“Your convictions aren’t going to mean very much. Especially since you nearly blew months of work by attacking Lorenzo Brassi.”

“I didn’t attack him. I pulled him off a woman he was trying to rape.”

“You don’t know his advances were unwelcome. We have photographic evidence…”

“Fuck your evidence. Rica was a victim.”

“Your judgment leaves something to be desired.”

Carter laughed. “Why don’t you just admit that you were wrong about her. Whatever information you had, whatever you think you saw in those surveillance photos, Rica is not involved with Enzo Brassi. She’s not part of her father’s organization. She’s not responsible for her father’s actions.”

“Well,” Allen said, shrugging as she stood. “I guess we’ll find out just how much she knows when we bring her in.”

“If you can even get a warrant with what little you’ve got, all you’re going to do is tip your hand to Pareto. He’ll know what you know, and then he’ll just cover his tracks. You’re jumping the gun.”

“If we can’t get anything from the daughter, we’ll at least be a step closer to Brassi, and Brassi sits at Pareto’s right hand. One way or the other, we’ll be closer than we are now.”

Carter knew she wasn’t going to be able to reason with Allen, because for whatever reason, Allen was fixated on Rica. Maybe she wanted Rica to be guilty. Maybe on some level she needed Rica to be guilty. Just because Allen was supposedly one of the good guys didn’t mean her motives were pure, or rational. Carter didn’t really care. All she cared about was getting Rica out of Allen’s line of fire. She wasn’t certain quite how she was going to do that, but she knew she had to. An arrest would ruin Rica’s life.

“If there’s something going on at the gallery in New York City, Rica is obviously not involved. She hasn’t been there for weeks.”

“She was there about a month ago.” Allen walked to the door, then paused as if in afterthought. “By the way. Unless you bring me something on Rica, you may find yourself on the bad end of an obstruction of justice charge.”

Carter watched the door swing closed behind Allen. She might have no official role in Rica’s life any longer, but nothing that had happened between the two of them had been about the case. Nothing that mattered. And now, Carter realized, keeping Rica from being destroyed because of her family ties was the only thing she cared about.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

“So?” Kevin pounced the minute he saw Carter exit the station’s rear door to the parking lot. “What’s the word?”

“How’d you know I’d come out here?” Carter asked, stalling.

He snorted. “Come on, you and I have been ducking out on meetings this way for the last four years. What did she say? You were in there long enough.”

Carter squinted in the bright noon sun. Her head ached. Her heart ached. “Let’s go for a beer.”

Kevin stopped and stared, his big open face revealing surprise and concern. “Kinda early.”

“It’s either that or a pain pill,” Carter said as she wove her way through the departmental and private vehicles baking on the tarmac. “What would you choose?”

“Good point. The Shamrock?”

Carter nodded, thinking that the dark, dingy hole-in-the-wall bar suited her mood perfectly. Plus, it was a cop bar, but not the kind where whole squads got together to celebrate. It was a place for solitary drinking when the waste and insanity that was a cop’s daily fare got to be too much. No one would bother them, or even notice them. Cops went to the Shamrock to try to forget, not for company.

The couple of men who sat at the bar didn’t look up as they walked in. A woman, blond, thirty, looking as if she hadn’t slept in a week, was slumped over a glass she cradled in both hands in a booth against the wall. She glanced once in their direction and quickly looked away. She was still new enough to be embarrassed at not being able to handle another dead child, another senseless vehicular fatality, another rape. Carter tried to remember how old she’d been when she’d passed from caring to numbness. It’d been a while ago. Before this case. Long before Rica.

“Two beers,” Carter said to the bartender. She handed a longneck to Kevin, and they ambled into the darker recesses at the rear. She slid across the cracked red vinyl seat to the far corner of a booth, turned sideways to rest her sore back against the wall, and stretched her legs out into the aisle. Kevin pulled at his beer, sitting across from her and waiting.

“Allen wants to get a warrant on Rica for whatever’s going down at the gallery,” Carter said at last.

“Huh. I don’t think we’ve got enough hard evidence on that to go after anyone, not yet. I agree there’s something there…probably a little bit of cash cleaning. Small-time, though. I’m surprised Pareto would risk his daughter for something like that.”

Carter drained half the bottle in several deep swallows. “It’s not Pareto. It’s Brassi.”

“Yeah, that would make more sense…Brassi setting up a little sideline and using Rica as a front. You think she knows?”

Carter shook her head. “Pareto doesn’t give those orders himself. Brassi is his messenger, so Rica would think that anything Brassi told her to do was coming from her father.”

“Well, if Pareto doesn’t know about it, Brassi’s risking his neck. All the daughter has to do is tell Daddy that this guy is fooling around with her business, putting her at risk. Do you think Brassi’s really that crazy?”

“Oh yeah. He thinks he’s got Rica in his pocket because he’s important to her father. And some other reasons. It goes back a ways.”

“All this family shit makes me nuts,” Kevin muttered. “Loyalty only goes so far, you know?”

Carter regarded Kevin silently for a long moment. “You agree with me, then? That Rica’s not part of this?”

Kevin shrugged. “You’re good police. Good instincts. Even if you are thinking with your… whatever, right now.”

“My whatever,” Carter said, grinning sadly, “doesn’t come into this. Rica doesn’t want anything to do with me.”

“If your dick’s anything like my dick, that doesn’t matter.”

Kevin didn’t always wear his wedding ring when he was working undercover. None of the undercover detectives did. But Carter had never known him to fool around on his wife of a dozen years. They had three kids. She tried to imagine what it would be like to go home after a day or week or a month of being someone else, of living another life, and then putting all that aside for the semblance of normality. She’d never needed to. She didn’t have another life besides the one she assumed until the next assignment. “So you think Allen’s off base with this plan of hers?”

“Yeah, I do,” Kevin said slowly. “She’s jumping the gun…and might blow any chance of getting at Pareto by going for the small fish first. Even if she got something to stick on Brassi, he’d never turn. Just doesn’t make good tactical sense.”

“Yeah, I think Brassi’s a dead end as far as getting to Pareto. Glad you agree.”

Kevin frowned. “Why is it so important what I think?”

“Because you’re my partner and someone needs to keep an eye on Allen,” Carter said quietly. “And because I turned in my shield today.”

Kevin banged his beer bottle down with a thump. “Jesus Christ, Carter, what the fuck’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing.” She grinned just a little unsteadily. “Well, if you don’t count the bumps and bruises.”

“Don’t try to laugh this off. We’re talking about your goddamn career here.”

“No we’re not. We’re talking about Allen’s personal agenda and the fact that we both know it’s wrong.”

“Okay. Fine. We’ll go over her head. Together.” He started to slide out of the booth. “Come on. Right now.”

“If I could move fast enough I’d haul you back down, but I can’t. So just sit. Please.”

“Fuck,” he muttered, but he settled back into the seat.

“It’s more than Allen. It’s me, too, Kev. Things used to be really clear to me. Black and white. Right and wrong.” She drained her beer and set the bottle gently on the tabletop. “Now it’s not.”

“That’s because of Rica. You’re all twisted up about her, but it doesn’t make what her father does right.”

“No, it doesn’t. But it doesn’t make her wrong.”

Kevin rubbed his face furiously, then sighed loudly. “What are you going to do?”

“You don’t have to worry about it.”

“Like hell. I don’t want to end up coming after you one of these days.”

Carter smiled, and hoped this once, she was telling the truth. “I’ll make sure you never need to.”

Reese marveled, not for the first time, at how memory blunts the fine details of beauty. She knew every inch of Tory’s face as her own, but the images she’d replayed in her mind dozens of times while she’d been in Iraq were nowhere near as breathtaking as the reality. The midday sun slanted through the window and haloed Tory’s face as she slept. Her hair held a little more gray, her skin carried a few more lines around her eyes and mouth than when they’d first met, but she was only more lovely with the passage of time. Reese traced a fingertip along the edge of her jaw and smiled when Tory murmured with pleasure.

“You’re supposed to be sleeping,” Tory whispered, her eyes still closed.

“I was.”

Tory opened her eyes and regarded Reese with professional focus. “How do you feel?”

“Lazy.”

“Silly me,” Tory said, laughing softly. “Here I thought you’d be home for at least a couple of days before you started chafing about the inactivity.” She ran her fingers gently over Reese’s collarbone. “What about this?”

“If I lie on my left side like now, it doesn’t really hurt. I can even move my right arm pretty comfortably.”

“You’re still not going to be able to carry the baby for a while.” At Reese’s sound of protest, Tory hastened to add, “Back and forth to the crib like this morning is fine. But getting her in and out of her car seat is going to take two strong arms. Believe me, she’s still nonstop wiggle.”