“That’s what I got from the mike feed. Which,” Frank said, “reminds me. What happened last night, after you went up to your room? I heard you talking, but somehow I had trouble catching the exact words.”
There was a different note in his voice, and not a good one. I stopped smoothing down the edges of the new bandage. “Nothing. Everyone said good night.”
“How sweet,” Frank said. “Very Waltons. I’m sorry I missed it. Where was your mike?”
“In my bag. The battery pack sticks into me when I sleep.”
“So sleep on your back. Your door doesn’t lock.”
“I put a chair in front of it.”
“Oh, well, then. That’s all the backup you need. Jesus, Cassie!” I could practically see him raking his free hand furiously through his hair, pacing.
“What’s the big deal, Frank? Last time I never even used the mike unless I was actually doing something interesting. Whether I talk in my sleep isn’t going to make or break this case.”
“Last time you weren’t living with suspects. These four may not be top of our list, but we haven’t eliminated them yet. Unless you’re in the shower, that mike stays on your body. You want to talk about last time? If your mike had been in your bag where we couldn’t hear you, you’d be dead. You’d have bled out before we could get to you.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I said. “Point taken.”
“Got it? On your body at all times. No fucking about.”
“Got it.”
“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.”
