In Death 24 - Innocent in Death

he’d…
    He hadn’t a clue.
    And when he saw the light was on in her office, the relief made him so weak it seemed the world tipped and shuddered for a moment before going solid again.
    And the weakness refired his temper on all circuits. He stalked in, his mind already flexing its fists for battle.
    She was at her desk, comp humming, data scrolling on screen. Her eyes were closed, and the shadows under them etched fatigue against pallor.
    It nearly stopped him, perhaps that unhappy weariness would have. But then her eyes flashed open.
    “Lieutenant.”
    “I’m working.”
    “It’ll have to wait. Computer off.”
    “Hey.”
    “Is this how you handle things? How you punish me for crimes you’ve decided I’ve committed? I’m not even granted an interview?”
    “Look, I’m tired. I need-”
    “So the bloody hell am I.”
    He looked it, she realized, as he so rarely did. “Then go to bed. I’m going to-”
    “If you think about walking out on me again,” he said, voice dangerously soft as she started to push out of the chair, “think again. Think carefully.”
     
    205
    She knew the heat-and the more deadly ice-of his wrath when it was fully formed. She felt the blast of it now, and it chilled her to the bone. “I’m going to make coffee.”
    “You can wait for it, as I’ve waited half the goddamn night for you.” He stepped toward her, those eyes piercing like sabers. “How am I supposed to know you’re not dead in some alley, and the next time I open the door there’ll be a cop and a grief counselor on the doorstep.”
    She hadn’t thought, not for an instant, he’d worry she’d gone down in the line. She hadn’t meant to punish, just to get through the day. So now she only shook her head. “You should trust me to handle myself.”
    “Oh, now I should trust you when you’ve shown such undiluted trust for me. You’ve no right and no cause to put me through this.”
    “Same goes.”
    “Through what?” He braced his hands on her desk, leaned down. “What am I putting you through, what the bleeding hell have I done? Be specific.”
    “You looked at her.”
    He stared, and for a moment those molten blue eyes were simply astonished. “Well, as I haven’t been struck blind in the last day or two, I’ve looked at any number of women.
    Castrate me.”
    “Don’t diminish my feelings, my instincts, or what Iknow. Don’t you make a joke of this or of me. Youlooked at her, and for a second, the first time you saw her again, you gave her what’s supposed to be mine.”
    “You’re wrong.”
    “I’mnot! ” She shoved up now so they were eye to eye. “I’m a fucking trained observer, and I know your face, I know your eyes. I know what I saw.”
    “And your police training tells you that this look I gave her, for a second you say, is cause for this irrational bout of jealousy?”
    “It’s not jealousy. I wish it were. I wish it were that stupid, that shallow, that definitive.
    But it’s not jealousy. It’s fear.” She dropped down in her chair again as her voice began to crumble. “It’s fear.”
    That stopped him, had him straightening again. “Can you really believe this? Believe that I’d regret what we are, what we have? That I’d regret it was you and not her? Haven’t I told you enough, shown you enough, that you’re everything to me?”
     
    206
    She struggled for calm, fought for the words. “She’s not like the others. The connection, it matters. You know it, and I know it. And maybe worse, she knows it. The connection, this history, they show. Show enough that people looked at me with pity today. That I was humiliated walking through my own bull pen to my own office.”
    “And what of our connection, Eve, our history?”
    Her eyes were swimming. She would never use tears as some did, he knew, and was battling them back even now. Her struggle not to give in to them made it all the worse.
    He walked over to her window, stared out at nothing. So they wouldn’t rage at each other until it was burned away, he realized. They would pick their way through it, uncover it.
    Then they’d see.
    “You need to know, is it, what it was, how it was, and how and what it is now?”
    “I know-”
    “You think you do,” he corrected. “And maybe you’re not altogether wrong, or altogether right. Do you want it?”
    “No.” God, no, she thought. “But I need it.”
    “Well, then, I’ll tell you. I was, what, three and twenty or thereabouts, doing business as it