New York to Dallas

 
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Copyright © 2011 by Nora Roberts
    All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions. Published simultaneously in Canada
     
    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
     
    Robb, J. D., date.
    New York to Dallas / J. D. Robb.
    p. cm.
    ISBN : 978-1-101-53691-9
    1. Dallas, Eve (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Women detectives—New York (State)—New York—Fiction. 3. Police—New York (State)—New York—Fiction. 4. New York (N.Y.)—Fiction. I. Title.
    PS3568.O243N
    813’.54—dc22
     

     

     
    This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
     
    While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
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The Present is the living sum-total of the whole Past.
    THOMAS CARLYLE
     
     
     
I wonder, by my troth, what thou, and I
Did, till we lov’d.
    JOHN DONNE
     

1
     
    W hile a late-summer storm bashed against her single skinny window, Lieutenant Eve Dallas wished for murder.
    As far as she could see, a good, bloody killing was the only thing that would save her from the torture of paperwork stacked like the Alps on her desk at Cop Central. Her own fault, no question, but she’d been just a little too busy investigating and closing cases to hunker down with budgets and expense reports and the damn evaluation sheets.
    Telling herself it was part of the job didn’t help when she actually had to do it—in bulk—which was why she’d closed herself in her office with lots and lots of coffee and wondered why somebody didn’t just kill somebody else and save her from this nightmare.
    Not really, she told herself. Or not exactly. But since people consistently killed other people anyway, why not now ?
    She stared at the numbers on her computer screen until her eyes throbbed. She cursed, sulked, steamed, then strapped on and squeezed, crunched, fudged, and manipulated until she could make the stingy departmental bottom line fit the needs of her division.
    They were murder cops, she thought with bitter resentment. Homicide didn’t run on blood alone.
    She got through it, moved on to the expense chits submitted by her officers and detectives.
    Did Baxter actually believe she’d bite on three-seventy-five for shoes because he’d fucked up his own chasing a suspect down a sewer? And why the hell had Reineke shelled out double the usual rate to a street-level licensed companion for information?
    She stopped, got more coffee, stared out at the brutality of the storm for a few minutes. At least she wasn’t out there, plugged like a wet cork into one of the shuddering airtrams, or shoving her way through the drowning hell of street traffic. She could be soaked, steaming like a clam in the endless stream of heat the