13
I had known, from the moment Sam said he was planning chats with his three potential vandals, that there would be consequences. If Mr. Baby-killers was in there, he wouldn’t be one bit happy about being questioned by the cops, he would blame the whole thing on us, and there wasn’t a chance in hell he would let it lie. What I missed was how fast the strike would come, and how straight. I felt so safe in that house, I had forgotten that that in itself should have been my warning.
It took him just one day. We were in the sitting room, Saturday night, not long before midnight. Abby and I had been doing our nails with Lexie’s silver nail polish, sitting on the hearth rug, and were waving them around to dry them; Rafe and Daniel were balancing out the estrogen surge by cleaning Uncle Simon’s Webley. It had been soaking in a casserole dish of solvent for two days, out on the patio, and Rafe had decided it was good to go. He and Daniel had turned the table into their armory zone—tool kit, kitchen towels, rags—and were happily cleaning the gun with old toothbrushes: Daniel was going at the crust of dirt on the grips, while Rafe tackled the actual gun. Justin was stretched out on the sofa, muttering at his thesis notes and eating cold popcorn out of a bowl beside him. Someone had put Purcell on the record player, a peaceful overture in a minor key. The room smelled of solvent and rust, a tough, reassuring, familiar smell.
“You know,” Rafe said, putting down his toothbrush and examining the gun, “I think it’s actually in pretty good shape, under all the crap. There’s a decent chance it’ll work.” He reached across the table for the ammo box, slid a couple of bullets into place and clicked the cylinder home. “Russian roulette, anyone?”
“Don’t,” said Justin, with a shudder. “That’s horrible.”
“Here,” Daniel said, holding his hand out for the gun. “Don’t play with it.”
“I’m joking, for God’s sake,” Rafe said, passing it across. “I’m just checking that everything works. Tomorrow morning I’ll take it out on the patio and get us a rabbit for dinner.”
“No,” I said, snapping upright and glaring at him. “I like the rabbits. Leave them alone.”
“Why? All they do is make more rabbits and shite all over the lawn. The little bastards would be a lot more use in a lovely fricassee, or a nice tasty stew—”
“You’re disgusting. Didn’t you ever see Watership Down?”
“You can’t stick your fingers in your ears or you’ll ruin your manicure. I could cook you a bunny au vin that would—”
“You’re going to hell, you know that?”
“Oh, chill out, Lex, it’s not like he’ll do it,” said Abby, blowing on a thumbnail. “The rabbits come out around dawn. At dawn, Rafe doesn’t even count as alive.”
“I don’t see anything disgusting about shooting animals,” Daniel said, carefully breaking the gun open, “provided you eat what you kill. We’re predators, after all. In an ideal world, I’d love us to be completely self-sufficient—living off what we could grow and hunt, dependent on no one. In reality, of course, that’s unlikely to happen, and in any case I wouldn’t want to start with the rabbits. I’ve become fond of them. They go with the house.”
“See?” I said to Rafe.
“See what? Stop being such a baby. How many times have I seen you stuff your face with steak, or—”
I was on my feet and into a shooter’s brace, my hand grabbing at where my gun should have been, before I understood that I had heard a crash. There was a big jagged rock sitting on the hearth rug beside me and Abby, as if it had been there all along, surrounded by bright flecks of glass like ice crystals. Abby’s mouth was open in a startled little O and a wide cold wind swept in through the broken window, swelling the curtains.
Then Rafe sprang out of his chair and threw himself towards the kitchen. I was half a pace behind him, with Justin’s panicky wail—“Lexie, your stitches!”—in my ears. Somewhere Daniel was calling something, but I swung through the French doors after Rafe and as he leaped off the patio, hair flying, I heard the gate clang at the bottom of the garden.
The gate was still swinging crazily when we flung ourselves through it. In the lane Rafe froze, head up, one hand going back to clamp around my wrist: “Shhh.”
We listened, not breathing. I felt something loom up behind me and spun round, but it was Daniel, swift and silent as a big cat on the grass.
Wind in leaves; then off to our right, towards Glenskehy and not far away, the tiny crack of a twig.
The last of the light from the house vanished behind us and we were flying down the lane in darkness, leaves whipping under my fingers as I reached out a hand to the hedge to guide myself, a sudden burst of running feet up ahead and a harsh triumphant shout from Rafe beside me. They were fast, Rafe and Daniel, faster than I would have believed. Our breathing savage as a hunting pack’s in my ears, the hard beat of our feet and my pulse like war drums speeding me on; the moon waxed and waned as clouds skimmed past and I caught a glimpse of something black, only twenty or thirty yards ahead of us, hunched and grotesque in the strange white light and running hard. For a flash I saw Frank leaning over his desk, hands pressing his headphones on tighter, and I thought at him hard as a punch Don’t you dare, don’t you dare send in your goons, this is ours.
We swung round a kink in the lane, grabbing at the hedge for balance, and skidded to a stop at a crossroads. In the moonlight the little lanes stretched out in every direction, bare and equivocal, giving away nothing; piles of stones huddled in the fields like spellbound watchers.
“Where’s he gone?” Rafe’s voice was a cracking whisper; he whirled around, casting about like a hunting dog. “Where’s the bastard gone?”
“He can’t have got out of sight this fast,” Daniel murmured. “He’s nearby. He’s gone to ground.”
“Shit!” Rafe hissed. “Shit, that little fuck, that vile little— God, I’ll kill him—”
The moon was slipping away again; the guys were barely shadows on either side of me, and fading fast. “Torch?” I whispered, stretching to get my mouth close by Daniel’s ear, and saw the quick shake of his head against the sky.
Whoever this man was, he knew the hillsides like he knew his own hands. He could hide here all night if he wanted to, slip from cover to cover the way centuries of his rebel ancestors had done before him, nothing but narrow eyes watching among the leaves and then gone.
But he was cracking. That rock through the window straight at us, when he had to know we would come after him: his control was slipping, eroding to dust under Sam’s questioning and the constant hard rub of his own rage. He could hide forever if he wanted to, but that right there was the catch: he didn’t want to, not really.
Every detective, in all the world, knows that this is our best weapon: your heart’s desire. Now that thumbscrews and red-hot pincers are off the menu, there’s no way we can force anyone to confess to murder, lead us to the body, give up a loved one or rat out a crime lord, but still people do it all the time. They do it because there’s something they want more than safety: a clear conscience, a chance to brag, an end to the tension, a fresh start, you name it and we’ll find it. If we can just figure out what you want—secretly, hidden so deep you may never have glimpsed it yourself—and dangle it in front of you, you’ll give us anything we ask for in exchange.