saga was still going on:
At two the next morning, Pat came back and blew his top.
A tiny hiss of breath from Richie, leaning in close beside me, but neither of us looked up. The skeptic posted a smiley rolling its eyes; someone else posted one tapping its temple; someone else told Pat to take the blue ones before the red ones. Trap Guy told them all to back off:
Pat was gone. Over the next few days there was some banter about Trap Guy going over to Ireland to catch this thing himself, some semi-sympathetic speculation about the state of Pat’s mind and his marriage (
Two weeks later, on the twenty-second of September, Pat was back and he was in much worse shape.
I had a sudden wild flood of nostalgia for just three days earlier, that first walk-through of the house, when I had thought Pat was some loser stashing drugs in his walls and Dina was safely making sandwiches for suits. If you’re good at this job, and I am, then every step in a murder case moves you in one direction: towards order. We get thrown shards of senseless wreckage, and we piece them together until we can lift the picture out of the darkness and hold it up to the white light of day, solid, complete, clear. Under all the paperwork and the politics, this is the job; this is its cool shining heart that I love with every fiber of mine. This case was different. It was running backwards, dragging us with it on some ferocious ebb tide. Every step washed us deeper in black chaos, wrapped us tighter in tendrils of crazy and pulled us downwards.
Dr. Dolittle and Kieran the techie were having a wonderful time-insanity always seems like a great big adventure when all you have to do is dabble a fingertip here and there, gawk at the mess, wash off the residue in your nice safe sane home and then go to the pub and tell your friends the cool story. I was having a lot less fun than they were. It slid into my mind, with a quick pinch of unease, that Dina might have had something almost like a point about this case, even if it wasn’t in the way she thought.
Most of the hunters had given up on Pat and his saga-more head-tapping smileys, someone wanting to know whether it was a full moon over in Ireland. A few of them started taking the piss:
Trap Guy was still trying to be reassuring.
At 4:45 the next morning Pat said,
And that was the end of that. The regulars played “What’s in Pat-the-lad’s attic?” for a while-pictures of Sasquatch, leprechauns, Ashton Kutcher, the inevitable Rickroll. When they got bored, the thread sank.
Richie leaned back from the computer, rubbing a crick out of his neck, and glanced at me sideways. I said, “So.”
“Yeah.”
“What do you make of that?”
He chewed his knuckle and stared at the screen, but he wasn’t reading; he was thinking hard. After a moment he took a long breath. “What I make of that,” he said, “is that Pat had lost it. Doesn’t even matter any more whether there actually was something in his gaff or not. Either way, he was well off the rails.”
His voice was simple and grave, almost sad. I said, “He was under a lot of stress. That’s not necessarily the same thing.”
I was playing devil’s advocate; underneath, I knew. Richie shook his head. “No, man. No. That there”-he flicked the edge of my monitor with a fingernail-“that’s not the same guy from this summer. Back in July, on that home- and-garden board, Pat’s all about protecting Jenny and the kids. By the time he gets to this stuff here, he doesn’t give a damn if Jenny’s scared, doesn’t give a damn if this yoke can get at the kids, as long as he gets his hands on it. And then he’s going to leave it in a trap-a trap he picked specifically to hurt it as much as possible-and he’s going to watch it take its time dying. I don’t know what the doctors would call it, but he’s not OK, man. He’s not.”
The words rang like an echo in my head. It took me a moment to remember why: I had said them to Richie, just two nights before, about Conor Brennan. My eyes wouldn’t focus; the monitor looked off-kilter, like a dense lump of dead weight sending the case rocking at dangerous angles. “No,” I said. “I know.” I took a swig of water; the cold helped, but it left a foul, rusty aftertaste on my tongue. “You need to bear in mind, though, that that doesn’t necessarily make him a murderer. There’s nothing in there about hurting his wife or children, and plenty about how much he loves them. That’s why he’s so set on getting his hands on the animal: he thinks that’s the only way to save his family.”
Richie said, “‘It’s my job to take care of her.’ That’s what he said, on that home-and-garden board. If he felt like he couldn’t do that any more…”
“‘What the fuck do I do now?’” I knew what came next. The thought rolled through my stomach with a dull heave, as if the water had been tainted. I closed my browser and watched the screen flash to a bland, innocuous blue. “Finish your phone calls later. We need to talk to Jenny Spain.”
She was alone. The room felt almost summery: the day was bright, and someone had opened the window a crack, so that a breeze toyed with the blinds and the fug of disinfectant had dissipated to a faint clean tang. Jenny was propped up on pillows, staring at the shifting pattern of sun and shadow on the wall, hands loose and unmoving on the blue blanket. With no makeup she looked younger and plainer than she had in the wedding photos, and somehow less nondescript, now that the little quirks showed-a beauty spot on the unbandaged cheek, an irregular top lip that made her look ready to smile. It wasn’t a remarkable face in any way, but it had a clean-lined
