Authors: J. D. Robb
Wild blue eyes, concentrate.
And with a jerk, one that brought her stomach to the base of her throat, turned her vision bright white, he snapped the shoulder back in place.
“Shit. Shit. Shit.” She caught her breath, nearly nodded, and was grateful he was holding her upright. “Okay. That's okay. It's better.”
And she'd needed the jolt, she thought, not just to dull the pain in the shoulder, but to bring her back, fully, to where she was.
“The kid,” she began.
“Summerset.”
He came out with Nixie clinging to his neck. “She hasn't been hurt.” There was the faintest of tremors in his voice. “Only frightened. She needs to be taken out of here.”
“I want to see him.” Nixie's voice was thick when she lifted her face from Summerset's neck. Her cheeks were wet, her eyes still streaming. But they met Eve's. “I want to see who killed my family. Dallas said I could.”
“Bring her over here.”
“I don't think--”
“I'm not asking you to think.” Eve crossed over herself, and when she wiggled down, took one of Nixie's hands in her bloody one. “The woman's dead,” she said flatly. “Neck snapped when we took that header down the steps.”
Not my arm, Eve thought, though it ached like a rotten tooth.
“There's another upstairs.”
“He's unconscious, unarmed, and restrained,” Summerset said.
“This one's hurt bad,” Eve went on. “But he'll live. He'll live a long time--the longer the better--because he'll never be free again. He'll eat and piss and sleep where and when he's told. Where he's going ... you getting this, Kirkendall?” she demanded. “Where he's going, it's like death. Only you live through it, day after day after day.”
Nixie looked down, and her fingers tightened on Eve's. “She's going to put you in a goddamn cage,” she said, clearly now. “Then, when you die, you're going to hell.”
“That's quite right.” Summerset went to Nixie again, picked her up. “Now let's go outside and let the lieutenant do her job.”
Peabody rushed in, a few strides ahead of an army of cops. “Jesus loving Christ.”
“Baxter's down. Out in the back most likely. See if he's alive.” She turned to a uniform as Peabody raced out. “One suspect down on the second floor, unconscious and restrained. A second in that room over there, dead. This one makes three. I want MTs, CSU, the ME, sweepers, and Captain Feeney from EDD.”
“Sir, you don't look so good yourself.”
“Get that going, I'll worry about how I look.” She started to go out to check on Baxter herself, and saw him being helped toward the house by Peabody.
Her knees trembled in relief. “Should've known the sick bastard wouldn't be dead. Where the hell was my backup, Baxter?”
“Got me dead in the shield. Must've.” He pressed a hand to the back of his head, showed the smear of blood. “Gave me a whale of a kick. Cracked my head on the frigging patio. Got the mother of all headaches.”
“Concussion,” Peabody said. “Needs a health center.”
“See he's transported.”
“What the hell happened here? Anybody dead?”
“One of them,” Eve told him.
“Okay then. Tell me later. Peabody, my beauty, get me drugs.”
Roarke touched her lightly on the back. “Let's have a look at that arm then, and the rest of you.”
“Got a couple of jabs in past my guard. I got a couple of sticks into her. Tit for fricking tat.”
“Your nose is bleeding.”
Eve swiped at it. “I broke hers. See who's the pussy now. Kicked her ass right through the door, but she was just quick enough to take me on a ride down that flight of stairs with her. Fall--I think it was the fall-- snapped her neck. She was dead when we landed.”
She wrapped a hand around her bloody shoulder, turned toward him. And really saw him for the first time. “You're hit. How bad?”
“He got a couple of streams past my guard,” he said, and smiled. “Hurts like a bitch, too.”
She touched his cheek with her bloody fingers. “Got a black eye coming on.”
“He got worse. Why don't we--oh, well now, that's extreme,” he said when she ripped away the tattered sleeve of his shirt.
“It was trashed anyway.” She poked and prodded at his wound and made him curse in two languages. “Shoulder's nasty.”
“As is yours.” He lifted his brows as two MTs came through. “Ladies first.”
“Civilians first. And I ain't no lady.”
He laughed, and kissed her solidly on the mouth. “You're mine. But we'll suffer through the first-aid together.”
It seemed fair enough, and she could bitch at the MTs, threaten them with violence if they so much as thought of tranqing her. She could coordinate the various teams, get her report on record, and watch three killers--two live, one dead--hauled away.
She'd take her shot at the live ones in the morning.
“I'll go in, take care of the paperwork,” Peabody told her. “There are too many cops volunteering to handle it. One of them's bound to try to get in some kicks for Knight and Preston.”
“We'll take them in separate interviews tomorrow.”
“You might want to send a team over to secure this address tonight. One on West Seventy-third.” Roarke handed her a memo. “I believe you'll find their headquarters.”
She took the memo, and standing in her bloody shirtsleeves now, grinned. “I \new it. Peabody, find uniforms you can trust and have them sit over Kirkendall and Clinton. Call in the team and screw the OF. We're moving on this tonight.”
“Hot damn!”
“E-men first,” she added. “And I want, let me think, I want Jules and Brinkman from Bombs and Explosives. We don't know how they may have that place wired, or what booby traps they might've set inside. I want body armor on everyone, full riot gear. These three may not be it. I'll contact the commander and clear it.”
She turned to Roarke. “You're in if you want it.”
“I can't think of a more entertaining way to spend the evening.”
“Give me five.” She walked away, yanking out her communicator. “That's my weapon, you putz,” she snapped at one of the Crime Scene techs as he bagged it. “Give it back.”
“Sorry, sir, it has to go in.”
“Goddamn it, do you know how long it takes to get--Commander, we have two suspects in custody and one suspect DOS.”
“I'm on my way to the scene now. I'm told four officers, including yourself, are injured.”
“MTs treated on-scene, three are being transported to the hospital. The suspects are secured. We have what we believe is the location for their base of operations. I've called in my team, as well as two members of B and E. As it's more efficiently located to both this scene and the suspected base, I'll be coordinating the maneuver from my home office. With permission, sir.”
“I'll meet you there. How extensive are your injuries, Lieutenant?”
“I'll do, sir.”
“Yes, you will.”
“Okay then,” she muttered when he clicked off. “I want the evidence from this scene so clean I could eat off it,” she told anyone from CSU within hearing. “I want this scene secured so tight a fucking flea couldn't squeeze under a doorway. Any screwups, I'll be eating asses for breakfast.”
She nodded to Roarke, who fell into step beside her. “I love when you snarl. Stirs me up.”
“You'll be plenty stirred before the night's over.” She stepped out, amused when he draped her ruined jacket over her shoulders.
And the smile fell away when she saw Summerset sitting in one of Roarke's vehicles with Nixie in his arms. The window rolled down as she approached.
“I had to promise we wouldn't leave until she'd spoken to you.”
“I don't have time to--” She broke off when Nixie lifted her head. “What?”
“Can I talk to you, just you, for a minute? Please.”
“Sixty seconds and counting. Come on then.”
When Nixie climbed out, Eve started to walk down the sidewalk. Gave a snarl Roarke would've enjoyed as she stared down the gawkers already pressed against the barricades. She detoured to her vehicle, gestured Nixie in.
“You hid in the backseat?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I ought to pound every square inch of you. I won't because my arm still hurts, and because--maybe--by being a stupid ass you helped. I could've taken the three of them.” She pressed a hand to the throb of her shoulder. “But it was handy having Roarke pull down the third.”
“I wanted to go home.”
Eve laid her head back on the seat. Taking down three armed and dangerous was easier than picking through the minefield of a child's emotions.
“You did. What did you find there? It sucks wide, the widest, but that's not home anymore.”
“I wanted to see it again.”
“I get that. It's just a house, building materials. It's what you had there before the bad stuff happened that counts. That's how I see it.”
“You're going to send me away.”
“I'm going to give you a chance, the best I've got to offer.” She lifted her head, shifted in the seat. “You got kicked hard. You can get up, or you can stay down. I'm saying you're going to get up. Elizabeth and Richard are good people. They know about getting kicked hard. They want to give you a place, give you a family. It's never going to be what it was, but it can be something else. You can make it something else and never forget what it was like in that house there, before the bad stuff happened.”
“I'm afraid.”
“Then you're not as stupid an ass as I thought. Another thing you're not is a coward. You've got to give this a chance, see how it goes.”
“Is Virginia really far away?”
“Not all that much.”
“Can I see you and Roarke and Summerset sometimes?”
“Yeah, I guess. If you actually want to see Summerset's ugly face again.”
“If you promise, I know you mean it. You said you'd find them, and you did. You keep promises.”
“I promise, then. I have to go, finish this.”
Nixie knelt on the seat, leaned over, and kissed Eve's cheek. Then she laid her head on Eve's good shoulder, sighed once. “I'm sorry you got hurt helping me.”
“No big.” She found her hand lifting to stroke over the soft, pale hair. “Just part of the job.”
She sat where she was when Nixie got out. Sat and watched the little girl walk to Roarke, and him bend down as they spoke. The way he gave the child a hug when she kissed him.
Summerset put her in the car, secured her himself, brushed those bony fingers gently over her cheek. As they drove away, Roarke got in beside Eve.
“All right?”
She shook her head. “Need another minute.”
“Take all you need.”
“She'll be okay. She's got guts, and heart. Scared ten years off me when she came running in, but she's got guts.”
“She loves you.”
“Oh, Jesus.”
“You found her, you protected her, you saved her. She'll love you more for it as her life heals. You were right to let her see his face.”
“I hope, because I wasn't thinking clear yet. The fall down the stairs--” She broke off, hissed. “Not just the fall. The blood, the knife, the pain. I heard her neck snap, and it was like an echo in my head. When I came out and saw you, there was this dull relief. Distant, in another part of me.”
She drew a long breath. “You'd have let me do it. You'd have stood back and let me put that knife in him.”
“Yes. I'd have stood back and let you do what you needed to do.”
“Even cold-blooded murder.”
“Nothing cold-blooded about it, Eve.” He touched her face, turned it to his. His eyes weren't wild and blue now, she thought, but calm and deep and sure. “You couldn't have done it.”
“I nearly did, I could feel the way it punched through his body.”
“Nearly did. And if something had snapped that clean inside of you, we'd have dealt with it. But what's inside of you, what you are down to the bone, wouldn't have allowed it. You needed to kneel there with that knife in your hand, and to know that.”
“Guess I did.”
“Tomorrow, you'll face him, both of them, in Interview. What you do will be worse to him than a knife in the heart. You beat him, you stopped him, you caged him.”
“Cage him, and another crawls out from under the next rock.” She pressed her shoulder, gave her arm a testing turn. “So I guess I'd better get back in shape, so I can go after the next one.”
“I love you, madly.”
“Yeah, you do.” She smiled and, praying nobody was watching, touched her lips to his burned shoulder. “Let's go clean up, and get back to work.”
She flicked a glance in the rearview as they drove away. Just a house, she thought. They'd clean up the blood, sweep out the death. Another family would move in.
She hoped they had a nice life.
Look out for the brand new novel in the Eve Dallas series: ORIGINS IN DEATH
Dr. Wilfred B. Icove himself has been found dead in his office murdered in a chillingly efficient manner: one swift stab to the heart. Struck by the immaculate condition of the crime scene, Dallas suspects a professional killing. Security discs show a stunningly beautiful woman calmly entering and leaving the building - the good doctor's final appointment.
Known as “Dr. Perfect,” the saintly Icove devoted his life to his family and his work. His record is clean. Too clean for Dallas. She knows he was hiding something and suspects that his son - and successor knows what it is. Then, like father like son, the young Dr. Icove is killed ... with the same deadly precision.
But who is the mystery woman - and what was her relationship with the good doctors'? With her husband, Roarke, working behind the scenes, Dallas follows her darkest instincts into the Icoves' pasts. And what she discovers are men driven to create perfection - playing fast and loose with the laws of nature, the limits of science, and the morals of humanity ...
Coming soon from Piatkus Books