Page 35 of Bonded in Death

“Until we take the father of my children home.”

“It may be a few days.”

“I will not go home without my husband.”

Eve met her eyes. “Neither would I.”

“So you know this bond. One death cannot break.”

“I do. My partner and I will do all we can so you can take your husband home soon.”

“I believe you. You have truth in your eyes. I think there’s an anger behind the truth. I respect the anger in them. I will send the names.”

“Thank you for coming in. Again, we’re very sorry for your loss. Detective Peabody will take you out.”

Alone, she sat for a moment, playing those questions, those answers over in her mind.

She rose, walked out, and met Peabody coming back.

“They held up,” Peabody observed. “It wasn’t easy on either of them. They just didn’t have the answers.”

“They had plenty of them. They gave me the answers because they didn’t know the answers.”

“Is that a riddle?”

“They didn’t know the answers because he never told them, not even the woman he lived with for half a frigging century. He didn’t tell them not just because he didn’t want to talk about it, but because he’d taken an oath.

“He didn’t tell them because he was a freaking spy.”

First Peabody’s mouth fell open. Then her eyes lit as she pumped her fists in the air. “Iknewit!”

“No, you wondered it, and you hoped it—because it adds—what’s the thing frosty stuff adds?”

“Cachet?”

“Sure, that works. But he was a goddamn agent, at least up until a few years ago. Didn’t fight in the Urbans? Got a knife wound and broken ribs, broken fingers falling off a scooter?”

Eve shook her head.

“I figure he was a damn good agent in his day.”

“Do you think the security company where he worked is like a front, a front for covert ops?”

“If not, he used it as a cover.”

“This is pretty frosty, Dallas.”

“Murder’s never frosty.”

“No, I mean before the murder. The life he led. Frosty. He was a spy, during the Urbans and beyond. He traveled all over Europe, a covert agent posing as an ordinary e-man. And while he did that, he made a family, what seems like a really good family. He not only kept them all safe—removed from his real work—but he kept their lives normal.”

“It couldn’t have been easy. Keeping it all contained. Contained and separated.”

“No, and that’s another layer of the frost.”

“I’ll give you that, but here’s what’s not frosty. He had enough experience, enough knowledge to understand exactly what was happening, going to happen the instant he felt the first effects of the gas.”

Outside of the bullpen, Eve paused.

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