by Tana French
I got everyone together in the Spains’ sitting room—it was much too small, but there was no way we were having this chat in the fishbowl kitchen. The floaters clustered up shoulder to shoulder, trying not to stand on the rug or brush against the telly, like the Spains still needed their guests to have good manners. I told them what was behind the garden wall. One of the techs whistled, a long soft sound.
“Here, Scorcher,” Larry said. He had settled himself comfortably on the sofa. “Now I’m not doubting you, we both know better than that, but is there no chance this is just some homeless guy who found himself a nice cozy place to doss down for a while?”
“With binoculars and an expensive sleeping bag, and bugger-all else? Not a chance, Lar. That nest was set up for one reason: so someone could spy on the Spains.”
“And he’s not homeless,” Richie said. “Or if he is, he’s got somewhere he can have a wash, himself and the sleeping bag. No smell.”
I said to the nearest floater, “Get onto the Dog Unit and have them send a general purpose dog out here ASAP. Tell them we’re after a murder suspect and we need the best trailing dog they’ve got.” He nodded and backed into the hall, already pulling out his phone. “Until that dog gets a chance at the scent, no one else goes into that house. All of you”—I nodded to the floaters—“can pick up the search for the weapon, but this time keep well away from that hide—head out the front, around to both sides, and cut down to the beach. When the dog handler arrives, I’ll text you all, and you’ll come back here at a run. I’m going to need chaos outside the front of this place: people running, shouting, driving up on full lights and sirens, crowding around to look at something—give it as much drama as you can. Then pick a saint, or whatever you’re into, and say a prayer that if our man’s watching, the chaos lures him round to the front to see what’s going on.”
Richie was leaning against a wall with his hands in his pockets. He said, “At least he’s after leaving his binoculars behind. If he wants to see what’s up, he can’t just stay somewhere out the back and check it out long-distance; he’ll have to come around the front, get in close.”
“There’s no guarantee he hasn’t got a second pair, but we’ll hope. If he comes close enough, we might even get our hands on him, although that’s probably too much to ask; this whole estate is a warren, he’s got enough hiding places to keep him going for months. Meanwhile, the dog goes around to that nest, scents off the sleeping bag—the handler can bring the bag down to the ground, if he can’t get the dog up there—and gets to work. One tech heads up there with them, inconspicuously, takes video and fingerprints, and leaves. Everything else can wait.”
“Gerry,” Larry said, pointing at a gangly young guy, who nodded. “Fastest print tape in the West.”
“Good man, Gerry. If you get prints, you head straight back to the lab and do what you do. The rest of us will keep up the action out front for as long as you need it, and then we’ll go back to what we were doing. We’ve got until six o’clock sharp. Then we clear the area. Anyone who’s still working inside the house can keep going, but the outside needs to look like we’ve packed up and gone home for the night. I want the coast clear—literally—for our man.”
Larry’s eyebrows were practically in his bald patch. It was a gamble, staking the whole evening’s work on this one chance—witnesses’ memories can change even overnight, rain showers can wash away blood and scent, tides can pull dumped weapons or bloody clothes out to sea forever—and gambling isn’t like me, but this case wasn’t like most cases. “Once it gets dark,” I said, “we re-deploy.”
“You’re assuming the dog won’t get him,” Larry pointed out. “You think this fella knows what he’s at?”
I saw the floaters shift as the thought sent a ripple of alertness through them. “That’s what we’re aiming to find out,” I said. “Probably not, or he’d have cleaned up after himself, but I’m not taking any chances. Sunset’s around half past seven, maybe a little later. About eight or half past, as soon as we can’t be seen, Detective Curran and I will head up to that nest, where we’ll spend the night.” I caught Richie’s eye; he nodded. “Meanwhile, two detectives will be patrolling the estate—again, inconspicuously—keeping an eye out for any action, in particular any action heading this way. Any takers?”
All of the floaters’ hands shot up. I picked Marlboro Man—he had earned it—and a kid who looked young enough that one night with no sleep wouldn’t wipe him out for the rest of the week. “Keep in mind that he could come from outside the estate or from inside—he could be hiding out in a derelict house, or he could live here and that’s how he targeted the Spains. If you spot anything interesting, ring me straightaway. Still no radios: we have to assume that this guy is into his surveillance gear, deep enough that he owns a scanner. If someone looks promising, tail him if you can, but your top priority is making sure he doesn’t spot you. If you get even the faintest sense that he’s onto you, back right off and report to me. Got it?”
They nodded. I said, “I’ll also need a pair of techs to spend the night in here.”
“Not me,” Larry said. “You know I love you, Scorcher, but I’ve got a previous engagement and I’m too old for the all-night carry-on, no double entendre intended.”
“No problem. I’m sure someone could do with the overtime, am I right?” Larry mimed his jaw hitting his chest—I have a rep for not authorizing overtime. A few of the techs nodded. “You can bring sleeping bags and take turns getting some kip in the sitting room, if you want to; I just need some kind of ongoing visible activity. Bring things back and forth from your car, swab things in the kitchen, take a laptop out there and pull up a graph that looks professional… Your job is to get our man interested enough that he can’t resist the temptation to go up to his nest, get his binoculars and check out what you’re doing.”
“Bait,” said Gerry the print tech.
“Exactly. We’ve got bait, trackers, hunters, and we’ll just have to hope our man walks into the trap. We’ll have a couple of hours off between six o’clock and nightfall; get something to eat, head back to the office if you need to check in, pick up anything you’ll want for the stakeout. For now, I’ll let you get back to what you’re doing. Thanks, lads and ladies.”
They moved off—two of the techs were flipping a coin for the overtime, a couple of floaters were trying to impress me or each other by taking notes. The scaffolding had stamped smears of rust onto the sleeve of my overcoat. I found a tissue in my pocket and headed out to the kitchen to dampen it.
Richie followed me. I said, “If you need something to eat, you can take the car and find that petrol station the Gogan woman talked about.”
He shook his head. “I’m grand.”
“Good. And you’re OK for tonight?”
“Yeah. No probs.”
“At six we’ll head back to HQ, brief the Super, pick up anything we need, then meet up again and come back here.” If Richie and I could make it into town fast enough, and if the briefing didn’t take too long, there was just a chance I would have time to get hold of Dina and put her in a taxi to Geri’s. “You’re welcome to put in for overtime if you want. I’m not planning to.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t believe in overtime.” Larry’s boys had cut the water and taken out the sink trap, in case our boy had washed up, but a leftover trickle came out of the tap. I caught it on the tissue and scrubbed at my sleeve.
“I heard that, all right. How come?”
“I’m not a babysitter, or a waiter. I don’t charge by the hour. And I’m not some politician looking for ways to get paid three times over for every tap of work I do. I get paid my salary to do my job, whatever that happens to mean.”
Richie didn’t comment. He said, “You’re pretty definite that this guy’s watching us, aren’t you?”
“On the contrary: he’s probably miles away, at work, if he’s got a job to go to and if he had the cool to go in today. But, like I said to Larry, I
’m not taking any chances.”
In the corner of my eye something white flicked. I was facing the windows, braced ready to lunge at the back door, before I knew I had moved. One of the techs was out in the garden, squatting on a paving stone, swabbing.
Richie let that speak for itself while I straightened up and stashed the tissue in my briefcase. Then he said, “So maybe ‘definite’ isn’t the right word. But you think he is.”
The great Rorschach blot on the floor where the Spains had lain was darkening, crusting at the edges. Above it, the windows ricocheted gray afternoon light back and forth, throwing off dislocated, off-kilter reflections: swirling leaves, a slice of wall, the heart-stopping nosedive of a bird against cloud. “Yeah,” I said. “I do. I think he’s watching.”
* * *
And that left us with the rest of the afternoon to get through, on our way to that night. The media had started swarming up—later than I’d expected; clearly their satnavs didn’t like the place any better than mine had—and were doing their thing, hanging over the crime-scene tape to get shots of the techs going in and out, doing pieces to camera in their best solemn voices. In my book, the media are a necessary evil: they live off the animal inside us, they bait their front pages with secondhand blood for the hyenas to snuffle up, but they come in useful often enough that you want to stay on their good side. I checked my hair in the Spains’ bathroom mirror and went out to give them a statement. For a second I actually considered sending Richie. The thought of Dina hearing my voice talking about Broken Harbor sent heartburn flaring across my chest.
There were a couple of dozen of them out there, everything from broadsheets to tabloids and from national TV to local radio. I kept it as brief and as monotone as possible, on the off chance that they might quote me instead of using the actual footage, and I made sure they got the impression that all four of the Spains were dead as dodoes. My man would be watching the news, and I wanted him smug and secure: no living witnesses, the perfect crime, give yourself a pat on the back for being such a winner and then come on down to take another look at your prize work.
The search team and the dog handler arrived not long afterwards, which meant we had plenty of cast members for the drama in the front garden—the Gogan woman and her kid stopped pretending they weren’t watching and stuck their heads out of the door, and the reporters practically burst the crime-scene tape trying to see what was going on, which I took as a good sign. I bent over something imaginary in the hall with the rest of the gang, shouted meaningless jargon out the door, jogged up and down the drive to get things from the car. It took all the willpower I had not to scan the tangle of houses for a blink of movement, a flash of light off lenses, but I never once looked up.
The dog was a shining, muscled Alsatian that picked up a scent off the sleeping bag in a split second, trailed it to the end of the road and lost it. I had the handler walk the dog through the house—if our man was watching, I needed him to think that was why we had called them in. Then I had the search team take over the weapon hunt, and sent the floaters out on new assignments. Go down to Emma’s school—fast, before it lets out for the day—talk to her teacher, talk to her friends and their parents. Go down to Jack’s preschool, ditto. Go around every shop near the schools, find out where Jenny got those carrier bags that Sinéad Gogan saw, find out if anyone saw someone following her, if anyone has CCTV footage. Go to the hospital where Jenny’s being treated, talk to whichever relatives have shown, track down whichever ones haven’t, make sure all of them know to keep their mouths shut and stay far from the media; go to every hospital within a sixty-mile radius, ask them about last night’s crop of knife wounds, and hope our boy got cut in the struggle. Go ring HQ and find out if the Spains made any calls to the police in the last six months; go ring the Chicago PD and have them send someone to break the news to Pat’s brother, Ian. Go find anyone who lives in this godforsaken place, threaten them with everything up to and including jail time if they tell the media anything they don’t tell us first; find out if they saw the Spains, if they saw anything strange, if they saw anything at all.
Richie and I went back to the house search. It was a different thing, now that the Spains had turned into that half myth, rare as a sweet-voiced hidden bird that no one ever sees alive: genuine victims, innocent to the bone. We had been looking for the thing they had done wrong. Now we were looking for the thing that they could never have guessed they were doing wrong. The receipts that would show who had sold them food, petrol, children’s clothes; the birthday cards that would tell us who had come to Emma’s party, the leaflet that would list the people who had attended some residents’ meeting. We were looking for the bright lure that had hooked something clawed and simian, brought it following them home.
The first floater to check in was the one I had sent to Jack’s preschool. “Sir,” he said. “Jack Spain didn’t go here.”
We had pulled the number from a list, in bubbly girly handwriting, pinned above the phone table: doctor, Garda station, work—crossed out—E school, J preschool. “Ever?”
“No, he did up until June. When they finished up for the summer. He was down on the list to come back this year, but in August Jennifer Spain rang up and canceled his place. She said they were going to keep him at home instead. The lady who runs the place, she thinks the problem was money.”
Richie leaned closer to the phone—we were still sitting on the Spains’ bed, getting deeper into paper. “James, howya, it’s Richie Curran. Did you get the names of any kids Jack was friendly with?”
“Yeah. Three young lads in particular.”
“Good,” I said. “Go talk to them and their parents. Then get back to us.”
Richie said, “Can you ask the parents when they last saw Jack? And when they last brought their young fellas over to the Spains’ to play?”
“Will do. I’ll be back in touch ASAP.”
“Do that.” I hung up. “What’s the story there?”
“Fiona said, when she was talking to Jenny yesterday morning, Jenny told her about Jack bringing over a mate from preschool. But if Jack wasn’t in preschool…”
“She could have meant a friend he made last year.”
“Didn’t sound like that, though, did it? It could’ve been a misunderstanding, but like you said: anything that doesn’t fit. Can’t see why Fiona would’ve lied to us about that, or why Jenny would’ve lied to Fiona, but…”
But if either of them had, it would be nice to know about it. I said, “Fiona could have made it up because she and Jenny had a blazing row yesterday morning and she feels guilty about it. Jenny could have made it up because she didn’t want Fiona to know how broke they were. Rule Number Seven, I think we’re on: everyone lies, Richie. Killers, witnesses, bystanders, victims. Everyone.”
* * *
The other floaters called in, one by one. According to the Chicago boys, Ian Spain’s reaction had been “all good”—your standard mix of shock and grief, nothing to raise red flags; he said he and Pat hadn’t been e-mailing much, but Pat hadn’t mentioned any stalkers, any confrontations, anyone who was worrying him. Jenny had barely more family than he did—her mother had shown up at the hospital and there were some cousins in Liverpool, but that was it. The mother’s reaction had been all good too, complete with a side order of near-hysteria about being kept away from Jenny. In the end the floater had managed to get a basic statement, for what it was worth; Jenny and her mother weren’t close, and Mrs. Rafferty knew less about the Spains’ lives than Fiona did. The floater had tried to nudge her into going home, but she and Fiona had set up camp at the hospital, which at least meant we knew where to find them.
Emma had actually been going to primary school, where the teachers said she had been a nice kid from a nice family: popular, well behaved, a people pleaser, no genius but well able to keep up. The floater had a list of teachers and friends. No suspicious knife wounds at the nearby A&E departments, no phone calls to us from the Spains. The door-to-door
had turned up nothing: out of maybe two hundred fifty houses, fifty or sixty showed any signs of official occupation, about half of those had someone home, and no one in those couple of dozen knew much about the Spains. None of them thought they had seen or heard anything unusual, but they couldn’t be sure: there were always joyriders, always half-wild teenagers prowling around the empty streets, setting bonfires and finding things to smash.
Jenny’s shopping traced back to the supermarket in the nearest decent-sized town, where at about four o’clock the previous afternoon she had bought milk, mince, crisps and a few other things that the checkout girl didn’t remember—the shop was working on pulling the receipt, and the CCTV footage. Jenny had seemed fine, the girl said, hurried and a bit stressed, but polite; no one had been talking to the family, no one had followed them out, at least not that the girl had seen. She only remembered them because Jack had been bouncing up and down in the trolley, singing, and while she swiped their shopping he had told her he was going to be a big scary animal for Halloween.
The search tossed up small things, low-tide flotsam and jetsam. Photo albums, address books, cards congratulating the Spains on their engagement, their wedding, their babies; receipts from a dentist, a doctor, a pharmacist. Every name and every number went into my notebook. Slowly, the list of question marks was getting shorter and the list of possible contact points was getting longer.
Computer Crime rang me late in the afternoon, to say they had taken a preliminary look at what we had sent them. We were in Emma’s room: I had been going through her schoolbag (lots of pink-based crayon drawings, TODAY I AM A PRINCESS in careful, wobbly capitals), Richie had been down on his hunkers on the floor, flipping through the fairy tales on her bookshelf. With her gone and the bed stripped—the morgue boys had wrapped her sheets around her and taken the lot, in case our man had shed hairs or fibers while he did what he did—the room was so empty it sucked the breath out of you, as if she had been taken away a thousand years ago and no one had stepped in here since.