words. “No amount of healing fully erases it. She was a victim, and if she killed him she had reason. A reason you and I both understand far too well. He was an ugly sort, a vicious user of people, a rapist. But you’ll stand for him even over a woman he used so meanly. You have to. You have to.”
He repeated it because that single reality lived in both of them now.
“More than the job, it’s a duty, and your sense of right. Your line.”
“My line and yours run only so far together before they fork off. Sometimes that’s a balance. Sometimes it’s a problem.”
Considering, she ran a finger around the lip of one of the wobbly bowls Feeney’s wife had given them.
He’d put that here, too, she thought—like the painting—in his space. Because he understood, he valued, connections, symbols of family—far better than she.
“So. If it turns out to be her, I’ll push for Mira to evaluate her, the circumstances, her state of mind, the PTSD angle. Mira’s evals have weight.”
“They do. As do yours.”
“But that’s jumping forward, and jumping far. Where it is now, I’ll lean on her, push buttons, even knowing how it feels to have them pushed.”
“You’ll stand for her, too, if she’s killed. Because it’s always more than the job, more than duty.”
“It’s not about me.”
“Bollocks.” He said it mildly, even smiled a little when she frowned, though her words stirred up memories of what he knew she’d survived. “Investigating objectively doesn’t remove you. Your experiences, your understanding of victimology from the viewpoint of the victim is as much a part of what you do, who you are, as your training and your instincts. You are, forever, all points of the triad, Lieutenant: victim, killer, cop. And you know each section intimately.”
“Because I’ve not only been a victim, I’m not only a cop, but I’ve killed.”
“Yes. To save your own life, to save the lives of others, you’ve taken lives. It weighs on you every bit as much as what happened to you when you were a defenseless and innocent child. And it makes you who you are.”
“Maybe it’s bollocks because I don’t want it to be her.” Because that weighed on her, too, she stuck her hands in her pockets, wandered his space. “Because, objectivity aside for the right here and now, I want it to be Copley because it would go down easier.”
“I may be able to help you there.”
“Yeah?” She stopped, turned back to him. “I’ll take it.”
Roarke lifted the cat, giving him an apologetic stroke as he set him on the floor. Then he swiveled his chair toward Eve, smiled, and patted his knee.
“Get serious. I’m not playing office whoopee.”
“The price, and a fair one, for the data.” He patted his knee again.
She rolled her eyes, but walked over, sat on his lap. “Satisfied?”
“I hope to be, eventually. But for now.”
He danced his fingers over keys, put data on the wall screen.
“As you can see the Quigley money—and here Natasha Quigley’s share of it, which is quite comfortable.”
“Ha. A paltry quarter billion?” She angled her face toward his, grinned. “Chump change from where I’m—literally—sitting.”
“Be that as it may.”
“Yeah, be it or may it, this part I knew. The sister’s got about the same. Investments, trusts, and whatnot, all down the same road until each hit twenty-five. Some divergence there, choices—different investments, expenses, big sister purchased the New York brownstone and a second home in Aruba, a flat in Paris—all in her own name. Little sis and her husband, who also has an even paltrier hundred and seventy-five-ish mil of his own. They bought the New York townhouse together. She also has a Paris flat—same building as big sis, bought on her own a couple years prior to her marriage. And as a couple they own a place on St. Lucia. Copley, on the other hand, has a pathetic six million in his own name.”
“All but begging on the street.”
“Comparatively.” Shifting, she hooked an arm around Roarke’s neck, studied the numbers. “He gets credit for earning it, a mil at a time, but it’s going to sting, isn’t it, to have his whole shot be what his wife would think of as pocket change?”
“Does it?”
This time she rested her head against his. “Not as long as you keep the coffee coming. But for him? He strikes me as a showboater, just the way he came across today.”
“He has a taste for the finer things, I can’t quibble with that. Wardrobe, vehicles—though