In Death 09 - Loyalty in Death

you. I didn't look that close, and I like to know who's looking out for my big sister."
    "Your big sister's doing a pretty good job of looking out for herself. Why don't you unpack?"
    "That'll take me about two minutes."
    "Which is about twice the time it'll take me to give you the grand tour." She took his arm and led him across the living space into the bedroom.
    "This is about it." A bed, a table, and lamp, a single window. The bed was made -- that was habit and training. There was a book on the nightstand. She'd never understood why anyone could choose to curl up with a palm unit and disc. But the fact that it was a grisly murder mystery made her wince when Zeke flipped it over.
    "Busman's holiday?"
    "I guess."
    "You always did like this kind of stuff." He set the book back down. "It comes down to good and evil, doesn't it, Dee? And good's supposed to win when it's over."
    "That's the way it works for me."
    "Yeah, but what's evil there for in the first place?"
    She might have sighed, thinking of all she'd seen, what she'd done, but she kept her gaze level on his. "Nobody's got the answer to that, but you've got to know it's there and deal with it. That's what I do, Zeke."
    He nodded, studied her face. He knew it was different from the routine she'd had when she'd moved to New York and put on a uniform. Then it had been traffic incidents, squabbles to break up, and paperwork. Now she was attached to homicide. She dealt with death every day and rubbed shoulders with those who caused it.
    Yes, she looked different, Zeke acknowledged. The things she'd seen and done and felt were there behind those dark, serious eyes.
    "Are you good at it?"
    "Pretty good." Now she smiled a little. "I'm going to be better."
    "You're learning from her. From Dallas."
    "Yeah." Peabody sat on the edge of the bed and looked up at him. "Before she took me on as her aide, I studied her. I read her files, I crammed on her technique. I never expected to be able to work with her. Maybe that was luck, maybe it was fate. We were taught to respect both."
    "Yeah." He sat next to her.
    "She's giving me a chance to find out what I can do. What I can be." Peabody drew in a long breath, let it out slowly. "Zeke, we were raised to take our own path, to pursue it, and to do the best we were capable of. That's what I'm doing."
    "You think I don't approve, don't understand."
    "I worry about it." She slid her hand down to the regulation stunner strapped to her belt. "About what you -- especially you -- feel."
    "You shouldn't. I don't have to understand what you do to know it's what you need to do."
    "You were always the easiest of us, Zeke."
    "Nah." He bumped his shoulder against hers. "It's just when you're the last coming up, you get to watch how everyone else screws up. Okay if I take a shower?"
    "Sure." She patted his hand and rose. "Water takes awhile to come up to temp."
    "No hurry."
    When he got his bag and took it into the bath, she pounced on the kitchen 'link, called Charles Monroe, and left a message on his service canceling their date that night.
    However wise and broad-minded and adult he'd sounded, she didn't see her baby brother embracing her casual, and just lately spotty, relationship with a licensed companion.
    She might have been surprised at just how much her little brother would understand. As he stood under the spray, let the hot water ease away the faint stiffness from travel, he was thinking of a relationship that wasn't -- couldn't be -- a relationship. He was thinking of a woman. And he told himself he had no right to think of her.
    She was a married woman, and she was his employer.
    He had no right to think of her as anything else, less to feel this shaky heat in his gut at the knowledge he would see her again very soon.
    But he couldn't get her face out of his mind. The sheer beauty of it. The sad eyes, the soft voice, the quiet dignity. He told himself it was a foolish, even childish crush. Horribly inappropriate. But he had no choice but to admit here, in private, where honesty was most valued, that she was one of the primary reasons he'd taken the commission and made the trip east.
    He wanted to see her again, no matter how that wanting shamed him.
    Still, he wasn't a child who believed he could have whatever he needed.
    It would be good for him to see her here, in her own home, with her husband. He liked to think it was the circumstances of how they'd met, of where they'd met, that had caused this infatuation. She'd been