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 branches 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
