Richie’s mouth was starting to set into a tough line, which was what I wanted to see. “I have control. Sir. Cooper got me off guard, is all.”
“Then don’t be off guard.”
He bit down on the inside of his cheek. “Yeah. Fair enough. It won’t happen again.”
“I didn’t think it would.” I gave him a quick clap on the shoulder. “Focus on the positive here, Richie. There’s a decent chance that this is the worst way you’ll ever spend a morning, and you’re still standing. And if it only takes you till your third week on the job to find out that you’re not Superboy, you’re a lucky man.”
“Maybe.”
“Believe me. You’ve got the rest of your career to bring yourself into line with your goals. That’s a gift, my friend. Don’t throw it away.”
The day’s worth of damage was starting to roll into the hospital: a guy in overalls pressing a blood-soaked cloth over his hand, a girl with a thin, strained face carrying a dazed-looking toddler. Cooper’s clock was ticking, but this needed to come from Richie, not from me.
He said, “Am I never going to live this down in the squad, no?”
“Don’t worry about that. I’m on it.”
He looked at me full face, for the first time since I’d got out there. “I don’t want you watching out for me. I’m not a kid. I can fight my own battles.”
I said, “You’re my partner. It’s my job to fight them with you.”
That took him by surprise. I watched something change in his face as it sank in. After a moment he nodded. He said, “Can I still . . . ? I mean, will Dr. Cooper let me back in?”
I checked my watch. “If we move fast, he will.”
“Right,” Richie said. He blew out a long breath, ran his hands over his hair and stood up. “Let’s go.”
“Good on you. And Richie?”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t let this get to you. This is a blip. You’ve got everything it takes to be a Murder D.”
He nodded. “I’m going to give it my best shot, anyway. Thanks, Detective Kennedy. Thank you.” Then he tugged his tie straight and the two of us headed back into the hospital, side by side.
*
Richie made it through Jack’s post-mortem. It was a bad one: Cooper took his time, he made sure we got an eyeful of every detail, and if Richie had glanced away once he would have been toast. He didn’t. He watched steadily, not twitching, barely even blinking. Jack had been healthy, well-nourished, big for his age; active, judging by all the scabs on his knees and elbows. He had eaten cottage pie and fruit salad around the same time as Emma. Residue behind his ears said he had had a bath, wiggled too hard for the shampoo to be rinsed away properly. Then he had gone to bed, and deep in the night someone had killed him—presumably by suffocating him with a pillow, but this time there was no way to be sure. He had no defensive injuries, but Cooper made sure to point out that that meant nothing: he could have slipped over the line in his sleep, or he could have screamed his last seconds away into the pillow that stopped him fighting. Richie’s face had sunk in around the mouth and nose, like he had lost ten pounds since we walked into that morgue.
When we got out it was lunchtime, not that either of us felt like eating. The mist had burned off, but it was still dark as dusk; the sky was heavy with cold clouds, and on the horizon the hills were a smoky, sullen green. Hospital traffic had picked up: people going in and out, an ambulance unloading a young guy in motorcycle leathers with one leg at a bad angle, a clutch of girls in scrubs helpless with laughter over something on one of their phones. I said, “You made it. Well done, Detective.”
Richie made a hoarse sound halfway between a cough and a retch, and I whipped my coat out of his way, but he wiped a hand over his mouth and pulled it together. “Just about. Yeah.”
I said, “You’re thinking that, next time you get a chance at some sleep, you’ll need a couple of shots of straight whiskey first. Don’t do it. The last thing you want is to have dreams and not be able to wake up.”
“Jesus,” Richie said softly, not to me.
“Keep your eye on the prize. The day our boy goes down for life, it’ll be the icing on the cake, knowing you ticked every box along the way.”
“That’s if we get him. If we don’t . . .”
“No ifs, my friend. That’s not how I roll. He’s ours.”
Richie was still looking at nothing. I made myself comfortable on the wall again and pulled out my mobile, to give him a chance to take a few deep breaths. “Let’s get ourselves updated,” I said, when the phone was ringing. “See what’s been going down in the real world,” and he woke up and came over to sit beside me.
I checked in with headquarters first: O’Kelly was going to want a full update and a chance to tell me to stop fucking about and catch someone, both of which I was happy to give him, and I wanted updates of my own. The searchers had turned up a small stash of hash, a woman’s razor and a cake tin. The sub-aqua team had found a badly rusted bicycle and a pile of building rubble; they were still going, but the currents were strong enough that they didn’t hold out much hope of anything smaller having stayed put for more than an hour or two. Bernadette had assigned us an incident room—one of the good ones, with plenty of desks and a decent-sized whiteboard and a working DVD-cum-VCR player, so someone could watch CCTV footage and the Spains’ home movies—and a couple of the floaters were setting it up, covering the walls with crime-scene shots, maps, lists, organizing a roster for the tip line. The rest were out in the field, starting the long process of talking to anyone whose path had ever crossed the Spains’. One of them had tracked down Jack’s friends from preschool: most of them hadn’t heard from the Spains since June, when the school closed for the summer. One mother said Jack had come over a couple of times since then, to play with her son, but sometime in August Jenny had stopped returning her calls. The woman had added something about that not being like Jenny at all.
“So,” I said, as I hung up. “One of the sisters is a liar: Fiona or Jenny, take your pick. Well spotted. And starting this summer, Jenny was being odd about Jack’s little friends. That’ll need explaining.”
Richie was looking healthier, now that he had something to concentrate on. “Maybe your woman did something that pissed Jenny off. Simple as.”
“Or maybe Jenny was just embarrassed to admit they’d had to pull Jack out of preschool. But there could have been something else bothering her. Maybe this woman’s husband was a little too friendly, or maybe one of the employees at the preschool had done something that scared Jack, and Jenny wasn’t sure what to do about it . . . We need to find out, either way. Remember Rule Number Two, or whatever it was: odd behavior is a present, just for us.”
I was dialing my message minder when the mobile rang. It was the computer whiz, Kieran or whatever, and he was talking before I got my name out. “So I’ve been trying to recover the browser history, see what was such a big deal that someone wanted it gone. So far, I’ve gotta be honest with you, it’s been kind of disappointing.”
“Hold on,” I said. No one was within earshot; I put the phone on speaker. “Go.”
“I’ve got a handful of URLs or partial URLs, but we’re talking eBay, we’re talking some mommies-and-kiddies board, we’re talking a couple of sports boards and a home-and-garden forum and some site that sells women’s underwear. Which was fun for me, but not a lot of help to you. I was expecting, I don’t know, like a smuggling operation or a dogfighting ring or something. I can’t see any reason why your dude would want to wipe the vic’s bra size.”
He sounded intrigued, more than disappointed. I said, “Her bra size, maybe not. The forums are a different story. Any sign of the Spains having problems out in cyberspace? Anyone they pissed off, anyone who was giving them hassle?”
“How would I know? Even when I’ve got a hit on a site, it’s not like I can check what they did on there. Each forum’s got like a few thousand members, minimum. Even if we assume your vics were members, not just lurkers, I don’t know who I’m supposed to be looking at.”