In Death 27 - Salvation in Death

environment while earning city salaries—while others want the energy and benefits of the city for living, and find work in one of the other boroughs.”
    In a slick move, he changed lanes again, a dodge and weave that gained them maybe a dozen feet. “Or they’re simply going over the bloody overcrowded bridge for some sort of business. Which, I’m forced to point out, we are at this moment. At a shagging crawl.”
    “We’re going to check out a woman who appears to live sensibly, moving across the bloody, overcrowded bridge and securing employment where she lives. She has what’s probably a ten-minute commute—by foot—to work. Less if she takes the subway. If she turns out to be my Lino’s mother, I wonder if he fought his way over to Brooklyn, at a shagging crawl, to visit.”
    Accepting he was well and truly stuck now—bugger it—Roarke sat back and waited for his chance. “Would you, in his place?”
    “Hard to put myself there as what little I remember of my relationship with my mother wasn’t cookies and milk. But . . . you come back home, hiding out for five to six years, and your mother—your only living blood relative as far as I can ascertain, excepting the half-sibling she’s had since you took off—is living across the bridge—bloody overcrowded or not. It seems you’d be compelled to see her. To check it out.”
    “Might be it wasn’t cookies and milk with his ma either.”
    “He kept the medal she gave him, so there was something there, some bond. If there’s a bond, that something, you’d want to see her, see how she was, what she was doing, who this guy is she’d married, see the half-brother. Something.”
    “If this is your Lino.”
    “Yeah, if.” She frowned over that, wondering if a hunch was worth the trip to Brooklyn during the inaccurately termed rush hour. “First big one. If we get over that one, and he did make contact, did go see her, then she has to know, with all the media coverage, that her son’s dead. How would she handle that? No one’s contacted the morgue on Lino, except for Father López. I checked. No inquiries, no requests for viewing.”
    Roarke said nothing for a moment. “I considered, spent some time considering actually, not making direct contact with my family in Ireland. Just . . . checking them out, doing a background on my mother’s sister, the others. Maybe observing, you could say, from a distance. Not making the connection.”
    She’d wondered about that. She knew he’d gotten drunk the night before he’d gone to see his aunt. And he wasn’t a man to drink himself drunk.
    “Why?”
    “A dozen reasons. More, a great deal more against it than the single one for making myself knock on that cottage door. I needed to see them, speak to them, hear their voices. Hers, especially. Sinead. My mother’s twin. And I would have rather faced torture than knock.”
    He could remember the moment still, the sweaty panic of it. “It was hideously hard to do. What would they think of me? Would they look at me and see him? And if they did, would I? Would they look at me, see only my sins—which are plentiful—and none of her, the mother I never knew existed? The prodigal son’s a hard role to carry.”
    “But you knocked on the door. That’s who you are.” She was silent as she considered. “It may not be who he was. Someone who could do what he did, live as someone else, some thing else for years. Hard to explain that to Mommy, unless Mommy’s the kind who wouldn’t give a shit what her baby boy’s done. And kills the fat cow anyway.”
    “That would be fatted, and calf.”
    “What’s the difference?”
    “A couple of hundred pounds, I’d say. But, to the point, finding out is why we’re going to Brooklyn in this bleeding traffic.”
    “Partly. But, you know, I could’ve kept Peabody on the clock. I figured since we’re going to check out Teresa at work, and work happens to be her Italian brother-in-law’s pizzeria, we could have a nice meal together.”
    He spared her a glance. “Meaning you can put a check in the column that reads: Went out to dinner with Roarke, and consider that a wifely duty dispensed.”
    She shifted, started to deny. Didn’t bother. “Maybe, but we’re still getting all this time together, and what’s billed as really mag Brooklyn-style pizza.”
    “With this traffic, it better be the best shagging pizza in all five boroughs.”
    “At least I’m not asking you to go to six o’clock Mass