“Read it,” Sam said. His voice sounded raw at the edges and his face was white, white as it had been that first day at the crime scene. “You read that letter—I’ll give you a copy, if Mackey won’t. That fella Chad is bloody devastated. Four and a half years, it’s been, and he hasn’t gone out with another girl. He’ll probably never trust a woman again. How could he? He woke up one morning with his whole life in bits around him. Everything he dreamed about, gone up in smoke.”
“Unless you want that super of yours in here,” Frank said silkily, “I’d keep it down.”
Sam didn’t even hear him. “And don’t forget, she didn’t fall into North Carolina out of the sky. She was somewhere else before that, and for all we know somewhere else before that. Somewhere out there, there’s more people—God only knows how many—who’ll never be able to stop wondering where she is, whether she’s in a shallow grave in a dozen pieces, whether she went off the rails and ended up on the streets, whether she just never gave a damn about them to start with, what the hell happened to blow up their lives. All of them were on this girl’s side, and look what it did to them. Everyone who’s been on her side has ended up fucked, Cassie, everyone, and you’re going the same way.”
“I’m fine, Sam,” I said. His voice rolled over me like the fine edge of dawn haze, barely there, barely real.
“Let me ask you this. Your last serious boyfriend was just before you first went undercover, am I right? Aidan something?”
"Yeah,” I said. “Aidan O’Donovan.” He was good news, Aidan: smart, high octane, going places, an offbeat sense of humor that could make me laugh no matter how crap my day had been. I hadn’t thought about him in a long time.
“What happened to him?”
“We broke up,” I said. “While I was under.” For a second I saw Aidan’s eyes, the evening he dumped me. I was in a hurry, had to get back to my flat in time for a late-night meeting with the speed-bunny who ended up stabbing me a few months later. Aidan waited with me at my bus stop and when I looked down at him from the top deck of the bus, I think he might have been crying.
“Because you were under. Because that’s what happens.” Sam spun round to Frank: “What about you, Mackey? Have you got a wife? A girlfriend? Anything?”
“Are you asking me out?” Frank inquired. His voice sounded amused, but his eyes had narrowed. “Because I should warn you, I’m not a cheap date.”
“That’s a no. And that’s what I figured.” Sam whipped round to me again: “Just three weeks, Cassie, and look what’s happening to us. Is this what you want? What do you think happens to us if you head off for a year to do this fucked-up joke of an idea?”
“Let’s try this,” Frank said softly, very still against the wall. “You decide if there’s a problem on your side of the investigation, and I’ll decide if there’s a problem on mine. Is that OK with you?”
The look in his eyes had sent superintendents and drug lords scuttling for cover, but Sam didn’t even seem to notice it. “No, it’s not bloody OK. Your side of this investigation is a fucking disaster area, and if you can’t see that, then thank Jesus I can. I’ve got a suspect in that room, whether he’s our fella or not, and I found him through police work. What have you got? Three weeks of this insane bloody carry-on, all for nothing. And instead of cutting our losses, you’re trying to force us to up the ante and do something even more insane—”
“I’m not forcing you to do anything. I’m asking Cassie—who’s on this investigation as my undercover, remember, not your Murder detective— whether she’d be willing to take her assignment a step further.”
Long summer afternoons on the grass, the hum of bees and the lazy creak of the swing seat. Kneeling in the herb garden picking our harvest, soft rain and leaf-smoke in the air, scent of bruised rosemary and lavender on my hands. Wrapping Christmas presents on Lexie’s bedroom floor, snow falling past my window, while Rafe played carols on the piano and Abby harmonized from her room and the smell of gingerbread curled under my door.
Sam’s eyes and Frank’s on me, unblinking. Both of them had shut up; the silence in the room was sudden and deep and peaceful. “Sure,” I said. “Why not?”
Naylor had moved on to “Avondale” and down the corridor Quigley was being aggrieved about something. I thought of me and Rob watching suspects from this observation room, laughing shoulder to shoulder along the corridor, disintegrating like a meteor in Operation Vestal’s poison air, crashing and burning, and I felt nothing at all, nothing except the walls opening up and falling away around me, light as petals. Sam’s eyes were huge and dark as if I had hit him, and Frank was watching me in a way that made me think if I had any sense I’d be scared, but all I could feel was every muscle loosening like I was eight years old and cartwheeling myself dizzy on some green hillside, like I could dive a thousand miles through cool blue water without once needing to breathe. I had been right: freedom smelled like ozone and thunderstorms and gunpowder all at once, like snow and bonfires and cut grass, it tasted like seawater and oranges.