“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.”