"Well, then," Andy said, recovering, "don't you agree that it's wrong to kill animals unnecessarily? It interrupts their spiritual journey. It forces them to suffer another rebirth." Kate bit into a second slice of bacon and Andy, his voice rising slightly, said, "It upsets the cosmic scheme of things!"

Kate swallowed and said, "Define 'unnecessarily.'

"What?"

"Define 'unnecessarily.' " Nonplussed, he didn't reply, and Kate said, "It's necessary for me to eat."

"But not meat," he said quickly.

"No?"

Her tone was mild. Andy sensed a potential convert.

"You can get everything you need, every essential vitamin, every mineral, all the nourishment your body requires for health and a long life from a vegetarian diet." Kate chewed bacon. "And without the senseless and wasteful slaughter of other living creatures!" Andy looked at her, his face expectant. If he'd had a tail, it would have been wagging.

Kate regarded him for a moment without expression, and returned to her bacon. He sighed, a gusty sigh of disappointment.

He oinked once more but his heart wasn't in it. She ignored him, eating her way placidly through the rest of her bacon and eggs, watching him from the corner of her eye as she did so.

A little over two years back, in another life, when she had worked full-time instead of part-time for Jack Morgan, Kate's throat had been cut almost literally from ear to ear in an altercation with a gentleman caught in the act of abusing his four-year-old daughter at knifed point. The gentleman was now deceased, and Kate's voice was now as scarred as her throat, a low husk of sound ranging anywhere from rough to rasping, and, when she chose, from harsh to horrifying. This morning she chose. Andy's mouth had barely closed on a heaping spoonful of granola when her scream ripped across the peaceful breakfast scene with all the soothing quality of a grizzly's claws ripping through flesh.