He leaned back against the counter, took a mouthful of coffee and watched me. “Don’t let the IA boys rattle you.”
“This was a mess, Frank,” I said. “The media are going to be all over it, and the brass are going to want someone to take the fall.”
“For what? The shoot was textbook. The house is on Byrne: he was warned to look after it, he didn’t follow through. Everything else along the way, we’ve got the ultimate defense: it worked. We got our man, even if we didn’t get a chance to arrest him. Just as long as you don’t do anything stupid—anything else stupid—we should all be able to walk away from this.”
I sat down on the futon and found my smokes. I couldn’t tell whether he was reassuring me or threatening me, or maybe a little of both. “What about you?” I asked, carefully. “If you’ve got history with IA . . .”
Flick of an eyebrow. “Nice to know you care. I’ve also got leverage, if it comes down to that.”
That tape—me disobeying a direct order, telling him I wasn’t coming in—flashed between us, solid as if he had tossed it onto the table. It wouldn’t get him off the hook—you’re supposed to be able to control your squad—but it would drag me in there with him, and it might muddy the waters enough to let him wriggle away. In that moment I knew that if Frank wanted to pin this whole mess on me, blast me right out of my career, he could do it; and that he probably had every right.
I saw the tiny flash of amusement, in those bloodshot eyes: he knew what I was thinking. “Leverage,” I said.
“Don’t I always,” said Frank, and just for a second he sounded tired and old. “Listen, IA need to throw their weight around, makes them feel like they can get it up, but as of now, they’re not out to get you—or your Sammy, come to that. They’ll give me a fun few weeks, but we’ll all be fine in the end.”
The shot of anger startled me. Whether or not Frank decided to throw me to the wolves—and I knew nothing I could say would sway him one way or the other—fine was not the word I personally would have picked for anything about this situation. “Right,” I said. “That’s good to hear.”
“Then why the long face? As the bartender said to the horse.”
I almost threw the lighter at his head. “Jesus Christ, Frank! I killed Daniel. I lived under his roof, I sat next to him at his table, I ate his food”—I didn’t say, I kissed him—“and then I killed him. Every day for what should have been the rest of his life, he won’t be here, and it’ll be because of me. I went in there to catch a murderer, I spent years throwing my heart and soul into doing that, and now I’m—” I shut up because my voice was shaking.
“You know something?” Frank said, after a moment. “You’ve got a bad habit of taking too much credit for the stuff other people do around you.” He brought his mug over to the sofa and collapsed, legs spread wide. “Daniel March was no idiot. He knew exactly what he was doing, and he deliberately forced you into a position where you had absolutely no choice except to take him down. That wasn’t homicide, Cassie. It wasn’t even self-defense. That right there was suicide by cop.”
“I know,” I said. “I know that.”
“He knew he was cornered, he had no intention of going to prison—and I don’t blame him; can you see him making friends with the boys on the cell block? So he picked his way out and he went for it. I’ll give the guy this: he had guts. I underestimated him.”
“Frank,” I said. “Have you ever killed anyone?”
He reached for my smoke packet, watched the flame as he lit his cigarette one-handed. “Yesterday was a good shoot,” he said, when he’d put his lighter away. “It happened, it was no fun, in a few weeks it’ll be over. The end.”
I didn’t answer. Frank blew a long trail of smoke at the ceiling. “Look, you closed the case. If you had to shoot someone along the way, it might as well have been Daniel. I never liked the little fucker.”
I was in no mood to keep a lid on my temper, not with him. “Yeah, Frankie, I spotted that. Everyone within a mile of this case spotted that. And you know why you didn’t like him? Because he was exactly like you.”
“Well well well,” Frank drawled. There was an amused twist to his mouth, but his eyes were ice blue and unblinking and I couldn’t tell whether he was furious or not. “And here I almost forgot you’d studied the old psychology.”
“The spitting image, Frank.”
“Bullshit. That guy was wrong, Cassie. Remember what you said, in your profile? Prior criminal experience. Remember that?”
“What, Frank,” I said. I realized my feet had come out from under me and were braced, hard, on the floor. “What did you find on Daniel?”
Frank shook his head, one small ambiguous jerk, over his cigarette. “I didn’t need to find anything. I know when someone smells wrong, and so do you. There’s a line, Cassie. You and me, we live on one side of it. Even when we fuck up and wander over to the other side, we’ve got that line to keep us from getting lost. Daniel didn’t have it.”
He leaned over the coffee table to tap ash. “There’s a line,” he said. “Don’t ever forget there’s a line.”
There was a long silence. The window was starting to dim again. I wondered about Abby and Rafe and Justin, where they would spend tonight; whether John Naylor would sleep sprawled in moonlight on the ruins of Whitethorn House, the one-night king of all our wreckage. I knew what Frank would say: Not your problem, not any more.
“What I’d love to know,” Frank said after a while, and his tone had changed, “is when Daniel made you. Because he did, you know.” Fast glint of blue, as he glanced up at me. “From the way he talked, I’m pretty sure he knew you were wired—but that’s not what’s bothering me. We could have wired Lexie, if we’d had her; the wire wasn’t enough to tell him you were a cop. But when Daniel walked into that house yesterday, he knew for definite that you had a gun on you, and that you’d use it.” He settled into the sofa, one arm spread along the back, and drew on his smoke. “Any idea what gave you away?”
I shrugged. “I’d bet on the onions. I know we figured I’d saved that, but apparently Daniel played better poker than we thought.”
“No kidding,” said Frank. “And you’re sure that’s all it was? He didn’t have a problem with, for example, your taste in music?”
He knew; he knew about the Fauré. There was no way he could be certain, but all his instincts were telling him something was there. I made myself meet his eyes, look puzzled and a little rueful. “Nothing springs to mind.”
Curls of smoke hanging in the sunlight. “Right,” Frank said, at last. “Well. They say the devil’s in the details. There’s nothing you could have done about those onions—which means there’s nothing you could have done to prevent yourself getting burned. Right?”
“Right,” I said, and that at least came easy. “I did everything I could, Frank. I was Lexie Madison as hard as I knew how.”
“And if, just say, you’d figured out a couple of days ago that Daniel had made you, is there anything you could have done that might have made this end better?”
“No,” I said, and I knew that was true too. This day had begun years before, in Frank’s office, over burnt coffee and chocolate biscuits. By the time I tucked that timeline into my uniform shirt and walked back to the bus station, this day had been ready and waiting for us all. “I think this was the happiest ending we were ever going to get.”
He nodded. “Then you did your job. Leave it at that. You can’t blame yourself for the stuff other people do.”
I didn’t even try to explain to him what I was seeing, the fine spreading web through which we had all tugged one another to this place, the multiple innocences that make up guilt. I thought of Daniel with that unutterable sadness like a brand on his face, telling me, Lexie had no conception of action and consequence, and I felt that slim blade slide deeper between her and me, twisting.
“Which,” Frank said, “brings me to my reason for coming over here. I’ve got one more question left about this case, and I’ve got a funny feeling you might know the answer.” He glanced up from picking something out of his mug. “Did Daniel really stab our girl? Or was he just taking the rap, for some fucked-up reason all his own?”
Those level blue eyes, across the coffee table. “You heard what I heard,” I said. “He’s the only one who got specific; the other three never gave me a name. Are they saying it wasn’t him?”
“They’re saying sweet fuck-all. We’ve been going at them all today and most of last night, and we’ve yet to get a word out of them beyond ‘I want a glass of water.’ Justin did a fair bit of crying, and Rafe threw a chair when he found out he’d been nursing a viper in his bosom for the past month—we had to slap him in cuffs till he settled down—but that’s as far as the communication goes. They’re like bloody prisoners of war.”
Daniel’s finger pressed to his lips, his eyes moving among the others with an intensity I hadn’t understood, then. Even for this point beyond the farthest horizon of his own life, he had had a plan. And the other three, whether out of faith in him or out of habit or just because they had nothing else left to hold on to, were still doing what he had told them to do.
“One reason I ask,” Frank said, “is because the stories don’t quite match. Almost, but not quite. Daniel told you he happened to have a knife in his hand, because he was washing up; but on the tape, Rafe and Justin both describe Daniel using two hands in the struggle with Lexie. Before she got stabbed.”
“Maybe they’re confused,” I said. “It happened fast; you know what eye-witness accounts are worth. Or maybe Daniel was minimizing: trying to claim he just happened to have the knife, when actually he picked it up specifically to stab Lexie. We’ll probably never know exactly what happened.”
Frank drew on his cigarette, watching the tiny red glow. “As far as I can tell,” he said, “there’s only one person who was washing up, and who wasn’t doing something else with his hands between the point when the note came out and the point when Lexie got stabbed.”
“Daniel killed her,” I said, and it didn’t feel like a lie then and it doesn’t now. “I’m positive, Frank. He was telling the truth.”
Frank watched my face for a long minute, searching. Then: “OK,” he said, on a sigh. “I’ll take your word for it. I’m never going to think he was the type to snap like that, no plan, no organization; but hey, maybe we had less in common than you think. My money was on someone else from the start, but if everyone wants it to be Daniel . . .” A small backwards jerk of his head, like a shrug. “There’s not a lot I can do about it.”