They moved off—two of the techs were flipping a coin for the overtime, a couple of floaters were trying to impress me or each other by taking notes. The scaffolding had stamped smears of rust onto the sleeve of my overcoat. I found a tissue in my pocket and headed out to the kitchen to dampen it.
Richie followed me. I said, “If you need something to eat, you can take the car and find that petrol station the Gogan woman talked about.”
He shook his head. “I’m grand.”
“Good. And you’re OK for tonight?”
“Yeah. No probs.”
“At six we’ll head back to HQ, brief the Super, pick up anything we need, then meet up again and come back here.” If Richie and I could make it into town fast enough, and if the briefing didn’t take too long, there was just a chance I would have time to get hold of Dina and put her in a taxi to Geri’s. “You’re welcome to put in for overtime if you want. I’m not planning to.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t believe in overtime.” Larry’s boys had cut the water and taken out the sink trap, in case our boy had washed up, but a leftover trickle came out of the tap. I caught it on the tissue and scrubbed at my sleeve.
“I heard that, all right. How come?”
“I’m not a babysitter, or a waiter. I don’t charge by the hour. And I’m not some politician looking for ways to get paid three times over for every tap of work I do. I get paid my salary to do my job, whatever that happens to mean.”
Richie didn’t comment. He said, “You’re pretty definite that this guy’s watching us, aren’t you?”
“On the contrary: he’s probably miles away, at work, if he’s got a job to go to and if he had the cool to go in today. But, like I said to Larry, I’m not taking any chances.”
In the corner of my eye something white flicked. I was facing the windows, braced ready to lunge at the back door, before I knew I had moved. One of the techs was out in the garden, squatting on a paving stone, swabbing.
Richie let that speak for itself while I straightened up and stashed the tissue in my briefcase. Then he said, “So maybe ‘definite’ isn’t the right word. But you think he is.”
The great Rorschach blot on the floor where the Spains had lain was darkening, crusting at the edges. Above it, the windows ricocheted gray afternoon light back and forth, throwing off dislocated, off-kilter reflections: swirling leaves, a slice of wall, the heart-stopping nosedive of a bird against cloud. “Yeah,” I said. “I do. I think he’s watching.”
*
And that left us with the rest of the afternoon to get through, on our way to that night. The media had started swarming up—later than I’d expected; clearly their satnavs didn’t like the place any better than mine had—and were doing their thing, hanging over the crime-scene tape to get shots of the techs going in and out, doing pieces to camera in their best solemn voices. In my book, the media are a necessary evil: they live off the animal inside us, they bait their front pages with secondhand blood for the hyenas to snuffle up, but they come in useful often enough that you want to stay on their good side. I checked my hair in the Spains’ bathroom mirror and went out to give them a statement. For a second I actually considered sending Richie. The thought of Dina hearing my voice talking about Broken Harbor sent heartburn flaring across my chest.