In Death 27 - Salvation in Death

Didn’t know, didn’t see, oh my poor baby. And I don’t get it. How can you not see, how can you not know?”
    “I don’t know. Maybe some don’t see, refuse to know what they can’t stand.”
    “It’s no excuse.”
    “It’s not, no.”
    “And I know it’s not like me, it’s not the same. My mother hated me, hated the fact of me. That’s some-thing I remember, one of the few things I remember about her. If she’d been there when he raped me, I don’t think she’d have cared one way or the other. It’s not the same, but . . .” She stopped, pressed her fingers to her eyes.
    “It pushed it back into your face,” Roarke finished. “It made it now again, instead of then.”
    “I guess.”
    “And wasn’t it worse, isn’t that what you think? Worse for this girl because there was someone there who should have seen, should have known, should have stopped it?”
    “Yes, yes.” She dropped her hands. “And I found myself detesting this pitiful, sad, terrified woman and giving props to a dead man I strongly suspect—hell, I know—was a murderer.”
    “Giving him props for doing the right thing for a child isn’t excusing the rest, Eve.”
    Calmer, she picked up her wine again. “It got a hook in me,” she repeated. “Later, the priest came back to see me. The real one. López. There’s something about him.”
    “Suspicious?”
    “No, no. Interesting. King of . . . compelling. He . . .” It struck her, shot out of far left and beaned her with insight. “He reminds me of you.”
    If she’d fielded the ball and winged it straight into his face, he’d have been no less shocked. “Me?”
    “He knows exactly who and what he is, and accepts it. He’s tough and he gets your measure pretty damn quick. Lino slipped by him, and that’s in his craw. He takes responsibility, and he blurred the lines to do what he saw was right.”
    “All that?” Roarke asked.
    “Yeah. He brought me information I needed, even though his superiors wanted to debate and stall on it. He went around them, followed his own code. Then I asked him—it didn’t apply, I don’t know why I asked him—what he did before he became a priest.”
    She sat now, had to sit now, and told him about López and Annamaria.
    “You thought of yourself again, of being trapped and defenseless all those years when your father beat you, raped you. And more, you thought of Marlena,” Roarke added, speaking of Summerset’s daughter.
    “God.” Her eye swam with the memories, the nightmares. “When he was telling me, I could see it. And I could see myself, that last time, in the room when he broke my arm, and was raping me, when I went crazy and killed him. I could see Marlena, and how it must have been when those men took her to get at you, when they tortured and raped and killed her.”
    She rubbed away tears, but couldn’t stop them. “And he’s talking about visitations and miracles, and I’m thinking: But what about before? What about the terror and the pain and the horrible helplessness? What about that? Because I’m not dead, and I can still feel it. Do you have to be dead not to feel it anymore?”
    Her voice broke. Roarke felt the crack in his own heart.
    “And he asks me if I’ve killed, and he knows the answer is yes because he asked me before. But then, he asks if I got pleasure from it. I said no, automatically. I’ve never taken a life in the line, I’ve never used my weapon as a cop for pleasure. But I wondered, for a minute, I had to wonder, did I feel it that night? That night when I was eight and I put the knife in him, when I kept putting it in him, did I get pleasure from that?”
    “No.” He sat beside her now, took her face in his hands. “You know better. You killed to live. No more, no less.” He touched his lips to her forehead. “You know better. What you’re wondering, what you need to know, is did I find pleasure in killing the men who murdered Marlena.”
    “There’d have been no justice for her. They killed her—brutalized and killed her to strike at you—and they were powerful men in a corrupt time. No one stood for her. No one but you.”
    “That’s not the point.”
    She laid her hands over his, joined them. “The cop can’t condone vigilantism, can’t condone going outside the law to hunt down and execute murderers. But the victim inside the cop, the person inside the cop understands, and more, believes it was the only justice an innocent girl would ever get.”
    “And