Ten Plagues by Mary Nealy Page A

Silently, they walked back into the station house together. Paul weighed the pros and cons of going back to open warfare.
    For the first time in the history of the world, war sounded like the most peaceful option.

CHAPTER SIX
    S he made peace with Paul and immediately began longing for a return to war. Or at least a demilitarized zone—that would keep him far away from her.
    After that long look and the electric heat of his hand on hers, she’d have gone right back to fighting if O’Shea hadn’t been keeping such a close eye on them to see if the cease-fire was real or phony. She was far more comfortable with her hostility than with the attraction. She’d learned in a terribly hard school to accept her lonely life. And she’d been content.
    And now Paul had touched her and—as if that electricity had started a motor—suddenly she was alive and awake in a way she hadn’t been in years. Her solitary life wasn’t enough.
    But solitary was safe. She liked safe.
    “I got the hard copies of Detective Morris’s case files.” An eager young secretary rolled a cart in front of her, bearing the fruit of ten years of Paul’s workaholic ambition. She gave Paul a completely unnecessarily friendly smile and said only to him, “Let me know if you need anything else.”
    Unable to stop herself from rolling her eyes, Keren turned to the mountain of paperwork.
    He’d been a patrolman for four years, a detective for six. With a suppressed groan and grudging respect, she could see he’d been more prolific than a wheat field full of bunnies.
    “Start with the computer. We can thin this down.” O’Shea nodded at Keren. She took over the cyber war portion of this mess.
    Before they’d gotten a good start the phone on O’Shea’s desk rang. After a few quick words he hung up. “The medical examiner is ready to autopsy our vic. Let’s go.”
    Paul rose from his seat. “Can’t you call her Juanita?”
    “No, we can’t,” Keren said, marching out of the room. Paul caught up to her and opened his mouth, probably to nag, as he dogged her.
    For once O’Shea took her side, cutting him off. “We can’t, and you know why. It’s our job to identify with the
criminal
, get inside
his
head. If we start thinking about Juanita, then we’re inside the
victim’s
head. We’re not going to be able to solve this crime.”
    “But it’s so—”
    “Enough, Paul.” O’Shea unrolled his shirtsleeves and tugged on his suit coat as they jogged down the stairs toward the parking garage. “You know how it goes. Especially on a case like this, where the facts are so nasty. We can’t dwell on Juanita or get involved in sympathy. If we do, we can’t function.”
    “I was a cop. I know how you rationalize your detachment. But from the outside looking in, you guys seem as cold blooded as the bad guys.”
    “Well, we’re not,” Keren snapped as she jerked her car door open. “Don’t make this harder than it is. Detach as best you can, or you’ll be useless to us.”
    Paul shoved his hands in his pockets and rode in silence in the backseat of Keren’s car to the coroner’s office.
    As they pulled into the lot by the forensic lab, Keren caught his eye in the rearview mirror. “You don’t have to do this.”
    He looked back with a sad kind of stubbornness. “Juanita died very likely because of an enemy of mine. I’m not going to protect myself by avoiding this.”
    Keren tried one last time. “But why watch, Paul? Watching won’t make her any less dead. Any chance you have of remembering the vic … Juanita, when she was happy and whole, will be destroyed by witnessing her autopsy. You know how they are.”
    “Yes, I know. Believe me I know.” He paused and looked at the Polaroid of Juanita that he must have lifted from the case file. It was the one Pravus had sent that Paul had left behind at the mission. He shouldn’t have it, but Keren didn’t say anything.
    “This picture has burned itself into my memory. Seeing the