It had been getting towards the end of term, and Frank hadn’t told me whether the operation was going to continue after the summer; I was setting up an exit, in case I needed one. The other point of Vicky: you could always rely on her to get gossip all round college in no time flat.
My head was spinning, strange-shaped things rearranging themselves and falling into new places with soft little clicks. The coincidence of Trinity-this girl heading straight for my old college, picking up where I had left off-had given me the creeps all along, but this was almost worse. The only coincidence was two girls running into each other, in a small city, and Sticky Vicky spends most of her time hanging around town looking for useful people to run into anyway. Lexie hadn’t ended up in Trinity by chance, or by some dark magnetic pull that had her shadowing me, elbowing her way into my corners. I had suggested it to her. We had worked together seamlessly, she and I. I had drawn her to this house, this life, every bit as neatly and surely as she had drawn me.
Frank was still going. “Our girl said no, she wasn’t in college at the moment, she’d been traveling. She was vague about where-Vicky assumed she’d been in the funny farm. But here’s the good part: Vicky figured it was a funny farm in America, or maybe Canada. Partly that’s because she remembers your imaginary family was living in Canada, but mostly it’s because, somewhere between your time in UCD and that day on Grafton Street, you’d picked up a fairly serious tinge of American accent. So not only do we know how this girl got hold of the Lexie Madison ID, and when, but we’ve got a pretty good idea of where to start looking for her. I think we may owe Sticky Vicky a cocktail or two.”
“Sooner you than me,” I said. I knew my voice sounded weird, but Frank was too hyped-up to notice.
“I’ve put in a call to the FBI boys, and I’m about to e-mail them over prints and photos. There’s a good chance our girl was on the run in one way or another, so they might turn up something.”
Lexie’s face watched me warily, in triplicate, from the dressing-table mirror. “Keep me updated, OK?” I said. “Anything you get.”
“Will do. Want to talk to your fella? He’s here.”
Sam and Frank sharing an incident room. Jesus. “I’ll call him later,” I said.
The deep murmur of Sam’s voice in the background, and for a split second out of nowhere I wanted to talk to him so badly it almost doubled me over. “He says he’s got through your last six months in Murder,” Frank told me, “and all the people you might’ve pissed off are out, one way or another. He’ll keep working backwards and keep you up to speed.”
In other words, this had nothing to do with Operation Vestal. God; Sam. Secondhand and at a distance, he was trying to reassure me: he was quietly, doggedly going after the only threat that he understood. I wondered how much he’d slept, the night before. “Thanks,” I said. “Tell him thanks, Frank. Tell him I’ll talk to him soon.”
I needed to get outdoors-partly because of eyeball overload, all those strange dusty objects, and partly because the house was starting to do things to the back of my neck; it made the air around me feel too intimate and too knowing, like an eyebrow flick from someone you never could fool. I hit the fridge, made myself a turkey sandwich-this gang believed in good mustard-and a jam sandwich and a thermos of coffee, and took them on a long walk. Sometime very soon, I was going to be navigating Glenskehy in the dark, quite possibly with input from a killer who knew the area like the back of his hand. I figured it might be a good idea to get my bearings.
The place was a maze, dozens of single-file lanes twisting their way among hedges and fields and woods from nowhere much to nowhere much else, but it turned out I knew my way around better than I’d expected; I only got lost twice. I was starting to appreciate Frank on a whole new level. When I got hungry I sat on a wall and had my coffee and sandwiches, looking out over the mountainsides and giving the mental finger to the DV squad room and Maher and his halitosis problem. It was a sunny, snappy day, hazy clouds high in a cool blue sky, but I hadn’t seen a single human being, anywhere along the way. Somewhere far off a dog was barking and someone was whistling to him, but that was it. I was developing a theory that Glenskehy had been wiped out by a millennium death ray and no one had noticed.
