“Too close to the bone?”

Richie was openmouthed and practically hopping off his chair with curiosity. I flipped my comb out of my pocket and gave it a quick run through my hair. “Am I good?”

“Lick-arse,” Quigley said, through his sulk. I ignored him.

“Yeah,” Richie said. “You’re grand. What … ?”

“Don’t go anywhere,” I repeated, and went after O’Kelly.

My second hint: he was up behind his desk, with his hands in his trouser pockets, rolling up and down on the balls of his feet. This case had pumped up his adrenaline enough that he wouldn’t fit in his chair. “You took your time.”

“Sorry, sir.”

He stayed where he was, sucking his teeth and rereading the call sheet on his desk. “How’s the Mullen file coming along?”

I had spent the last few weeks putting together a file for the Director of Public Prosecutions on one of those tricky drug dealer messes, making sure the little bastard didn’t have a single crack to slime through. Some detectives think their job’s done the second the charges are filed, but I take it personally when one of my catches wriggles off the hook, which they seldom do. “Good to go. Give or take.”

“Could someone else finish it up?”

“Not a problem.”

He nodded and kept reading. O’Kelly likes you to ask—it shows you know who’s boss—and since he is in fact my boss, I have no problem rolling over like a good little doggie when it makes things run more smoothly. “Did something come in, sir?”

“Do you know Brianstown?”

“Haven’t heard of it.”

“Neither had I. It’s one of those new places; up the coast, past Balbriggan. Used to be called Broken Bay, something.”

“Broken Harbor,” I said. “Yeah. I know Broken Harbor.”

“It’s Brianstown now. And by tonight the whole country’ll have heard of it.”

I said, “This is a bad one.”

O’Kelly laid one heavy palm on the call sheet, like he was holding it down. He said, “Husband, wife and two kids, stabbed in their own home. The wife’s headed for hospital; it’s touch and go. The rest are dead.”

We left that for a moment, listening to the small tremors it sent through the air. I said, “How did it come in?”

“The wife’s sister. They talk every morning, but today she couldn’t get through. That got her het up enough that she got in her car and headed out to Brianstown. Car’s in the driveway, lights are on in broad daylight, no one’s answering the door, she rings the uniforms. They break the door down and surprise, surprise.”

“Who’s on scene?”

“Just the uniforms. They took one look and figured they were out of their depth, called it straight in.”

“Beautiful,” I said. There are plenty of morons out there who would have spent hours playing detective and churning the whole case to shit, before they admitted defeat and called in the real thing. It looked like we had lucked into a pair with functioning brains.