When you’re too close to people, when you spend too much time with them and love them too dearly, sometimes you can’t see them. Unless Daniel was bluffing, he had made one last mistake, the same one he had been making all along. He was seeing the other four not as they were but as they should have been, could have been in some softer-edged and warmer world. He had missed the stark fact that Abby and Rafe and Justin were already disintegrating, they were running on empty; it stared him in the face every day, it passed him on the stairs like a cold breath and slipped into the car with us in the mornings and sat dark and hunched between us at the dinner table, but he had never once seen it. And he had missed the possibility that Lexie had had secret weapons of her own, and that she had willed them to me. He knew his world was falling apart, but somehow he was still seeing the inhabitants untouched amid the wreckage: five faces against drifting snow on a day in December, cool and luminous and pristine, timeless. It was the first time in all those weeks that I remembered he was much younger than me.
“Maybe not,” I said. “But I’ve got to try.”
Daniel leaned his head back against the stone of the wall and sighed. All of a sudden, he looked terribly tired. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I suppose you do.”
“It’s your call,” I said. “You can tell me what happened right now, while I’m not wired: I’ll be gone by the time the others get home, and if it comes to arrests it’ll be your word against mine. Or I can stay here, and you can take the chance that I’ll get something on tape.”
He ran a hand over his face and straightened up, with an effort. “I’m perfectly aware, you know,” he said, glancing at his cigarette as if he had forgotten he was holding it, “that a return to normality may not be possible for us, at this point. I’m aware, in fact, that our entire plan was probably unfeasible right from the start. But, like you, we have no choice but to try.”
He dropped the smoke on the flagstones and put it out with the toe of his shoe. That frozen detachment was starting to slip into place over his face, the formal mask he used with outsiders, and there was a crisp note of finality in his voice. I was losing him. As long as we were talking like this, I had a chance, no matter how small; but any second now he was going to get up and go back indoors, and that would be the end of that.
If I had thought it would work, I would have got down on my knees on the flagstones and begged him to stay. But this was Daniel; my only chance was logic, cold hard reason. “Look,” I said, keeping my voice even, “you’re raising the stakes a whole lot higher than they need to be. If I get something on tape, then, depending what it is, it could mean jail time for all four of you-one on murder, and three on accessory or even conspiracy. Then what’s left? What have you got to come back to? Given the way Glenskehy feels about you, what are the odds that the house will even be standing when you get out?”
“We’ll have to take that chance.”
“If you tell me what happened, I’ll fight your corner all the way. You’ve got my word.” Daniel would have had every right to give me a sardonic look for that, but he didn’t. He was watching me with what appeared to be mild, polite interest. “Three of you can walk away from this, and the fourth can face manslaughter charges instead of murder. There wasn’t any premeditation here: this happened during an argument, nobody wanted Lexie to die, and I can vouch for the fact that all of you cared about her and that whoever stabbed her was under extreme emotional duress. Manslaughter gets maybe five years, maybe even less. Then it’s over, whoever it is gets out, and you can all four put this whole thing behind you and go back to normal.”
“My knowledge of the law is patchy,” Daniel said, leaning over to pick up his glass, “but as far as I know-and correct me if I’m wrong-nothing said by a suspect during questioning is admissible in evidence unless the suspect has been cautioned to that effect. Out of curiosity, how are you planning to administer a caution to three people who have no idea that you’re a police officer?” He rinsed out the glass again and held it up to the light, squinting, to check that it was clean.
“I’m not,” I said. “I don’t need to. Whatever I get on tape was never going to be admissible in court, but it can be used to get an arrest warrant and it can be used in a formal interview. How long do you think Justin, for example, will hold out if he’s arrested at two in the morning and questioned by Frank Mackey for twenty-four hours, with a tape of him describing Lexie’s murder playing in the background?”
“An interesting question,” Daniel said. He tightened the cap on the whiskey bottle, placed it carefully on the bench beside the glass.
My heart was going like hoofbeats. “Never go all in on a bad hand,” I said, “unless you’re absolutely positive you’re a stronger player than your opponent. How sure are you?”
