“Yes.”
Thoughtfully, she pressed a hand on her stomach. “I could eat.” She sat down to eggs, crisp slices of bacon. “So anyway, he’s out in the cold. His direct supervisors are either dead by his own hand or hunting him. He’s been betrayed, used, fucked. Cops are looking into the murders in a way he’d been assured they would not, and sooner or later he’s going to get squeezed from that side, too. There’s nobody to tell him what to do, what to think. He kills twice more to protect himself, to cover his tracks. Both are unnecessary, and mistakes, because the murders only serve to lead the police investigation to the fact that he’s still alive. What would you have done?”
“In his place?” He spread jam on toast as he considered. “I’d’ve gone under, deep. Accessed some of the funds I’d squirreled away, and buried myself until I could plan a way to either kill Sparrow or expose him as a traitor. Wait and watch. A year, two, maybe longer, then hit him. One way or the other.”
“But he won’t. He can’t. He can’t suppress his ego that long, or think that clearly. That coldly. He needs to slap back at everything and everyone who had a part in screwing this up for him. At the same time he’s scared, like a little boy whose mommy and daddy left him home alone. And he needs to feel safe. He’s still in New York, somewhere he feels safe. And he’s going to make a move.”
She could almost see him, almost see him. “Bigger, more violent, more reckless. Each of his kills was a degree away from the bull’s-eye. And each was less carefully thought through, and with more risk of collateral damage than the last. He doesn’t care who gets hurt now, as long as he proves himself.”
“You think he’ll go after Reva.”
“Sooner or later. She didn’t cooperate. She’s not curled up in a cage crying over her dead husband and proclaiming her innocence. But we’re not going to give him a chance to go after her.”
She took the toast Roarke handed her, bit in. “We’re going to lock him down before that, before he starts contacting the targets again. He’ll try for Sparrow again sooner. I’m not averse to using that schmuck as bait, but I don’t like the idea of taking Bissel at the hospital and risking civilians. We need to track him down, take him in his hole, with minimal risk to civilians. Where would you hide? If you were staying in New York?”
It soothed his soul to sit with her like this, sharing a meal and the work that drove her. It settled, and it comforted, he found, as much as the lovemaking. And when he smiled at her, she smiled back.
“Am I thinking like myself, or like Bissel?”
“Like you.”
“A small apartment in a lower middle-class neighborhood where no one pays attention to anyone else. Better, something just outside the city, convenient to public transportation so I could get back and forth easily.”
“Why not a house?”
“Too much overhead, too much of a paper trail. I wouldn’t want to waste my capital on the roof over my head, or deal with lawyers and so forth. Just a simple, short-term lease on a modest couple of rooms where I’d be invisible.”
“Yeah, that would be smart, and patient.”
“Which means you think he’s likely in the heart of the city, in something more suited to his taste.”
“Yeah, I do. Something big enough where he can work. Someplace with plenty of security where he can lock himself up, stew, rant, plot.”
“You probably don’t need to be told that there are countless places in the city that fit those requirements.”
“You should know, you own most of them. And I . . .” She trailed off with a forkful of eggs halfway to her mouth. “Jesus, would he be that dumb? Or that smart?”
She shoveled in the eggs, snagged her coffee as she rose. “Let’s roust the team. I want to check something out.”
“You may want to put some shoes on first,” Roarke suggested. “You look like you’re about to kick some ass, and there’s no point in bruising your pretty pink toes.”
“Cute.” But she winced when she looked down at her feet. She’d forgotten about the pink toenails. Hauling open a drawer, she yanked out some socks and hastily covered all evidence of pedicure.
“Lieutenant?”
She grunted as she pulled on her boots.
“It feels good to know you and I are a team again.”
She reached out, took his hand. “Let’s go kick some ass together.”
22 AS THE TECHS outnumbered the nontechs on her team, Eve took the briefing to the lab.
She didn’t understand the nature of the work, or the purposes of the tools meticulously arranged on work counters and workstations. She couldn’t decipher the patterns of the color-coded boards, the gibberish scrolling by on screens or the constant hum and clack that was the odd communication in the network of machines.
But she knew what she was looking at was a great number of man-hours and a large dose of brain power.
“You’ll kill the worm.”