The Likeness

Undercover picked my honesty. I should have seen this coming, but somehow I had been so caught by the dazzling absoluteness of the job that I had managed to miss the most obvious thing about it: you spend your day lying. I don’t like lying, don’t like doing it, don’t like people who do it, and to me it seemed deeply fucked-up to go after the truth by turning yourself into a liar. I spent months picking my way along a fine double-talk line, cozying up to this small-fish dealer and spinning jokes or sarcasm to mislead him with literal truths. Then one day he fried both his brain cells on speed, pulled a knife on me and asked me if I was just using him to get to know his supplier. I skated the fine line for what felt like hours-Chill out, what’s your problem, what have I ever done to make you think I’m trying to screw you over?-stalling and hoping to God that Frank was listening to the mike feed. Dealer Boy put the knife in between my ribs and shrieked in my face, Are you? Are you? No bullshit. Yes or no. Are you? When I hesitated-because of course I was, even if it wasn’t for the reason he had in mind, and this seemed like too crucial a moment for lies-he stabbed me. Then he burst into tears, and sometime in there Frank arrived and carted me discreetly off to the hospital. But I knew. The sacrifice had been demanded and I had withheld it. I had thirty stitches for warning: Don’t do that again.

I was a good Murder detective. Rob once told me that all through his first case he had elaborate visions of fucking up, sneezing on DNA evidence, waving a cheerful good-bye to someone who had just let slip the giveaway piece of withheld info, bumbling vacantly past every clue and red flag. I never had that. My first Murder case was about as banal and depressing as they get-a young junkie knifed in the stairwell of a nightmare block of flats, great blood smears down grimy flights of stairs and eyes watching behind chained doors and the smell of piss everywhere. I stood on the landing with my hands in my pockets so I wouldn’t touch anything by mistake, looking up at the victim sprawled on the steps with his tracksuit bottoms half pulled down by the fall or the fight, and I thought: So this is it. This is where I was coming to, all along.

I still remember that junkie’s face: too thin, a faint fuzz of pale stubble, his mouth a little open as if all this had startled him silly. He had a crooked front tooth. Against all the odds and O’Kelly’s nonstop depressing predictions, we got a solve.

On Operation Vestal the Murder god chose my best friend and my honesty, and gave me nothing in exchange. I transferred out knowing there would be a price to pay for the desertion. At the back of my mind I expected my solve rate to plummet, expected every vicious guy to beat the living daylights out of me, every raging woman to scratch my eyes out. I wasn’t scared; I was looking forward to it being over. But when nothing happened I realized, like a slow cold tide, that this was the punishment: to be turned loose, allowed to go on my way. To be left empty by my guardian god.

And then Sam phoned and Frank was waiting at the top of the hill, and strong implacable hands were reeling me back in. You can put all of this down to a superstitious streak if that’s easiest, or to the kind of intense secret life that a lot of orphans and onlies have; I don’t mind. But maybe it goes some way towards explaining why I said yes to Operation Mirror, and why, when I signed on, I figured there was a decent chance I was going to get killed.

4

Frank and I spent the next week developing Lexie Madison Version 3.0. During the day he pumped people for information about her, her routine, her moods, her relationships; then he came over to my flat and spent the night hammering the day’s crop into my head. I’d forgotten how good at this he was, how systematic and thorough, and how fast he expected me to keep up. Sunday evening, before we left the squad room, he handed me Lexie’s weekly schedule and a sheaf of photocopies of her thesis material. On Monday he had a thick file of her KAs-known associates-complete with photos and voice recordings and background info and smart-arsed commentary, for me to memorize. On Tuesday he brought an aerial map of the Glenskehy area, made me go over every detail till I could draw it from memory, gradually worked his way inwards till we got to floor plans and photos of Whitethorn House. This stuff had taken time to get together. Frank, the fucker, had known long before Sunday night that I was going to say yes.