In Death 18 - Divided in Death

doesn’t fix anything. We’ve both got a lot of work to do.”
    She set the photo on his dresser. “You should leave this out. She was beautiful.”
    But when Eve left the room, he put the photo away. It was still too painful to look at those images for long.
    ———«»———«»———«»———
    They gave each other a wide berth, working in their separate areas late into the night. Sleeping, for once, with a sea of bed between them and neither attempting to bridge it. In the morning, they circled around the distance that had spread between them, carefully avoiding each other’s territory, and cautious of their moves when that territory overlapped.
    She knew Reva Ewing and Tokimoto were in the house, and was leaving them to Feeney while she bunkered in her office, waiting for Peabody and McNab to get in.
    She could focus on the work at hand for long periods, running her probabilities, then sifting through data to create other scenarios. She could study her murder board, and reconstruct the crimes, the motives, the methods from what evidence she had and begin to see a picture.
    But she only had to shift that evidence to one side and a different picture formed.
    And if her concentration wavered, even for an instant, there was yet another image. One of herself and Roarke on opposing sides of a bottomless chasm.
    She hated that her personal life interfered with work. Hated more that she couldn’t stop it from creeping into her thoughts when she needed to train them on the job.
    And what was she upset about, really? she asked herself as she stalked back into the kitchen yet again for coffee. That Roarke wanted to hunt up and bloody some HSO agent she didn’t even know? She was fighting with him, and just because they weren’t yelling and slamming around didn’t mean they weren’t fighting still.
    She’d figured out that much of the marriage game.
    They were fighting because he had a rage like a trapped tiger about what had been done to her as a child. Layered over it, sharpening the claws and teeth of the trapped tiger was the rage over what had happened to his mother.
    Brutality, violence, neglect. Christ knew they’d both lived with it and survived. Why couldn’t they live with it still?
    She shoved through the kitchen door to stand on the little terrace beyond, and just breathe.
    And how did she live with it? The work—and, yes, sometimes she used the work until it dragged her down to exhaustion, even misery, but she needed what it gave her, through the process, through the results. Standing not just over the victim but for the victim, and working to find whatever balance the system allowed. Even hating the system from time to time when that balance didn’t meet her own standards.
    But you could respect something, even when you hated it. The nightmares? Weren’t they some sort of coping mechanism, an unconscious outlet for the fear, the pain, even the humiliation? Mira could probably give her a whole cargo-load of fancy terms and psychiatric buzz on the subject. But at the base they were just triggers, for events she could stand to remember. Maybe a few she wasn’t sure she could stand. But she coped.
    God knew she coped better with Roarke there to pull her out of the sticky grip of them, to hold onto her, to remind her she was beyond them now.
    But she didn’t deal with what had been done to her by meeting brutality with more of the same. How could she wear her badge if she didn’t believe, at the core, in the heart and soul of the law?
    And he didn’t.
    She scooped a hand through her hair as she stared out over the riotous late-summer gardens: the full green trees, the sheen and sparkle of the world he’d built, his way. She’d known when she met him, when she’d fallen in love with him, when she married him, that he didn’t, and never would, have the same in-the-bone beliefs as she had.
    They were, on some elemental plane, opposite. Two lost souls, he’d once said. So they were. But as much as they had in common, they would never meet smoothly on this one point.
    Maybe it was that opposition, the pull and tug of it, that made what was between them so intense. That gave that terrible and terrifying love such power.
    She could reach his heart—it was so open to her, so miraculously open. She could reach his grief, give a kind of comfort to him she hadn’t known herself capable of. But she couldn’t, and never would, fully reach his rage. That hard knot inside him he covered so