The Likeness

I was having a hard time breathing; the air felt too thick, almost solid. One of the fluorescents was on the fritz and it gave the room a shimmery, epileptic look, something out of a fever dream. A couple of the big binders lined up on the filing cabinets still had my handwriting down the spines. Sam pulled up his chair to his desk and glanced at me with a faint furrow between his eyebrows, but he didn’t say anything, and I was grateful for that. I concentrated on Frank’s face. There were bags under his eyes and he had cut himself shaving, but he looked wide awake, alert and energized. He was looking forward to this.

He caught me watching him. “Glad to be back?”

“Ecstatic,” I said. I wondered, suddenly, if he had got me into this room deliberately, knowing it might throw me. I dropped my satchel on a desk-Costello’s; I knew the handwriting on the paperwork-leaned back against the wall and stuck my hands in my jacket pockets.

“Companionable though this may be,” Cooper said, edging a little farther from O’Kelly, “I, for one, would be delighted to come to the point of this little gathering.”

“Fair enough,” Frank said. “The Madison case-well, the Jane Doe alias Madison case. What’s the official name?”

“Operation Mirror,” Sam said. Obviously the word about the victim’s looks had spread as far as headquarters. Beautiful. I wondered whether it was too late to change my mind, go home and order pizza.

Frank nodded. “Operation Mirror it is. It’s been three days, and we’ve got no suspects, no leads and no ID. As you all know, I think it might be time to try a different tack-”

“Hold your horses there,” O’Kelly said. “We’ll get to your ‘different tack’ in a moment, don’t you worry about that. But first, I’ve a question.”

“Off you go,” Frank said magnanimously, with an expansive gesture to match.

O’Kelly gave him a dirty look. There was an awful lot of testosterone circulating in this room. “Unless I’m missing something,” he said, “this girl was murdered. Correct me if I’m wrong here, Mackey, but I’m not seeing any indication of domestic violence, and I’m not seeing anything that says she was undercover. Why did you people”-he jerked his chin at me and Frank-“want in on this one to begin with?”

“I didn’t,” I told him. “I don’t.”

“The victim was using an identity I created for one of my officers,” Frank said, “and I take that pretty personally. So you’re stuck with me. You may or may not be stuck with Detective Maddox; that’s what we’re here to find out.”

“I can tell you that right now,” I said.

“Humor me,” Frank said. “Don’t tell me till I’ve finished. Once you’ve heard me out, you can tell me to fuck off all you like, and I won’t say a word. Doesn’t that sound like fun?”

I gave up. This is another of Frank’s skills: the ability to sound like he’s making a vast concession, so that you come across as an unreasonable cow if you won’t meet him halfway. “Sounds like a dream date,” I said.

“Fair enough?” Frank asked everyone. “At the end of this evening, you tell me to climb back in my box, and I’ll never mention my little idea again. Just hear me out first. That OK with everyone?”

O’Kelly grunted noncommittally; Cooper gave a not-my-problem shrug; Sam, after a moment, nodded. I was getting that specific feeling of Frank-related impending doom.

“And before we all get too carried away,” Frank said, “let’s make sure the resemblance stands up to a closer look. If it doesn’t, then there’s no point fighting about it, is there?”

Nobody answered. He swung himself off the chair, pulled a handful of photos out of his file and started Blu-tacking them to the whiteboard. The shot from the Trinity ID, blown up to eight by ten; the dead girl’s face in profile, eye closed and bruised-looking; a full-length shot of her on the autopsy table-still dressed, thank Jesus-with her fists clenched on top of that dark star of blood; a close-up of her hands, unfurled and stippled with brownish-black, streaks of silver nail polish showing through the blood. “Cassie, could you do me a favor? Stand over here for a minute?”

You fucker, I thought. I peeled myself off the wall, went to the whiteboard and stood against it like I was having a mug shot taken. I would have bet good money that Frank had already pulled my photo from Records and compared it to these with a magnifying glass. He prefers to ask questions to which he already knows the answers.

“We should really be using the actual body for this,” Frank told us cheerfully, biting a piece of Blu-tack in half, “but I figured that might be a little weird.”

“God forbid,” said O’Kelly.