It was the obvious thing to do, the only thing. You get burned, you get out, fast. And I had everything a girl could ask for. I had narrowed our suspects down to four; Sam and Frank would be well able to take it from there. I could get around the fact that this wasn’t on tape: disconnect the mike wire and claim it was accidental-Frank might not believe me, exactly, but he wouldn’t care-report back the bits of this conversation that suited me, bounce back home immaculate and triumphant and take a bow.
I never even considered doing it. “We do, yeah,” I said. “I can get out of here on a couple of hours’ notice without blowing my cover. I’m not going to, though. Not till I find out who killed Lexie, and why.”
Daniel turned his head and looked at me, and in that second I smelled danger, clear and cold as snow. Why not? I had invaded his home, his family, and I was trying to wreck them both for good. Either he or one of his own had already killed a woman for doing the same thing on a lesser scale. He was strong enough to do it and very possibly smart enough to get away with it, and I had left my gun in my bedroom. The trickle of water sang on at our feet and electricity fizzed through my back, down into the palms of my hands. I held his eyes and didn’t move, didn’t blink.
After a long moment his shoulders shifted, almost imperceptibly, and I saw his gaze turn inwards, abstracted. He had rejected that idea: he was moving towards some other plan, his mind clicking through options, sorting, classifying, connecting, faster than I could guess. “You won’t do it, you know,” he said. “You assume that my reluctance to hurt the others gives you an advantage-that, as they’ll continue to believe you’re Lexie, you have a chance at getting them to talk to you. But believe me, they’re all very well aware of what’s at stake. I’m not talking about the possibility of one or all of us going to jail; you have no evidence pointing towards any one of us in particular, no case against us either individually or collectively, or you’d have made your arrests long ago and this charade would never have been necessary. In fact, I’m willing to bet that, until a few minutes ago, you weren’t actually certain that your target was within Whitethorn House.”
“We kept all lines of inquiry open,” I said.
He nodded. “As things stand, jail is the least of our worries. But take the situation, for a moment, from the others’ point of view: assume that Lexie is alive and well and safely home again. If she were to find out what happened, it would mean the ruin of everything we’ve worked for. Suppose she were to learn that Rafe, to pick one of us at random, had stabbed her-had almost cost her her life. Do you think she could continue to share that life with him-without being afraid of him, without resenting him, without using this against him?”
“I thought you said she was incapable of thinking about the past,” I said.
“Well, this is in a slightly different league,” Daniel said, a little acidly. “He could hardly assume that she would dismiss this as if it were some spat over whose turn it was to buy milk. And even if she did, do you suppose he could look at her every day without seeing the constant risk she presented-the fact that at any moment, with one phone call to Mackey or O’Neill, she could send him to jail? This is Lexie, remember: she could make that call without realizing for a second the magnitude of that action. How could he treat her as he always has, tease her, argue with her, even disagree with her? And what about the rest of us, walking on eggshells, reading danger into every look and every word that passed between the two of them, always waiting for the tiniest misstep to detonate the land mine and blow everything to smithereens? How long do you think we’d last?”
His voice was very calm and even. Lazy curls of smoke were trickling from his cigarette, and he lifted his head to watch as they spread and wound upwards, through the fluttering bars of light. “We can survive the act itself,” he said. “It’s the shared knowledge of the act that would destroy us. This may sound odd, especially coming from an academic who prizes knowledge above almost anything, but read Genesis, or, even better, read the Jacobeans: they understood how too much knowledge can be lethal. Every time we were in the same room, it would be there among us like a bloody knife, and in the end it would slice us apart. And none of us will allow that to happen. Since the day you came into this house, we’ve put every drop of energy we have into preventing it, into restoring our lives to normality.” He smiled slightly, one eyebrow lifting. “So to speak. And telling Lexie who stabbed her would end any hope of that normality. Believe me, the others won’t do it.”
