The Likeness

3

So, on Sunday evening, Sam and I went to Dublin Castle for Frank’s council of war. Dublin Castle is where the Murder squad works. I had cleared out my desk there on another long cool evening, in autumn: stacked my paperwork in neat piles and labeled each pile with a Post-it, thrown away the cartoons stuck to my computer and the chewed pens and old Christmas cards and stale M&Ms in my desk drawers, turned off the light and closed the door behind me.

Sam picked me up. He was very quiet. He had been up and out early that morning, so early that the flat was still dark when he leaned over to kiss me good-bye. I didn’t ask him about the case. If he had found anything good, even the slimmest lead, he would have told me.

“Don’t let your man pressure you,” he said, in the car. “Into doing anything you don’t want to.”

“Come on,” I said. “When have I ever let anyone pressure me into anything?”

Sam adjusted his rearview mirror, carefully. “Yeah,” he said. “I know.”

When he unlocked the door, the smell of the building came at me like a shout: an old, elusive smell, damp and smoke and lemon, nothing like the antiseptic tang of DV in the new building up in Phoenix Park. I hate nostalgia, it’s laziness with prettier accessories, but every step hit me straight in the gut with something: me running down those stairs with a bunch of files in each hand and an apple caught between my teeth, my partner and me high-fiving each other outside that door after getting our first confession in that interview room; the two of us double-teaming the superintendent down that hallway, one in each ear, trying to hassle him into giving us more overtime. It seemed like the corridors had an Escher look, the walls all tilting in subtle, seasick ways, but I couldn’t focus my eyes enough to figure out exactly how.

“How’re you doing?” Sam asked quietly.

“Starving,” I said. “Whose idea was it to do this at dinnertime?”

Sam smiled, relieved, and gave my hand a quick squeeze. “We don’t have an incident room yet,” he said. “Till we decide… well, how we’re doing this; where we’re working out of.” Then he opened the door of the Murder squad room.

Frank was straddling a backwards chair at the head of the room, in front of the big whiteboard, and all his reassurances about a casual chat between him and me and Sam had been bollocks. Cooper, the state pathologist, and O’Kelly, the superintendent of the Murder squad, were sitting at desks on opposite sides of the room with their arms folded, wearing identical narky looks. This should have been funny—Cooper looks like a heron and O’Kelly looks like a bulldog with a comb-over—but actually it gave me a very bad feeling. Cooper and O’Kelly hate each other; getting them in the same room for any length of time takes a lot of skilled persuasion and a couple of bottles of pretty serious wine. For some cryptic reason of his own, Frank had pulled out all the stops to get them both there. Sam shot me a wary, warning glance. He hadn’t been expecting this either.

“Maddox,” O’Kelly said, managing to make it sound injured. O’Kelly never had any use for me when I was on Murder, but the second I applied for a transfer, I somehow morphed into the serpent’s—tooth protégée who snubbed years of devoted mentoring and buggered off to DV. “How’s life in the minor leagues?”

“All sunshine and flowers, sir,” I said. When I’m tense, I get flippant. “Evening, Dr. Cooper.”

“Always a pleasure, Detective Maddox,” said Cooper. He ignored Sam. Cooper hates Sam, too, and more or less everyone else. I’d stayed in his good books so far, but if he discovered I was going out with Sam, I would shoot down his Christmas-card list at the speed of light.

“At least in Murder,” O’Kelly said, giving my ripped jeans a fishy look—for some reason I hadn’t been able to bring myself to wear my nice new appropriate-image clothes, not for this—“most of us can afford decent gear. How’s Ryan getting on?”

I wasn’t sure whether the question was bitchy or not. Rob Ryan used to be my partner, back in Murder. I hadn’t seen him in a while. I hadn’t seen O’Kelly, either, or Cooper; not since I’d transferred out. This was all happening too fast and out of control. “Sends love and kisses,” I said.

“Can’t say I didn’t suspect,” O’Kelly said, and sniggered at Sam, who looked away.

The squad room holds twenty, but it was Sunday-evening empty: computers off, desks scattered with paperwork and fast-food wrappers—the cleaners don’t come in till Monday morning. In the back corner by the window, the desks where Rob and I used to sit were still at right angles, the way we liked them, so we could be shoulder to shoulder. Some other team, maybe the newbies brought in to replace us, had taken them over. Whoever was at my desk had a kid—silver-framed photo of a grinning little boy with his front teeth missing—and a pile of statement sheets, sun falling across them. It always used to get in my eyes, this time of day.

I was having a hard time breathing; the air felt too thick, almost solid. One of the fluorescents was on the fritz and it gave the room a shimmery, epileptic look, something out of a fever dream. A couple of the big binders lined up on the filing cabinets still had my handwriting down the spines. Sam pulled up his chair to his desk and glanced at me with a faint furrow between his eyebrows, but he didn’t say anything, and I was grateful for that. I concentrated on Frank’s face. There were bags under his eyes and he had cut himself shaving, but he looked wide awake, alert and energized. He was looking forward to this.

He caught me watching him. “Glad to be back?”

“Ecstatic,” I said. I wondered, suddenly, if he had got me into this room deliberately, knowing it might throw me. I dropped my satchel on a desk—Costello’s; I knew the handwriting on the paperwork—leaned back against the wall and stuck my hands in my jacket pockets.

“Companionable though this may be,” Cooper said, edging a little farther from O’Kelly, “I, for one, would be delighted to come to the point of this little gathering.”

“Fair enough,” Frank said. “The Madison case—well, the Jane Doe alias Madison case. What’s the official name?”

“Operation Mirror,” Sam said. Obviously the word about the victim’s looks had spread as far as headquarters. Beautiful. I wondered whether it was too late to change my mind, go home and order pizza.

Frank nodded. “Operation Mirror it is. It’s been three days, and we’ve got no suspects, no leads and no ID. As you all know, I think it might be time to try a different tack—”

“Hold your horses there,” O’Kelly said. “We’ll get to your ‘different tack’ in a moment, don’t you worry about that. But first, I’ve a question.”

“Off you go,” Frank said magnanimously, with an expansive gesture to match.

O’Kelly gave him a dirty look. There was an awful lot of testosterone circulating in this room. “Unless I’m missing something,” he said, “this girl was murdered. Correct me if I’m wrong here, Mackey, but I’m not seeing any indication of domestic violence, and I’m not seeing anything that says she was undercover. Why did you people”—he jerked his chin at me and Frank—“want in on this one to begin with?”

“I didn’t,” I told him. “I don’t.”

“The victim was using an identity I created for one of my officers,” Frank said, “and I take that pretty personally. So you’re stuck with me. You may or may not be stuck with Detective Maddox; that’s what we’re here to find out.”

“I can tell you that right now,” I said.

“Humor me,” Frank said. “Don’t tell me till I’ve finished. Once you’ve heard me out, you can tell me to fuck off all you like, and I won’t say a word. Doesn’t that sound like fun?”

I gave up. This is another of Frank’s skills: the ability to sound like he’s making a vast concession, so that you come across as an unreasonable cow if you won’t meet him halfway. “Sounds like a dream date,” I said.

“Fair enough?” Frank asked everyone. “At the end of this evening, you tell me to climb back in my box, and I’ll never mention my little idea again. Just hear me out first. That OK with everyone?”

O’Kelly grunted noncommittally; Cooper gave a not-my-problem shrug; Sam, after a moment, nodded. I was getting that specific feeling of Frank-related impending doom.

“And before we all get too carried away,” Frank said, “let’s make sure the resemblance stands up to a closer look. If it doesn’t, then there’s no point fighting about it, is there?”

Nobody answered. He swung himself off the chair, pulled a handful of photos out of his file and started Blu-tacking them to the whiteboard. The shot from the Trinity ID, blown up to eight by ten; the dead girl’s face in profile, eye closed and bruised-looking; a full-length shot of her on the autopsy table—still dressed, thank Jesus—with her fists clenched on top of that dark star of blood; a close-up of her hands, unfurled and stippled with brownish-black, streaks of silver nail polish showing through the blood. “Cassie, could you do me a favor? Stand over here for a minute?”

You fucker, I thought. I peeled myself off the wall, went to the whiteboard and stood against it like I was having a mug shot taken. I would have bet good money that Frank had already pulled my photo from Records and compared it to these with a magnifying glass. He prefers to ask questions to which he already knows the answers.

“We should really be using the actual body for this,” Frank told us cheerfully, biting a piece of Blu-tack in half, “but I figured that might be a little weird.”

“God forbid,” said O’Kelly.

I wanted Rob, dammit. I had never let myself think that before, not one time in all the months since we stopped talking, no matter how tired I got or how late at night it was. At first I wanted to kick his ass so badly it was doing my head in, I was throwing things at my wall on a regular basis. So I stopped thinking about him altogether. But the squad room all round me, and the four of them peering intently as if I were some exotic forensic exhibit, and those photos so close to my cheek I could feel them; the acid-trip feeling I’d had all week was swelling into a wild, dizzying wave and I hurt, somewhere under my breastbone. I would have sold a limb to have Rob there for just one instant, raising a sardonic eyebrow at me behind O’Kelly’s back, pointing out blandly that the swap would never work because the dead girl had been pretty. For a vicious second I could have sworn I smelled his aftershave.

“Eyebrows,” Frank said, tapping the ID shot—I had to stop myself from jumping—“eyebrows are good. Eyes are good. Lexie’s fringe is shorter, you’ll need a trim; apart from that, the hair’s good. Ears—turn to the side for a second?—ears are good. Yours pierced?”

“Three times,” I said.

“She only had two. Let’s have a look…” Frank leaned in. “Shouldn’t be a problem. I can’t even see ’ em unless I ’m looking for them. Nose is good. Mouth is good. Chin’s good. Jawline’s good.” Sam blinked, a rapid flick like a wince, on every one.

“Your cheekbones and clavicles appear to be more pronounced than the victim’s,” Cooper said, studying me with vaguely creepy professional interest. “May I ask how much you weigh?”

I never weigh myself. “A hundred and something. Sixteen? seventeen?”

“You’re a little thinner than she was,” Frank said. “No problem; a week or two of hospital food’ll do that. Her clothes are size six, jeans waist twenty-nine inches, bra size 34B, shoe size seven. All of that sound like it’ll fit?”

“Near enough,” I said. I wondered how the fuck my life had ended up here. I thought about finding some magic button that would rewind me, at lightning speed, till I was lounging happily in the back corner kicking Rob in the leg every time O’Kelly came out with a cliché, instead of standing here like a Muppet showing people my ears and trying to stop my voice shaking while we discussed whether I would fit into a dead girl’s bra.

“A brand-new wardrobe,” Frank told me, grinning. “Who says this job doesn’t have perks?”

“She could do with it,” O’Kelly said bitchily.

Frank moved on to the full-length shot, drew a finger down it from shoulders to feet, glancing back and forth at me. “Build is all good, give or take the few pounds.” His finger on the photo made a long dragging squeak; Sam shifted, sharply, in his chair. “Shoulder width looks good, waist-to-hip ratio looks good—we can measure, just to be sure, but the weight difference gives us a little leeway there. Leg length looks good.”

He tapped the close-up. “These are important; people notice hands. Give us a look, Cassie?”

I held out my hands like he was going to cuff me. I couldn’t make myself look at the photo; I could barely breathe. This was one question to which Frank couldn’t already know the answer. This could be it: the difference that would slice me away from this girl, sever the link with one hard final snap and let me go home.

“Those right there,” Frank said appreciatively, after a long look, “may be the loveliest hands I’ve ever seen.”

“Extraordinary,” Cooper said with relish, leaning forwards to peer at me and AnonyGirl over his glasses. “The odds must be one in millions.”

“Anyone seeing any discrepancies?” Frank asked the room.

No one said anything. Sam’s jaw was tight.

“Gentlemen,” Frank said, with a flourish of his arm, “we have a match.”

“Which doesn’t necessarily mean we need to do anything with it,” said Sam.

O’Kelly was doing a sarcastic slow clap. “Congratulations, Mackey. Makes a great party trick. Now that we all know what Maddox looks like, can we get back to the case?”

“And can I stop standing here?” I asked. My legs were trembling like I’d been running and I was furiously pissed off with everyone in sight, including myself. “Unless you need me for inspiration.”

“You can, of course,” Frank said, finding a marker for the whiteboard. “So here’s what we’ve got. Alexandra Janet Madison, aka Lexie, registered as born in Dublin on the first of March 1979—and I should know, I registered her myself. In October 2000”—he started sketching a timeline, fast straight strokes—“she entered UCD as a psychology postgrad. In May of 2001, she dropped out of college due to stress-related illness and went to her parents in Canada to recover, and that should’ve been the end of her—”

“Hang on. You gave me a nervous breakdown?” I demanded.

“Your thesis was getting on top of you,” Frank told me, grinning. “It’s a tough old world, academia; you couldn’t take the heat, so you got out of the kitchen. I had to get rid of you somehow.”

I rearranged myself against my wall and made a face at him; he winked at me. He had played straight into this girl’s hands, years before she ever came on the scene. Any slip she made when she ran into that old acquaintance and started trawling for info, any off-kilter pause, any reluctance to meet up again: Well, you know she did have that nervous breakdown…

“In February 2002, though,” Frank said, switching from blue marker to red, “Alexandra Madison shows up again. She pulls her UCD records and uses them to wangle her way into Trinity to do a PhD in English. We don’t have a clue who this girl actually is, what she was doing before then, or how she hit on the Lexie Madison ID. We ran her prints: she’s not in the system.”

“You might want to widen the net,” I said. “There’s a decent chance she’s not Irish.”

Frank glanced at me sharply. “Why’s that?”

“When Irish people want to hide, they don’t hang around here. They go abroad. If she was Irish, she’d have run into someone from her mammy’s bingo club inside a week.”

“Not necessarily. She was living a pretty isolated life.”

“As well as that,” I said, keeping my voice level, “I take after the French side. Nobody thinks I’m Irish, till I open my mouth. If I didn’t get my looks here, odds are neither did she.”

“Great,” O’Kelly said, heavily. “Undercover, DV, Immigration, the Brits, Interpol, the FBI. Anyone else who might want to join the party? The Irish Countrywomen’s Association? The Vincent de Paul?”

“Any chance of getting an ID off her teeth?” Sam asked. “Or a country, even? Can’t you tell where dental work was done?”

“The young woman in question had excellent teeth,” Cooper said. “I am not, of course, a specialist in the field, but she had no fillings, crowns, extractions or other readily identifiable work.”

Frank arched an inquiring eyebrow at me. I gave him my best puzzled look.

“The two bottom front teeth overlap slightly,” Cooper said, “and one top molar is significantly misaligned, implying that she had no orthodontic work done as a child. I would hazard that the possibility of dental identification is practically nonexistent.” Sam shook his head, frustrated, and went back to his notebook.

Frank was still eyeballing me, and it was getting on my nerves. I shoved myself off the wall, opened my mouth wide at him and pointed at my teeth. Cooper and O’Kelly gave me identical horrified looks.

“No, I don’t have fillings,” I told Frank. “See? Not that it matters anyway.”

“Good girl,” Frank said approvingly. “Keep flossing.”

"That’s lovely, Maddox,” O’Kelly said. “Thanks for sharing. So in autumn of 2002 Alexandra Madison goes into Trinity, and in April 2005 she turns up murdered outside Glenskehy. Do we know what she was doing in between?”

Sam stirred and looked up, put down his pen. “Her PhD, mostly,” he said. “Something to do with women writers and pseudonyms; I didn’t understand the whole of it. She was doing grand, her supervisor says—a bit behind schedule, but what she came up with was good. Up until September she was living in a bedsit off the South Circular Road. She paid her way with student loans, grants, and by working in the English department and in Caffeine, in town. She had no known criminal activity, no debts except the loan for her college fees, no dodgy activity on her bank account, no addictions, no boyfriend or ex-boyfriend”—Cooper raised an eyebrow—“no enemies and no recent arguments.”

“So no motive,” Frank said musingly, to the whiteboard, “and no suspects.”

“Her main associates,” Sam said evenly, “were a bunch of other postgrads: Daniel March, Abigail Stone, Justin Mannering and Raphael Hyland.”

“Bloody silly name,” said O’Kelly. “He a poof, or a Brit?” Cooper closed his eyes briefly in distaste, like a cat.

“He’s half English,” Sam said; O’Kelly gave a smug little grunt. “Daniel has two speeding tickets, Justin has one, apart from that they’re all clean as a whistle. They don’t know Lexie was using an alias—or if they do, they’ve said nothing. According to them, she was estranged from her family and didn’t like talking about her past. They don’t even know where she was from; Abby thinks maybe Galway, Justin thinks Dublin, Daniel gave me a snotty look and told me that ‘wasn’t really of interest’ to him. They’re the same about her family. Justin thinks her parents were dead, Rafe says divorced, Abby says she was illegitimate…”"

“Or maybe none of the above,” Frank said. “We already know our girl wasn’t above telling a few little white ones.”

Sam nodded. “In September, Daniel inherited Whitethorn House near Glenskehy from his great-uncle, Simon March, and they all moved in. Last Wednesday night, the five of them were home, playing poker. Lexie got knocked out first and went for a walk around half past eleven-late-night walks were a regular part of her routine, the area’s safe, the rain hadn’t started in yet, the others didn’t think twice. They finished up a little after midnight and went to bed. They all describe the card game the same way, who won how much on what hand—little differences here and there, but that’s only natural. We’ve interviewed all of them several times, and they haven’t budged an inch. Either they’re innocent or they’re dead organized.”

“And the next morning,” Frank said, finishing off the timeline with a flourish, “she shows up dead.”

Sam pulled a handful of papers out of the pile on his desk, went to the whiteboard and stuck something in one corner: a surveyor’s map of a patch of countryside, detailed down to the last house and boundary fence, marked with neat Xs and squiggles in colored highlighter. “Here’s Glenskehy village. Whitethorn House is just under a mile to the south. Here, about halfway in between and a little to the east, that’s the derelict cottage where we found our girl. I’ve marked all the obvious routes she might have taken to get there. The Bureau and the uniforms are still searching them: nothing yet. According to her mates, she always went out the back gate for her walk, wandered around the little lanes for an hour or so—it’s a maze of them, all around there—and came home either by the front or by the back, depending on what route took her fancy.”

“In the middle of the night?” O’Kelly wanted to know. “Was she mental, or what?”

“She always took the torch we found on her,” Sam said, “unless the night was bright enough to see without. She was mad for the old walks, went out almost every night; even if it was lashing rain, she mostly just bundled up warm and went anyway. I wouldn’t say it’s exercise she was after, more privacy—living that close with the other four, it’s the only time she got to herself. They don’t know whether she ever went to the cottage, but they did say she liked it. Just after they first moved in, the five of them spent a day wandering all round Glenskehy, getting the lie of the land. When they spotted the cottage, Lexie wouldn’t move on till she’d gone in and had a look around, even though the others told her the farmer would probably be out with his shotgun any minute. She liked that it had been left there, even though no one was using it—Daniel said she ‘likes inefficiency,’ whatever that means. So we can’t rule out the possibility that it was a regular stop on her walks.”

Definitely not Irish, then, or at least not brought up here. Famine cottages are all over the countryside, we barely even see them any more. It’s only tourists—and mostly tourists from newer countries, America, Australia —who look at them long enough to feel their weight.

Sam found another piece of paper to add to the whiteboard: a floor plan of the cottage, with a neat, tiny scale at the bottom. “However she ended up there,” he said, pressing the last corner into place, “that’s where she died—against this wall, in what we’re calling the outer room. Sometime after death and before rigor set in, she was moved to the inner room. That’s where she was found, early Thursday morning.”

He gestured to Cooper.

Cooper had been gazing into space, in a lofty trance. He took his time: cleared his throat primly, glanced around to make sure he had everyone’s full attention. “The victim,” he said, “was a healthy white female, five feet five inches in height, a hundred and twenty pounds. No scars, tattoos or other identifying marks. She had a blood alcohol content of.03, consistent with drinking two to three glasses of wine a few hours previously. The toxicology screen was otherwise clear—at the time of death she had consumed no drugs, toxins or medications. All organs were within normal limits; I found no defects or signs of disease. The epiphyses of the long bones are completely fused and the inner sutures of the skull bones show early signs of fusion, placing her age around the late twenties. It is clear from the pelvis that she has never delivered a child.” He reached for his water glass and took a judicious sip, but I knew he wasn’t finished; the pause was for effect. Cooper had something up his sleeve.

He put down the glass, aligning it neatly in the corner of the desk. “She was, however,” he said, “in the early stages of pregnancy.” He sat back and watched the impact.

“Ah, Jesus,” Sam said softly. Frank leaned back against the wall and whistled, one long low note. O’Kelly rolled his eyes.

That was all this case needed. I wished I had had the sense to sit down. “Any of her mates mention this?” I asked.

“Not a one,” Frank said, and Sam shook his head. “Our girl kept her friends close and her secrets closer.”

“She might not even have known,” I said. “If her cycle wasn’t regular—”

"Ah, Jaysus, Maddox,” said O’Kelly, horrified. “We don’t want to hear about that carry-on. Put it in a report or something.”

"Any chance of IDing the father through DNA?” Sam asked.

“I see no reason why not,” Cooper said, “given a sample from the putative father. The embryo was approximately four weeks old and just under half a centimeter long, and was—”

"Christ,” said O’Kelly; Cooper smirked. “Skip the bloody details and get on with it. How’d she die?”

Cooper left a loud pause, to show everyone that he wasn’t taking orders from O’Kelly. “At some point on Wednesday night,” he said, when he figured his point was made, “she suffered a single stab wound to the right chest. The probability is that the attack came from the front: the angle and point of entry would be difficult to achieve from behind the victim. I found slight abrasions to both palms and one knee, consistent with a fall on hard ground, but no defensive wounds. The weapon was a blade at least three inches long, with a single edge, a sharp point and no distinctive features—it could have been any large pocketknife, even a sharp kitchen knife. This blade entered on the midclavicular line at the level of the eighth rib, at an upward angle, and nicked the lung, leading to a tension pneumothorax. To put it as simply as possible”—he threw O’Kelly a snide sidelong glance—“the blade created a flap valve in the lung. Each time she inhaled, air escaped from the lung into the pleural space; when she exhaled, the flap closed, leaving the air trapped. Prompt medical attention could almost certainly have saved her. In the absence of such attention, however, the air gradually accumulated, compressing the other thoracic organs within the chest cavity. Eventually the heart was no longer able to fill with blood, and she died.”

There was a tiny silence, only the soft hum of the fluorescents. I thought of her in that cold ruined house, with night birds keening above her and rain gentle all around, dying of breathing.

“How long would that have taken?” Frank asked.

“The progression would depend on a variety of factors,” Cooper said. “If, for example, the victim ran for any distance after being stabbed, her breathing would have accelerated and deepened, hastening the development of the tension pneumothorax. The blade also left a minute nick in one of the major veins of the chest; with activity, this nick grew into a tear, and she would gradually have begun to bleed quite heavily. To give a tentative estimate, I would guess that she became unconscious approximately twenty to thirty minutes after receiving the injury, and died perhaps ten or fifteen minutes later.”

“In that half hour,” Sam asked, “how far could she have got?”

“I am not a medium, Detective,” Cooper said sweetly. “Adrenaline can have fascinating effects on the human body, and there is evidence that the victim was in fact in a state of considerable emotion. The presence of cadaveric spasm—in this case, the hands contracting into fists at the moment of death and remaining clenched through rigor mortis—is generally associated with extreme emotional stress. If she was sufficiently motivated, which under the circumstances I would imagine she was, a mile or so would not be out of the question. Alternatively, of course, she could have collapsed within yards.”

“OK,” Sam said. He found a highlighter pen on someone’s desk and drew a wide circle around the cottage on the map, taking in the village and Whitethorn House and acres of empty hillside. “So our primary crime scene could be anywhere in here.”

“Wouldn’t she have been in too much pain to get far?” I asked. I felt Frank’s eyes flick to me. We don’t ask whether victims suffered. Unless they were actually tortured, we don’t need to know: getting emotionally involved does nothing except wreck your objectivity and give you nightmares, and we’re going to tell the family it was painless anyway.

“Restrain your imagination, Detective Maddox,” Cooper told me. “A tension pneumothorax is often relatively painless. She would have been aware of mounting shortness of breath and an increased heart rate; as shock set in, her skin would have become cold and clammy and she would have felt light-headed, but there is no reason to suppose that she was in excruciating agony.”

“How much force went into the stabbing?” Sam asked. “Could anyone have done it, or would it take a big strong fella?”

Cooper sighed. We always ask: could a scrawny guy have done it? What about a woman? A kid? How big a kid? “The shape of the wound on cross section, ” he said, “combined with the lack of splitting in the skin at the entry point, implies a blade with a fairly sharp tip. It did not encounter bone or cartilage at any point. Assuming a fairly swift lunge, I would say that this injury could have been inflicted by a large man, a small man, a large woman, a small woman, or a strong pubescent child. Does that answer your question?”

Sam shut up. “Time of death?” O’Kelly demanded.

“Between eleven and one o’clock,” said Cooper, examining a cuticle. “As I believe my preliminary report stated.”

“We can narrow it down a bit,” Sam said. He found a marker and started a new timeline under Frank’s. “Rainfall in that area started about ten past midnight, and the Bureau’s guessing she was out in it for fifteen or twenty minutes max, from the degree of dampness, so she was moved into shelter by around half past twelve. And she was dead by then. Going by what Dr. Cooper says, that puts the actual stabbing no later than midnight, probably earlier—I’d say she was well on the way to unconscious before the rain started in, or she’d have gone into shelter. If the housemates are telling the truth about her leaving the house unharmed at half past eleven, then that gives us a half-hour window for the stabbing. If they’re lying or mistaken, it could’ve been anywhere between ten and twelve.”

“And that,” Frank said, swinging a leg over his chair, “is all we’ve got. No footprints and no blood trail—the rain got rid of all that. No fingerprints: someone went through her pockets and then wiped down all her stuff. Nothing good under her fingernails, according to the Bureau; looks like she didn’t get a go at the killer. They’re going through the trace, but on preliminary there’s nothing that stands out. All the hairs and fibers look like matching either her, her housemates or various stuff from the house, which means they don’t cut either way. We’re still searching the area, but so far we’ve got no sign of the murder weapon and no sign of an ambush site or a struggle. Basically, what we have is one dead girl and that’s it.”

“Wonderful,” O’Kelly said heavily. “One of those. What do you do, Maddox, carry a crap-case magnet in your bra?”

“This one isn’t mine, sir,” I reminded him.

“And yet here you are. Lines of investigation?”

Sam put the marker back and held up his thumb. “One: a random attack.” In Murder you get into the habit of numbering things; it makes O’Kelly happy. “She was out walking and someone jumped her—for money, as part of a sexual assault, or just looking for trouble.”

“If there had been any sign of sexual assault,” Cooper said wearily, to his fingernails, “I would, I think, have mentioned it by this point. In fact, I found nothing to indicate recent sexual contact of any kind.”

Sam nodded. “No sign of robbery, either—she still had her wallet, with cash in it, she didn’t own a credit card and she’d left her mobile at home. But that doesn’t prove it wasn’t the motive. Maybe she fights, he stabs her, she runs, he goes after her and then panics when he realizes what he’s done…” He shot me a quick, inquiring look.

O’Kelly has definite opinions on psychology, and he likes to pretend he doesn’t know about the profiling thing. I needed to do this delicately. “You think?” I said. “I don’t know, I sort of figured… I mean, she was moved after she died, right? If it took her half an hour to die, then either this guy spent all that time looking for her—and why would a mugger or a rapist do that?—or someone else found her later, moved her, and didn’t bother ringing us. They’re both possible, I guess, but I don’t think either one’s likely.”

"Fortunately, Maddox,” O’Kelly said nastily, “your opinion is no longer our problem. As you pointed out, you’re not on this case.”

“Yet,” Frank said, to the air.

“There’s other problems with the stranger scenario, too,” said Sam. “That area’s pretty well deserted during the daytime, never mind at night. If someone was looking for trouble, why would he hang around a laneway in the middle of nowhere, just on the off chance that a victim might wander past? Why not head into Wicklow town, or Rathowen, or at least Glenskehy village?”

"Any similars in the area?” O’Kelly asked.

“No knifepoint muggings or stranger sexual assaults,” Sam said. “Glenskehy’s a small village, sure; the two main crimes are drinking after hours and then driving home. The only stabbing in the last year was a group of lads getting drunk and stupid. Unless something similar turns up, I’d say we put the stranger on the back burner for now.”

“Suits me,” Frank said, grinning at me. A random attack would mean no info within the victim’s life, no evidence or motive waiting to be discovered, no reason to send me under. “Suits me down to the ground.”

"Might as well,” said O’Kelly. “If it’s random, we’re bolloxed anyway: it’s luck or nothing.”

“Grand, so. Two”—Sam ticked off a finger—“a recent enemy; I mean, someone who knew her as Lexie Madison. She moved in a pretty limited circle, so it shouldn’t be too hard to find out whether anyone had any problems with her. We’re starting with the housemates and working our way outwards—staff at Trinity, students—”

“With no luck so far,” Frank said, to no one in particular.

“It’s early days,” Sam said firmly. “We’re only at the preliminary interviews. And now we know she was pregnant, we’ve a whole other line of inquiry. We need to find the father.”

O’Kelly snorted. “Good luck with that. Girls these days, he’s probably some young fella she met at a disco and shagged down a laneway.”

I felt a sudden, confused spurt of fury: Lexie wasn’t like that. I reminded myself that my info was out of date, for all I knew this edition had been a five-star slapper. “Discos went out with the slide rule, sir,” I said sweetly.

“Even if he’s some fella from a nightclub,” Sam said, “he’ll have to be found and eliminated. It might take time, but we’ll get it done.” He was looking at Frank, who nodded gravely. “I’ll ask the lads from the house to give us DNA samples, to start with.”

“We might want to leave that for a while,” Frank said smoothly, “all depending, of course. If by any chance her acquaintances should end up under the impression that she’s alive and well, we don’t want to rattle their cages. We want them relaxed, off their guard, thinking the investigation’s wound down. The DNA’ll still be there in a few weeks’ time.”

Sam shrugged. He was starting to tense up again. “We’ll work that out as we go. Three: an enemy from her previous life, someone who had a grudge and tracked her down.”

“Now that’s the one I fancy,” Frank said, straightening up. “We’ve got no indication of any problems in her Lexie Madison life, right? But wherever she was before, something obviously went wrong. She wasn’t going around under a fake name just for the laugh. Either she was on the run from the cops, or she was on the run from someone else. My money’s on someone else.”

"I’m not sure I buy it,” I said. Screw O’Kelly’s feelings; I could see exactly where Frank was going with this, and I don’t like being railroaded. “The killing’s completely disorganized: one stab wound that didn’t even need to be fatal, and then—instead of finishing her off, or at least holding her so she can’t go for help and give him up—he lets her get away, to the point where it takes him half an hour to find her again. To me, that says no premeditation, maybe even no intent to kill.”

O’Kelly gave me a disgusted grimace. "Someone stuck a knife in this girl’s chest, Maddox. I’d say he knew there was a fair chance she could die.”

I have years of practice in letting O’Kelly wash over me. “A chance, sure. But if someone had spent years thinking about killing her, he’d have it planned down to the last detail. He’d have every base covered, he’d have a script, and he’d stick to it.”

“So maybe he did have a script,” Frank said, “but it didn’t involve anything like violence. Say it’s not a grudge that has him chasing her, it’s unrequited love. He’s got it in his head that they’re soul mates, he’s planning a lovey-dovey reunion and happy ever after, and instead she tells him to fuck off. She’s the one who breaks away from the script, and he can’t handle it.”

“Stalkers snap,” I said, “yeah. But they do it a whole lot more thoroughly than this. You’d expect a frenzy of violence: multiple blows, facial disfigurement, serious overkill. Instead, we’ve got one stab, barely even deep enough to kill her. It doesn’t fit.”

“Maybe he didn’t get the chance for overkill,” Sam said. “He stabs her, she runs, by the time he catches up with her she’s already dead.”

“Still,” I said. “You’re talking about someone obsessed enough to wait years and follow her God knows how far. That level of emotion, when it finally gets an outlet it’s not going to vanish just because the target’s dead. If anything, the fact that she’d escaped him again would have made him even angrier. I’d expect at least a few more stab wounds, a couple of kicks in the face, something like that.”

It felt good, getting stuck into the case like this, like I was just a Murder detective again and she was just another victim; it spread through me strong and sweet and soothing as hot whiskey after a long day in wind and rain. Frank was sprawled casually in his chair, but I could feel him watching me, and I knew I was starting to sound too interested. I shrugged, leaned my head back against the wall and gazed up at the ceiling.

“The real point is,” Frank said, inevitably, “if she’s foreign and he followed her over here, for whatever reason, then the minute he knows he’s got the job done, he’ll be out of the country like a hot snot off a slate. The only way he’ll stick around long enough for us to catch up with him is if he thinks she’s still alive.”

A brief, heavy silence.

“We can run checks on everyone leaving the country,” Sam said.

“Checks for what?” Frank inquired. “We haven’t a clue who we’re looking for, where he or she might be heading, nothing. Before we can get anywhere, we need an ID.”

“We’re working on that. Like I said. If this woman could pass herself off as Irish, then odds are English was her first language. We’ll start with England, the U.S., Canada —”

Frank shook his head. “That’s going to take time. We need to keep our boy—or girl—here until we find out who the hell we’re looking for. And I can think of exactly one way to do that.”

“Four,” Sam said, firmly. He ticked off another finger, and his eyes went to me for a split second, then slid away. “Mistaken identity.”

There was another small silence. Cooper came out of his trance and started looking distinctly intrigued. My face had started to feel like it was scorching me, like overdone eye shadow or a top cut too low, something I should have known better than to wear.

"Piss anyone off lately?” O’Kelly asked me. “More than usual.”

“About a hundred abusive men and a couple of dozen abusive women,” I said. “No one’s jumping out at me, but I’ll send over the case files, flag the ones who got most obnoxious.”

“What about when you were undercover?” Sam asked. “Could anyone have held a grudge against Lexie Madison?”

“Apart from the idiot who stabbed me?” I said. “Not that I recall.”

“He’s been inside for a year now,” Frank said. “Possession with intent. I meant to tell you. Anyway, his brain’s so fried he probably couldn’t pick you out of a lineup. And I’ve gone through all our intelligence from that period: not a single red flag anywhere. Detective Maddox didn’t piss anyone off, there’s no sign that anyone ever suspected her of being a cop, and when she was wounded we pulled her out and sent someone else in to start over. No one was arrested as a direct result of her work, and she never had to testify. Basically, no one had any reason to want her dead.”

“Does the idiot not have friends?” Sam wanted to know.

Frank shrugged. “Presumably, but again, I don’t see why he’d sic them on Detective Maddox. It’s not like he was charged with the assault. We pulled him in, he gave us some bullshit story about self-defense, we acted like we believed him and cut him loose. He was a lot more useful outside than in.”

Sam’s head snapped up and he started to say something, but then he bit his lip and focused on rubbing a smudge off the whiteboard. No matter what he thought of someone who would let an attempted cop killer off the hook, he and Frank were stuck with each other. It was going to be a long investigation.

“What about in Murder?” Frank asked me. “Make any enemies?” O’Kelly gave a sour little laugh.

“All my solves are still inside,” I said, “but I guess they could have friends, family, accomplices. And there are suspects we never managed to convict.” The sun had slid off my old desk; our corner had gone dark. The squad room felt suddenly colder and emptier, blown through by long sad winds.

“I’ll do that,” Sam said. “I’ll check those out.”

“If someone’s after Cassie,” Frank said helpfully, “she’ll be a lot safer in Whitethorn House than she would be all by herself in that flat.”

“I can stay with her,” Sam said, without looking at him. We weren’t about to point out that he spent half his time at my place anyway, and Frank knew it.

Frank raised an amused eyebrow. “Twenty-four seven? If she goes under, she’ll be miked up, she can have someone listening to the mike feed day and night—”

“Not on my budget she can’t,” O’Kelly told him.

“No problem: it’ll go on our budget. We’ll work out of Rathowen station; anyone comes after her, we’ll have guys on the scene in minutes. Will she get that at home?”

“If we think someone’s out to kill a police officer,” Sam said, “then she bloody well should get that at home.” His voice was starting to tauten.

“Fair enough. How’s your budget for round-the-clock protection?” Frank asked O’Kelly.

“Fuck that for a game of soldiers,” O’Kelly said. “She’s DV’s detective, she’s DV’s problem.” Frank spread his hands and grinned at Sam.

Cooper was enjoying this way too much. “I don’t need round-the-clock protection,” I said. “If this guy was obsessed with me, he wouldn’t have stopped at one blow, any more than he would’ve if he was obsessed with Lexie. Everybody relax.”

“Right,” Sam said, after a moment. He didn’t sound happy. “I think that’s the lot.” He sat down, hard, and pulled his chair up to his desk.

“She wasn’t killed for her money, anyway,” Frank said. “The five of them pool most of their funds—a hundred quid a week each into a kitty, to pay for food, petrol, bills, doing up the house, all the rest of it. On her income, that didn’t leave much. She had eighty-eight quid in her bank account.”

“What do you think?” Sam asked me.

He meant from a profiling angle. Profiling is nowhere near foolproof and I don’t actually have much of a clue what I’m doing anyway, but as far as I could see, everything said she had been killed by someone she knew, someone with a hair-trigger temper rather than a well-nursed grudge. The obvious answer was either the kid’s father or one of the housemates, or both.

But if I said that, then this meeting was over, at least as far as I was concerned; Sam would blow every gasket at the thought of me sharing a house with the odds-on favorites. And I didn’t want that. I tried to tell myself it was because I wanted to make the decision, not have Sam make it for me, but I knew: this was working on me, this room and this company and this conversation, pressing subtly just like Frank had known they would. Nothing in this world takes over your blood like a murder case, nothing demands you, mind and body, with such a huge and blazing and irresistible voice. It had been months since I had worked like this, concentrated like this on fitting together evidence and patterns and theories, and all of a sudden it felt like years.

“I’d go with door number two,” I said, finally. “Someone who knew her as Lexie Madison.”

“If that’s where we’re focusing,” Sam said, “her housemates were the last ones to see her alive, and they’re the ones were closest to her. That puts them front and center.”

Frank shook his head. “I’m not so sure. She was wearing her coat, and it wasn’t put on her after she died—there’s a slit in the front right side, perfect match to the wound. To me, that says she was out of the house, away from the housemates, when she got stabbed.”

“I’m not eliminating them yet,” Sam said. “I don’t know why any of them would want to stab her, I don’t know why they’d do it outside the house, all I know is that on this job the obvious answer is mostly the one you’re after—and any way you look at it, they’re the obvious answers. Unless we find a witness who saw her alive and well after she left that house, I’m keeping them in.”

Frank shrugged. “Fair enough. Say it’s one of the housemates: they’re sticking together like glue, they’ve been interviewed for hours without batting an eyelid, the chances of us breaking their story are virtually nil. Or say it’s an outsider: we don’t have the foggiest clue who he is, how he knew Lexie or where to start looking for him. There are some cases that just plain can’t be broken from the outside. That’s why Undercover exists. Which brings me back nicely to my alternative tack.”

“Throwing a detective into the middle of a bunch of murder suspects,” Sam said.

“Just as a rule,” Frank told him, with an amused little lift of one eyebrow, “we don’t send undercovers to investigate holy innocents. Being surrounded by criminals is what we tend to do.”

“And we’re talking IRA, gangsters, dealers,” O’Kelly said. “This is a bunch of fucking students. Even Maddox can probably handle them.”

“Exactly,” Sam said. “Exactly. Undercover investigates organized crime: drugs, gangs. They don’t go in on your run-of-the-mill murder. Why do we need them on this one?”

“From a murder detective,” Frank said, concerned, “that amazes me. Are you saying that this girl’s life is worth less than a K of heroin?”

“No,” Sam said, evenly. “I’m saying there are other ways to investigate a murder.”

“Like what?” Frank demanded, going in for the kill. “In the case of this particular murder, what other ways have you got? You don’t have an ID on the victim”—he was leaning in towards Sam, ticking off fingers fast—“a suspect, a motive, a weapon, a primary scene, a print, a witness, trace evidence or a single good lead. Am I right?”

“It’s three days into the investigation,” Sam said. “Who knows what we’ll—”

“Now let’s look at what you have got.” Frank held up one finger. “A first-rate, trained, experienced undercover who’s the spitting image of the victim. That’s it. Any reason why you don’t want to use that?”

Sam laughed, an angry little sound, swinging his chair onto its back legs. “Why I don’t want to throw her in there for shark bait?”

“She’s a detective,” Frank said, very gently.

“Yeah,” Sam said, after a long moment. He let the front legs of his chair down again, carefully. “She is.” His eyes skated away from Frank, across the squad room: empty desks in dimming corners, the explosion of scribbles and maps and Lexie on the whiteboard, me.

“Don’t look at me,” O’Kelly said. “Your case, your call.” If this thing went splat, and he obviously thought it would, he wanted to be well out of range.

All three of them were starting to get right up my nose. “Remember me?” I inquired. “You might want to start trying to convince me, too, Frank, because I’d say this was at least partly my call.”

“You’ll go where you’re sent,” said O’Kelly.

“It is, of course,” Frank told me reproachfully. “I’m getting to you. I felt it would be polite to start by discussing matters with Detective O’Neill, what with this being a joint investigation and all. Am I wrong?”

This is why joint investigations are from hell: nobody is ever quite sure who the big boss is, and nobody wants to find out. Officially, Sam and Frank were supposed to agree on any major decisions, but if it came to the crunch, anything to do with undercover was Frank’s call. Sam could probably override him, since this had started out as his investigation, but not without an awful lot of string-pulling and a damn good reason. Frank was making sure—I felt it would be polite—that Sam remembered that. “You’re dead right,” I said. “Just remember, you need to discuss matters with me, too. So far, I haven’t heard anything very convincing.”

“How long are we talking about?” Sam asked. He was asking Frank, but his eyes were on me, and the look in them startled me: they were intent and very grave, almost sad. That was the second when I realized Sam was going to say yes.

Frank saw it too; his voice didn’t change, but his back had straightened and there was a new spark in his face, something alert and predatory. “Not long. A month, max. It’s not like we’re investigating organized crime and we could need someone on the inside for years. If this doesn’t pay off inside a few weeks, then it’s not going to.”

“She’d have backup.”

“Twenty-four-hour.”

“If there’s any indication of danger—”

“We’ll pull Detective Maddox out straightaway, or go in and get her if we need to. Same if you develop information that means she’s no longer necessary to the investigation: we’ll have her out that same day.”

“So I’d better get cracking,” Sam said quietly, on a long breath. “OK: if Detective Maddox wants to do it, then we’ll do it. On condition that I’m kept fully informed of all developments. No exceptions.”

“Beautiful,” Frank said, sliding off his chair fast, before Sam could change his mind. “You won’t regret it. Hang on, Cassie—before you say anything, I want to show you this. I promised you videos, and I’m a man of my word.”

O’Kelly let out a snort and said something predictable about amateur porn, but I barely heard him. Frank fished around in his big black knapsack, waved a DVD labeled in marker scrawl at me and shoved it into the squad room’s cheapo DVD player.

“Date stamp says the twelfth of September last,” he said, turning on the monitor. “Daniel got the keys to the house on the tenth. He and Justin drove down that afternoon to make sure the roof hadn’t fallen in or anything, the five of them spent the eleventh packing up their stuff, and on the twelfth they all handed in the keys to their flats and moved out to Whitethorn House, lock, stock and barrel. They don’t hang about, this lot.” He hoisted himself onto Costello’s desk, beside me, and hit Play on the remote.

Darkness; a click and rattle, like an old key turning; feet thumping on wood. “Sweet Jesus,” someone said. A finely modulated voice with a Belfast tinge: Justin. “The smell.”

“What are you being shocked about?” demanded a deeper voice, cool and almost accentless. (“That’s Daniel,” Frank said, next to me.) “You knew what to expect.”

“I blanked it out of my mind.”

“Is this thing working?” a girl asked. “Rafe, can you tell?”

“That’s our girl,” Frank said softly, but I already knew. Her voice was lighter than mine, alto and very clear, and the first syllable had hit me straight in the back of the neck, at the top of my spine.

“My God,” said a guy with an English accent, amused: Rafe. “You’re recording this?”

“Course I am. Our new home. Only I can’t tell if it’s doing anything, because I’m only recording black anyway. Does the electricity work?”

Another clatter of feet; a door creaked. “This should be the kitchen,” Daniel said. “As far as I remember.”

“Where’s the switch?”

“I’ve got a lighter,” said another girl’s voice. Abigail; Abby.

“Brace yourselves,” said Justin.

A tiny flame, wavering in the center of the screen. All I could see was one side of Abby’s face, eyebrow raised, mouth a little open.

“Jesus H. Christ, Daniel,” said Rafe.

“I did warn you,” said Justin.

“In fairness, he did,” said Abby. “If I remember, he said it was a cross between an archaeological site and the nastier bits of Stephen King.”

“I know, but I thought he was exaggerating as usual. I didn’t expect him to be understating.”

Someone—Daniel—took the lighter off Abby and cupped his hand around a cigarette; there was a draft coming from somewhere. His face on the wobbly screen was calm, unperturbed. He glanced up over the flame and gave Lexie a solemn wink. Maybe because I had spent so long staring at that photo, there was something astonishing about seeing them all in action. It was like being one of those kids in books who find a magic spyglass that lets them into the secret life of some old painting, enthralling and risky.

“Don’t,” said Justin, taking the lighter and poking gingerly at something on a rickety shelf. “If you want to smoke, go outside.”

“Why?” asked Daniel. “So I don’t smudge the wallpaper, or so I don’t stink up the curtains?”

“He’s got a point,” said Abby.

“What a bunch of wusses,” said Lexie. “I think this place is terrifantastic. I feel like one of the Famous Five.”

“Five Find a Prehistoric Ruin,” Daniel said.

“Five Find the Mold Planet,” said Rafe. “Simply spiffing.”

“We should have ginger cake and potted meat,” Lexie said.

“Together?” asked Rafe.

“And sardines,” said Lexie. “What is potted meat?”

“Spam,” Abby told her.

“Ew.”

Justin went over to the sink, held the lighter close and turned on the taps. One of them sputtered, popped and eventually let out a thin stream of water.

“Mmm,” said Abby. “Typhoid tea, anyone?”

“I want to be George,” said Lexie. “She was cool.”

“I don’t care as long as I’m not Anne,” Abby said. “She always got stuck doing the washing up, just because she was a girl.”

“What’s wrong with that?” asked Rafe.

“You can be Timmy the dog,” Lexie told him.

The rhythms of their conversation were faster than I had expected, smart and sharp as a jitterbug, and I could see why the rest of the English department thought this lot were up themselves. They had to be impossible to talk to; those tight, polished syncopations didn’t leave room for anyone else. Somehow, though, Lexie had managed to slot herself in there, tailored herself or rearranged them inch by inch till she made a place for herself and became part of them, seamless. Whatever this girl’s game was, she had been good at it.

A small clear voice at the back of my head said: Just like I’m good at mine.

Miraculously, the screen lit up, more or less, as a forty-watt bulb came on overhead: Abby had found the light switch, in an unlikely corner by a grease-draped cooker. “Well done, Abby,” said Lexie, panning.

“I’m not sure,” said Abby. “It looks even worse now that I can see it.”

She was right. The walls had obviously been papered at some stage, but a greenish mold had staged a coup, creeping in from every corner and almost meeting in the middle. Spectacular Halloween-decoration cobwebs trailed from the ceiling, swaying gently in the draft. The linoleum was grayish and curling, with sinister dark streaks; on the table was a glass vase holding a bunch of very dead flowers, stalks broken and sagging at odd angles. Everything was about three inches thick with dust. Abby looked deeply skeptical; Rafe looked amused, in a horrified kind of way; Daniel looked mildly intrigued; Justin looked like he might throw up.

“You want me to live there?” I said to Frank.

“It doesn’t look like that now,” he told me, reproachfully. “They’ve really done a lot with it.”

“Have they bulldozed it and started over?”

“It’s lovely. You’ll love it. Shh.”

“Here,” Lexie said; the camera jerked and swung wildly, caught cobwebby curtains in a horrible seventies orange swirl. “You mind that. I want to explore.”

“I hope you’ve had your shots,” Rafe said. “What do you want me to do with this?”

“Don’t tempt me,” Lexie told him, and bounced into shot, heading over towards the cupboards.

She moved lighter than me, small steps tipped up on the balls of her feet, and girlier: her curves were no more impressive than mine, obviously, but she had a dancing little swing that made you notice them. Her hair had been longer then, just long enough to pull into two curly bunches over her ears, and she was wearing jeans and a tight cream-colored sweater a lot like one I used to have. I still had no idea whether we would have liked each other, if we had had the chance to meet—probably not—but that was beside the point, so irrelevant that I didn’t even know how to think about it.

“Wow,” Lexie said, peering into one of the cupboards. “What is it? Is it alive?”

“It may well have been,” Daniel said, leaning over her shoulder. “A very long time ago.”

“I think it’s the other way around,” said Abby. “It didn’t use to be alive, but it is now. Has it evolved opposable thumbs yet?”

“I miss my flat,” said Justin lugubriously, from a safe distance.

“You do not,” Lexie told him. “Your flat was three foot square and made from reconstituted cardboard and you hated it.”

“My flat didn’t have unidentified life-forms.”

“Whatsisname upstairs with the sound system who thought he was Ali G.”

“I think it’s some kind of fungus,” Daniel said, inspecting the cupboard with interest.

“That does it,” said Rafe. “I am not recording this. When we’re old and gray and wallowing in nostalgia, our first memories of our home should not be defined by fungus. How do I turn this thing off?”

A second of linoleum; then the screen went black.

“We’ve got forty-two clips like that,” Frank told me, hitting buttons, “all between about one minute and five minutes long. Add in, say, another week’s worth of intensive interviews with her associates, and I’m pretty sure we’ll have enough information to put together our very own DIY Lexie Madison. Assuming, that is, that you want to.”

He froze the frame on Lexie, head turned over her shoulder to say something, eyes bright and mouth half open in a smile. I looked at her, soft-edged and flickering like she might fly off the screen at any second, and I thought: I used to be like that. Sure-footed and invulnerable, up for anything that came along. Just a few months ago, I used to be like that.

“Cassie,” Frank said softly. “Your call.”

For what seemed like a long time, I thought about saying no. Back to DV: the standard Monday crop of the weekend’s aftermath, too many bruises and high-necked sweaters and sunglasses indoors, the regulars filing charges on their boyfriends and withdrawing them by Tuesday night, Maher sitting beside me like a big pink ham in a sweater and sniggering predictably every time we pulled a case with foreign names.

If I went back in there the next morning I would never leave. I knew it solid as a fist in my stomach. This girl was like a dare, flung hard and deadly accurate straight at me: a once-off chance, and catch it if you can.

O’Kelly stretched out his legs and sighed ostentatiously; Cooper examined the cracks in the ceiling. I could tell from the stillness of Sam’s shoulders that he wasn’t breathing. Only Frank was looking at me, his eyes steady and unblinking. The air of the squad room hurt everywhere it touched me. Lexie in dim gold light on the screen was a dark lake I could high-dive into, she was a thin-ice river I could skate away on, she was a long-distance flight leaving now.

“Tell me this woman smoked,” I said.

My ribs opened up like windows, I’d forgotten you could breathe that deeply. "Jesus, you took your time,” said O’Kelly, heaving himself out of his chair and pulling his trousers up over his belly. “I think you’re bloody certifiable, but nothing new there. When you get yourself killed, don’t come crying to me.”

“Fascinating,” Cooper said, eyeing me speculatively; a part of him was obviously working out the odds that I would end up on his table. “Do keep me posted.”

Sam ran a hand over his mouth, hard, and I saw his neck sag. “Marlboro Lights,” Frank said, and hit Eject, a big grin slowly breaking across his face. "That’s my girl.”"

I used to believe, bless my naive little heart, that I had something to offer the robbed dead. Not revenge—there’s no revenge in the world that could return the tiniest fraction of what they’ve lost—and not justice, whatever that means, but the one thing left to give them: the truth. I was good at it. I had one, at least, of the things that make a great detective: the instinct for truth, the inner magnet whose pull tells you beyond any doubt what’s dross, what’s alloy and what’s the pure, uncut metal. I dug out the nuggets without caring when they cut my fingers and brought them in my cupped hands to lay on graves, until I found out—Operation Vestal again—how slippery they were, how easily they crumbled, how deep they sliced and, in the end, how very little they were worth.

In Domestic Violence, if you can get one bruised girl to press charges or go to a shelter, then there’s at least one night when her boyfriend is not going to hit her. Safety is a small debased currency, copper-plated pennies to the gold I had been chasing in Murder, but what value it has it holds. I had learned, by that time, not to take that lightly. A few safe hours and a sheet of phone numbers to call: I had never been able to offer a single murder victim that much.

I had no clue what currency I had to offer Lexie Madison—not safety, obviously, and truth didn’t appear to have been one of her main priorities—but she had come looking for me, alive and dead she had padded closer on soft feet till she arrived with a spectacular bang on my doorstep: she wanted something. What I wanted from her in exchange—I really believed this, at the time—was simple: I wanted her the fuck out of my life. I knew she would drive a hard bargain, but I was good with that; I had done it before.

I don’t tell people this, it’s nobody’s business, but the job is the nearest thing I’ve got to a religion. The detective’s god is the truth, and you don’t get much higher or much more ruthless than that. The sacrifice, at least in Murder and Undercover—and those were always the ones I wanted, why go chasing diluted versions when you could have the breathtaking full-on thing?—is anything or everything you’ve got, your time, your dreams, your marriage, your sanity, your life. Those are the coldest and most capricious gods of the lot, and if they accept you into their service they take not what you want to offer but what they choose.

Undercover picked my honesty. I should have seen this coming, but somehow I had been so caught by the dazzling absoluteness of the job that I had managed to miss the most obvious thing about it: you spend your day lying. I don’t like lying, don’t like doing it, don’t like people who do it, and to me it seemed deeply fucked-up to go after the truth by turning yourself into a liar. I spent months picking my way along a fine double-talk line, cozying up to this small-fish dealer and spinning jokes or sarcasm to mislead him with literal truths. Then one day he fried both his brain cells on speed, pulled a knife on me and asked me if I was just using him to get to know his supplier. I skated the fine line for what felt like hours—Chill out, what’s your problem, what have I ever done to make you think I’m trying to screw you over?—stalling and hoping to God that Frank was listening to the mike feed. Dealer Boy put the knife in between my ribs and shrieked in my face, Are you? Are you? No bullshit. Yes or no. Are you? When I hesitated—because of course I was, even if it wasn’t for the reason he had in mind, and this seemed like too crucial a moment for lies—he stabbed me. Then he burst into tears, and sometime in there Frank arrived and carted me discreetly off to the hospital. But I knew. The sacrifice had been demanded and I had withheld it. I had thirty stitches for warning: Don’t do that again.

I was a good Murder detective. Rob once told me that all through his first case he had elaborate visions of fucking up, sneezing on DNA evidence, waving a cheerful good-bye to someone who had just let slip the giveaway piece of withheld info, bumbling vacantly past every clue and red flag. I never had that. My first Murder case was about as banal and depressing as they get—a young junkie knifed in the stairwell of a nightmare block of flats, great blood smears down grimy flights of stairs and eyes watching behind chained doors and the smell of piss everywhere. I stood on the landing with my hands in my pockets so I wouldn’t touch anything by mistake, looking up at the victim sprawled on the steps with his tracksuit bottoms half pulled down by the fall or the fight, and I thought: So this is it. This is where I was coming to, all along.

I still remember that junkie’s face: too thin, a faint fuzz of pale stubble, his mouth a little open as if all this had startled him silly. He had a crooked front tooth. Against all the odds and O’Kelly’s nonstop depressing predictions, we got a solve.

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.