Broken Harbour

8

Richie was waiting outside the hospital at a quarter to six. Normally I would have sent one of the uniforms-officially, all we were there for was to identify the bodies, and I have more productive ways to spend my time-but this was Richie’s first case, and he needed to watch the PM. If he didn’t, word would get around. As a bonus, Cooper likes you to watch, and if Richie managed to get on his good side, we would have a shot at the fast track if we needed it.

It was still night, just that cold pre-dawn thinning of the darkness that leaches the last strength out of your bones, and the air had a bite to it. The light of the hospital entrance was a warmthless, stuttering white. Richie was leaning against the railing, with an industrial-size paper cup in each hand, kicking a crumple of tinfoil back and forth between his feet. He looked pale and baggy-eyed, but he was awake and wearing a clean shirt-it was just as cheap as the one before, but I gave him points for having thought of it at all. He even had my tie on over it.

“Howya,” he said, handing me one of the cups. “Thought you might want this. Tastes like washing-up liquid, though. Hospital canteen.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I think.” It was coffee, give or take. “How was last night?”

He shrugged. “Would’ve been better if our fella’d shown up.”

“Patience, old son. Rome wasn’t built in a day.”

Another shrug, down at the tinfoil that he was kicking harder. I realized that he had wanted to have our guy ready to present to me first thing this morning, all trussed up and oven-ready, the kill to prove that he was a man. He said, “The techs say they got a load done, anyway.”

“Good.” I leaned against the railings next to him and tried to get the coffee into me: one hint of a yawn and Cooper would boot me out the door. “How did the patrol floaters do?”

“Grand, I think. They picked up a few cars coming into the estate, but all the plates checked out to Ocean View addresses: just people heading home. A bunch of teenagers met up in one of the houses down the other end from us, brought a couple of bottles with them, played their music loud. Around half past two there was a car going around and around, slow, but it was a woman driving and she had a baby crying in the back, so the lads figured she was trying to get it to sleep. That was the lot.”

“You’re satisfied that if someone dodgy had been prowling around, they’d have spotted him?”

“Unless he was really lucky, yeah. I’d say so.”

“No more media?”

Richie shook his head. “I thought they’d be going after the neighbors, but nah.”

“Probably off looking for loved ones to hassle; juicier stuff there. It looks like the press office has them under control, for now anyway. I had a quick skim of the early editions: nothing we didn’t already know, and nothing about Jenny Spain being alive. We won’t be able to keep that to ourselves much longer, though. We need to get our hands on this guy fast.” Every front page had run with a howl-sized headline and an angelic blond shot of Emma and Jack. We had a week, two at the outside, to get this guy before we turned into worthless incompetents and the Super turned into a very unhappy camper.

Richie started to answer, but a yawn cut him off. “Get any sleep?” I asked.

“Nah. We talked about doing shifts, but the countryside’s bleeding noisy, did you know that? Everyone gives it loads about the peace and quiet, but that’s a load of bollix. The sea, and there were like a hundred bats throwing a party, and mice or something running around, all through the houses. And something went for a wander down the road; sounded like a tank, charging through all those plants. I tried checking it out with the goggles, but it headed down between the houses before I could get it. Something big, anyway.”

“Too creepy for you?”

Richie gave me a wry sideways grin. “I managed not to crap my kacks. Even if it’d been quiet, I wanted to be awake. In case.”

“I’d have been the same. How are you doing?”

“All right. A bit wrecked, like, but I’m not gonna crash out halfway through the post-mortem or anything.”

“If we get you a couple of hours’ kip somewhere along the way, can you take another night?”

“Little more of this”-he tilted the coffee cup-“and yeah, sure I can. Same as last night, yeah?”

“No,” I said. “One of the definitions of insanity, my friend, is doing the same thing again and again and hoping for different results. If our man could resist the bait last night, he can resist it tonight. We need better bait.”

Richie’s head turned towards me. “Yeah? I thought ours was pretty decent. Another night or two and I’d say we’ll have him.”

I raised my cup to him. “Vote of confidence appreciated. But the fact is, I misjudged our boy. He’s not interested in us. Some of them can’t stay away from the cops: they insert themselves into the investigation every way they can find, you can’t turn around without tripping over Mr. Helpful. Our guy isn’t like that, or we’d have him by now. He doesn’t give a damn what we do, or what the Bureau lads do. But you know what he’s very interested in, don’t you?”

“The Spains?”

“Ten points for you. The Spains.”

“We haven’t got the Spains, but. I mean, Jenny, yeah, but-”

“But even if Jenny was able to help us out, I want to keep her under wraps for as long as I can. True enough. What we do have, though, is Whatshername, that floater-what is her name?”

“Oates. Detective Janine Oates.”

“Her. You may not have noticed this, but from a distance, in the right context, Detective Oates could quite probably pass for Fiona Rafferty. Same height, same build, same hair-Detective Oates’s is a lot neater, luckily, but I’m sure she could mess it up if we asked her to. Get her a red duffle coat and Bob’s your uncle. It’s not that they’re actually anything alike, but to spot that you’d have to get a proper look, and for that, you’d need a decent vantage point and your binoculars.”

Richie said, “We clear out at six again, she drives up-have we got a yellow Fiat in the pool, yeah?”

“I’m not sure, but if we don’t, we can just have a marked car drop her off. She goes into the house and spends the night doing whatever she thinks Fiona Rafferty would do, as obviously as possible-wandering around looking distraught with the curtains open, having a read of Pat and Jenny’s papers, that kind of thing. And we wait.”

Richie drank his coffee, with an unconscious grimace on each sip, and considered that. “You think he knows who Fiona is?”

“I think there’s a damn good chance he does, yeah. Remember, we don’t know where he came into contact with the Spains; it could have been somewhere that involved Fiona too. Even if it wasn’t, she may not have been out here in a few months, but for all we know he’s been watching them for a lot longer than that.”

On the horizon the outline of low hills was starting to take shape, darker against darkness. Somewhere beyond them, the first light was moving up the sand in Broken Harbor, seeping into all those empty houses, into the emptiest one of all. It was five to six. I said, “Have you ever been to a post-mortem?”

Richie shook his head. He said, “There’s a first time for everyone.”

“There is, yeah, but it’s not usually like this. This is going to be bad. You should be there, but if you’re seriously not on for it, this is when you need to speak up. We can say you’re getting some kip after the stakeout.”

He crushed his paper cup into a wad and tossed it at the bin with a hard downward snap of his wrist. “Let’s go,” he said.

The morgue was in the hospital basement, small and low-ceilinged, with dirt and probably worse things ground into the grout between the floor tiles. The air was chilly and damp, motionless. “Detectives,” Cooper said, eyeing Richie with a faint anticipatory smirk. Cooper is maybe fifty, but in the tube lighting, against white tile and metal, he looked ancient: grayish and shriveled, like an alien stepped out of some hallucination, probes at the ready. “How nice to see you. We will begin, I think, with the adult male: age before beauty.” Behind him, his assistant-heavy build, stolid stare-pulled open a storage drawer with a horrible grating screech. I felt Richie brace his shoulders beside me, a tiny jerk.

They broke the seals on the body bag, unzipped it to reveal Pat Spain in his blood-stiffened pajamas. They photographed him clothed and naked, took blood and fingerprints, bent close while they picked at his skin with tweezers and clipped his fingernails for DNA. Then the assistant swung the instrument tray around to Cooper’s elbow.

Post-mortems are brutal things. This is the part that always catches rookies off guard: they expect delicacy, tiny scalpels and precision cuts, and instead they get bread knives sawing fast careless gashes, skin ripped back like sticky paper. Cooper at work looks more like a butcher than a surgeon. He doesn’t need to take care to minimize scarring, hold his breath making sure not to nick an artery. The flesh he works on isn’t precious any more. When Cooper is done with a body, no one else will need it, ever again.

Richie did well. He didn’t flinch when the pruning shears snapped Pat’s ribs open, or when Cooper folded Pat’s face downwards on itself, or when the skull saw sent up a thin acrid smell of scorched bone. The squelching sound when the assistant dumped the liver on the weighing scales made him jump, but that was all.

Cooper moved deftly and efficiently, dictating into the hanging mike and ignoring us. Pat had eaten a cheese sandwich and some crisps, three or four hours before he died. Traces of fat in his arteries and around his liver said he should have been getting fewer crisps and more exercise, but overall he had been in good shape: no illnesses that showed, no abnormalities, a long-ago broken collarbone and thickened ears that could have been rugby injuries. I said quietly, to Richie, “Healthy man’s scars.”

Finally Cooper straightened, stretching his back, and turned to us. “To summarize,” he informed us, with satisfaction, “my preliminary statement at the scene was correct. As you will remember, I posited that the cause of death was either this wound”-he prodded the gash in the middle of Pat Spain’s chest with his scalpel-“or this one.” A poke to the slit below Pat’s collarbone. “In point of fact, each of these was potentially fatal. In the first, the blade glanced off the central edge of the sternum and nicked the pulmonary vein.”

He folded back Pat’s skin-delicately, holding the flap between thumb and finger-and pointed with his scalpel, to make sure Richie and I both saw exactly what he meant. “Absent any other wounds or any medical treatment, this injury would have resulted in death within approximately twenty minutes, as the subject gradually bled out into the chest cavity. As it happened, however, this sequence of events was interrupted.”

He let the skin drop back into place and reached to pry up the flap below the collarbone. “This is the wound that proved fatal. The blade entered between the third and fourth ribs, at the mid-clavicular line, causing a one-centimeter laceration to the right ventricle of the heart. Blood loss would have been rapid and extensive. The drop in blood pressure would have led to unconsciousness within fifteen or twenty seconds, and to death perhaps two minutes later. The cause of death was exsanguination.”

So there was no way Pat had been the one who got rid of the weapons; not that I thought he had been, not any more. Cooper tossed his scalpel into the instrument tray and nodded to the assistant, who was threading a thick, curved needle and humming softly to himself. I said, “And the manner of death?”

Cooper sighed. He said, “I understand that you currently believe a fifth party was present in the house at the time of the deaths.”

“That’s what the evidence tells us.”

“Hmm,” Cooper said. He flicked something unthinkable off his gown, onto the floor. “And I am sure this leads you to assume that this subject”-a nod at Pat Spain-“was a victim of homicide. Unfortunately, some of us do not have the luxury of assumption. All of the wounds are consistent with either assault or self-infliction. The manner of death was either homicide or suicide: undetermined.”

Some defense lawyer was going to love that all over. I said, “Then let’s leave that blank on the paperwork for now, and come back to it when we’ve got more evidence. If the lab finds DNA under his fingernails-”

Cooper leaned over to the hanging mike and said, without bothering to look at me, “Manner of death: undetermined.” That little smirk slid over me, to Richie. “Do cheer up, Detective Kennedy. I doubt there will be any ambiguity as to the next subject’s manner of death.”

Emma Spain came out of her drawer with her bedsheets folded neatly around her like a shroud. Richie twitched, at my shoulder, and I heard the fast rasp as he started scratching at the inside of a pocket. She had curled up all cozy in those same sheets, two nights ago, with a good-night kiss. If he started thinking along those lines, I would have a new partner by Christmas. I shifted, nudging against his elbow, and cleared my throat. Cooper gave me a long stare across that small white shape, but Richie got the message and went still. The assistant unfolded the sheets.

I know detectives who learn the knack of unfocusing their eyes at the bad parts of post-mortems. Cooper violates dead children searching for signs of violation, and the investigating officer stares intently at nothing but a blur. I watch. I don’t blink. The victims didn’t get to choose whether or not to endure what was done to them. I’m spoiled enough, next to them, without claiming to be too delicate even to endure looking.

Emma was worse than Patrick not just because she was so young, but because she was so unblemished. Maybe this sounds twisted, but the worse the injuries, the easier the autopsy. When a body comes in macerated to something from an abattoir, the Y incision and the grating snap as the top of the skull comes off don’t pack much punch. The injuries give the cop in you something to focus on: they turn the victim from a human being into a specimen, made out of urgent questions and fresh clues. Emma was just a little girl, tender-soled bare feet and freckled snub nose, sticking-out belly button where her pink pajama top had ridden up. You would have sworn that she was only a hairsbreadth from alive; that if you had just known the right words to say in her ear, the right spot to touch, you could have woken her. What Cooper was about to do to her in our name was a dozen times more brutal than anything her murderer had done.

The assistant took off the paper bags tied over her hands to preserve evidence, and Cooper bent over her with a palette knife to take fingernail scrapings. “Ah,” he said suddenly. “Interesting.”

He reached for tweezers, did something finicky at her right hand, and straightened up holding the tweezers high. “These,” he said, “were between the index and middle fingers.”

Four fine, pale hairs. A blond man crouched over the pink ruffled bed, that tiny girl fighting- I said, “DNA. Is there enough there for a shot at DNA?”

Cooper shot me a thin smile. “Control your excitement, Detective. Microscopic comparison will, of course, be necessary, but judging by color and texture, there appears to be every probability that these hairs come from the head of the victim herself.” He dropped them into an evidence bag, pulled out his fountain pen and bent to scribble something on the label. “Assuming the evidence bears out the preliminary theory of suffocation, I would theorize that her hands were trapped beside her head by the pillow or other weapon, and that, unable to claw at the attacker, she pulled at her own hair in her final moments of consciousness.”

That was when Richie left. At least he managed not to put a fist through the wall, or puke his guts onto the floor. He just turned on his heel, walked out and closed the door behind him.

The assistant sniggered. Cooper gave the door a long, chilly stare. “I apologize for Detective Curran,” I said.

He transferred the stare to me. “I am not accustomed,” he told me, “to having my post-mortems interrupted without an excellent reason. Do you, or does your colleague, have an excellent reason?”

So much for Richie getting on Cooper’s good side. And that was the least of our problems. Whatever flak Quigley had been giving Richie in the squad room was nothing to what he could expect from now on, if he didn’t get his arse back into the morgue and see this thing through. We were talking lifetime nickname here. Cooper probably wouldn’t spread the word-he likes being above gossip-but the glint in the assistant’s eye said he couldn’t wait.

I kept my mouth shut while Cooper worked his way through the external examination. No more nasty surprises along the way, thank Christ. Emma was a little above average height for six, average weight, healthy in every way that Cooper could check. There were no healed fractures, no burn marks or scars, none of the hideous spoor of abuse, physical or sexual. Her teeth were clean and healthy, no fillings; her nails were clean and clipped; her hair had been trimmed not long ago. She had spent the little life she had being well taken care of.

No conjunctival hemorrhages in her eyes, no bruising to her lips where something had been pressed over her mouth, nothing that could tell us anything about what he had done to her. Then Cooper, shining his pencil torch into Emma’s mouth like he was her GP, said, “Hm.” He reached for his tweezers again, tilted her head farther back and maneuvered them deep into her throat.

“If I remember correctly,” he said, “the victim’s bed held a number of ornamental pillows, embroidered with anthropomorphic animals in multicolored wool.”

Kittens and puppies, staring in the torchlight. “That’s correct,” I said.

Cooper pulled the tweezers out of her mouth with a flourish. “In that case,” he said, “I believe we have evidence of cause of death.”

A wisp of wool. It was sodden and darkened, but when it dried out it would be rose pink. I thought of the kitten’s pricked ears, the puppy’s hanging tongue.

“As you have seen,” Cooper said, “smothering often leaves so few signs that it is impossible to diagnose definitively. In this case, however, if this wool matches that used in the pillows, I will have no difficulty in stating that the victim was smothered with one of the pillows from her bed-the Bureau may well be able to identify the specific weapon. She died either from anoxia or from cardiac arrest pursuant to anoxia. The manner of death was homicide.”

He dropped the tag of wool into an evidence bag. As he sealed it, he gave it a nod and a brief, satisfied smile.

The internal exam gave us more of the same: a healthy little girl, nothing to say she had ever been ill or hurt in her life. Emma’s stomach contained a partially digested meal of minced beef, mashed potato, vegetables and fruit: cottage pie, with fruit salad for dessert, eaten about eight hours before she died. The Spains seemed like the family-dinner type, and I wondered why Pat and Emma hadn’t eaten the same meal that night, but that was a small enough thing that it could easily go unexplained forever. A queasy stomach that couldn’t take cottage pie, a kid being given the meal she had refused at lunchtime: murder means that little things get swept away, lost for good on the ebb of that red tsunami.

When the assistant started stitching her up, I said, “Dr. Cooper, could you give me two minutes to go get Detective Curran? He’ll want to see the rest of this.”

Cooper stripped off his bloody gloves. “I am unsure what gives you that impression. Detective Curran had every opportunity to see the rest of this, as you call it. He apparently feels himself to be above such mundanities.”

“Detective Curran came here directly from an all-night stakeout. Nature called, as it does, and he didn’t want to interrupt your work again by coming back in. I don’t think he should be penalized for having spent twelve straight hours on duty.”

Cooper threw me a disgusted glance that said I could at least have come up with something more creative. “Detective Curran’s theoretical innards are hardly my problem.”

He turned away to drop his gloves into the biohazard bin; the clang of the lid said this conversation was over. I said evenly, “Detective Curran will want to be here for Jack Spain’s post-mortem. And I think it’s important that he should be. I’m willing to go out of my way to make sure that this investigation gets everything it needs, and I’d like to think that everyone involved will do the same.”

Cooper turned around, taking his time, and gave me a shark-eyed stare. “Simply out of interest,” he said, “let me ask: are you attempting to tell me how to run my post-mortems?”

I didn’t blink. “No,” I said gently. “I’m telling you how I run my investigations.”

His mouth was pursed up tighter than a cat’s arse, but in the end he shrugged. “I plan to spend the next fifteen minutes dictating my notes on Emma Spain. I will then move on to Jack Spain. Anyone who is in the room when I begin the process may remain. Anyone who is not present at that point will refrain from disturbing yet another post-mortem by entering.”

We both understood that I was going to pay for this, sooner or later. “Thank you, Doctor,” I said. “I appreciate that.”

“Believe me, Detective, you have no reason to thank me. I have no plans to deviate one iota from my usual routine, either for your sake or for Detective Curran’s. That being the case, I feel I should inform you that my usual routine does not include small talk between post-mortems.” And he turned his shoulder to me and started talking into the hanging mike again.

On my way out, behind Cooper’s back, I caught the assistant’s eye and pointed a finger at him. He tried to do perplexed innocence, which didn’t suit him, but I held the eye contact till he blinked. If this story got around, he knew where I was going to come looking.

The frost was still on the grass, but the light had brightened to a pearly pale gray: morning. The hospital was starting to wake up for the day. Two old women in their best coats were supporting each other up the steps, talking loudly about stuff I would have been happier not hearing, and a young guy in a dressing gown was leaning beside the door and having a smoke.

Richie was sitting on a low wall near the entrance, staring at the toes of his shoes, with his hands dug deep in the pockets of his jacket. It was actually a pretty decent jacket, gray, with a good cut. He managed to make it look like denim.

He didn’t look up when my shadow fell across him. He said, “Sorry.”

“Nothing to apologize for. Not to me.”

“Is he done?”

“He’s done with Emma. He’s about to move on to Jack.”

“Jesus Christ,” Richie said softly, to the sky. I couldn’t tell whether he was swearing or praying.

I said, “Kids are hell. No way round that. We all act like it’s not a problem, but the fact is, it kills every single one of us, every time. You’re not alone there.”

“I was sure I could handle it. Definite.”

“And that’s the right way to think. Always go in thinking positive. Doubts will kill you in this game.”

“I’ve never gone to bits like that before. I swear. At the scene, even: I was grand. Not a problem.”

“Yeah, you were. The scene’s different. The first look is bad, and then the worst’s over. It doesn’t keep coming at you.”

I saw his Adam’s apple jump as he swallowed. After a moment he said, “Maybe I’m not cut out for this.”

The words sounded like they hurt his throat. I said, “Are you sure you want to be?”

“All I ever wanted. Since I was a kid. Saw a program on the telly-documentary, not made-up crap.” A quick squint my way, to check if I was laughing at him. “Some old case, a girl that got killed down the country. The detective was talking about how they solved it. I thought he was the smartest guy I’d ever seen, you know? Way smarter than college professors and people like that, because he got things done. Things that mattered. I just thought… That. I want to do that.”

“And now you’re learning to do that. Like I told you yesterday, it takes time. You can’t expect to have the whole thing sussed on your first day.”

“Yeah,” Richie said. “Or else your man Quigley’s right, and I should fuck off back to Motor Vehicles and spend some more time arresting my cousins.”

“Is that what he was saying to you yesterday? When I was in with the Super?”

Richie rubbed a hand over his hair. “It doesn’t matter,” he said tiredly. “I don’t give a damn what Quigley says. I only give a damn if he’s right.”

I dusted off a piece of wall and sat down beside him. “Richie, old son,” I said. “Let me ask you something.”

His head turned towards me. He had that food-poisoned look again. I gambled that he wouldn’t puke on my suit.

“I’m betting you know I have the highest overall solve rate on this squad.”

“Yeah. I knew coming in. When the Super said he was putting me with you, I was only delighted.”

“And now you’ve had a chance to watch me work, where do you think that solve rate comes from?”

Richie looked uncomfortable. Clearly he had asked himself the same question, and hadn’t managed to come up with an answer.

“Is it because I’m the smartest guy in the squad room?”

He did something between a shrug and a wriggle. “How would I know?”

“In other words, no. Is it because I’m some kind of psychic wonder boy, like you see on TV?”

“Like I said. I wouldn’t-”

“You wouldn’t know. Right. Then let me say it for you: my brain and my instincts are no better than anyone else’s.”

“I didn’t say that.”

In the thin morning light his face looked pinched and anxious, desperately young. “I know. It’s true just the same: I’m no genius. I would have liked to be. For a while, when I started out, I was sure I was something special. Not a doubt in my mind.”

Richie watched me, wary, trying to work out if he was getting told off here. He said, “When…?”

“When did I figure out that I’m not Superboy?”

“I guess. Yeah.”

The hills were hidden in mist, just snatches of green appearing and disappearing. There was no way to tell where land ended and sky began. “Probably a lot later than I should have,” I said. “There wasn’t one moment that sticks out. Let’s just say I got older and wiser, and it became obvious. I made a few mistakes I shouldn’t have made, missed a few things that Superboy would have spotted. Most of all, I worked with a couple of guys along the way who were the real thing: what I wanted to be. And it turns out I’m just about smart enough to spot the difference when it’s right in front of my nose. Smart enough to see how smart I’m not, I guess.”

Richie said nothing, but he was paying attention. That alertness was rising in his face, edging out the rest; he almost looked like a cop again. I said, “It was a nasty surprise, finding out that I was nothing special. But like I said to you before, you work with what you’ve got on hand. Otherwise you might as well buy yourself a one-way ticket on the train to failure.”

Richie said, “Then the solve rate…?”

“The solve rate,” I said. “My solve rate is what it is for two reasons: because I work my arse off, and because I keep control. Over situations, over witnesses, over suspects, and most of all, over myself. If you’re good enough at that, you can compensate for just about anything else. If you’re not, Richie, if you lose control, then it doesn’t matter how much of a genius you are: you might as well go home. Forget your tie, forget your interrogation technique, forget all the things we’ve talked about over the last couple of weeks. They’re just symptoms. Get down to the core of it, and every single thing I’ve said to you boils down to control. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

Richie’s mouth was starting to set into a tough line, which was what I wanted to see. “I have control. Sir. Cooper got me off guard, is all.”

“Then don’t be off guard.”

He bit down on the inside of his cheek. “Yeah. Fair enough. It won’t happen again.”

“I didn’t think it would.” I gave him a quick clap on the shoulder. “Focus on the positive here, Richie. There’s a decent chance that this is the worst way you’ll ever spend a morning, and you’re still standing. And if it only takes you till your third week on the job to find out that you’re not Superboy, you’re a lucky man.”

“Maybe.”

“Believe me. You’ve got the rest of your career to bring yourself into line with your goals. That’s a gift, my friend. Don’t throw it away.”

The day’s worth of damage was starting to roll into the hospital: a guy in overalls pressing a blood-soaked cloth over his hand, a girl with a thin, strained face carrying a dazed-looking toddler. Cooper’s clock was ticking, but this needed to come from Richie, not from me.

He said, “Am I never going to live this down in the squad, no?”

“Don’t worry about that. I’m on it.”

He looked at me full face, for the first time since I’d got out there. “I don’t want you watching out for me. I’m not a kid. I can fight my own battles.”

I said, “You’re my partner. It’s my job to fight them with you.”

That took him by surprise. I watched something change in his face as it sank in. After a moment he nodded. He said, “Can I still…? I mean, will Dr. Cooper let me back in?”

I checked my watch. “If we move fast, he will.”

“Right,” Richie said. He blew out a long breath, ran his hands over his hair and stood up. “Let’s go.”

“Good on you. And Richie?”

“Yeah.”

“Don’t let this get to you. This is a blip. You’ve got everything it takes to be a Murder D.”

He nodded. “I’m going to give it my best shot, anyway. Thanks, Detective Kennedy. Thank you.” Then he tugged his tie straight and the two of us headed back into the hospital, side by side.

Richie made it through Jack’s post-mortem. It was a bad one: Cooper took his time, he made sure we got an eyeful of every detail, and if Richie had glanced away once he would have been toast. He didn’t. He watched steadily, not twitching, barely even blinking. Jack had been healthy, well-nourished, big for his age; active, judging by all the scabs on his knees and elbows. He had eaten cottage pie and fruit salad around the same time as Emma. Residue behind his ears said he had had a bath, wiggled too hard for the shampoo to be rinsed away properly. Then he had gone to bed, and deep in the night someone had killed him-presumably by suffocating him with a pillow, but this time there was no way to be sure. He had no defensive injuries, but Cooper made sure to point out that that meant nothing: he could have slipped over the line in his sleep, or he could have screamed his last seconds away into the pillow that stopped him fighting. Richie’s face had sunk in around the mouth and nose, like he had lost ten pounds since we walked into that morgue.

When we got out it was lunchtime, not that either of us felt like eating. The mist had burned off, but it was still dark as dusk; the sky was heavy with cold clouds, and on the horizon the hills were a smoky, sullen green. Hospital traffic had picked up: people going in and out, an ambulance unloading a young guy in motorcycle leathers with one leg at a bad angle, a clutch of girls in scrubs helpless with laughter over something on one of their phones. I said, “You made it. Well done, Detective.”

Richie made a hoarse sound halfway between a cough and a retch, and I whipped my coat out of his way, but he wiped a hand over his mouth and pulled it together. “Just about. Yeah.”

I said, “You’re thinking that, next time you get a chance at some sleep, you’ll need a couple of shots of straight whiskey first. Don’t do it. The last thing you want is to have dreams and not be able to wake up.”

“Jesus,” Richie said softly, not to me.

“Keep your eye on the prize. The day our boy goes down for life, it’ll be the icing on the cake, knowing you ticked every box along the way.”

“That’s if we get him. If we don’t…”

“No ifs, my friend. That’s not how I roll. He’s ours.”

Richie was still looking at nothing. I made myself comfortable on the wall again and pulled out my mobile, to give him a chance to take a few deep breaths. “Let’s get ourselves updated,” I said, when the phone was ringing. “See what’s been going down in the real world,” and he woke up and came over to sit beside me.

I checked in with headquarters first: O’Kelly was going to want a full update and a chance to tell me to stop fucking about and catch someone, both of which I was happy to give him, and I wanted updates of my own. The searchers had turned up a small stash of hash, a woman’s razor and a cake tin. The sub-aqua team had found a badly rusted bicycle and a pile of building rubble; they were still going, but the currents were strong enough that they didn’t hold out much hope of anything smaller having stayed put for more than an hour or two. Bernadette had assigned us an incident room-one of the good ones, with plenty of desks and a decent-sized whiteboard and a working DVD-cum-VCR player, so someone could watch CCTV footage and the Spains’ home movies-and a couple of the floaters were setting it up, covering the walls with crime-scene shots, maps, lists, organizing a roster for the tip line. The rest were out in the field, starting the long process of talking to anyone whose path had ever crossed the Spains’. One of them had tracked down Jack’s friends from preschool: most of them hadn’t heard from the Spains since June, when the school closed for the summer. One mother said Jack had come over a couple of times since then, to play with her son, but sometime in August Jenny had stopped returning her calls. The woman had added something about that not being like Jenny at all.

“So,” I said, as I hung up. “One of the sisters is a liar: Fiona or Jenny, take your pick. Well spotted. And starting this summer, Jenny was being odd about Jack’s little friends. That’ll need explaining.”

Richie was looking healthier, now that he had something to concentrate on. “Maybe your woman did something that pissed Jenny off. Simple as.”

“Or maybe Jenny was just embarrassed to admit they’d had to pull Jack out of preschool. But there could have been something else bothering her. Maybe this woman’s husband was a little too friendly, or maybe one of the employees at the preschool had done something that scared Jack, and Jenny wasn’t sure what to do about it… We need to find out, either way. Remember Rule Number Two, or whatever it was: odd behavior is a present, just for us.”

I was dialing my message minder when the mobile rang. It was the computer whiz, Kieran or whatever, and he was talking before I got my name out. “So I’ve been trying to recover the browser history, see what was such a big deal that someone wanted it gone. So far, I’ve gotta be honest with you, it’s been kind of disappointing.”

“Hold on,” I said. No one was within earshot; I put the phone on speaker. “Go.”

“I’ve got a handful of URLs or partial URLs, but we’re talking eBay, we’re talking some mommies-and-kiddies board, we’re talking a couple of sports boards and a home-and-garden forum and some site that sells women’s underwear. Which was fun for me, but not a lot of help to you. I was expecting, I don’t know, like a smuggling operation or a dogfighting ring or something. I can’t see any reason why your dude would want to wipe the vic’s bra size.”

He sounded intrigued, more than disappointed. I said, “Her bra size, maybe not. The forums are a different story. Any sign of the Spains having problems out in cyberspace? Anyone they pissed off, anyone who was giving them hassle?”

“How would I know? Even when I’ve got a hit on a site, it’s not like I can check what they did on there. Each forum’s got like a few thousand members, minimum. Even if we assume your vics were members, not just lurkers, I don’t know who I’m supposed to be looking at.”

Richie said, “They had a file of all their passwords, yeah? Can you not use that?”

Kieran was starting to lose patience with the idiot laypeople. The kid had a low boredom threshold. “Use it how? Throw the passwords at every ID on every website in the world till I wind up logging in to something? They didn’t put their forum IDs in the password file; half the time they didn’t even put down the name of the website, just initials or something. So, like, I’ve got a line here that says ‘WW-EmmaJack’ but I don’t have a bog whether WW is Weight Watchers or World of Warcraft, or what ID they used on whatever site we’re talking about. I got her eBay ID because I turned up a couple of hits on the feedback page for ‘sparklyjenny,’ so I tried logging in and boom, away we went. Kids’ clothes and eye shadow, in case you’re interested. No leads like that on any other site, though, or not so far.”

Richie had his notebook out, writing. I said, “Check all the sites for a sparklyjenny, or variations on that-jennysparkly, that kind of thing. If they didn’t get clever with their passwords, odds are they didn’t get clever with their IDs.”

I could almost hear Kieran rolling his eyes. “Um, yeah, that had actually occurred to me. No other sparklyjennys yet, but we’ll keep looking. Any chance of, like, just getting the IDs off the vic? Save us a load of time.”

“She hasn’t come round yet,” I said. “Our guy wiped that history for a reason. I’m thinking maybe he’d been stalking Pat or Jenny online. Check out the last few days’ worth of posts on each forum. If there’s been any drama in the last while, it shouldn’t be hard to find.”

“Who, me? Are you for reals? Get a random eight-year-old to read forums till his brain cells commit mass suicide. Or, like, a chimpanzee.”

“Have you seen the amount of media attention this case is getting, old son? We need our best and our brightest on this one, every step of the way. No chimpanzees here.” Kieran did a long, exasperated sigh, but he didn’t argue. “Focus on the last week, to start with. If we need to go deeper, we can.”

“Who’s this ‘we,’ Kemosabe? I mean, not being smart, but remember, I’ll probably turn up more sites as the recovery software does its thing. If your vics hit a bunch of different forums, me and my boys can check them out fast or we can check them out in depth. Take your pick.”

“Fast should do it for the sports boards, unless you spot something good. Just have a quick skim for any recent drama. On the mums-and-kids and the home-and-garden one, go into depth.” Online as well as off, women are the ones who talk.

Kieran groaned. “I was afraid you’d say that. The mommy board is like Armageddon; there’s some kind of nuclear war going on about ‘controlled crying.’ I’d have been totally fine living the entire rest of my life without finding out what that is.”

“Like the man says, chum, education is never a waste. Grin and bear it. You’re looking for a stay-at-home mum with a background in PR, a six-year-old daughter, a three-year-old son, a mortgage in arrears, a husband who got laid off in February, and a full set of financial problems. Or we’ll assume you are. We could be very wrong, but we’ll go with that for now.”

Richie glanced up from his notebook. “What d’you mean?”

I said, “Online, Jenny could have had seven kids, a stockbroking firm and a mansion in the Hamptons. She could’ve been living in a hippie commune in Goa. People lie on the net. Surely that doesn’t come as a surprise.”

“Lie like rugs,” Kieran agreed. “All the time.”

Richie was giving me a skeptical look. “On dating sites, yeah, they do. Add a few inches, knock off a few pounds, give yourself a Jag or a PhD, means you get to shop in the luxury section. But feeding crap to a bunch of other women you’re never gonna meet? Where’s the percentage in that?”

Kieran snorted. “I’ve got to ask, Kemosabe. Has your other half ever been online?”

I said, “If you can’t stand your own life, these days, you go online and get a new one. If everyone you’re talking to believes you’re a jet-set rock star, then they treat you like one; and if that’s how everyone treats you, then that’s how you feel. When you come right down to it, how is that different from actually being a jet-set rock star, at least part-time?”

The skeptical look had grown. “Because you’re not a bleeding jet-set rock star. You’re still Bobby Bollix from Accounting. You’re still sitting in your one-bed apartment in Blanchardstown eating Scooby Snax, even if you have the world thinking you’re drinking champagne in a five-star hotel in Monaco.”

“Yes and no, Richie. Human beings aren’t that simple. Life would be a lot more straightforward if all that mattered was what you actually are, but we’re social animals. What other people think you are, what you believe you are: those matter too. Those make a difference.”

“Basically,” Kieran said cheerfully, “people talk crap to impress each other. Nothing new there. They’ve done it in meatspace since forever; cyberspace just makes it easier.”

I said, “Those boards could have been the place where Jenny got away from everything that was wrong in her life. She could have been anyone, out there.”

Richie shook his head, but it had gone from disbelieving to baffled. Kieran asked, “So what do you want me to look for?”

“Keep an eye out for anyone who fits her stats, but if no one matches, that doesn’t mean she’s not there. Look for anyone who’s having serious trouble with another poster, anyone who mentions being stalked or harassed-online or off-anyone who mentions her husband or her kid being stalked or harassed. If you find anything good, call us. Any luck on the e-mails?”

Keys clicking in the background. “So far, just a bunch of fragments. I’ve got a mail from someone called Fi, back in March, wanting to know if Emma has the Ultimate Box Set of Dora the Explorer, and I’ve got someone in the house submitting a CV for a recruitment job in June, but apart from that it’s basically spam spam spam. Unless ‘Make your rod harder for her pleasure’ is some kind of secret code, we’ve got nothing.”

I said, “Then keep looking.”

Kieran said, “Chillax. Like you said, your dude didn’t wipe the machine just to show off his mad skills. Sooner or later, something’s gonna show.”

He hung up. Richie said softly, “Sitting out there, middle of nowhere, playing rock star for people you’ll never meet. How bloody lonely would you have to be?”

I left my mobile off speaker while I checked my voice mail, just in case-Richie took the hint and slid away from me on the wall, squinting into his notebook like the killer’s home address was in there somewhere. I had five messages. The first one was from O’Kelly, bright and early, wanting to know where I was, why Richie hadn’t managed to pull in our man last night, whether he was wearing something that wasn’t a shiny tracksuit, and whether I wanted to change my mind and partner up with an actual Murder D on this one. The second one was from Geri, apologizing all over again about last night and hoping work was all right and hoping Dina felt better: “And listen to me, Mick, if she’s still not doing great, I can take her tonight, no bother-Sheila’s on the mend and Phil’s practically grand, he’s only got sick the once since midnight, so you just drop her over to ours as soon as you get the chance. I mean it, now.” I tried not to think about whether Dina had woken up yet, and what she had thought of being locked in.

The third message was from Larry. He and his boys had run the prints from the sniper’s nest through the computer, got nothing: our man wasn’t in the system. The fourth one was O’Kelly again: same message as before, this time with free bonus swearing. The fifth one had come in just twenty minutes earlier, from some doctor, upstairs. Jenny Spain was awake.

One of the reasons I love Murder is that the victims are, as a general rule, dead. The friends and relations are alive, obviously, but we can palm them off on Victim Support after an interview or two, unless they’re suspects, in which case talking to them doesn’t run your mind through a shredder quite the same way. I don’t make a habit of sharing this, in case people take me for a sicko or-worse-a wimp, but give me a dead child, any day, over a child sobbing his heart out while you make him tell you what the bad man did next. Dead victims don’t show up crying outside HQ to beg for answers, you never have to nudge them into reliving every hideous moment, and you never have to worry about what it’ll do to their lives if you fuck up. They stay put in the morgue, light-years beyond anything I can do right or wrong, and leave me free to focus on the people who sent them there.

What I’m getting at is that going to see Jenny Spain in hospital was my worst work-related nightmare come true. A part of me had been praying that we would get the other phone call, the one to say she had let go without ever regaining consciousness, that there had been a borderline to her pain.

Richie’s head had turned towards me, and I realized my hand was clenched around the phone. He said, “News, yeah?”

I said, “Looks like we can ask Jenny Spain for those IDs after all. She’s awake. We’re going upstairs.”

The doctor outside Jenny’s room was fair and skinny, trying hard to make himself older with a middle-aged parting and the beginnings of a beard. Behind him, the uniform at the door-maybe because I was tired, everyone looked about twelve-took one look at me and Richie and snapped to attention, chin tucked in.

I held up my ID. “Detective Kennedy. Is she still awake?”

The doctor gave the ID a careful going-over, which was good. “She is, yeah. I doubt you’ll get a lot of time with her, though. She’s on powerful painkillers, and injuries on this scale are exhausting in themselves. I’d say she’ll be falling asleep soon.”

“She’s out of danger, though?”

He shrugged. “No guarantees. Her prognosis is brighter than it was a couple of hours ago, and we’re cautiously optimistic about her neurological function, but there’s still a massive risk of infection. We’ll have a better idea in a few days.”

“Has she said anything?”

“You know about the facial injury, don’t you? She has a hard time talking. She told one of the nurses she was thirsty. She asked me who I was. And she said, ‘It hurts,’ two or three times, before we upped the painkillers. That’s it.”

The uniform should have been in there with her, in case that changed, but I had told him to guard the door, and by God he was guarding it. I could have kicked myself for not using an actual detective with a functioning brain, instead of some pubescent drone. Richie asked, “Does she know? About her family?”

The doctor shook his head. “Not as far as I can tell. I’m guessing there’s a certain amount of retrograde amnesia. It’s common enough after a head injury; usually transient, but again, no guarantees.”

“And you didn’t tell her, no?”

“I thought you might want to do that yourselves. And she hasn’t asked. She… well, you’ll see what I mean. She’s not in great shape.”

He had been keeping his voice low, and on that his eyes slid over my shoulder. I had missed her, up until then: a woman, asleep in a hard plastic chair up against the corridor wall, with a big flowered purse clutched on her lap and her head canted back at a painful angle. She didn’t look twelve. She looked at least a hundred-white hair falling out of its bun, face swollen and discolored from crying and exhaustion-but she couldn’t have been over about seventy. I recognized her from the Spains’ photo albums: Jenny’s mother.

The floaters had taken a statement from her the day before. We would have to come back to her sooner or later, but at that moment there was more than enough agony waiting for us inside Jenny’s room, without stocking up in the corridor. “Thanks,” I said, a lot more quietly. “If anything changes, let us know.”

We gave our IDs to the drone, who examined them from every angle for about a week. Mrs. Rafferty shifted her feet and moaned in her sleep, and I almost shouldered the uniform out of our way, but luckily he picked that moment to decide we were legit. “Sir,” he said smartly, handing back the IDs and stepping away from the door, and then we were inside Jenny Spain’s room.

No one would ever have known her for the platinum girl shining in those wedding photos. Her eyes were closed, eyelids puffy and purple. Her hair, straggling on the pillow from under a wide white bandage, was stringy and darkened to mouse-brown by days without washing; someone had tried to get the blood out of it, but there were still matted clumps, strands sharpened into hard points. A pad of gauze, stuck down with sloppy strips of tape, covered her right cheek. Her hands, small and fine like Fiona’s, were slack on the bobbled pale-blue blanket, a thin tube running into a great mottled bruise; her nails were perfect, filed to delicate arcs and painted a soft pinkish-beige, except the two or three that had been ripped away down to the quick. More tubing ran from her nose up around her ears, snaked down her chest. All around her machines beeped, clear bags dripped, light flashed off metal.

Richie closed the door behind us, and her eyes opened.

She stared, dazed and dull-eyed, trying to figure out whether we were real. She was fathoms deep in the painkillers. “Mrs. Spain,” I said, gently, but she still flinched, hands jerking up to defend herself. “I’m Detective Michael Kennedy, and this is Detective Richard Curran. Would you be able to talk to us for a few minutes?”

Slowly Jenny’s eyes focused on mine. She whispered-it came out thick and clotted, through the damage and the bandage-“Something happened.”

“Yes. I’m afraid so.” I turned a chair to the side of the bed and sat down. Across from me, Richie did the same.

“What happened?”

I said, “You were attacked, in your home, two nights ago. You were seriously wounded, but the doctors have been taking good care of you, and they say you’re going to be fine. Can you remember anything about the attack?”

“Attack.” She was struggling to swim to the surface, through the vast weight of drugs bearing down on her mind. “No. How… what…” Then her eyes came alive, flaring incandescent blue with pure terror. “The babies. Pat.”

Every muscle in my body wanted to fling me out the door. I said, “I’m so sorry.”

“No. Are they-where-”

She was fighting to sit up. She was much too weak to do it, but not too weak to rip stitches trying. “I’m so sorry,” I said again. I cupped a hand around her shoulder and pressed down, as gently as I could. “There was nothing we could do.”

The moment after those words has a million shapes. I’ve seen people howl till their voices were scraped away, or freeze like they were hoping it would pass them over, prowl on to rip out someone else’s rib cage, if they just stayed still enough. I’ve held them back from smashing their faces off walls, trying to knock out the pain. Jenny Spain was beyond any of that. She had done all her defending two nights before; she had none left for this. She dropped back on the worn pillowcase and cried, steadily and silently, on and on.

Her face was red and contorted, but she didn’t move to cover it. Richie leaned over and put a hand on hers, the one without the IV line, and she gripped it till her knuckles whitened. Behind her a machine beeped, faintly and steadily. I focused on counting the beeps and wished to God I had brought water, gum, mints, anything that would let me swallow.

After a long time, the crying wore itself away and Jenny lay still, cloudy red eyes staring at the flaking paint on the wall. I said, “Mrs. Spain, we’re going to do everything we can.”

She didn’t look at me. That thick, ragged whisper: “Are you sure? Did you… see them yourself?”

“I’m afraid we’re sure.”

Richie said gently, “Your babies didn’t suffer, Mrs. Spain. They never knew what was happening.”

Her mouth started to convulse. I said quickly, before she could get lost in it again, “Mrs. Spain, can you tell us what you remember about that night?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know.”

“That’s OK. We understand. Could you take a moment and think back, see if anything comes to you?”

“I don’t… There’s nothing. I can’t… ”

She was tensing up, her hand tightening on Richie’s again. I said, “That’s fine. What’s the last thing you do remember?”

Jenny gazed at nothing and for a moment I thought she had drifted away, but then she whispered, “The babies’ bath. Emma washed Jack’s hair. Got shampoo in his eyes. He was going to cry. Pat… his hands in the sleeves of Emma’s dress, like it was dancing, to make Jack laugh…”

“That’s good,” I said, and Richie gave her hand an encouraging squeeze. “That’s great. Any little thing could help us. And after the children’s bath…?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know. The next thing was here, that doctor-”

“OK. It might come back to you. Meanwhile, can you tell me whether there’s anyone who’s bothered you, over the past few months? Anyone who worried you? Maybe someone you knew was acting a bit odd, or you saw someone around who made you nervous?”

“No one. Nothing. Everything’s been fine.”

“Your sister Fiona mentioned that you had a break-in during the summer. Can you tell us about that?”

Jenny’s head stirred on the pillow, like something hurt. “That was nothing. Not a big deal.”

“Fiona sounded like it was a pretty big deal at the time.”

“Fiona exaggerates. I was just stressed that day. I got worried about nothing.”

Richie’s eyes met mine, across the bed. Somehow, Jenny was managing to lie.

I said, “There are a number of holes in the walls of your home. Do those have anything to do with the break-in?”

“No. Those are… They’re nothing. They’re just DIY stuff.”

“Mrs. Spain,” Richie said. “Are you sure?”

“Yeah. I’m positive.”

Through all the fog of drugs and damage, something in her face glinted dense and hard as steel. I remembered what Fiona had said: Jenny isn’t a wimp.

I asked, “What kind of DIY stuff?”

We waited, but Jenny’s eyes had clouded over again. Her breathing was so shallow that I could barely see her chest rise and fall. She whispered, “Tired.”

I thought about Kieran and his ID hunt, but there was no way she would be able to find those in the wreckage of her mind. I said gently, “Just a few more questions, and we’ll let you rest. A woman called Aisling Rooney-her son Karl was a friend of Jack’s from preschool-she mentioned that she tried to get in touch over the summer, but you stopped returning her calls. Do you remember that?”

“Aisling. Yeah.”

“Why didn’t you ring her back?”

A shrug; barely a twitch, but it made her wince. “I just didn’t.”

“Had you had problems with her? With any of that family?”

“No. They’re fine. I just forgot to ring her.”

That flash of steel again. I pretended I hadn’t seen it, moved on. “Did you tell your sister Fiona that Jack had brought home a friend from preschool last week?”

After a long moment, Jenny nodded. Her chin had started to tremble.

“Had he?”

She shook her head. Her eyes and lips were squeezed tight. I said, “Can you tell me why you told Fiona he had?”

Tears leaked onto Jenny’s cheeks. She managed, “… Should have-” before a sob jackknifed her like a punch. “So tired… please…”

She pushed Richie’s hand away and covered her face with her arm. He said, “We’ll let you get some rest. We’re going to send someone from Victim Support to talk to you, OK?”

Jenny shook her head, gasping for breath. Blood had dried in the creases of her knuckles. “No. Please… no… just… by myself.”

“I promise, they’re good. I know nothing’s going to make this better, but they can help you get through it. They’ve helped out a load of people who’ve had this happen. Would you give them a shot?”

“I don’t…” She managed to catch her breath, in a deep, shaky heave. After a moment she asked, dazed, “What?” The painkillers were closing over her head again.

“Never mind,” Richie said gently. “Is there anything we can get you?”

“I don’t…”

Her eyes were closing. She was slipping into sleep, which was the best place for her. I said, “We’ll be back when you’re feeling stronger. For now, we’re going to leave our cards here with you. If you remember anything, anything at all, please call either one of us.”

Jenny made a sound between a moan and a sob. She was asleep, tears still sliding down her face. We put our cards on her bedside table and left.

Out in the corridor, everything was the same: the uniform was still standing to attention, and Jenny’s mother was still asleep in her chair. Her head had dropped to one side and her fingers had loosened on her purse, twitching against the worn handle. I sent the uniform into the room as quietly as I could and got us around the corner, walking fast, before I stopped to put away my notebook.

Richie said, “That was interesting, yeah?” He sounded subdued, but not shaken up: the live ones didn’t get to him. Once that empathy had somewhere to go, he was fine. If I had been in the market for a long-term partner, we would have been perfect for each other. “A lot of lies, for just a few minutes.”

“So you noticed that. They might or might not be relevant-like I told you, everyone lies-but we’ll need to find out. We’ll come back to Jenny.” It took me three tries to get my notebook into my coat pocket. I turned my shoulder to Richie to hide it.

He hovered, squinting up at me. “You all right?”

“I’m fine. Why do you ask?”

“You look a bit…” He wavered one hand. “That was rough enough, in there. I thought maybe…”

I said, “Why don’t you go ahead and assume that anything you can take, I can take. That wasn’t rough. That was just another day on the job-as you’ll know, once you get a little experience under your belt. And even if it had been rough as all hell, I’d be fine. That chat we had earlier, Richie, about control: did that not go in?”

He backed away, and I realized my tone had been a notch sharper than I wanted it to be. “Only asking.”

It took a second to sink in: he genuinely had been. Not prodding for weak spots, or trying to even things out after the post-mortem incident; just looking out for his partner. I said, more gently, “And I appreciate it. Sorry for snapping at you. How about you? Are you all right?”

“I’m grand, yeah.” He flexed his hand, wincing-I could see deep purple dents where Jenny’s nails had dug in-and glanced back over his shoulder. “The mother. Are we… when do we let her go in?”

I headed down the corridor, towards the exit stairs. “Whenever she wants, as long as she’s supervised. I’ll ring the uniform and let him know.”

“And Fiona?”

“Same goes for her: she’s more than welcome, once she doesn’t mind having company. Maybe they’ll be able to get Jenny to pull it together a bit, get more out of her than we could.”

Richie kept pace and said nothing, but I was starting to get the hang of his silences. I said, “You think I should be concentrating on how they can help Jenny, not how they can help us. And you think I should have let them go in yesterday.”

“She’s in hell. They’re family.”

I took the stairs fast. “Exactly, old son. E-fucking-xactly. They are family, which means we don’t have a hope of understanding the dynamics there, not yet anyway. I don’t know what a couple of hours with Mum and Sis would have done to Jenny’s story, and I didn’t want to find out. Maybe the mother’s a guilt-tripper, she makes Jenny feel even worse about ignoring the intruder, so when Jenny talks to us she skips over the fact that he broke in a few more times along the way. Maybe Fiona warns her that we were looking at Pat, and by the time we get to Jenny she won’t talk to us at all. And don’t forget: Fiona may not be top of our suspect list, but she’s not off it-not till we find out how our man picked the Spains-and she’s still the one who would have inherited if Jenny had died. I don’t care how badly the vic needs a hug, I’m not letting the heir talk to her before I do.”

“I guess,” Richie said. At the bottom of the stairs he moved aside to let a nurse go past, pushing a trolley of coiled plastic and glinting metal, and watched her bustle down the corridor. “Probably you’re right.”

I said, “You think I’m a cold bastard, don’t you?”

He shrugged. “Not for me to say.”

“Maybe I am. It depends on your definition. Because you see, Richie, to me, a cold bastard is someone who could look Jenny Spain in the eye and tell her, Sorry, ma’am, we won’t be catching the person who butchered your family, because I was too busy making sure everybody liked me, see you around, and then waltz off home for a nice dinner and a good night’s sleep. That’s something I can’t do. So if I have to do some minor cold shit along the way, to make sure that doesn’t happen, so be it.” The exit doors juddered open, and a wave of cool rain-drenched air rolled over us. I crammed as much of it into my lungs as I could.

Richie said, “Let’s talk to the uniform now. Before the ma wakes up.”

In the heavy gray light he looked terrible, eyes bloodshot, face flat and haggard; if it hadn’t been for the half-decent clothes, Security would have taken him for a junkie. The kid was exhausted. It was heading for three o’clock. Our night shift started in five hours.

“Go ahead,” I said. “Give him a bell.” Richie’s face told me I looked as bad as he did. Every breath I took was still clotted with disinfectant and blood, like the hospital air had closed around me and soaked into my pores. I almost wished I smoked. “And then we can get away from this place. Time to go home.”