On Operation Vestal the Murder god chose my best friend and my honesty, and gave me nothing in exchange. I transferred out knowing there would be a price to pay for the desertion. At the back of my mind I expected my solve rate to plummet, expected every vicious guy to beat the living daylights out of me, every raging woman to scratch my eyes out. I wasn’t scared; I was looking forward to it being over. But when nothing happened I realized, like a slow cold tide, that this was the punishment: to be turned loose, allowed to go on my way. To be left empty by my guardian god.
And then Sam phoned and Frank was waiting at the top of the hill, and strong implacable hands were reeling me back in. You can put all of this down to a superstitious streak if that’s easiest, or to the kind of intense secret life that a lot of orphans and onlies have; I don’t mind. But maybe it goes some way towards explaining why I said yes to Operation Mirror, and why, when I signed on, I figured there was a decent chance I was going to get killed.
4
F
rank and I spent the next week developing Lexie Madison Version 3.0. During the day he pumped people for information about her, her routine, her moods, her relationships; then he came over to my flat and spent the night hammering the day’s crop into my head. I’d forgotten how good at this he was, how systematic and thorough, and how fast he expected me to keep up. Sunday evening, before we left the squad room, he handed me Lexie’s weekly schedule and a sheaf of photocopies of her thesis material. On Monday he had a thick file of her KAs—known associates—complete with photos and voice recordings and background info and smart-arsed commentary, for me to memorize. On Tuesday he brought an aerial map of the Glenskehy area, made me go over every detail till I could draw it from memory, gradually worked his way inwards till we got to floor plans and photos of Whitethorn House. This stuff had taken time to get together. Frank, the fucker, had known long before Sunday night that I was going to say yes.
We watched the phone videos again and again, Frank hitting Pause every few seconds to snap his fingers at some detail: “See that? How her head tilts to the right when she laughs? Show me that angle . . . See the way she looks at Rafe, and there, at Justin? She’s flirting with them. Daniel and Abby, she looks at straight on; the two lads, it’s sideways and up. Remember that . . . See her with the cigarette? She doesn’t tuck it into the right-hand side of her mouth, the way you do. Her hand crosses over, and the smoke goes in on the left. Let’s see you do it . . . See that? Justin starts getting all worked up about the mildew, and straightaway there’s that little glance between Abby and Lexie, and they start talking about the pretty tiles to take his mind off it. There’s an understanding there . . .” I watched those clips so many times that when I finally went to sleep—five in the morning, mostly, Frank sprawled on the sofa in all his clothes—they slid through my dreams, a constant undercurrent, tugging: the brusque cut of Daniel’s voice against Justin’s light obbligato, the patterns of the wallpaper, the rich tumble of Abby’s laugh.
They lived with a kind of ceremony that startled me. My student life was spur-of-the-moment house parties, frantic bursts of all-night study and non-meals involving crisp sandwiches at weird hours. But this lot: the girls made breakfast at half past seven every morning, they were in college around ten—Daniel and Justin had cars, so they drove the others—whether they had tutorials to give or not, home around half past six and the guys made dinner. On weekends they worked on the house; occasionally, if the weather was good, they took a picnic somewhere. Even their free time involved stuff like Rafe playing piano and Daniel reading Dante out loud and Abby restoring an eighteenth-century embroidered footstool. They didn’t own a TV, never mind a computer—Daniel and Justin shared a manual typewriter, the other three were in enough contact with the twenty-first century to use the computers in college. They were like spies from another planet who had got their research wrong and wound up reading Edith Wharton and watching reruns of
Little House on the Prairie
. Frank had to look up piquet on the internet and teach me to play.
All this stuff, of course, got right up Frank’s nose and inspired him to more and more creative flights of bitchery (“I’m thinking this is some weird cult that believes technology is the work of Satan and chants to house plants at the full moon. Don’t worry, if they start gearing up for an orgy, I’ll get you out; by the looks of them, it’s not like you’d enjoy it. Who the hell doesn’t have a
television
?”). I didn’t tell him this, but the more I thought about it, the less bizarre their lives seemed and the more they enchanted me. Dublin goes fast, these days, fast and jam-packed and jostling, everyone terrified of being left behind and forcing themselves louder and louder to make sure they don’t disappear. I had spent my time since Operation Vestal going fast too, headlong and gritted, anything not to stop, and at first the unabashed, graceful leisure of these four—
embroidery,
for Christ’s sake—was as shocking as a slap. I had forgotten even how to want something slow, something soft, something with wide spaces and its own sure-footed swaying rhythms. That house and that life hung in my mind cool as well water, cool as the shadow under an oak tree on a hot afternoon.
During the day I practiced: Lexie’s handwriting, her walk, her accent—which luckily for me was a light old-fashioned County Dublin, probably picked up from some TV or radio talk-show host, and not all that different from my own—her inflections, her laugh. The first time I got that right—a delighted, helpless bubble of a laugh, running up the scale like a tickled kid’s—it scared the shit out of me.
Her version of Lexie Madison had been, comfortingly, a little different from mine. Way back in UCD, I played Lexie as cheerful, easygoing, sociable, happiest at the center of the action; nothing unpredictable about her, no dark edges, nothing that could make dealers or buyers see her as a risk. At the beginning, at least, Frank and I thought of her as a custom-made precision tool, built to suit our needs and do our bidding, with a very specific goal in mind. The mystery girl’s Lexie had been more mercurial, more volatile, more willful and capricious. She had come up with a Siamese kitten of a girl, all bounce and chatter and little explosions of mischief with her friends, aloof and ice cool with outsiders, and it bothered me that I couldn’t trace that thread backwards and work out what her goal had been, what job she had precision-made this new self to do.
I did consider the possibility that I was making things more complicated than they needed to be, and she had never had a goal at all; that when it came to personality, at least, she was just plain being herself. It isn’t easy, after all, wearing someone else against your skin for months on end; I should know. But the thought of taking her at face value, no pun intended, made me edgy. Something told me that underestimating this girl would be a big, big mistake.
* * *
On Tuesday evening Frank and I were sitting on my floor, eating Chinese takeaway off the banged-up wooden chest I use for a coffee table, across a sprawl of maps and photos. It was a wild night, wind slamming at the window in great irregular bursts like some mindless attacker, and we were both in a jittery mood. I had spent the day memorizing KA info and building up enough excess energy that by the time Frank arrived I was doing handstands to keep myself from shooting straight through the ceiling; Frank had come in moving fast, sweeping stuff off the table and talking nonstop while he dealt out maps and food cartons, and I was wondering—there was no point in asking—what was going on, somewhere in the hidden levels of that X-box game he calls a brain, that he wasn’t telling me.
The combination of geography and food calmed us down a little—this was probably why Frank had gone for Chinese; it’s hard to be edgy when you’re full of lemon chicken. “And here,” Frank said, maneuvering the last of his rice onto his fork with one hand and pointing with the other, “that’s the petrol station on the Rathowen road. Open from seven in the morning till three at night, mainly to sell smokes and petrol to locals who’re in no condition to be buying either one. You sometimes do cigarette runs there. Want more food?”
“God, no,” I said. I had startled myself by being starving—normally I eat like a horse, Rob used to be constantly fascinated by how much food I could put away, but Operation Vestal had sort of sidelined my appetite. “Coffee?” I had a pot already going on the cooker; Frank’s eye bags were reaching the point where they would scare small children.
“And lots of it. We’ve got work to do. Gonna be another long night, babe.”
“Surprise, surprise,” I said. “What’s Olivia think of you sleeping over at my place?”
I was fishing, and I knew from the fraction of a pause as Frank pushed his plate away that I had guessed right: undercover strikes again. “Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to—”
“Yeah, you did. Olivia got smart and dumped me last year. I get Holly one weekend a month and two weeks in summer. What’s your Sammy think of me sleeping over at your place?”
His eyes were cool and unblinking and he didn’t sound annoyed, just firm, but the message was clear:
Back off.
“He’s fine with it,” I said, getting up to check the coffee. “Anything for the job.”
“You think? The job didn’t seem to be his main priority on Sunday.”
I changed my mind: he was pissed off with me about the Olivia thing. Apologizing would only make it worse. Before I could think of anything useful to say, my buzzer rang. I managed to keep the jump down to a minimum, had a graceful Inspector Clouseau moment where I whacked myself neatly across the shin with the sofa corner on my way to the door, and caught Frank’s sharp, curious up-glance.
It was Sam. “And there’s your answer,” Frank said, grinning and hoisting himself up off the floor. “You, he’d trust anywhere, but me he’s keeping an eye on. I’ll take care of the coffee; you go canoodle.”
Sam was exhausted; I could feel it in the weight of his body when he kissed me, the way he let out his breath in something like a sigh of relief. “God, it’s good to see you,” he said; then, as he spotted Frank waving from the kitchen, “Oh.”
“Welcome to the Lexie Lab,” Frank said cheerfully. “Coffee? Sweet and sour pork? Prawn cracker?”
“Yeah,” Sam said, blinking. “I mean, no; just coffee, thanks. I won’t stay, if you’re working; I just wanted to . . . Are you busy?”
“You’re fine,” I told him. “We were having dinner. What’ve you eaten today?”
“I’m grand,” Sam said vaguely, dumping his holdall on the floor and struggling out of his coat. “Could I borrow you for a few minutes? If you’re not in the middle of something.”
He was asking me, but Frank said expansively, “Why not? Have a seat, have a seat,” and waved him to the futon. “Milk? Sugar?”
“No milk, two sugars,” Sam said, collapsing onto the futon. “Thanks.” I was pretty sure that he was starving, that he wasn’t going to touch anything Frank had bought, that the holdall contained all the ingredients for something a lot more evolved than lemon chicken, and that if I could just get my hands on his shoulders I could rub that tension away in five minutes flat. Going undercover was starting to seem like the easy part here.
I sat next to Sam, as close as I could get without touching. “How’s it going?” I asked.
He gave my hand a quick squeeze and reached round to his coat, draped over the back of the futon, to find his notebook. “Ah, sure, all right, I suppose. Just eliminating, mostly. Richard Doyle, your man who found the body, his alibi’s solid. We’ve ruled out all the DV files you flagged; we’re working on the rest and on your murder cases, but nothing yet.” The thought of the Murder squad combing through my files, with the rumors sizzling in their heads and my face for victim, sent a nasty little twitch down between my shoulder blades. “It doesn’t look like she used the internet at all—no internet activity under her log-in on the college computers, no MySpace page or anything like that, the e-mail address Trinity assigned her hasn’t even been used—so no leads there. And not even a sniff of any arguments in college—and the English department is mad for the old rumors. If she’d had problems with anyone, we’d have heard.”
“I hate to say I told you so,” Frank said sweetly, gathering up mugs, “but sometimes, in life, we have to do things we hate.”
“Yeah,” Sam said absently. Frank bent to hand him his coffee with a servile little flourish, and winked at me behind Sam’s back. I ignored him. One of Sam’s rules is that he doesn’t fight with anyone working the same case, but there are always people like Frank who figure he’s just too thick to notice when he’s being messed with. “So I wondered, Cassie . . . The thing is, eliminating could take forever, but as long as I’ve no motive and no leads, I’ve no other choice; there’s nothing to tell me where to start. I thought, if I just had some idea what I was looking for . . . Could you profile this for me?”
For a second I felt like the air in the room had gone dark with pure sadness, bitter and ineradicable as smoke. Every murder case I ever pulled, I had done my best to profile right here in my flat: late nights, whiskey, Rob stretched out on the sofa cat’s-cradling an elastic band and testing everything I came up with for holes. On Operation Vestal we’d brought Sam along, Sam smiling shyly at me while music and moths swirled at the windowpane, and all I could think was how happy the three of us had been, in spite of everything, and how fatally, devastatingly innocent. This prickly, crowded place—greasy smell of cold Chinese, my shin hurting like hell, Frank watching with those sidelong amused eyes—this wasn’t the same thing, it was like a mocking reflection in some creepy distorting mirror, and all I could think was, ludicrously,
I want to go home.
Sam moved a sheaf of maps to one side—gingerly, glancing up at us to make sure he wasn’t messing anything up—and put down his mug. Frank scooted his arse to the very edge of the sofa, leaned his chin on his interlaced fingers and did enthralled. I kept my eyes down so they wouldn’t see the look on my face. There was a photo of Lexie on the table, half hidden under a carton of rice; Lexie up a ladder in the kitchen of Whitethorn House, wearing dungarees and a man’s shirt and an awful lot of white paint. For the first time ever, the sight of her felt good: that handcuff bite on my wrist jerking me down to earth, that cold-water slap in the face slamming everything else out of my mind. I almost reached out and pressed my hand onto the picture.