“How’re you doing?” I asked him, pulling off my helmet.
“Grand,” Sam said. He tried to smile at me, but it came out lopsided.
“Oo,” Frank said, mock-camp, holding me at arm’s length and eyeballing me. “Check you out. Is this what the well-dressed detective is wearing these days?” The last time he had seen me, I’d been in combats and a top that said “Miss Kitty’s House of Fun Wants YOU.”
“Bite me, Frank,” I told him. “At least I’ve changed my gear once or twice in the last few years.”
“No, no, no, I’m impressed. Very executive.” He tried to spin me round; I batted his hand away. Just for the record, I was not dressed like Hillary Clinton here. I was wearing my work clothes—black trouser suit, white shirt—and I wasn’t that crazy about them myself, but when I switched to Domestic Violence my new superintendent kept going on at me about the importance of projecting an appropriate corporate image and building public confidence, which apparently cannot be done in jeans and a T-shirt, and I didn’t have the energy to resist. “Bring sunglasses and a hoodie or something?” Frank asked. “They’ll go great with this getup.”
“You brought me down here to discuss my fashion sense?” I inquired. I found an ancient red beret in my satchel and waved it at him.
“Nah, we’ll get back to that some other time. Here, have these.” Frank pulled sunglasses out of his pocket, repulsive mirrored things that belonged on Don Johnson in 1985, and passed them to me.
“If I’m going to go around looking like that much of a dork,” I said, eyeing them, “there had better be a damn good explanation.”
“We’ll get to that. If you don’t like those, you can always wear your helmet. ” Frank waited till I shrugged and put on the dork gear. The buzz of seeing him had dissolved and my back was tensing up again. Sam looking sick, Frank on the case and not wanting me spotted at the scene: it read a lot like an undercover had got killed.
“Gorgeous as always,” Frank said. He held the crime-scene tape for me to duck under, and it was so familiar, I had made that quick easy movement so many times, that for a split second it felt like coming home. I automatically settled my gun at my belt and glanced over my shoulder for my partner, as if this was my own case I were coming to, before I remembered.
“Here’s the story,” Sam said. “At about quarter past six this morning, a local fella called Richard Doyle was walking his dog along this lane. He let it off the lead to have a run about in the fields. There’s a ruined house not far off the lane, and the dog went in and wouldn’t come out; in the end, Doyle had to go after it. He found the dog sniffing around the body of a woman. Doyle grabbed the dog, legged it out of there and rang the uniforms.”
I relaxed a little: I didn’t know any other women from Undercover. “And I’m here why?” I asked. “Not to mention you, sunshine. Did you transfer into Murder and no one told me?”
“You’ll see,” Frank said. I was following him down the lane and I could only see the back of his head. “Believe me, you’ll see.”
I glanced over my shoulder at Sam. “Nothing to worry about,” he said quietly. He was getting his color back, in bright uneven splotches. “You’ll be grand.”
The lane sloped upwards, too narrow for two people to walk abreast, just a muddy track with ragged hawthorn hedges spilling in on both sides. Where they broke, the hillside was crazy-quilted into green fields scattered with sheep—a brand-new lamb was bleating somewhere, far off. The air was cold and rich enough to drink, and the sun sifted long and gold through the hawthorn; I considered just keeping on walking, over the brow of the hill and on, letting Sam and Frank deal with whatever seething dark blotch was waiting for us under the morning. “Here we go,” Frank said.
The hedge fell away to a broken-down stone wall bordering a field left to run wild. The house was thirty or forty yards off the lane: one of the Famine cottages that still litter Ireland, emptied in the nineteenth century by death or emigration and never reclaimed. One look added another layer to my feeling that I wanted to be very far away from whatever was going on here. The whole field should have been alive with focused, unhurried movement—uniforms working their way across the grass with their heads bent, Technical Bureau crew in white coveralls busy with cameras and rulers and print dust, morgue guys unloading their stretcher. Instead there were two uniforms, shifting from foot to foot on either side of the cottage door and looking slightly out of their depth, and a pair of pissed-off robins bouncing around the eaves making outraged noises.
“Where is everyone?” I asked.
I was talking to Sam, but Frank said, “Cooper’s been and gone”—Cooper is the state pathologist. “I figured he needed to have a look at her as fast as possible, for time of death. The Bureau can wait; forensic evidence isn’t going anywhere.”
“Jesus,” I said. “It is if we walk on it. Sam, ever worked a double homicide before?”
Frank raised an eyebrow. “Got another body?”
“Yours, once the Bureau get here. Six people wandering all over a crime scene before they’ve cleared it? They’re gonna kill you.”
“Worth it,” Frank said cheerfully, swinging a leg over the wall. “I wanted to keep this under wraps for a little while, and that’s hard to do if you’ve got Bureau guys swarming all over the place. People tend to notice them.”
Something was badly wrong here. This was Sam’s case, not Frank’s; Sam should have been the one deciding how the evidence was handled and who got called in when. Whatever was in that cottage, it had shaken him up enough that he had let Frank sweep in, bulldoze him out of the way and instantly, efficiently start arranging this case to suit whatever agenda he had today. I tried to catch Sam’s eye, but he was pulling himself over the wall and not looking at either of us.
“Can you climb walls in that getup,” Frank inquired sweetly, “or would you like a hand?” I made a face at him and vaulted into the field, up to my ankles in long wet grass and dandelions.
The cottage had been two rooms, once, a long time ago. One of them still looked more or less intact—it even had most of its roof—but the other was just shards of wall and windows onto open air. Bindweed and moss and little trailing blue flowers had rooted in the cracks. Someone had spray-painted SHAZ beside the doorway, not very artistically, but the house was too inconvenient for a regular hangout: even prowling teenagers had mostly left it alone, to collapse on itself in its own slow time.
“Detective Cassie Maddox,” Frank said, “Sergeant Noel Byrne and Garda Joe Doherty, Rathowen station. Glenskehy’s on their patch.”
“For our sins,” said Byrne. He sounded like he meant it. He was somewhere in his fifties, with a slumped back and watery blue eyes, and he smelled of wet uniform and loser.
Doherty was a gangly kid with unfortunate ears, and when I held out my hand to him he did a double take straight out of a cartoon; I could practically hear the boing of his eyeballs snapping back into place. God only knew what he’d heard about me—cops have a better rumor mill than any bingo club—but I didn’t have time to worry about it right then. I gave him the smile-and-stare number, and he mumbled something and dropped my hand as if it had scorched him.
“We’d like Detective Maddox to take a look at our body,” Frank said.
“I’d say you would, all right,” said Byrne, eyeing me. I wasn’t sure he meant it the way it sounded; he didn’t look like he had the energy. Doherty snickered nervously.
“Ready?” Sam asked me quietly.
“The suspense is killing me,” I said. It came out a little snottier than I intended. Frank was already ducking into the cottage and pulling aside the long sprays of trailing bramble that curtained the doorway to the inner room.
“Ladies first,” he said, with a flourish. I hung the stud-muffin glasses off the front of my shirt by one earpiece, took a breath and went in.
It should have been a peaceful, sad little room. Long bands of sun slanting through holes in the roof and filtering past the net of branche
s over the windows, shivering like light on water; some family’s hearth, cold a hundred years, with piles of bird’s-nest fallen down the chimney and the rusty iron hook for the cooking pot still hanging ready. A wood dove murmuring contentedly, somewhere nearby.
But if you’ve seen a dead body, you know how they change the air: that huge silence, the absence strong as a black hole, time stopped and molecules frozen around the still thing that’s learned the final secret, the one he can never tell. Most dead people are the only thing in the room. Murder victims are different; they don’t come alone. The silence rises up to a deafening shout and the air is streaked and hand-printed, the body smokes with the brand of that other person grabbing you just as hard: the killer.
The first thing that hit me about this scene, though, was how slight a mark the killer had left. I had been bracing myself against things I didn’t want to imagine—naked and spread-eagled, vicious dark wounds too thick to count, body parts scattered in corners—but this girl looked as if she had arranged herself carefully on the floor and let out her last breath in a long even sigh, chosen her own time and place with no need for anyone’s help along the way. She was lying on her back among the shadows in front of the fireplace, neatly, with her feet together and her arms at her sides. She was wearing a navy peacoat, falling open; under it were indigo jeans—pulled up and zipped—runners and a blue top with a dark star tie-dyed across the front. The only thing out of the ordinary was her hands, clenched into tight fists. Frank and Sam had moved in beside me, and I shot Frank a puzzled look—And the big deal is?—but he just watched me, his face giving away nothing.
She was medium height, built like me, compact and boyish. Her head was turned away from us, towards the far wall, and all I could see in the dim light was short black curls and a slice of white: high round curve of a cheekbone, the point of a small chin. “Here,” Frank said. He flicked on a tiny, powerful torch and caught her face in a sharp little halo.
For a second I was confused—Sam lied?—because I knew her from somewhere, I’d seen that face a million times before. Then I took a step forwards, so I could get a proper look and the whole world went silent, frozen, darkness roaring in from the edges and only the girl’s face blazing white at the center; because it was me. The tilt of the nose, the wide sweep of the eyebrows, every tiniest curve and angle clear as ice: it was me, blue-lipped and still, with shadows like dark bruises under my eyes. I couldn’t feel my hands, my feet, couldn’t feel myself breathing. For a second I thought I was floating, sliced off myself and wind currents carrying me away.
“Know her?” Frank asked, somewhere. “Any relation?”
It was like going blind; my eyes couldn’t take her in. She was impossible: a high-fever hallucination, a screaming crack straight across all the laws of nature. I realized I was braced rigid on the balls of my feet, one hand halfway to my gun, every muscle ready to fight this dead girl to the death. “No,” I said. My voice sounded wrong, somewhere outside me. “Never seen her.”
“You adopted?”
Sam whipped his head around, startled, but the bluntness was good, it helped like a pinch. “No,” I said. For an awful, rocking instant I actually wondered. But I’ve seen photos, my mother tired and smiling in a hospital bed, brand-new me at her breast. No.
“Which side do you look like?”
“What?” It took me a second. I couldn’t look away from the girl; I had to force myself to blink. No wonder Doherty and his ears had done a double take. “No. My mother’s side. It’s not that my father was running around, and this is . . . No.”
Frank shrugged. “Worth a shot.”
“They say everyone’s got a double, somewhere,” Sam said quietly, beside me. He was too close; it took me a second to realize that he was ready to catch me, just in case.
I am not the fainting type. I bit down, hard and fast, on the inside of my lip; the jolt of pain cleared my head. “Doesn’t she have ID?”
I knew, from the tiny pause before either of them answered, that something was up. Shit, I thought, with a new thump in my stomach: identity theft. I wasn’t too clear on how it worked exactly, but one glimpse of me and a creative streak and presumably this girl could have been sharing my passport and buying BMWs on my credit.
“She had a student card on her,” Frank said. “Key ring in the left-hand pocket of her coat, Maglite in the right, wallet in the front right pocket of her jeans. Twelve quid and change, an ATM card, a couple of old receipts and this.” He fished a clear plastic evidence bag out of a pile by the door and slapped it into my hand.
It was a Trinity College ID, slick and digitized, not like the laminated bits of colored paper we used to have. The girl in the photo looked ten years younger than the white, sunken face in the corner. She was smiling my own smile up at me and wearing a striped baker-boy cap turned sideways, and for a second my mind flailed wildly: But I never had a striped one of those, did I, when did I—I pretended to tilt the card to the light, reading the small print, so I could turn my shoulder to the others. Madison, Alexandra J.
For a whirling instant, I understood completely: Frank and I had done this. We made Lexie Madison bone by bone and fiber by fiber, we baptized her and for a few months we gave her a face and a body, and when we threw her away she wanted more. She spent four years spinning herself back, out of dark earth and night winds, and then she called us here to see what we had done.
“What the hell,” I said, when I could breathe.
“When the uniforms called it in and ran her name through the computer,” Frank said, taking back the bag, “she came up flagged: anything happens to this girl, call me ASAP. I never bothered taking her out of the system; I figured we might need her again, sooner or later. You never know.”
“Yeah,” I said. “No kidding.” I stared hard at the body and got a grip: this was no golem, this was a real live dead girl, oxymoron and all. “Sam,” I said. “What’ve we got?”
Sam shot me a quick, searching glance; when he realized I wasn’t about to swoon or scream or whatever he’d had in mind, he nodded. He was starting to look a little more like himself. “White female,” he said, “mid-twenties to early thirties, single stab wound to the chest. Cooper says she died sometime around midnight, give or take an hour. He can’t be more specific: shock, ambient temperature variations, whether there was physical activity around the time of death, all the rest of it.”
Unlike most people, I get on well with Cooper, but I was glad I’d missed him. The tiny cottage felt too full, full of clumping feet and people shifting and eyes on me. “Stabbed here?” I asked.
Sam shook his head. “Hard to tell. We’ll wait and see what the Bureau says, but all that rain last night got rid of a lot—we won’t be finding footprints in the lane, a blood trail, nothing like that. For what it’s worth, though, I’d say this isn’t our primary crime scene. She was on her feet for at least a while after she got stabbed. See there? Blood’s dripped straight down the leg of her jeans.” Frank shifted the torch beam, obligingly. “And there’s mud on both knees and a rip in one, like she was running and she fell.”
“Looking for cover,” I said. The image surged up at me like something from every forgotten nightmare: the lane twisting into the dark and her running, feet slipping helplessly on pebbles and her breath wild in her ears. I could feel Frank carefully standing back, saying nothing; watching.
“Could be,” Sam said. “Maybe the killer was coming after her, or she thought he was. She could’ve left a trail straight from his front door, for all we’ll ever know; it’s long gone.”
I wanted to do something with my hands, rub them through my hair, over my mouth, something. I shoved them in my pockets to keep them still. “So she got into shelter and collapsed.”
“Not exactly. I’m thinking she died over there.” Sam pulled back the brambles and nodded at a corner of the outer room. “We’ve got what looks like a fair-sized pool of blood. No way to be sure exactly how much—we’ll see if the Bureau can help there
—but if there’s still plenty left after a night like this, I’d say there was a load of it to start with. She was probably sitting up against that wall—most of the blood is on the front of her top and on the lap and seat of her jeans. If she’d been lying down, it’d have seeped down her sides. See this?”