Acknowledged. Working…

“There would have been others,” Roarke commented. “Other fatalities, on both sides of the war, while your victim was a captain. And therefore in charge.”

“Yeah, got that covered. Stuben’s going to get me the data by tomorrow. I don’t hit here, I’ll start looking there.”

Task complete.

“Display, screen one. Five fatalities,” Eve said. “There’s another whose injuries were severe enough I’ll need to look at. Guy lost an arm. Three of the fatalities were members of the Skulls. Of the other two, one was the manager and one was a part-time counter guy. All fatalities were minors, except the manager.”

“Four children dead.”

“Yeah. Well, two of the gang members, according to Stuben’s file, had done time in juvie, had been arrested for assault with deadly-and released when the wits failed to identify-and had been suspects in the bludgeoning death of a Soldado.”

“Boys will be boys.”

“And scum will be scum. The manager… Computer, display data for adult victim. Kobie Smith, some bumps in his teens and early twenties. No time inside. Employed there for three years, manager for six months. Left a wife of eighteen months and a kid. Kid was two at the time of his father’s death, making him about twenty now. Too young to fit Mira’s profile, or my gut, but we look.” She ordered the data.

“Well, well,” Roarke commented as he read. “It seems he’s attending the Police Academy in Orlando, Florida. In the land of speculation, his father is killed in what is believed to be gang violence, and the son sets a goal to become a cop. To serve and protect.”

Eve frowned thoughtfully at the data on-screen. “No criminal. Two half-sibs. Mother married again. Huh. Married a cop after relocating to Florida, three years after husband’s death. Can’t see Penny tracking her down, getting her hyped enough to come back and poison Lino. But the vic had parents, too, and a brother.”

She ran their data, studying it, considering it. Parents divorced, she noted. Mother residing in Philadelphia, father in the Bronx, as was one brother. The second brother in Trenton. “None of them stayed in the neighborhood. It’s going to be someone in the neighborhood.”

“That’s most likely, I agree, but it’s very possible your bad Penny-”

“Ha-ha.”

“That she went out of the neighborhood to add more distance between her and the murder. I would have.”

“She’s not as smart as you.”

“Well now, billions aren’t, but it’s good strategy, and she had plenty of time to work on that strategy.”

“Yeah. Damn. I see hikes to the Bronx and Trenton in my future. Possibly Philadelphia because it’s poison, and poison skews most often as a female weapon. And look at that, the mother’s never remarried, works as a medical assistant in a rehab facility. Medicals can access poisons easier than the rest of us.”

“She lost not only a son, but a grandson, as the mother took him to Orlando, remarried. Of course, it may be there’s been effort to maintain a relationship on all sides.”

“And it may not be,” Eve finished and blew out a breath. “Okay, top of the list goes Emmelee Smith. I may be able to work a warrant for checking her communications and travel over the past few weeks.” She yawned. “I need coffee.”

“You need bed.”

She shook her head, rose. “I just want to run through the others. I can start looking into the ones that give me the buzz tomorrow.”

She hit the kitchen and the AutoChef for both of them.

“I called up the data on the counter boy,” Roarke told her when she returned. “He was barely sixteen.”

“Quinto Turner. Quinto. That sounds like a Spanish name. Mother Juanita Rodrigez Turner. Hmmm. Father Joseph Turner. He was mixed race, Mexican and black, straddling a line between gangs, racially and geographically. No sibs. Father deceased. Look at that. Self-terminated by hanging, on the one-year anniversary of his son’s death.”

“So the woman lost two.”

“Computer, all data on Juanita Rodrigez Turner, on-screen.”

“She lives three blocks from the church,” Roarke began.

“Wait. Wait. I’ve seen her. Computer, enlarge ID photo, twenty-five percent. I’ve seen her,” Eve repeated. “Where was it? It was quick, it was just a… Goddamn, goddamn, the youth center. She works at the youth center. Day-care manager, on-site medical. She wasn’t pissed and irritated, she was nervous. That’s why she kept her back to me. Magda didn’t call her Juanita, but that’s her. Nita,” Eve remembered. “She called her Nita.

“She’d have seen him every day, nearly every day for those five years. She probably worked with him, joked with him, helped him counsel kids. She confessed her sins to him, and all the while, all the while, he killed her son, and that death had driven her husband to suicide. Every day for five years she gave him respect, because of his calling. And then she finds out who he is, what he is.”

“What’s that I hear?” Roarke wondered. “Ah, yes, it’s buzzing.”

“Put those trips to Trenton and beyond on hold,” she said. “She’d pass the bodega where Penny works any time she went to church, and she’s been going to that church-I’ll lay odds-for most of her life. One of the faithful,” she murmured. “But for Penny, just a mark, just a means to an end. Now I have to bring this woman in, I have to put her in the box and make her confess to me. And when she does, I have to put her in a cage.”

“Sometimes the law is transitory,” Roarke repeated. “And sometimes it turns its back on real justice.”

Eve shook her head. “She took a life, Roarke. Maybe it was a bad life, but it wasn’t her right.” She turned to him. “The cops did nothing about what happened to Marlena. They were wrong cops at a wrong time. But this woman could have come forward with what she’d been told, or what she knew. Detective Stuben? He’d have done what had to be done. He cared. He cares. Part of him’s never stopped working the case, and none of him has ever forgotten the victims of the bombing, or their families.”

“How many are there like him?”

“Never enough. She has to answer for Lino Martinez, whatever he was. She won’t answer for Jimmy Jay Jenkins, but her act of revenge led to his death, too. It planted the seed. Or… tossed in the pebble. Ripples,” she reminded him. “We can’t be sure where they’ll spread. Somebody’s got to try to stop them.”

“He was barely sixteen.” He brought the ID photo back on-screen of the young, fresh-faced, clear-eyed boy. “The line’s less defined on my side than it could ever be on yours. What now?”

“Now, I contact Peabody and have her meet me here, so I can brief her in the morning before we go pick up Juanita Turner for questioning. Contact her voice mail,” Eve said when she caught his look.

“And then?”

“We go to bed.” She glanced back toward the screen. “She’s not going anywhere.”

She slept poorly, dogged by dreams, images of a boy she’d never met who’d died simply because he’d been in the wrong place. The young, fresh face was torn and ruined, the clear eyes dull and dead.

She heard his mother weeping over his body. Mindless, keening sobs that echoed into forever.

As she watched, Marlena-bloodied, battered, broken as she’d been in the holo Roarke had once shown her-walked up to the mangled body of the dead boy.

“We were both so young,” Marlena said. “We’d barely begun to live. So young to be used as a tool. Used, destroyed, discarded.”

She held out a hand for Quinto Turner, and he took it. Even as his blood poured over the floor of the church, he took it and got to his feet.

“I’ll take him now,” Marlena said to Eve. “There’s a special place for the innocents. I’ll take him there. What was she to do?” She gestured to the grieving mother, covered with her son’s blood. “Can you stop it? Can you stop it all? You couldn’t stop what happened to you.”