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Eve shot out of sleep with her heart pounding, her throat dry.

Ricker. Oh God. Ricker and her father.

She gripped the arms of the chair to steady herself, to keep herself in the now. Had it been real or just a product of fatigue and imagination?

Real. When those little flashes of the past came to her, they were always real. She could see herself, a tangle of hair, huge eyes, skinny arms, huddled in the bed like an animal in a cave.

She could hear the voices.

Leaning forward, she pressed her fingers to her temples. Max Ricker had known her father. In New York. Yes, she was sure they’d been in New York that night. How long had it been before they’d landed in Dallas? How long before the night she’d found the knife in her hand when her father was raping her?

How long before the night when she’d killed him?

Long enough for the money to run low. Long enough, she realized, for Ricker to have been hunting, to have set wolves on the trail of the man who’d stolen from him.

But she’d ended it first.

Rising, she paced the room. What had happened then didn’t apply now, and she couldn’t allow it to interfere with her investigation or influence her.

And yet, what sneering twist of fate had brought this circle around again? Ricker to her father. Ricker to Roarke.

And without question, Ricker to herself.

What choice did she have but to end it again?

chapter nineteen

She needed more coffee. She needed some sleep. Dreamless sleep. And she needed the rest of the data from the search and scan.

But something had rooted in her brain, something that had her leapfrogging over the current data and running yet another search.

She’d just begun when the summons came from The Towers.

“I don’t have time for this. Goddamn politics. I don’t have time to go running up to Tibble and giving him updates he can pass to the media.”

“Dallas, you to up to The Towers. I’ll finish the run for you,” Peabody said.

Eve wanted to do the run herself. It was personal. And that was the whole damn problem, she admitted. She’d let it get personal. “Vernon’s due in an hour. If he’s thirty seconds late, send uniforms, have him picked up. Familiarize yourself with his profile,” she added as she grabbed her jacket. “Contact Feeney. I want him and McNab in on the interview. I want the room full of cops.”

She hesitated, looked back at the computer. No point in wasting time, she reminded herself. No point in it. “Add the data I’m compiling to the file, and run a probability on our three homicides.”

“Yes, sir. On who?”

“You’ll know,” Eve said as she stalked out. “If you don’t, you’re in the wrong business.”

“I live for pressure,” Peabody muttered and sat down.

She was going to make it short, Eve told herself. And she was going to make it direct. Tibble might have to be concerned about departmental image, about politics, about the drooling and slathering in IAB, but she didn’t.

She had one job, and that was to close her case.

She wasn’t going to sit still for having to squeeze another damn press conference into her schedule. And if he thought he could yank her off the investigation to make the proper noises to the media, he could just . . .

Oh boy.

It wouldn’t help matters for her to march into Tibble’s office leading with attitude. Any more, she thought, than this underlying pity would help if her suspicions regarding the killer’s identity proved out.

Her job was to close the case. And the dead, whoever they were, deserved her best.


Tags: J.D. Robb In Death Mystery