In Death 15 - Purity in Death

he added before he walked over to take his turn in the studio. "It's going to be a long one."
    At home, she fell facedown on the bed for three and a half hours.
    The alarm on her wrist unit woke her with its incessant beeping. She crawled out of bed in the dark, stumbled into the shower, and stayed under hot, crisscrossing jets for twenty full minutes.
    When she came back in the bedroom, Roarke was just getting up. "Did I wake you? You could catch another half hour."
    "I'm fine." He gave her face a critical study, then nodded. "And you look considerably better than you did at four this morning. Why don't you order us up some breakfast while I get a shower?"
    "I was just going to grab a bagel at my desk."
    "You've changed your mind," he said as he went into the bath. "Because you've remembered that your body needs proper fuel to maintain energy and health and because you'd prefer I not pour a protein shake down your throat as that just starts your day off on the wrong foot. Scrambled eggs would be good, wouldn't they?"
    She bared her teeth, but he was already in the shower.
    She ate, she told herself, because she was hungry.
    And when Roarke buzzed Summerset on the in-house 'link and asked about McNab, she tried to feel optimistic at the information that the patient had spent a restful night.
    Just as she struggled against despair when she watched him ride into her office in an electronic wheelchair.
    "Hey!" His face was just a little too cheerful. His voice was just a little too bright. "I'm getting me one of these rides when I'm back on my feet. They rule."
    "No racing in the corridors."
    He grinned at her. "Too late."
    "We'll wait for Feeney before I start the briefing," Eve began.
    "We caught the morning report on 75, Lieutenant." Peabody's eyes were shadowed, and more than a little desperate when they met Eve's behind McNab's back. "I'd say we got a good start on the briefing."
    "I need coffee." She gestured for Roarke to distract McNab, then jerked a thumb toward the kitchen. "You've got to hold up better than this," she told Peabody the minute they were out of earshot. "He's not stupid."
    "I know. I'm okay. It's just, when I see him in that chair, I get a little shaky. There's no change. They said he should start to feel a tingling, like you do when your foot's asleep and starts to wake up. That would signal the nerves are coming back. But he's not, they're not."
    "Recovery time varies. I've taken a full body blast and had no appreciable numbness within minutes. And I've had a glancing stream hit my arm and put it down for hours."
    "He's scared. He's pretending he's not, but he's really scared."
    "If he can pretend he's not, so can you. And if you want to do something about the people who put him in that chair - temporarily - then you need to pull it in and focus."
    "I know." Peabody drew a deep breath, straightened her shoulders. "I can handle it."
    "Good, then get started by handling the coffee."
    She walked back out, stopped cold when she saw Feeney in her office doorway. His face was a picture of misery, sorrow, and fury as he stared at the back of McNab's chair.
    Eve started to make a sound, anything that would snap him back, but before she could, he hit some internal switch. His face cleared.
    "What's all this?" He came in scowling at McNab. "This looks like malingering to me. Trust you to manage to get a toy out of it all."
    "Iced, huh?"
    "First time you run over my foot, I'm flattening you. Baxter's on his way in. Got coffee?"
    "Yeah." Eve nodded. "We got coffee."
    By nine-thirty, she'd given the team the basic details. By nine forty-five she'd filled in the gaps, and by ten she'd added a basic theory.
    "At least one of the key people in this group has been personally affected by a crime, most likely a crime against a child. Most probably more than one of them. You need like minds to get something like this off the ground. They have superior and as yet unknown electronic abilities, and must have some sort of medical consultant. It's also likely they have contact of some sort with the police or with the judicial system. Or both.
    "They're organized, they're articulate, and they're media savvy."
    "When you've got a group like this," Baxter said, "you've got those like minds. But you almost always have one or more who's in it for the thrill, the blood, or because they're just seriously wacko."
    "Agreed. You can start a search for serious wackos who fit another of the group's profile. They will contact