Page 132 of Devoted in Death

“Huh? Wait.” She started to sit up. McNab shifted, pulled her closer. And laid a hand directly over her left breast. “Um.” Peabody removed his hand. “We needed to take five.”

“Now you can have three and a half.”

“Eve, have some pity here,” Roarke insisted.

“Four. Back here, oh-seven-thirty.”

“We didn’t get ’em?”

“We will. Full briefing, oh-seven-thirty, but we eliminated three buildings, and the van’s being watched. Hit the rack.”

She strode out, past Banner who, awake now, sat on the floor like a man coming out of a dream.

The cat gave him a friendly head bump, then deserted him to trot after Eve.

•••

Eve dreamed, harsh and bloody dreams, dreams where Jayla Campbell opened dead eyes to accuse her.

Where were you? I needed help. I wanted to live.

Dreams where her mother snuck in to taunt her.

I might as well have tossed you out the window like I wanted to half the time for all the good you do.

Dreams where all the known dead lay on slabs crowded into her office.

How can you sleep? they demanded. How can you sleep?

So, scarcely three hours after she’d closed her eyes in her own bed, she opened them again.

Roarke wrapped her closer when she started to rise. “You’ve time yet.”

“They won’t let me sleep. The dead won’t let me sleep. How can I? They keep asking me that. How can I sleep?”

“It’s you who asks it, darling Eve. Not the dead.” He hoped to soothe her under again, stroked her back. “Death brings knowledge, to my thinking. Of all that couldn’t be known in life. So the dead know what you do, what you give.”

“I don’t know. But if they know so much maybe that’s why they always seem so pissed off.”

He laughed a little. “Rest a bit more.”

“I can’t. I need to get going on it again. It’s today, Roarke. If we don’t find them today, Campbell’s dead, and probably Mulligan. I know it, like your dead know. Only hours now, or I lose both of them.”

“All right, then, we’ll start.”

He gave her the shower first as he wanted to light the fire and program coffee. And something else. When she came out, he held out a glass.

She scowled at it. “Uh-uh.”

“Have this, or no coffee for you.”

“Bollocks. And bite me.”

“It won’t give that nervous edge the departmental approved does, but it will give you a slow and reasonable energy lift. I’ve diluted it as you’ll chase it with coffee all day. You should trust me on this by now.”

The last booster he’d bargained her into taking had been okay, she remembered. “It doesn’t look like the last one.”

“It’s newer. We’ve been selling it for a few weeks now overseas, and in Asia. Your FDA is slower to move on such things—as your FBI and all your other acronyms and initials.”