In Death 18 - Divided in Death

connection between your father and mine is there. We can’t pretend otherwise. I don’t want to hurt you. I can’t stand to hurt you.”
    “You have to let me go.”
    “I can’t. I’m sorry. I tried to talk myself out of telling you. ‘She doesn’t need to know, doesn’t want to know.’ But I can’t hold this back from you. It would hurt you more, wouldn’t it, and insult you on top of that if I treated you like you couldn’t take it.”
    “That’s tricky.” Her voice was scratchy and her eyes burned. “That’s pretty fucking tricky.”
    “Maybe, but no less true for all that. I have to tell you what I’ve found, and you’ll decide how much of it you want to hear.”
    “I need to think!” She yanked her hands free from his. “I need to think. Just leave me alone and let me think.” She sprang off the bed, rushed into the bathroom. Slammed the door.
    He nearly went after her, but when he asked himself if doing so would be for her sake or his own, he wasn’t at all sure. So instead, he waited for her.
    She took a shower, blistering hot. Halfway through her heart rate was nearly normal again. She stayed in the drying tube too long, and felt a little lightheaded afterward. She just needed coffee, that was all. Just a few hits of coffee—and she needed to put this crap out of her mind.
    She had a job to do. It didn’t matter, it didn’t fucking matter about Patrick Roarke or her father, or Dallas. It didn’t apply. She couldn’t afford to crowd her head with that kind of bullshit when she had work to do.
    And she looked at her face in the mirror over the sink, her pale, terrified face. She wanted to smash her fist through it. Nearly did.
    But she turned away, yanked on her robe, and walked back into the bedroom.
    He’d gotten up, put on a robe of his own. He said nothing as he walked over and handed her a cup of coffee.
    “I don’t want to know about this. Can you understand? I don’t want to know.”
    “All right, then.” He touched her cheek. “We’ll put it away.”
    He wouldn’t call her a coward, she realized. He wouldn’t even think it. He would just love her.
    “I don’t want to know about this,” she repeated. “But you have to tell me.” She walked to the sitting area and lowered to a chair because she was afraid her knees would shake. “His name was Troy?”
    He sat across from her, keeping the low table between them because he sensed she wanted the distance. “He had a number of aliases, but that was his legal name, so it seems. Richard Troy. There’s a file on him. I didn’t read the whole of it, but just the . . . just the business in Dallas. But copied it for you in case you wanted to.”
    She didn’t know what she wanted. “They met in Dallas.”
    “They did. Yours picked mine up at the airport, brought him to the hotel where you . . . where you were. He registered. They went out later that night and got piss-faced. There’s a transcript of their conversation, such as it was, and the same over the three days they were there together. A lot of posturing and bragging, and some speculation on the operation in Atlanta.”
    “Ricker’s gun-running operation.”
    “Yes. My father was to go on to Atlanta, which he did the following day. There is speculation that he took payoff money from the cops who were using him as an inside man in Ricker’s organization. He took that, and Ricker’s money, and—double-crossing both sides—went back to Dublin.”
    “That confirms what we theorized when we dealt with Skinner. Sloppy job by the spooks if they didn’t cop to what your father had in mind, and warn the locals. Puts HSO on the trigger for the thirteen cops who died in that botched raid as much as Ricker, as much as anyone.”
    “I’d say HSO didn’t give a damn about the cops.”
    “Okay.” She could focus on that, pinpoint some of the rage on that. “They’d consider Ricker the prime directive. The Atlanta operation was major, but it wasn’t the whole ball. Maybe they were too focused on bringing down Ricker, crushing his network and doing the victory dance that they didn’t figure a small cog like Patrick Roarke was going to screw all sides. But it’s unconscionable they’d let cops die that way.”
    “They knew about you.”
    “What?”
    “They knew there was a child in that bloody room with him. Female, minor child. The bastards knew.”
    When her eyes went glassy, he cursed. Shoving the table away, he pushed her head between her knees.