“We’re partners. You’ve got to trust your partner. I’m rank, and I expect her to follow an order without hesitation. And I know she will, and that my rank isn’t why she will.”
“That’s not the only reason you told her.”
“No. No, it’s not.” She looked at him through the candlelight. “Cases like this, they get into my gut. I can make a mistake because I’m looking too hard, or I’m looking away because I can’t stand to look too hard.”
“You never look away, Eve.”
“Well, I want to. Sometimes I want to, and the difference is a pretty thin line. She’s with me every day, and she’s a good cop. She’ll see if I’m off, and she’s got a right to know why I am, if I am.”
“I agree with you. But there’s still one more reason you told her.”
“She’s a friend. The tightest, I guess, next to Mavis. Mavis is different.”
“Oh, let me count the ways.”
She laughed, as he’d wanted. “She’s not a cop and she’s Mavis. She’s the first person I ever told any part of it to. The first person I could tell any part of it to. I should’ve told Feeney. We were partners and I should’ve told him. But I didn’t know, didn’t remember most of it when we were hooked, and besides . . .”
“He’s a man.”
“I told you. You’re a man.”
“I’m not your father figure,” he said and watched her reach quickly for her water glass.
“I guess. I mean, no, you’re sure as hell not. And maybe Feeney . . . in some kind of way. Doesn’t matter,” she decided. “I didn’t tell him. Telling Mira was almost an accident, and she’s a doctor. I’ve never dumped it, in a big lump, on anybody but you, and now Peabody.”
“You told her the whole of it then?”
“That I killed him? Yeah. She said something about hoping I ripped him to pieces. She cried. Jesus.”
She dropped her head in her hands.
“Is that what troubles you most about this? That her heart hurts for you?”
“That’s not why I told her.”
“Friendship, partnership. They aren’t just about trust, Eve. They’re about affection. Even love. If she didn’t feel pity for and anger over the child, she wouldn’t be your friend.”
“I guess I know that. I’ll give you one of the other things on my mind, then we have to finish the list. I watched the whole hypnotherapy deal today. Mira’s brought it up before, she doesn’t push it, but she’s told me it might help bring things back to the surface, clear it out of me. Maybe the more you remember, the more control you have over it. I don’t know. But I don’t think I can go there, Roarke. I don’t know if I can, even if it means getting rid of the nightmares.”
“Were you considering it?”
“I hadn’t ruled it out, completely, for later. Sometime later. But it’s t
oo much like Testing. If you terminate somebody on the job, you have to go through Testing. That’s SOP, and you deal. You hate it, but you deal. This is like saying, sure, put me through the wringer, take away my control, because maybe—possibly—it’ll make things better.”
“If you want to find out more, and you’re not comfortable with hypnosis, there are other ways, Eve.”
“You could dig details out of my past for me, the way you dug them out for yourself.” She picked up the water again. “I’ve thought about it. I’m not sure I want to go there either. But I’ll think about it some more. I guess finding out what we did before, about Homeland surveilling him, knowing about me, knowing what he was doing to me, and letting it happen to preserve the integrity of their investigation—”
Roarke said something particularly vile about Homeland and integrity. Something, she thought with dark humor, that didn’t belong in snooty French restaurants.
“Yeah, well. It’s played on my head some, finding out other people knew. And it’s made me ask myself, would I sacrifice a civilian for a collar?”
“You would not.”
“No, I wouldn’t. Not knowingly, not willingly. But there are people out there, people who consider themselves solid citizens who would. Would, and do, sacrifice others to get what they want or need. Happens every day, in big ways, in little ways. For the greater good, for their good, for their interpretation of someone else’s good. By action, by omission of action, people sacrifice other people all the damn time.”
Peabody stepped off the subway and stifled a yawn. It was still shy of eleven, but she was beat. At least she wasn’t hungry on top of it, as Feeney had been as happy as she to break for food. Her belly was nicely full of fried chicken strips—at least it had been billed as chicken, and she didn’t want to question what else might have been inside the batter.