All this stuff, of course, got right up Frank’s nose and inspired him to more and more creative flights of bitchery (“I’m thinking this is some weird cult that believes technology is the work of Satan and chants to house plants at the full moon. Don’t worry, if they start gearing up for an orgy, I’ll get you out; by the looks of them, it’s not like you’d enjoy it. Who the hell doesn’t have a television ?”). I didn’t tell him this, but the more I thought about it, the less bizarre their lives seemed and the more they enchanted me. Dublin goes fast, these days, fast and jam-packed and jostling, everyone terrified of being left behind and forcing themselves louder and louder to make sure they don’t disappear. I had spent my time since Operation Vestal going fast too, headlong and gritted, anything not to stop, and at first the unabashed, graceful leisure of these four—embroidery, for Christ’s sake—was as shocking as a slap. I had forgotten even how to want something slow, something soft, something with wide spaces and its own sure-footed swaying rhythms. That house and that life hung in my mind cool as well water, cool as the shadow under an oak tree on a hot afternoon.
During the day I practiced: Lexie’s handwriting, her walk, her accent—which luckily for me was a light old-fashioned County Dublin, probably picked up from some TV or radio talk-show host, and not all that different from my own—her inflections, her laugh. The first time I got that right—a delighted, helpless bubble of a laugh, running up the scale like a tickled kid’s—it scared the shit out of me.
Her version of Lexie Madison had been, comfortingly, a little different from mine. Way back in UCD, I played Lexie as cheerful, easygoing, sociable, happiest at the center of the action; nothing unpredictable about her, no dark edges, nothing that could make dealers or buyers see her as a risk. At the beginning, at least, Frank and I thought of her as a custom-made precision tool, built to suit our needs and do our bidding, with a very specific goal in mind. The mystery girl’s Lexie had been more mercurial, more volatile, more willful and capricious. She had come up with a Siamese kitten of a girl, all bounce and chatter and little explosions of mischief with her friends, aloof and ice cool with outsiders, and it bothered me that I couldn’t trace that thread backwards and work out what her goal had been, what job she had precision-made this new self to do.
I did consider the possibility that I was making things more complicated than they needed to be, and she had never had a goal at all; that when it came to personality, at least, she was just plain being herself. It isn’t easy, after all, wearing someone else against your skin for months on end; I should know. But the thought of taking her at face value, no pun intended, made me edgy. Something told me that underestimating this girl would be a big, big mistake.
* * *
On Tuesday evening Frank and I were sitting on my floor, eating Chinese takeaway off the banged-up wooden chest I use for a coffee table, across a sprawl of maps and photos. It was a wild night, wind slamming at the window in great irregular bursts like some mindless attacker, and we were both in a jittery mood. I had spent the day memorizing KA info and building up enough excess energy that by the time Frank arrived I was doing handstands to keep myself from shooting straight through the ceiling; Frank had come in moving fast, sweeping stuff off the table and talking nonstop while he dealt out maps and food cartons, and I was wondering—there was no point in asking—what was going on, somewhere in the hidden levels of that X-box game he calls a brain, that he wasn’t telling me.
The combination of geography and food calmed us down a little—this was probably why Frank had gone for Chinese; it’s hard to be edgy when you’re full of lemon chicken. “And here,” Frank said, maneuvering the last of his rice onto his fork with one hand and pointing with the other, “that’s the petrol station on the Rathowen road. Open from seven in the morning till three at night, mainly to sell smokes and petrol to locals who’re in no condition to be buying either one. You sometimes do cigarette runs there. Want more food?”
“God, no,” I said. I had startled myself by being starving—normally I eat like a horse, Rob used to be constantly fascinated by how much food I could put away, but Operation Vestal had sort of sidelined my appetite. “Coffee?” I had a pot already going on the cooker; Frank’s eye bags were reaching the point where they would scare small children.
“And lots of it. We’ve got work to do. Gonna be another long night, babe.”
“Surprise, surprise,” I said. “What’s Olivia think of you sleeping over at my place?”
I was fishing, and I knew from the fraction of a pause as Frank pushed his plate away that I had guessed right: undercover strikes again. “Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to—”
“Yeah, you did. Olivia got smart and dumped me last year. I get Holly one weekend a month and two weeks in summer. What’s your Sammy think of me sleeping over at your place?”
His eyes were cool and unblinking and he didn’t sound annoyed, just firm, but the message was clear: Back off. “He’s fine with it,” I said, getting up to check the coffee. “Anything for the job.”
“You think? The job didn’t seem to be his main priority on Sunday.”
I changed my mind: he was pissed off with me about the Olivia thing. Apologizing would only make it worse. Before I could think of anything useful to say, my buzzer rang. I managed to keep the jump down to a minimum, had a graceful Inspector Clouseau moment where I whacked myself neatly across the shin with the sofa corner on my way to the door, and caught Frank’s sharp, curious up-glance.
It was Sam. “And there’s your answer,” Frank said, grinning and hoisting himself up off the floor. “You, he’d trust anywhere, but me he’s keeping an eye on. I’ll take care of the coffee; you go canoodle.”
Sam was exhausted; I could feel it in the weight of his body when he kissed me, the way he let out his breath in something like a sigh of relief. “God, it’s good to see you,” he said; then, as he spotted Frank waving from the kitchen, “Oh.”
“Welcome to the Lexie Lab,” Frank said cheerfully. “Coffee? Sweet and sour pork? Prawn cracker?”
“Yeah,” Sam said, blinking. “I mean, no; just coffee, thanks. I won’t stay, if you’re working; I just wanted to . . . Are you busy?”
“You’re fine,” I told him. “We were having dinner. What’ve you eaten today?”
“I’m grand,” Sam said vaguely, dumping his holdall on the floor and struggling out of his coat. “Could I borrow you for a few minutes? If you’re not in the middle of something.”
He was asking me, but Frank said expansively, “Why not? Have a seat, have a seat,” and waved him to the futon. “Milk? Sugar?”
“No milk, two sugars,” Sam said, collapsing onto the futon. “Thanks.” I was pretty sure that he was starving, that he wasn’t going to touch anything Frank had bought, that the holdall contained all the ingredients for something a lot more evolved than lemon chicken, and that if I could just get my hands on his shoulders I could rub that tension away in five minutes flat. Going undercover was starting to seem like the easy part here.
I sat next to Sam, as close as I could get without touching. “How’s it going?” I asked.
He gave my hand a quick squeeze and reached round to his coat, draped over the back of the futon, to find his notebook. “Ah, sure, all right, I suppose. Just eliminating, mostly. Richard Doyle, your man who found the body, his alibi’s solid. We’ve ruled out all the DV files you flagged; we’re working on the rest and on your murder cases, but nothing yet.” The thought of the Murder squad combing through my files, with the rumors sizzling in their heads and my face for victim, sent a nasty little twitch down between my shoulder blades. “It doesn’t look like she used the internet at all—no internet activity under her log-in on the college computers, no MySpace page or anything like that, the e-mail address Trinity assigned her hasn’t even been used—so no leads there. And not even a sniff of any arguments in college—and the English department is mad for the old rumors. If she’d had problems with anyone, we’d have hea
rd.”
“I hate to say I told you so,” Frank said sweetly, gathering up mugs, “but sometimes, in life, we have to do things we hate.”
“Yeah,” Sam said absently. Frank bent to hand him his coffee with a servile little flourish, and winked at me behind Sam’s back. I ignored him. One of Sam’s rules is that he doesn’t fight with anyone working the same case, but there are always people like Frank who figure he’s just too thick to notice when he’s being messed with. “So I wondered, Cassie . . . The thing is, eliminating could take forever, but as long as I’ve no motive and no leads, I’ve no other choice; there’s nothing to tell me where to start. I thought, if I just had some idea what I was looking for . . . Could you profile this for me?”
For a second I felt like the air in the room had gone dark with pure sadness, bitter and ineradicable as smoke. Every murder case I ever pulled, I had done my best to profile right here in my flat: late nights, whiskey, Rob stretched out on the sofa cat’s-cradling an elastic band and testing everything I came up with for holes. On Operation Vestal we’d brought Sam along, Sam smiling shyly at me while music and moths swirled at the windowpane, and all I could think was how happy the three of us had been, in spite of everything, and how fatally, devastatingly innocent. This prickly, crowded place—greasy smell of cold Chinese, my shin hurting like hell, Frank watching with those sidelong amused eyes—this wasn’t the same thing, it was like a mocking reflection in some creepy distorting mirror, and all I could think was, ludicrously, I want to go home.
Sam moved a sheaf of maps to one side—gingerly, glancing up at us to make sure he wasn’t messing anything up—and put down his mug. Frank scooted his arse to the very edge of the sofa, leaned his chin on his interlaced fingers and did enthralled. I kept my eyes down so they wouldn’t see the look on my face. There was a photo of Lexie on the table, half hidden under a carton of rice; Lexie up a ladder in the kitchen of Whitethorn House, wearing dungarees and a man’s shirt and an awful lot of white paint. For the first time ever, the sight of her felt good: that handcuff bite on my wrist jerking me down to earth, that cold-water slap in the face slamming everything else out of my mind. I almost reached out and pressed my hand onto the picture.
“Yeah, sure, I’ll profile,” I said. “You know I can’t give you a lot, though, right? Not on one crime.” Most of profiling is built on patterns. With a stand-alone crime, you have no way of knowing what’s pure chance and what’s a clue, stenciled in by the boundaries of your guy’s life or by the secret jagged outlines of his mind. One murder on a Wednesday evening tells you nothing very much; three more matching ones say that your guy has a window that night, and you might want to look twice when you find a suspect whose wife plays Bingo on Wednesdays. A phrase used in one rape could mean nothing; used in four, it becomes a signature that some girlfriend or wife or ex, somewhere, is going to recognize.
“Anything,” Sam said. He flipped his notebook open, pulled out his pen and leaned forwards, eyes fixed on me, ready. “Anything at all.”
“OK,” I said. I didn’t even need the file. I had spent more than enough time thinking about this, while Frank snored like a water buffalo on the sofa and my window went from black to gray to gold. “The first thing is that it’s probably a man. We can’t rule out a woman for definite—if you get a good female suspect, don’t ignore her—but statistically, stabbing’s usually a male crime. For now, we’ll go with a guy.”
Sam nodded. “That’s what I figured, too. Any ideas on what age he is?”
“This isn’t a teenager; he’s too organized and too controlled. We’re not talking about an old man, either, though. This didn’t take an athlete, but it did take a basic level of fitness—running around lanes, climbing over walls, dragging a body. I’d go with twenty-five to forty, give or take.”
“And I’m thinking,” Sam said, scribbling, “there’s local knowledge there.”
“Oh yeah,” I said. “Either he’s local or he’s spent an awful lot of time around Glenskehy, one way or another. He’s very comfortable in the area. He hung around for ages after the stabbing; killers who’re off their turf tend to get uneasy and split as fast as they can. And going by the maps, the place is a maze, but he managed to find her—in the dead of night, with no street lamps—after she got away from him.”
For some reason this was harder than usual. I had analyzed the living bejasus out of every fact we had, gone back over every textbook, but I couldn’t make the killer materialize. Every time I reached out for him, he streamed between my fingers like smoke and slid away over the horizon, left me staring at no silhouette except Lexie’s. I tried to tell myself profiling is like any other skill, doing a backflip, riding a bike: get out of practice and your instinct goes rusty; that doesn’t have to mean it’s gone for good.
I found my cigarettes—I think better if I have something to do with my hands. “He knows Glenskehy, all right, and he almost definitely knew our girl. For one thing, we’ve got the positioning of the body: her face was turned away, towards the wall. Any kind of focus on the victim’s face—covering it, disfiguring it, turning it away—usually means it’s personal; the killer and the victim knew each other.”
“Or,” Frank said, swinging his legs up onto the sofa and balancing his mug on his stomach, “it’s pure coincidence: that’s just the way she landed when he put her down.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But we’ve also got the fact that he found her. That cottage is well off the lane; in the dark, you wouldn’t even know it was there unless you were looking for it specifically. The time lag says he wasn’t exactly hot on her trail, so I doubt he actually saw her go in there, and once she was sitting down the wall would hide her from the road. Unless she had her torch on and our guy spotted the light—and why would you switch on a torch if you were trying to hide from a homicidal maniac?—then he had to have a reason for checking there. I think he knew she liked the cottage.”
“None of that says she knew him,” Frank said. “Just that he knew her. If he’d been stalking her for a while, say, he could feel like there was a personal connection, and he’d have a good handle on her habits.”
I shook my head. “I’m not completely ruling out a stalker, but if that’s what we’re dealing with, he was at least an acquaintance of hers. She was stabbed from the front, remember. She wasn’t running away, and she wasn’t jumped from behind; they were face to face, she knew he was there, they could well have been talking for a while. And she didn’t have any defensive wounds. To me, that says she wasn’t on guard. This guy was up close and she was at ease with him, right up until the second he stabbed her. Me, I wouldn’t be all that relaxed with a complete stranger who showed up at that hour in the middle of nowhere.”
“All of which will be a lot more use,” Frank said, “just as soon as we have a clue who this girl knew, exactly.”
“Anything else I can look for?” Sam asked, ignoring him—I could see the effort. “Would you say he’s got a record?”
“He probably has some kind of criminal experience,” I said. “He did a damn good job of cleaning up after himself. There’s a good chance he’s never got caught, if he’s this careful, but maybe he learned the hard way. If you’re going through files, you could try looking for stuff like car theft, burglary, arson—something that would take cleanup skills but wouldn’t involve any direct contact with victims. No assault, including sexual assault. Judging by how crap he is at killing people, he’d had no practice being violent, or practically none.”
“He’s not that crap,” Sam said quietly. “He got the job done.”
“Barely,” I said. “Through dumb luck, more than anything. And I don’t think that’s the job he went there to do. There are elements of this crime that just don’t match up. Like I said on Sunday, the stabbing reads as unplanned, spontaneous; but everything around that moment is a whole lot more organized. Your guy knew where to find her—I don’t buy the idea that he just happened to wander into her, at midnight on some back lane in the
middle of nowhere. Either he knew her routine, or they’d arranged to meet. And after the stabbing, he kept his head and he took his time: tracked her down, searched her, erased his footprints and wiped her stuff clean—and that says he wasn’t wearing gloves. Again, he wasn’t planning on a murder.”