*
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.”