Leeta.... He thought of her with a crushing sense of tragedy. He knew he loved her—incredible and weird as that love may have seemed. He remembered the shyness of her kiss, the numbed horror of her belief that she had been betrayed, that he had pretended love only as a ruse to obtain Mulvaney's freedom. If only he were able to reassure her—
But he had the chill certainty that he would never see her again. For she had learned the meaning of pain.
Despair rose in him, a despair that submerged even his concern over the situation in which he now found himself. Cop-killer.... The implications brought a kind of remote wonder. Joyce, it appeared, had made her threat good. She had told the police a story that they had swallowed without tasting. It was a story that had resulted in a swift and thorough search of the park, a story that had required handcuffs and drawn guns.
Bryan glanced at the detective beside him. "You boys taking me in because of what happened to Mulvaney?"
"Mostly because of Mulvaney," the other grunted. "We don't know what you did to him, friend—but you're going to tell us about it. In the back room at Headquarters. You're damned well going to tell us all about it."
"Mulvaney isn't dead," Bryan insisted.
"Not yet. But he's going to kick off sooner or later—just like the others. I know about that, friend."
Bryan shook his head. "Mulvaney isn't going to die."
"That so?" The detective's flat gaze studied him without surprise or interest. "But the other guys did—four of them. Don't forget that."
Bryan fell silent. Mulvaney wouldn't die—but he would tell of Bryan knocking him down, of Bryan's co-operation with strange creatures that had taken the lives of four men. Mulvaney, however, wasn't likely to tell exactly what he had seen. His story, too, would be something that could be swallowed without tasting....