The Likeness: A Novel (12 page)

"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.