“No problem. They’re focused on food, and dessert’s coming up.”
He continued to look at her, to search, and she knew he saw something as he nodded. “I’d appreciate it.”
“Why don’t you take this?” Roarke handed Eve the platter. “Set it out, and I’ll have Summerset box up some of the desserts for Chale.”
“You’d make me a hero in the rectory tonight. I’ll just say my good-byes then.”
“Thanks,” Eve said when Lopez moved back to the party. “There’s just a couple of things I wanted his take on. It won’t take long.”
“Go ahead then. I’ll have your vehicle brought around.”
She wasn’t sure how to approach it, or even why she felt the need to. But he made it easy for her—maybe that’s what men like Lopez did.
“You want to ask me about Li,” he began as she passed through the gates.
“Yeah, for one thing. I see Morris mostly over dead bodies, but I can get a sense of where he is. Just by wardrobe for a start. I know he’s coming through it, but . . . ”
“It’s hard to watch a friend grieve. I can’t tell you specifics, as some of what we’ve talked about was in confidence. He’s a strong and spiritual man, one who—like you—lives with death.”
“It helps—the work. I can see it,” Eve said, “and he’s said it does.”
“Yes, tending to those whose lives have been taken, like his Amaryllis. It centers him. He misses her, misses the potential of what they might have made together. I can tell you most of his anger has passed. It’s a start.”
“I don’t know how people get rid of the anger. I don’t know if I’d want to in his place.”
“You gave him justice—earthly justice. From there he needed to find acceptance, and then the faith that Amaryllis is in the hands of God. Or, if not God, the belief that she, too, has moved on to the next phase.”
“If the next phase is so great, why do we work so hard to stay in this one? Why does death seem so useless and hurt so damn much? All those people, just going along, living their lives, until somebody decides to end it for them. We should be pissed off. The dead should be pissed off. Maybe they are, because sometimes they just won’t let go.”
“Murder breaks both God’s law and man’s, and it requires—demands—punishment.”
“So I put them in a cage and the next stop is a fiery hell? Maybe. I don’t know. But what about the murdered? Some of them are innocent, just living their lives. But others? Others are as bad, or nearly, as the one who ended them. In this phase, I have to treat them all the same, do the job, close the case. I can do that. I have to do that. But maybe I wonder, sometimes, if it’s enough for the innocent, and for the ones—like Morris—who get left behind.”
“You’ve had a difficult week,” he murmured.
“And then some.”
“If closing cases was all that mattered to you, if it began and ended there, you would never have suggested your friend meet with me. You and I wouldn’t be having this conversation. And you wouldn’t, couldn’t, maintain your passion for the work I believe you were born to do.”
“Sometimes I wish I could see, or feel . . . No, I wish I could know, even once, that it’s enough.”
He reached out, touched her hand briefly. “Our work isn’t the same, but some of the questions we ask ourselves are.”
She glanced at him. Out of the side window she caught the movement. For a moment it seemed the streets, the sidewalks, were empty. Except for the old woman who staggered, who lifted an already bloodied hand to her chest an instant before she tumbled off the curb and into the street.
Eve slammed the brakes, flicked on her flashers. Even as she leaped out of the car, she yanked her ’link from her pocket. “Emergency sequence, Dallas, Lieutenant Eve. I need MTs, I need a bus, six hundred block of 120 Street. First aid kit in the trunk,” she shouted at Lopez. “Code’s two-five-six-zero-Baker-Zulu. Female victim,” she continued, dropping down beside the woman. “Multiple stab wounds. Hold on,” she muttered. “Hold on.” And dropping the ’link, she pressed her hands to the chest wound. “Help’s coming.”
“Beata.” The woman’s eyelids flickered, opened to reveal eyes so dark Eve could barely gauge the pupils. “Trapped. The red door. Help her.”
“Help’s coming. Give me your name,” Eve said as Lopez pulled padding from the first aid kit. “What’s your name?”
“She is Beata. My beauty. She can’t get out.”
“Who did this to you?”
“He is the devil.” Those black eyes bore into Eve’s. The words she pushed out held an accent thick as the heat.
Eastern European, Eve thought, filing it in her mind.