Remember When

Cobb and carry it into the battle?"
    "Some other cop," she said.
    "There is no other like you." He pressed his lips to the top of her head. "There's no other who understands them, the victims and those who victimize them, quite like you. Seeing that, knowing that, well, it's made an honest man out of me, hasn't it?"
    She turned now to look him straight in the eye. "You made yourself."
    She knew he thought of his mother, of what he'd learned only a short time before, and she knew he suffered. She couldn't stand for Roarke's dead as she did for those of strangers. She couldn't help him find justice for the woman he never knew existed, for the woman who'd loved him and died at the brutal hand of his own father.
    "If I could go back," she said slowly, "if there was a way to twist time and go back, I'd do everything I could to bring him down and put him away for what he did. I wish I could stand for her, for you."
    "We can't change history, can we? Not for my mother, not for ourselves. If we could, you're the only one in this world I would trust with it. The only one who might make me stand back and let the law do what the law does." He traced his finger down the dent in her chin. "So, Lieutenant, whenever you do take one of those shortcuts, you should remember there are those of us who depend on you who don't give a rat's ass about the book."
    "Maybe not. But I do. Go help Feeney. Get me something I can use so we can make him pay for what he did to them."
    She sat alone when he'd gone, her coffee forgotten and her gaze on the murder board. She saw herself in each of the victims. In Andrea Jacobs, struck down and abandoned. In Tina Cobb, robbed of her own identity and discarded.
    But she'd come back from those things. She'd been created from those things. No, you couldn't change history, she thought. But you could sure as hell use it.

27
    She lost track of time when she worked alone. Eve supposed, if pressed on the subject, she lost track of time when she worked with others, too.
    But there was something soothing about sitting in or pacing around her office by herself, letting the data and the speculations bump around in her head with only the computer's bland voice for company.
    When her 'link beeped, she jerked out of a half trance and realized the only light in the room was from her various screens.
    "Dallas. What?"
    "Hey, Lieutenant." McNab's young, pretty face popped on screen. She could see the slice of pizza in his hand. Hell, since she could all but smell the pepperoni, it occurred to her she'd missed dinner. "Were you asleep or something?"
    She could feel her embarrassment scale rising just because another cop had tagged her when she'd been drifting off. "No, I wasn't asleep. I'm working."
    "In the dark?"
    "What do you want, McNab?" She knew what she wanted. She wanted his pizza.
    "Okay. I put in some OT on the 'links and d and c's." He took a bite of pizza. Eve was forced to swallow her own saliva. "Lemme tell you, these dink units are tougher than the pricey ones.
    Memory's for shit, and the broadband-"
    "Don't walk me down that path, McNab. Bottom-line it."
    "Sure. Sorry."
    He licked-the bastard actually licked sauce from his thumb.
    "I got locations on two of the transmissions we believe the killer sent Cobb. One of them matches the location of an aborted trans sent to the Gannon residence and picked up by the answering program on the night of Jacobs's murder."
    "Where?"
    "The location that hit both is a public 'link in Grand Central. The other, generated from a cyber club downtown. Oh, and there's a second aborted to the Gannon residence, ten minutes after the first, from another public three blocks from her residence."
    Public places, public access. Phony accounts. Careful, careful, careful. "You with Peabody?"
    "Yeah. She's in the other room."
    "Why don't you check out the club? See if you can pinpoint the unit he used. Maybe you can get us a better description."
    "No problem."
    "We're going to brief at my home office, eight hundred hours."
    His mouth might've been full of pizza, but she recognized a groan when she heard one. Served him right for eating on her empty stomach.
    "You get anything hot, I want to hear right away. No matter what time it is. That's good work on the 'links."
    "I am the wizard. You guys got any of that real bacon?"
    She cut him off. Sitting back in the blue-shadowed dark, she thought about diamonds and pizza and murder.
    "Lieutenant."
    "Hmm?"
    "Lights on, twenty-five percent."