"Linking weasels and their trainers is dicey work, Dallas. You got to be real security conscious about that stuff."

"Yes or no, Feeney?"

"I can do it, I can do it," he muttered. "But don't bring this back on me. Cops hate to have their files searched."

"Tell me about it. I appreciate it, Feeney. Whoever did him worked him over hard. If he knew something worth killing him over, I don't think it was one of my ongoings."

"So maybe it was somebody else's. I'll get back to you."

She leaned back from the blank screen and tried to clear her mind. Into it floated Boomer's battered face. A pipe or a bat maybe, she mused. But fists, too. She knew what hard, bare knuckles could do to a face. She knew what they felt like.

Her father had had big hands.

It was one of the things she tried to pretend she didn't remember. But she knew how they'd felt, how the blow would shock even before the brain registered the pain.

What had been worse? The beatings or the rapes? One was so mixed with the other in her mind, in her rears.

That odd angle of Boomer's arm. Broken, she mused, and dislocated. She had a vague, hideous memory of the brittle sound of a bone snapping, the nausea that went above the agony, the high-pitched whine that substituted for a scream when a hand was clamped over your mouth.

The cold sweat, and the bowel-loosening terror of knowing those fists would come back, and come back until you were dead. Until you wished to God Almighty that you were.

The knock at her door had her jolting, had her swallowing a yelp. Through the glass she saw Peabody, uniform pressed, shoulders straight.

Eve ran a hand over her mouth to steady herself. It was time to go to work.

CHAPTER THREE

Boomer's flop was better than some. The building had once been a low-rent hourly motel that had catered to hookers on a budget before prostitution had been licensed and legalized. It was four stories, and no one had ever bothered to put in an elevator or glide, but it did boast a dingy lobby and the dubious security of a surly-faced droid.