“I’m okay. I just want to close it down, get it done.”
“Take the blocker.”
“Nag, nag, nag.” But she took it, swallowed it. “I can’t leave it open. I can’t pretend I don’t know. I can’t just let her do murder and turn away.”
“No. You can’t, no.”
“And even if I could, even if I could find some way to live with it, if I let her go, I let Penny Soto go. How can I?”
“Eve.” He rubbed at the knots of tension in her shoulders. “You don’t have to explain yourself, not to me. Not to anyone, but especially not to me. I could turn away. I could do that. I could do that and find some way outside the law to make sure the other paid. You never could. There’s that shifting line between us. I don’t know if it makes either of us right, either of us wrong. It just makes us who we are.”
“I went outside the law. Asked you to go outside it with Robert Lowell. I did that to make sure he paid for the women he’d tortured and killed. I did that because I’d given Ariel my word he’d pay.”
“It’s not the same, and you know it.”
“I crossed the line.”
“The line shifts.” Now he gave those shoulders a quick, impatient shake. “If the law, if justice has no compassion, no fluidity, no humanity, how is it justice?”
“I couldn’t live with it. I couldn’t live with letting him take the easy way out, letting the law give him the easy way. So I shifted the line.”
“Was it justice, Eve?”
“It felt like it.”
“Then go.” He lifted her hands, kissed them. “Do your job.”
“Yeah.” She started toward the door, stopped, and turned back. “I dreamed about Marlena. I dreamed about her and Quinto Turner. They were both the way they were after they’d been killed.”
“Eve.”
“But . . . she said she’d take him, and she did. She said there was a special place for the innocents, and she’d take him there. Do you think there is? A place for innocents.”
“I do, actually. Yes.”
“I hope you’re right.”
She left him, went to her office to prepare for what had to be done.
When Peabody and McNab came in, she simply gestured toward the kitchen. There were twin hoots of joy as they scrambled for the treasure trove of her AutoChef. She stuck with coffee. The blocker had done the job—and maybe the conversation with Roarke had smoothed the rest, at least a little.
She cocked her eyebrows when Peabody and McNab came back in with heaping plates and steaming mugs.
“Do you think you’ve got enough to hold you off from starvation during the briefing?”
“Belgian waffles, with seasonal berries.” Peabody sat down, prepared to plow in. “This may hold me forever.”
“As long as your ears stay as open as your mouths.”
She began with Ortega, took them through her premise.
“At the end of the seven years, he’d stand to inherit, by spousal right, upward of six hundred and eighty-five million—not including personal property, and the profits from the real property and businesses over the seven.”
“That’s a lot of waffles,” McNab commented.
“Set for life,” Peabody agreed. “Wel
l, if he’d lived.”