“Not precisely,” said Horowitz.
“Oh Jesus,” said Julie. “She’s dead, isn’t she? She’s dead, and I didn’t do anything to stop it.”
A weird echo in my mind. The voice: I’m dead, and you didn’t do anything to stop it. I put a hand out to steady myself, caught hold of the sideboard in the hall.
“Cassandra?” said Horowitz. “You okay?”
“No one is okay!” said Julie. “I went into the house,” she continued; a total non sequitur, her mind jumping all over the place, to stop landing on the image of a dead Paris, I guessed. “The door was open. I ran in. The place was empty. Repossessed or something, you know? Bare walls. People had written things on the surfaces. ‘**** the bankers.’ ‘Foreclose my ass.’ Stuff like that. It stank of piss and there were empty bottles everywhere, condom wrappers. But no Paris. No Paris! And I watched her go in there, like half an hour before.”
Horowitz had taken out a notebook from his pocket. “Did you hear anything? Car engines, anything like that?”
“I don’t know!”
“Did the place have a garage? A lot of those properties, they have a garage that can be accessed from the kitchen. At the side of the house.”
Julie thought for a moment. “Yeah. Yeah, I think so.”
“Is it possible someone had a car in there? That they left when you came in the door?”
Silence.
Then:
“Yeah. Yeah, it’s possible. I mean, I was shouting. Calling for Paris, you know? I wasn’t really listening. I was looking. For her. Oh *****. Oh Jesus. You think I missed something because of that? You think I—”
“I think you were looking for your friend, to try to help her,” said Horowitz softly.
Julie sat down abruptly on one of the living room chairs. Her movements, her speech, were abrupt—like someone had cut up footage of her, taken out the slow transitions, so that she jumped around the room.
“So after that, that was when you called the police?” said Horowitz.
Julie sighed. “Yeah. I mean, Paris had said not to. But I was freaked. The house being empty, you know? It was like a horror movie. So I dialed 911, and this cop car turned up like one minute later. It must have been close by, I guess.”
“This was …” He consulted his notebook. “Officer O’Grady.”
A shrug. “Maybe. He said his name was Brian. He came with his lights flashing, the siren, everything, you know? He was going fast and he braked hard; the tires squealed. It was ****** up. It was like a movie, and I couldn’t turn it off. And you know the stupidest thing? You know how much of an ******* I am?”
“What?” said Horowitz. His tone pretty gentle.
“I had this song going around and around in my head! You know, the old hip-hop song? “Woop, woop, it’s the sound of da police … woop, woop, it’s the sound of da police.” Someone was probably slitting my friend’s throat at that very moment, and I was sitting in my car like a moron, watching this cop turn up and with a random ******* hip-hop song stuck on repeat in my head.” She hung her head and sobbed.
“It’s not your fault,” I said. I knew all about unwanted sounds in the head.
“The mind responds to stress in unusual ways,” said Horowitz. “I’ve seen people laughing uncontrollably when they find out their kid is dead.”
“Mm,” said Julie, noncommittal.
“And what happened after the cop, I mean Officer O’Grady, turned up?”
“He spoke to me for a while and then ran into the house. He didn’t come out again, and after I’d sat there for like half an hour I figured he wasn’t coming out, so I drove home. Which is why you came here, right?”
“Right,” said Horowitz. “Like you, Officer O’Grady—Brian—found no one in the house and nothing suspicious. But we have a tech team over there now. If there are traces … if there’s anything there, they’ll find it.”
“Oh God,” said Julie.
I went and put my arm around her shoulder. She shook under my touch. “She didn’t even get to finish her cranes,” Julie said.
“What?” said Horowitz.
Julie was crying too much to explain; I filled him in about the thousand cranes.
“Oh, right,” he said, like it didn’t matter, when of course it did. I mean, it may not have been important for finding Paris. But it mattered to Paris.
She never got her wish.
“I think we need to take you in,” said Horowitz to Julie. “Get a proper witness statement. Cassandra, I can give you a lift home if you like.”
“Am I a suspect?” said Julie.
“No,” said Horowitz. “And a suspect in what? At the moment we have a girl who has gone missing. Admittedly a sex worker in a town where sex workers have been disappearing, which fits a pattern. But for all we know she’s run off to her parents in New York.”