*
The doctor outside Jenny’s room was fair and skinny, trying hard to make himself older with a middle-aged parting and the beginnings of a beard. Behind him, the uniform at the door—maybe because I was tired, everyone looked about twelve—took one look at me and Richie and snapped to attention, chin tucked in.
I held up my ID. “Detective Kennedy. Is she still awake?”
The doctor gave the ID a careful going-over, which was good. “She is, yeah. I doubt you’ll get a lot of time with her, though. She’s on powerful painkillers, and injuries on this scale are exhausting in themselves. I’d say she’ll be falling asleep soon.”
“She’s out of danger, though?”
He shrugged. “No guarantees. Her prognosis is brighter than it was a couple of hours ago, and we’re cautiously optimistic about her neurological function, but there’s still a massive risk of infection. We’ll have a better idea in a few days.”
“Has she said anything?”
“You know about the facial injury, don’t you? She has a hard time talking. She told one of the nurses she was thirsty. She asked me who I was. And she said, ‘It hurts,’ two or three times, before we upped the painkillers. That’s it.”
The uniform should have been in there with her, in case that changed, but I had told him to guard the door, and by God he was guarding it. I could have kicked myself for not using an actual detective with a functioning brain, instead of some pubescent drone. Richie asked, “Does she know? About her family?”
The doctor shook his head. “Not as far as I can tell. I’m guessing there’s a certain amount of retrograde amnesia. It’s common enough after a head injury; usually transient, but again, no guarantees.”
“And you didn’t tell her, no?”
“I thought you might want to do that yourselves. And she hasn’t asked. She . . . well, you’ll see what I mean. She’s not in great shape.”
He had been keeping his voice low, and on that his eyes slid over my shoulder. I had missed her, up until then: a woman, asleep in a hard plastic chair up against the corridor wall, with a big flowered purse clutched on her lap and her head canted back at a painful angle. She didn’t look twelve. She looked at least a hundred—white hair falling out of its bun, face swollen and discolored from crying and exhaustion—but she couldn’t have been over about seventy. I recognized her from the Spains’ photo albums: Jenny’s mother.
The floaters had taken a statement from her the day before. We would have to come back to her sooner or later, but at that moment there was more than enough agony waiting for us inside Jenny’s room, without stocking up in the corridor. “Thanks,” I said, a lot more quietly. “If anything changes, let us know.”
We gave our IDs to the drone, who examined them from every angle for about a week. Mrs. Rafferty shifted her feet and moaned in her sleep, and I almost shouldered the uniform out of our way, but luckily he picked that moment to decide we were legit. “Sir,” he said smartly, handing back the IDs and stepping away from the door, and then we were inside Jenny Spain’s room.
No one would ever have known her for the platinum girl shining in those wedding photos. Her eyes were closed, eyelids puffy and purple. Her hair, straggling on the pillow from under a wide white bandage, was stringy and darkened to mouse-brown by days without washing; someone had tried to get the blood out of it, but there were still matted clumps, strands sharpened into hard points. A pad of gauze, stuck down with sloppy strips of tape, covered her right cheek. Her hands, small and fine like Fiona’s, were slack on the bobbled pale-blue blanket, a thin tube running into a great mottled bruise; her nails were perfect, filed to delicate arcs and painted a soft pinkish-beige, except the two or three that had been ripped away down to the quick. More tubing ran from her nose up around her ears, snaked down her chest. All around her machines beeped, clear bags dripped, light flashed off metal.
Richie closed the door behind us, and her eyes opened.
She stared, dazed and dull-eyed, trying to figure out whether we were real. She was fathoms deep in the painkillers. “Mrs. Spain,” I said, gently, but she still flinched, hands jerking up to defend herself. “I’m Detective Michael Kennedy, and this is Detective Richard Curran. Would you be able to talk to us for a few minutes?”
Slowly Jenny’s eyes focused on mine. She whispered—it came out thick and clotted, through the damage and the bandage—“Something happened.”
“Yes. I’m afraid so.” I turned a chair to the side of the bed and sat down. Across from me, Richie did the same.
“What happened?”
I said, “You were attacked, in your home, two nights ago. You were seriously wounded, but the doctors have been taking good care of you, and they say you’re going to be fine. Can you remember anything about the attack?”
“Attack.” She was struggling to swim to the surface, through the vast weight of drugs bearing down on her mind. “No. How . . . what . . .” Then her eyes came alive, flaring incandescent blue with pure terror. “The babies. Pat.”
Every muscle in my body wanted to fling me out the door. I said, “I’m so sorry.”
“No. Are they—where—”
She was fighting to sit up. She was much too weak to do it, but not too weak to rip stitches trying. “I’m so sorry,” I said again. I cupped a hand around her shoulder and pressed down, as gently as I could. “There was nothing we could do.”
The moment after those words has a million shapes. I’ve seen people howl till their voices were scraped away, or freeze like they were hoping it would pass them over, prowl on to rip out someone else’s rib cage, if they just stayed still enough. I’ve held them back from smashing their faces off walls, trying to knock out the pain. Jenny Spain was beyond any of that. She had done all her defending two nights before; she had none left for this. She dropped back on the worn pillowcase and cried, steadily and silently, on and on.
Her face was red and contorted, but she didn’t move to cover it. Richie leaned over and put a hand on hers, the one without the IV line, and she gripped it till her knuckles whitened. Behind her a machine beeped, faintly and steadily. I focused on counting the beeps and wished to God I had brought water, gum, mints, anything that would let me swallow.
After a long time, the crying wore itself away and Jenny lay still, cloudy red eyes staring at the flaking paint on the wall. I said, “Mrs. Spain, we’re going to do everything we can.”
She didn’t look at me. That thick, ragged whisper: “Are you sure? Did you . . . see them yourself?”
“I’m afraid we’re sure.”
Richie said gently, “Your babies didn’t suffer, Mrs. Spain. They never knew what was happening.”
Her mouth started to convulse. I said quickly, before she could get lost in it again, “Mrs. Spain, can you tell us what you remember about that night?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know.”
“That’s OK. We understand. Could you take a moment and think back, see if anything comes to you?”
“I don’t . . . There’s nothing. I can’t . . . ”
She was tensing up, her hand tightening on Richie’s again. I said, “That’s fine. What’s the last thing you do remember?”