The Likeness: A Novel (10 page)

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.”