“Yes, we are. Very soon.”

“Water, please. Could I have some water?”

“Did Lieutenant Dallas indicate where she could take Nixie Swisher?”

“No, no. I swear, I swear. Into her custody. Not regs, but she pushed it through. I wanted to get home. It was a bad place to be. I wanted to get out. Supposed to check into the safe house with the subject, but Dallas overrode me. I let her.”

“Have you been in contact with Lieutenant Dallas since that night?”

“No. The bosses took it over. They don't tell me. It's high-profile. It's sensitive. I'm just-”

“A cog on the wheel.”

“I don't know anything. Will you let me go now?”

“Yes. You can go now.”

The knife slashed so fast, so cleanly across her throat, she never felt it.

9

EVE WALKED INTO HER OWN HOME AS IF SHE were walking into an op. “No one comes in, no one goes out,” she snapped to Summerset, “without my clearance. Savvy?”

“Certainly.”

“Where's the kid?”

“In the game room with Officer Trueheart.” Summerset hitched back the cuff of his black jacket to reveal a wrist unit. Not a time piece, Eve noted, but a monitor. On it, she saw Trueheart and Nixie battling it out on one of Roarke's classic pinball machines.

“I took the precaution of pinning a homer on her sweater,” he added. “If she moves from one location to another, it signals.”

Despite herself, Eve was impressed. “Sweet.”

“They will not lay a hand on that child.”

She looked at him. He'd lost a child, a daughter, not that much older, really, than this one. Whatever else she thought of him, she understood he would stand as Nixie's shield.

“No, they won't. Roarke?”

“He's here. In his private office.”

“Right.” The office where he kept his unregistered-and therefore illegal-equipment. However much she trustedPeabody, there were lines. “Head up, will you,” she said toPeabody. “Give Baxter the current. I'm going to update Roarke, then we'll conference. My office.”

As her partner started up the steps, Eve moved out of the foyer and to the elevator. There she paused. “I need them alive,” she said to Summerset. “Best-case scenario.”

“One of them alive would do.”

She turned back. “She will be protected. Extreme measures, including termination, will be employed if necessary. But consider this before you get your juices up. Two men grabbed Meredith Newman off the street-and one to drive, so that makes three. There may be more. I don't get one healthy, that I can sweat, she may never be safe. The more of them I get healthy, the better chance I have to get them all. To get the why. Without the why, she may never be safe. And she'll never know. You don't know the why, you don't always heal.”

Though his face remained unreadable, Summerset nodded. “You're quite right, Lieutenant.”

She stepped into the elevator, ordered Roarke's private office.

He knew when she came through the gates, and that she'd come up before much longer. So he closed the file, went back to evaluating his security.

He didn't think it was appropriate right at the moment to tell her one of the tasks he'd chosen for the unregisters was indepth-and technically illegal-background checks on all of Nixie's family connections.

The grandmother was out. She'd had a few misdemeaner illegals charges, any number of cohabs, and had a part-time licensed companion standing.

Perhaps the moral judgment was ironic as he was currently an official guardian for the child and had done worse. Considerably worse.

But he was making it nonetheless. He wouldn't see a child turned over to a woman of that sort. She deserved better.

He'd found Grant Swisher's biological father. It had taken a bit of time, but the moral judgment there had come swiftly.

The man was rarely employed, had done a short stint for petty theft, and another for jacking vehicles.

The step-sister looked more promising. She was married, a corporate lawyer out ofPhiladelphia. Childless. No criminal on record, and financially solvent. She'd been married, to another lawyer, for seven years.

The child could have a home with her, temporarily, even permanently should it become necessary. A good home, he thought, with someone who'd known her parents, who felt some connection.

He sat back, tipped back in the chair. It was none of his business. Not a bit of it.

The hell it wasn't. He was responsible for that child now, whether he'd chosen to be or not. Whether he wanted to be or not.

He had stood outside her bedroom, had seen what had nearly been done to her.

He had stood outside her brother's room, had seen what had been done. A young boy's blood drying to rust on the sheets, the walls.

Why was it that seeing it made him see his own? He didn't think of those days, or so rarely it didn't count. He wasn't-wouldn't be- haunted by nightmares as Eve was. He was done with those days, and what had been.

But he thought of them now, had thought of them too many times since he'd been inside the Swisher home.

He remembered seeing his own blood. Coming to, barely. Obscene pain swimming through him as he stared at his own blood on the filthy ground of the alley after his father had beaten him half to death.

More than half, come to that.

Had he meant to kill him? Why hadn't he ever wondered that before? He'd killed before.

Roarke looked at the photo of his mother, of himself as a baby. Such a young, pretty face she'd had, he thought. Even bruised by the bastard's fists, she'd had a pretty face.

Until Patrick Roarke had smashed it, until he'd murdered her with his own hands and tossed her in the river like sewage. And now her son couldn't remember her. He'd never remember her voice, or her scent. And there was nothing to be done about it.

She'd wanted him, this pretty girl with the bruised face. She'd died because she'd wanted to give her son family.

Those few years later, had Patrick Roarke, God rot him, meant to leave his own son for dead, or had he simply used his fists and feet as usual?

A lesson for you, boy-o. Life's full of hard lessons.

Roarke dragged his hands through his hair, pressed them to his temples. Christ, he could hear the cocksucker's voice, and that would never do. He wanted a drink, and nearly rose to pour himself a whiskey, just to take off the edge.

But that was a weakness-drinking because you wanted to blunt the edge. Hadn't he proved every day, every bloody day of the life he'd been given that he wouldn't be weak?

He hadn't died in that alley, as poor young Coyle had died in his bed. He'd lived, because Summerset had found him, had cared enough to take a broken boy in-a nasty little son of a bitch, as well.

He'd taken him in, and tended him. And given him a home.

In a human world, even one of murder and blood, didn't an innocent girl like Nixie Swisher deserve that much? Deserve more than he'd been given?

He'd help her get it, for her sake-and for his own. Before his father's voice got too loud in his head.

He didn't get the whiskey. Instead he pushed aside the memories, the questions, and as much of the sickness of heart as he could manage, and waited for his wife to step into the room.

The room was full of light, the wide windows uncovered. She knew no surveillance device could penetrate the privacy screens on them. Unless he'd built them himself, she thought. Then he'd have built better screens.

At the wide black U of the control console, he sat, jacket discarded, sleeves rolled up, the silk of his hair tied back with a cord.

Work mode.

The console always looked a bit futuristic to her, just as the man who piloted it could remind her of a pirate at the helm of a spaceship.

Lights flashed on that glossy black like jewels as he worked the controls, manually, and by voice.