirded me out now, him as much as her. I’ve got to slap it together and get to work. Go back to sleep.”
He dropped back on the pillows when she jumped out of bed and dashed toward the bath. “Right. That’ll happen.”
She was smart enough to get in and out of the shower in a blink, knowing he might try to talk them both into a quick water game. She was shutting the door on the drying tube when he came in.
“She wants pictures,” he said. “Pictures of her family. Can you get some for her?”
“I’ll take care of it. Gotta check some things in my office,” she added. “See if anything came in while we slept. Then I’ve got to get back downtown.”
“I’ll check the search results for you before you go—on the condition you have some breakfast.”
She watched him—the man had the best ass on the planet—step into the shower. “Get something in the office.” She stepped out of the tube, combed her fingers through her hair as she reached for a robe. “Update you in there if you want.”
“I’ll come up as soon as I’m dressed. We’ll have some breakfast while you do.”
“Deal.” She went into the bedroom, pulled out some underwear, grabbed some trousers, reached for a shirt. She was pulling it on when the in-house ’link beeped.
“Video off. What?”
“As you’re up, Nixie would like a word with you,” Summerset said.
“I’m heading to my office in a minute.”
“As none of you has had breakfast, perhaps she could join you.”
Put me right in that corner, Eve thought with a snarl for the ’link. “I’m still—”
“I can program coffee.” Nixie’s voice piped through. “I know how.”
“Okay, fine, sure. Do that. I’ll be there in a minute.”
She buttoned the shirt, pulled on her boots, and muttered to herself about having to have conversations with witnesses before she’d had her coffee. Sex might’ve given her a charge, cleared the cobwebs, but no. Kid’s got to start nagging at her before she’s out of the damn bed.
She strapped on her weapon harness, strode to the closet for a jacket. She had work to do, damn it. Serious, concentrated work, and what was going to happen? The kid was going to start out the day with one of those long, soulful looks. And she’d have to tell her for the umpteenth time that no, she hadn’t caught the murdering bastards who’d slaughtered her family.
“Oh fucking shit!”
The murder board, Eve thought, standing in plain sight in her office. She streaked out of the room, swung into the one Nixie was using. When she found it empty, she charged toward her office.
Still in her pink pajamas, the child stood, staring at the stark
images of murder and death. Cursing herself, cursing Summerset, Eve strode across the room, put herself directly between Nixie and the board.
“This isn’t for you.”
“I saw them before. I saw them for real. My mom and dad. I saw them before. You said I could see them again.”
“Not like this.” Her eyes were huge, Eve thought. So big in her face it seemed they’d swallow it whole.
“It’s my mom and dad. They’re not yours.” She tried to push pass Eve.
Going with instinct, Eve hauled Nixie up, turned around. “It doesn’t help to see them like that. It doesn’t help them or you.”
“Why do you then?” Nixie pushed, shoved. Kicked. “Why do you have pictures of them? Why do you get to look at them?”
“Because it’s my job. That’s it. You have to deal with that. Stop it. I said stop! Look at me.” When Nixie went limp, Eve tightened her grip. She wished desperately for Roarke, for Peabody, even—God—for Summerset. Then she fell back on training. She knew how to handle the survivor of violent death.
“Look at me, Nixie.” She waited until the child lifted her head, until those drenched eyes met hers. “You want to be mad, be mad. They stole your family from you. Be pissed off. Be sad and sorry and outraged. They had no right. The bastards had no right to do this.”
Nixie trembled a little. “But they did.”
“But they did. And last night, they killed two men I knew, men who worked for me. So I’m pissed off, too.”
“Will you kill them now? When you find them, will you kill the bastards because they killed your friends?”
“I’ll want to. Part of me will want to, but that’s not the job. Unless my life or someone else’s life is in danger, if I kill them because I’m just pissed off and sad and sorry, it puts me in the same place as them. You have to leave this to me.”
“If they try to kill me, will you kill them first?”
“Yes.”
Nixie looked into Eve’s eyes, nodded gravely. “I can do the coffee. I know how.”
“That’d be good. I take mine black.”
When Nixie went into the kitchen, Eve grabbed the blanket off her sleep chair, tossed it over the board. Then she pressed her hands to her face.
The day, she thought, was already sucking large.
13
“THAT WAS JUST WEIRD.” EVE WENT STRAIGHT to her desk to check any incomings the minute Summerset led Nixie out of the office.
Roarke poured the last of the coffee from the pot into his cup before he rose. “Spending twenty minutes over breakfast is considered fairly normal in some primitive societies.”
“And now I’m behind.” She scanned the ME reports on Knight and Preston, the preliminaries on the security and electronics on the safe house. “I’ve got to get out of here.”
“Let me see what I’ve got for you first.”
“Roarke? She saw the board.”
“Bloody hell. When—”
“I told Summerset to send her up, so I can’t even blame him. I wasn’t thinking—was just a little annoyed that I was going to have to deal with her before I got to work. And then—” She shook her head. “By the time I thought of it, hauled ass up here, it was too late.”
He set the coffee down, forgot it. “How did she handle it?”
“She’s got more spine than you’d expect from a kid. But she’s not going to forget it—ever. I’ll need to tell Mira.” With no other target handy, she kicked her desk. “Shit, shit, shit! How could I be that stupid?”
No need to ask how Eve was handling it, he thought. “It’s not your fault, or not exclusively. It’s on all of us. We’re not used to having a child in the house. I didn’t think of it either. She might have wandered in here last night when she was coming up to see me. I never gave it a thought.”
“We’re supposed to be smarter than this, aren’t we? You know, responsible?”
“I suppose we are.” And he wondered just how hard he’d be kicking himself if Nixie had come through Eve’s office to come to him the night before. “Still it is a bit like diving straight into the pool without learning first how to swim a bloody stroke.”
“We need to get her with the Dysons, with people who know what they’re doing with a nine-year-old girl. She’s already got a cargo ship of issues she’ll have to work through. I don’t want to add to them.”
“You’ll want them here and that’s fine,” he said before she could speak. “The sooner the better, I’d say, for her sake.”
“I’ll put a call through to them, ask them to meet me at Central.”
“Let me get you the search results from last night.”
He moved into his office, called for the results on screen and on disc. “Nineteen names,” he mused. “More than you might expect, I’d think. Natural causes would cut that back considerably, but . . .”
“A lot of names.” She turned to study the wall screen. “Five that cross with both of them. The Swishers weren’t the first,” she said again. “No way I buy that. I’ll take these in, give them a run.”
“I can help you out in . . . later,” he decided when he checked the time. “I’m behind myself. I’ve work I have to get to here, then I have some meetings in midtown starting at nine.”
“You said you’d work from here.”
“No, I said we’d argue about it this morning.” He reached out, skimmed a finger down her chin. “My work can’t stop anymore than yours, Lieutenant—and if someone’s paying attention, they might wonder why I’m hunkered down here when I should be out and about. I’ll promise you to be careful, very. No unnecessary chances.”
“We might have different definitions of unnecessary chances.”
“Not so very much. Come here.”
“I am here.”
“A bit closer than that.” With a laugh he yanked her forward, into his arms. “I’ll worry about you, you worry about me.” He rubbed his cheek to hers. “And we’re even.”
“You let something happen to yourself, I’ll kick your ass.”
“Ditto.”
Since she had to be satisfied with that, Eve fought the traffic downtown. Even the sky seemed more crowded this morning, jammed with sky trams and airbuses and the traffic copters that struggled to keep things moving.
However quicker they claimed it was to use the sky routes, she’d stick with the creep and stink of the streets.
She fought her way down Columbus and straight into a fresh logjam caused by a glide-cart that had overturned into the street. A number of pedestrians were helping themselves to the tubes and food supplies that were rolling on the asphalt while the operator jumped up and down like a man on springs.
For a moment she regretted she didn’t have the time to wade in to the potential riot. It would’ve been an entertaining way to start the day. Instead, she called the incident in, and solved her own commute dilemma by blasting her sirens—wow! look at those assholes scramble—and hit vertical mode.
Okay, she admitted, she loved her new ride.
She breezed over the jam—caught a glimpse of the glide-cart operator shaking a fist into the air—then settled back down three blocks south in relatively reasonable traffic.
She decided to trust auto long enough to make the calls on her list. She left messages for the Dysons, for Mira, reserved a conference room for ten, and left more voice mails for each member of the team she wanted in attendance.
And thought how much of this drone work she’d been able to avoid when Peabody had been her aide rather than her partner.
When she got to Central, there was Peabody right outside the bull pen, fit up against McNab like they were two pieces in some strange and perverted jigsaw puzzle.
“I actually had breakfast this morning.” Eve stopped beside them. “This is the sort of thing that could make me boot.”
“Just kissing my sweetie good-bye,” Peabody said, and made exaggerated kissy noises against McNab’s lips.
“Definitely booting material. This is a cop sho
p, not a sex club. Save it for after shift.”
“Still two minutes before shift.” McNab gave Peabody’s butt a squeeze. “See you later, She-Body.”
“Bye, Detective Stud.”
“Oh, please.” Eve pressed a hand to her uneasy belly. “I want to keep the waffles down.”
“Waffles?” Peabody spun on the heels of her checked airskids. “You had waffles. What’s the occasion?”
“Just another day in Paradise. My office.”
“Tell me about the waffles,” Peabody begged as she scurried after Eve. “Were they the kind with strawberries and whipped cream all over them, or the kind you just drown in syrup? I’m dieting, sort of. I had a low-cal nutridrink for breakfast. It’s disgusting, but it won’t expand my ass.”
“Peabody, I’ve observed—unwillingly and with considerable regret—that the person you have chosen to cohabitate with appears to have a nearly unnatural fondness for your ass.”
“Yeah.” She smiled, dreamily. “He does, doesn’t he?”
“So why—I ask unwillingly and with some regret—are you so obsessed with the size and shape of that particular part of your anatomy?”
“I’ve got the body type and metabolism that means I have to watch it or you’ll be able to serve a five-course meal off the shelf of that particular part of my anatomy. It’s a matter of pride. Not all of us are preordained to go through life skinny as a snake.”
“Now that we’ve cleared that up, I want coffee.”
She’d planned to wait a couple of beats, then give Peabody the Look of Destruction. But her partner moved directly to the AutoChef and programmed. “I guess what happened last night with Knight and Preston got me and McNab both thinking, and just appreciating what we’ve got. Knowing what can happen sort of makes the moment more intense. He doesn’t usually walk me to Division.”
She handed coffee to Eve, took one for herself. “We just wanted a few minutes more.”
“Understood.” And because it was, Eve gestured to the chair before she leaned back against her desk. “I left you a message, as well as leaving one for the rest of the team. Conference Room C, ten hundred. We’ll brief, and hope Yancy’s got a better picture of our suspects. Meanwhile, I have some names to be run. Potentials. Morris worked on Knight and Preston last night. Nothing new or unexpected there. Stun took them down, knife took them out. Tox was clear. I’m waiting for the lab to confirm that Preston’s weapon was fired before he went down.”