18

There have been so many of them. Run-down rooms in tiny mountain-country stations, smelling of mold and feet; sitting rooms crammed with flowered upholstery, simpering holy cards, all the shining medals of respectability; council-flat kitchens where the baby whined through a bottle of Coke and the ashtray overflowed onto the cereal-crusted table; our own interview rooms, still as sanctuaries, so familiar that blindfolded I could have put my hand on that piece of graffiti, that crack in the wall. They are the rooms where I have come eye to eye with a killer and said, You. You did this.

I remember every one. I save them up, a deck of richly colored collector’s cards to be kept in velvet and thumbed through when the day has been too long for sleep. I know whether the air was cool or warm against my skin, how light soaked into worn yellow paint or ignited the blue of a mug, whether the echoes of my voice slid up into high corners or fell muffled by heavy curtains and shocked china ornaments. I know the grain of wooden chairs, the drift of a cobweb, the soft drip of a tap, the give of carpet under my shoes. In my father’s house there are many mansions: if somehow I earn one, it will be the one I have built out of these rooms.

I have always loved simplicity. With you, everything’s black and white, Richie had said, like an accusation; but the truth is that almost every murder case is, if not simple, capable of simplicity, and that this is not only necessary but breathtaking, that if there are miracles then this is one. In these rooms, the world’s vast hissing tangle of shadows burns away, all its treacherous grays are honed to the stark purity of a bare blade, two-edged: cause and effect, good and evil. To me, these rooms are beautiful. I go into them the way a boxer goes into the ring: intent, invincible, home.

Jenny Spain’s hospital room was the only one I have ever been afraid of. I couldn’t tell whether it was because the darkness inside was honed sharper than I had ever touched, or because something told me that it hadn’t been honed at all, that those shadows were still crisscrossing and multiplying, and this time there was no way to make them stop.

They were both there, Jenny and Fiona. Their heads turned to the door when I opened it, but no conversation cut off in mid-sentence: they hadn’t been talking, just sitting there, Fiona by the bedside in an undersized plastic chair, her hand and Jenny’s clasped together on the threadbare blanket. They stared at me, thin faces worn away in grooves where the pain was settling in to stay, blank blue eyes. Someone had found a way to wash Jenny’s hair—without the straighteners, it was soft and flyaway as a little girl’s—and her fake tan had worn away, leaving her even paler than Fiona. For the first time I saw a resemblance there.