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Possible connection to woman known as Dolores Nocho-Alverez. Any body or face work? Last visit to the Center prior to father-in-law's death.

I'm what he wanted.

What, if anything, did she take to the Hamptons. She sat back, let it circle through her mind another time or two. Wished for coffee.

She shut down and walked to the bedroom. He'd left the light on low, so she wouldn't come into the dark. Eve stripped, dragged on a nightshirt. When she slid into bed, he drew her into his arms to spoon

"I wanted more coffee."

"Of course you did. Go to sleep."

"She didn't want them to suffer."

"All right."

She started to drift, warm in his arms. "She wanted them dead, but she didn't want them to suffer. Love. Hate. It's complicated."

"It certainly is."

"Love. Hate. But no passion." She yawned, hugely. "If I needed to kill you, I'd want you to suffer. A lot."

He smiled in the dark. "Thanks, darling."

She smiled along with him, and slipped into slumber.

AT SEVEN A.M., EVE WAS DRINKING HER SECOND

cup of coffee and studying the data she'd pulled up on Avril Icove.

She noted Avril's date of birth, her parents' dates of death, and that she'd become Icove's legal ward before her sixth birthday.

Eve read through Avril's educational data-Brookhollow Acad­emy, Spencerville, New Hampshire, grades one through twelve, with continuing education Brookhollow College.

So the kindly doctor had put his ward in a boarding school straight off the bat. How had she felt about that? Eve wondered. Loses her mother-and where had the kid been while Mommy was off in ... where had it been? Africa. Who'd kept the girl while the mother was off saving lives, and losing her own in Africa?

Then she loses her mother and gets shipped off to school.

No living relatives. Really bad luck there, Eve thought. No sibs; par­ents were both only children. Grandparents dead before she was born. No records of aunts or uncles or fricking second cousins twice re­moved.

Kinda weird, Eve thought. Most everyone had some relation some­where. However distant.

She didn't, but there were always some exceptions to the rules.

Jeez, look what had happened to Roarke. Go around all your life thinking you're it, then bam! Got yourself enough relatives to people small city.

But Avril's records indicated no blood kin except her two children.

So, she's almost six years old, tragically orphaned, and Icove, her legal guardian, puts her in a swank school. Busy surgeon, busy becoming Icon Icove, raising his own kid, who'd have been, what, about seventeen.

Teenage boys had a habit of getting into trouble, causing trouble, br­ing trouble. But her run of Dr. Will had shown her a record as spotless as his father's.

Meanwhile Avril's doing sixteen years at basically the same school which struck her as close to a prison term. Of course, she considered as she sipped more coffee, school had been a kind of jail for her.

Marking time, she remembered, until she'd been of legal age and could escape the system that had gobbled her up after she'd been found in that alley in Dallas. Then straight to the Police Academy. Another system, she admitted. But her choice. Finally, her choice.

Had Avril had a choice?


Tags: J.D. Robb In Death Mystery