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"Yeah They found theht to look under ‘Munster, Herrave robbers double as triviaby the mess in the file rooh all the drawers till they got what they wanted We could have filed it under ‘Bell, Tinker,’ and they would have found it Anyway, they weren’t grave robbers They didn’t dig Allwine out of the ground They took hiue drawer"
"So they’re bodysnatchers," Michael said "Getting the ter, Jack"
"It feels like a barbed-wire thong," Jack said "Losing evidence in a capital case? Man, there goes the pension"
Trying to make sense of the situation, Carson said, "Did the city cut your security budget or what?"
Jack shook his head "We’re as tight as a prison here It has to be an inside job"
Simultaneously, Carson and Michael looked at Luke, who sat on a stool in a corner
"Hey," he said, "I never stole a diers assured them "He couldn’t have pulled it off He’d have screwed up"
Luke winced "Thanks, I guess" "Luke and I were here for a while after you two left, but not all night We hit a wall, needed sleep Because I’d sent hoht staff to keep the lid on this, the place was deserted"
"You forget to lock up?" Carson asked Jack glowered at her "No way" "Signs of forced entry?" "None They must’ve had keys" "Somebody knehat you’d find in Allwine," she said, "because maybe he’s not unique Maybe there’re others like hiain," Michael half warned, half pleaded
‘At least one other," she said "The friend he went to funerals with Mr Average Everything"
Almost simultaneous with a knock, the door opened, and Frye, Jonathan Harker’s partner, entered He looked surprised to see thelum?" he asked "Did soe "What don’t you understand about ‘buzz off?"
"Hey, I’m not here about your case We’re on that liquor-store shooting"
"Yeah? Is that right? Is that what you were doing yesterday at Allwine’s apart?"
Frye pretended innocence "I don’t knohat you’re talking about O’Connor, you’re wound as tight as a golf ball’s guts Get a man, relieve some tension"
She wanted to shoot hiun can always go off accidentally, but you’d have to explain why you drew it in the first place"
CHAPTER 45
COMFORTABLE IN HER ROBE, ensconced in a wing-back chair, Erika spent the night and thewith no company but books, and even took her breakfast in the library
Reading for pleasure, lingering over the prose, she nevertheless covered a hundred pages an hour She was, after all, an Alpha-class e skills
She read Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, and when she finished it, she did so that she had not done before in her weeks of life She wept
The story was about the power of love, the nobility of self-sacrifice, and the horrors of revolution in the nas
Erika understood the concept of love and found it appealing, but she didn’t know if she would ever feel it The New Race was supposed to value reason, to eschew emotion, to reject superstition
She had heard Victor say that love was superstition One of the Old Race, he’d made himself New He claireater than any ued by the concept of love and longed to experience it
She found hope in the fact that she was capable of tears Her built-in disposition toward reason at the expense of eic laho, at the end of Dickens’s novel, went to the guillotine in place of another man
The lawyer had sacrificed himself to ensure that the woman he loved would have happiness with the man she loved That man was the one whose name the lawyer had assumed and in whose place he had been executed
Even if Erika was capable of love, she would not be capable of self-sacrifice, for it violated the proscription against suicide that had been embedded in every member of the New Race Therefore, she was in awe of this capacity in ordinary hus
As for revolution … A day would co secretly a the Old would pour down upon humanity a storm of terror unprecedented in history She’d not been created to serve in the front lines of that war, only to be a wife to Victor When the time came, she supposed that she would be as ruthless as her maker had created her to be
If they knehat she was, ordinary humans would consider her a monster Members of the Old Race weren’t her brothers and sisters
Yet she adifts
She suspected that it would be a mistake to let Victor know that her interest in the arts of the Old Race had evolved into admiration In his view, they deserved only contempt If she could not sustain that contempt, Erika Five could always be activated
As noon drew near, when she was certain that the household staff had cleaned the master suite and made the bed, she went upstairs
If theextraordinary or just peculiar in the bedroos, she would have been told Whatever had been in the bedrooht must not be there now
She prowled the suite anyway, listening for furtive sounds, looking behind furniture
In the night, gripped by a surprising fear of the unknown, she had retreated Fear, an important survival mechanism, had not been entirely denied to the New Race
Superstition, on the other hand, was uncon-testable proof of a weak mind Victor had no tolerance for superstition Those eak minds would be recalled, terminated, replaced