“OK, then,” Frank said, settling down. “I’ve got a little pressie for you.” There was the edge of a grin in there: he’d saved up something good for after the lecture. "I’ve been tracking down all your KAs from our first Lexie Madison Extravaganza. Remember a girl called Victoria Harding?”
I bit off a piece of surgical tape. “Should I?”
"Tallish, slim, long blond hair? Talks a hundred an hour? Doesn’t blink?”
“Oh God,” I said, taping the bandage down. “Sticky Vicky. There’s a blast from the past.” Sticky Vicky was in UCD with me, studying something nonspecific. She had glassy blue eyes, a lot of matching accessories and a frantic, limitless ability to octopus herself onto anyone who might be useful, mainly rich boys and party girls. For some reason she had decided I was cool enough to be worth it, or maybe she was just hoping for free drugs.
“The very one. When did you last talk to her?”
I locked my bag and shoved it under the bed, trying to think back; Vicky wasn’t the type that leaves a lasting impression. “Maybe a few days before I got pulled out? I’ve seen her around town once or twice since, but I always dodged.”
“That’s funny,” Frank said, with that wolfish grin spreading through his voice, “because she’s talked to you a lot more recently than that. In fact, you and she had a nice long chat in early January of 2002—she knows the date because she’d just been to the winter sales and bought some kind of fancy designer coat, which she showed to you. Apparently it involved, and I quote, ‘the absolute ultimate taupe suede,’ whatever class of animal a taupe may be. Ringing any bells?”
“No,” I said. My heart was going slow and hard; I could feel it right down to the soles of my feet. “That wasn’t me.”
“I figured it might not be. Vicky remembers the conversation vividly, though, almost word for word—the girl’s got a memory like a steel trap, she’ll make a dream witness if it ever comes to that. Want to hear what you talked about?”
Vicky always did have that kind of mind: since there was basically no activity going on inside her head, conversations went in there and came back out virtually untouched. It was one of the main reasons I’d spent any time with her. “Refresh my memory,” I said.
“You ran into each other on Grafton Street. According to her, you were ‘totally spacey,’ didn’t remember her at first, weren’t sure when you’d last seen each other. You claimed to have a foul hangover, but she put it down to that awful nervous breakdown she’d heard about.” Frank was enjoying this: his voice had a fast, focused, predator-on-the-move rhythm. I was having a lot less fun than he was. I had known all this already, only the specifics had been missing, and being right wasn’t as satisfying as you might think. “Once you managed to place her, though, you were very friendly. You even suggested going for a coffee, to catch up. Whoever our girl was, she had some nerve.”
“Yeah,” I said. I realized I was crouched like a sprinter, ready to leap. Lexie’s bedroom felt mocking and tricky around me, humming with secret drawers and fake floorboards and spring traps. “She had that, all right.”
“You went to the café in Brown Thomas, she showed you her fashion finds and you both played Do You Remember for a while. You, amazingly enough, were pretty quiet. But get this: at one point Vicky asked you whether you were in Trinity these days. Apparently, not long before you had your nervous breakdown, you’d told her you were sick of UCD. You were thinking of transferring somewhere else, maybe Trinity, maybe abroad. Sound familiar?”
“Yeah,” I said. I sat down, carefully, on Lexie’s bed. “Yeah, it does.”
It had been getting towards the end of term, and Frank hadn’t told me whether the operation was going to continue after the summer; I was setting up an exit, in case I needed one. The other point of Vicky: you could always rely on her to get gossip all round college in no time flat.
My head was spinning, strange-shaped things rearranging themselves and falling into new places with soft little clicks. The coincidence of Trinity—this girl heading straight for my old college, picking up where I had left off—had given me the creeps all along, but this was almost worse. The only coincidence was two girls running into each other, in a small city, and Sticky Vicky spends most of her time hanging around town looking for useful people to run into anyway. Lexie hadn’t ended up in Trinity by chance, or by some dark magnetic pull that had her shadowing me, elbowing her way into my corners. I had suggested it to her. We had worked together seamlessly, she and I. I had drawn her to this house, this life, every bit as neatly and surely as she had drawn me.
Frank was still going. “Our girl said no, she wasn’t in college at the moment, she’d been traveling. She was vague about where—Vicky assumed she’d been in the funny farm. But here’s the good part: Vicky figured it was a funny farm in America, or maybe Canada. Partly that’s because she remembers your imaginary family was living in Canada, but mostly it’s because, somewhere between your time in UCD and that day on Grafton Street, you’d picked up a fairly serious tinge of American accent. So not only do we know how this girl got hold of the Lexie Madison ID, and when, but we’ve got a pretty good idea of where to start looking for her. I think we may owe Sticky Vicky a cocktail or two.”
“Sooner you than me,” I said. I knew my voice sounded weird, but Frank was too hyped-up to notice.
“I’ve put in a call to the FBI boys, and I’m about to e-mail them over prints and photos. There’s a good chance our girl was on the run in one way or another, so they might turn up something.”
Lexie’s face watched me warily, in triplicate, from the dressing-table mirror. “Keep me updated, OK?” I said. “Anything you get.”
“Will do. Want to talk to your fella? He’s here.”
Sam and Frank sharing an incident room. Jesus. “I’ll call him later,” I said.
The deep murmur of Sam’s voice in the background, and for a split second out of nowhere I wanted to talk to him so badly it almost doubled me over. “He says he’s got through your last six months in Murder,” Frank told me, “and all the people you might’ve pissed off are out, one way or another. He’ll keep working backwards and keep you up to speed.”
In other words, this had nothing to do with Operation Vestal. God; Sam. Secondhand and at a distance, he was trying to reassure me: he was quietly, doggedly going after the only threat that he understood. I wondered how much he’d slept, the night before. “Thanks,” I said. “Tell him thanks, Frank. Tell him I’ll talk to him soon.”
I needed to get outdoors—partly because of eyeball overload, all those strange dusty objects, and partly because the house was starting to do things to the back of my neck; it made the air around me feel too intimate and too knowing, like an eyebrow flick from someone you never could fool. I hit the fridge, made myself a turkey sandwich—this gang believed in good mustard—and a jam sandwich and a thermos of coffee, and took them on a long walk. Sometime very soon, I was going to be navigating Glenskehy in the dark, quite possibly with input from a killer who knew the area like the back of his hand. I figured it might be a good idea to get my bearings.