The Likeness

“Which,” Frank said, “brings me to my reason for coming over here. I’ve got one more question left about this case, and I’ve got a funny feeling you might know the answer.” He glanced up from picking something out of his mug. “Did Daniel really stab our girl? Or was he just taking the rap, for some fucked-up reason all his own?”

Those level blue eyes, across the coffee table. “You heard what I heard,” I said. “He’s the only one who got specific; the other three never gave me a name. Are they saying it wasn’t him?”

“They’re saying sweet fuck-all. We’ve been going at them all today and most of last night, and we’ve yet to get a word out of them beyond ‘I want a glass of water.’ Justin did a fair bit of crying, and Rafe threw a chair when he found out he’d been nursing a viper in his bosom for the past month-we had to slap him in cuffs till he settled down-but that’s as far as the communication goes. They’re like bloody prisoners of war.”

Daniel’s finger pressed to his lips, his eyes moving among the others with an intensity I hadn’t understood, then. Even for this point beyond the farthest horizon of his own life, he had had a plan. And the other three, whether out of faith in him or out of habit or just because they had nothing else left to hold on to, were still doing what he had told them to do.

“One reason I ask,” Frank said, “is because the stories don’t quite match. Almost, but not quite. Daniel told you he happened to have a knife in his hand, because he was washing up; but on the tape, Rafe and Justin both describe Daniel using two hands in the struggle with Lexie. Before she got stabbed.”

“Maybe they’re confused,” I said. “It happened fast; you know what eye-witness accounts are worth. Or maybe Daniel was minimizing: trying to claim he just happened to have the knife, when actually he picked it up specifically to stab Lexie. We’ll probably never know exactly what happened.”

Frank drew on his cigarette, watching the tiny red glow. “As far as I can tell,” he said, “there’s only one person who was washing up, and who wasn’t doing something else with his hands between the point when the note came out and the point when Lexie got stabbed.”

“Daniel killed her,” I said, and it didn’t feel like a lie then and it doesn’t now. “I’m positive, Frank. He was telling the truth.”

Frank watched my face for a long minute, searching. Then: “OK,” he said, on a sigh. “I’ll take your word for it. I’m never going to think he was the type to snap like that, no plan, no organization; but hey, maybe we had less in common than you think. My money was on someone else from the start, but if everyone wants it to be Daniel…” A small backwards jerk of his head, like a shrug. “There’s not a lot I can do about it.”

He stubbed out his smoke and stood up. “Here,” he said, fishing in a jacket pocket. “I figure you might as well have this.”

He tossed something across the table to me; it flashed in the sunlight and I caught it reflexively, one-handed. It was a minicassette, the kind Undercover uses to record a mike feed.

“That’s you flushing your career down the jacks. I seem to have stepped on a cable while I was on the phone to you that day, disconnected something. The official tape has about fifteen minutes of nothing, before I caught the problem and plugged everything back in. The techs want me drawn and quartered for abusing their beloved gadgetry, but they’ll just have to get in the queue.”

Not his style, I had said to Sam the night before; not Frank’s style, to let me take the fall. And before that, way back at the beginning: Lexie Madison was Frank’s responsibility when he made her from nothing, she stayed his responsibility when she turned up dead. It wasn’t that he felt guilty about this godawful mess, nothing like that-once IA got off his back, he would probably never think about it again. But some people take care of their own, no matter what that turns out to mean.

“No copies,” Frank said. “You’ll be fine.”

“When I said you’re a lot like Daniel,” I said, “that wasn’t an insult.”

I saw the flick of something complicated in his eyes as he took that in. After a long moment, he nodded. “Fair enough,” he said.

“Thanks, Frank,” I said, and closed my hand over the tape. “Thank you.”

“Whoa,” Frank said suddenly. His hand shot out, across the table, and grabbed my wrist. “And what’s this?”

The ring. I’d forgotten; my head was still getting used to it. It took an effort not to giggle at the look on his face. I’d never seen Frank Mackey truly gobsmacked before. “I think it suits me,” I said. “You like?”

“Is this new? Or did I miss something before?”

“Pretty new,” I said, “yeah.”

That lazy, malicious grin, tongue stretching his cheek; all of a sudden he looked wide awake and sparking with energy, ready to roll. “Well, fuck me sideways with a broomstick,” he said. “I don’t know which of you two just surprised me more. I’ve got to say, hand on heart, I take my hat off to your Sammy. Wish him good luck from me, will you?”