The Other Side - J. D. Robb [21]
“Okay, that’s good. He stabbed her in the back first—back of the shoulder.” She remembered the shocking, tearing pain. “Because he’s a coward, and because he feared her. She didn’t see his face—he wore a mask or makeup. A kind of costume, because he’s theatrical. A devil,” she murmured, “because it’s a role he plays, or wants to. Because it’s powerful, because it instills fear, because he wanted that image to be the last she saw.”
“Why?” Morris asked.
“He has something she wanted, and she wouldn’t have stopped until she got it back. Exposed him. Punished him. Deprived him.”
“Now you’ll get it back.”
She turned to Roarke, nodded. “Yeah. I will. I need to go home. You could drive while I talk to some cops.”
“Dallas,” Morris said, “I’d like to talk about this at some point.”
“Yeah. At some point.” She hesitated, handed him back the cloth, then closed her hand over his for just a moment. “Thanks.”
Cooler, steadier, she walked down the tunnel with Roarke.
“Is she there?”
Eve paused, looked down at the floor where she’d sat with Jenna. “No. I guess she’s gone wherever she had to go. Jesus, Roarke.”
He took her hand firmly. “Let’s get to the bottom of this, because right now I don’t know if you need a doctor or a bloody priest.”
“A priest?”
“For an exorcism.”
“That’s not funny,” she muttered.
“It’s not, no.”
Seven
Roarke gave her the time she needed while he drove. He said nothing, listening to her talk with a handful of cops about someone named Alexi Barin. Since her color was back, and her skin no longer felt as though it might burn off her bones, he checked the impulse to take her straight to a health center.
He considered his wife, among other things, cynical, stable, and often annoyingly rooted in reality and logic.
When she told him, straight-faced and clear-eyed, she’d had a conversation with the dead, he leaned toward believing her. Particularly adding in her unhesitating response to his simple How are you? in Russian.
She clicked off her ’link again, said, “Hmmm.”
“How do you make Hungarian goulash?”
“What? I’m not making goulash.”
“I didn’t ask you to make it, but how you would.”
“Oh, it’s a test. Well, you’d cut up some onions and brown them in hot oil—just to golden brown, then you’d take this beef you’d cut in cubes and coated with flour, add that and some paprika to the oil and onions. Then—”
“That’s enough.”
“Why would you coat good meat with flour? I thought flour was for baking stuff.”
“Which proves you know less about cooking than I do, which is next to nothing, and yet you can toss off a recipe for goulash.”
“It’s weird, and it’s pretty fucking irritating. Which is why I’m going home instead of in to Central. I’m not going to find myself talking to some dead guy or whatever in front of other cops.”
“You’re still you,” he murmured, foolishly relieved. “You’re more embarrassed than frightened by the situation you appear to be in.”
“I don’t even believe this is happening, but I know it is. I’m not sure I wouldn’t rather have a brain tumor.”
She took a breath, then another. “I’m going back over it in my head. She was walking—staggering—bleeding all over the place. Science says she was dead, but Lopez saw her, too—and the medics when they got there. She talked to me. She looked at me.”
She moved back to the scene. “But she’d walked that way for blocks—I followed the blood trail back. And no one helped her, no one called for help. I can’t buy that, so, using the twisted logic of this whole deal, I have to conclude no one saw her.”
“Continuing with that so-called twisted logic, she came to you. She had enough left in her to cross your path, to leave you a trail, to give you what you’d need to help her.”
“You could theorize. And the first thing she said was the girl’s name: Beata. That she was trapped, needed help. She told me her name, and when I asked who’d done this to her, she said the devil. And . . . ”
“What?”
“She said I was the warrior. Her eyes were so dark, black eyes, so intense. She said I had to take her in, let her in. She asked