In Death 27 - Salvation in Death

why she kept her back to me. Magda didn’t call her Juanita, but that’s her. Nita,” Eve remembered. “She called her Nita.
    “She’d have seen him every day, nearly every day for those five years. She probably worked with him, joked with him, helped him counsel kids. She confessed her sins to him, and all the while, all the while, he killed her son, and that death had driven her husband to suicide. Every day for five years she gave him respect, because of his calling. And then she finds out who he is, what he is.”
    “What’s that I hear?” Roarke wondered. “Ah, yes, it’s buzzing.”
    “Put those trips to Trenton and beyond on hold,” she said. “She’d pass the bodega where Penny works any time she went to church, and she’s been going to that church—I’ll lay odds—for most of her life. One of the faithful,” she murmured. “But for Penny, just a mark, just a means to an end. Now I have to bring this woman in, I have to put her in the box and make her confess to me. And when she does, I have to put her in a cage.”
    “Sometimes the law is transitory,” Roarke repeated. “And sometimes it turns its back on real justice.”
    Eve shook her head. “She took a life, Roarke. Maybe it was a bad life, but it wasn’t her right.” She turned to him. “The cops did nothing about what happened to Marlena. They were wrong cops at a wrong time. But this woman could have come forward with what she’d been told, or what she knew. Detective Stuben? He’d have done what had to be done. He cared. He cares. Part of him’s never stopped working the case, and none of him has ever forgotten the victims of the bombing, or their families.”
    “How many are there like him?”
    “Never enough. She has to answer for Lino Martinez, whatever he was. She won’t answer for Jimmy Jay Jenkins, but her act of revenge led to his death, too. It planted the seed. Or . . . tossed in the pebble. Ripples,” she reminded him. “We can’t be sure where they’ll spread. Somebody’s got to try to stop them.”
    “He was barely sixteen.” He brought the ID photo back on-screen of the young, fresh-faced, clear-eyed boy. “The line’s less defined on my side than it could ever be on yours. What now?”
    “Now, I contact Peabody and have her meet me here, so I can brief her in the morning before we go pick up Juanita Turner for questioning. Contact her voice mail,” Eve said when she caught his look.
    “And then?”
    “We go to bed.” She glanced back toward the screen. “She’s not going anywhere.”
     
    She slept poorly, dogged by dreams, images of a boy she’d never met who’d died simply because he’d been in the wrong place. The young, fresh face was torn and ruined, the clear eyes dull and dead.
    She heard his mother weeping over his body. Mindless, keening sobs that echoed into forever.
    As she watched, Marlena—bloodied, battered, broken as she’d been in the holo Roarke had once shown her—walked up to the mangled body of the dead boy.
    “We were both so young,” Marlena said. “We’d barely begun to live. So young to be used as a tool. Used, destroyed, discarded.”
    She held out a hand for Quinto Turner, and he took it. Even as his blood poured over the floor of the church, he took it and got to his feet.
    “I’ll take him now,” Marlena said to Eve. “There’s a special place for the innocents. I’ll take him there. What was she to do?” She gestured to the grieving mother, covered with her son’s blood. “Can you stop it? Can you stop it all? You couldn’t stop what happened to you.”
    “I can’t stop it all. But murder isn’t an end. Murder isn’t a solution.”
    “She was his mother. It was her solution.”
    “Murder doesn’t resolve murder. It perpetuates it.”
    “What of us, then? What of us? No one stood for me. No one but Roarke.”
    “And still it wasn’t an end. He lives with it.”
    “And so do you. Now you’ll perpetuate her loss, her grief, for justice. You’ll live with that, too.” With her hand holding Quinto’s, Marlena led him away.
    Eve stared at the pools of blood, the ripples in them.
    And watched them spread.
     
    She woke edgy, and with none of the energy the imminent closing of a case usually brought her. She knew the answers, or most of them, saw the pattern clearly, and understood, accepted, what she had to do.
    But the acceptance and the restless few hours of sleep left her with a dull headache.
    “Take a blocker,” Roarke