There were a couple of dozen of them out there, everything from broadsheets to tabloids and from national TV to local radio. I kept it as brief and as monotone as possible, on the off chance that they might quote me instead of using the actual footage, and I made sure they got the impression that all four of the Spains were dead as dodoes. My man would be watching the news, and I wanted him smug and secure: no living witnesses, the perfect crime, give yourself a pat on the back for being such a winner and then come on down to take another look at your prize work.

The search team and the dog handler arrived not long afterwards, which meant we had plenty of cast members for the drama in the front garden—the Gogan woman and her kid stopped pretending they weren’t watching and stuck their heads out of the door, and the reporters practically burst the crime-scene tape trying to see what was going on, which I took as a good sign. I bent over something imaginary in the hall with the rest of the gang, shouted meaningless jargon out the door, jogged up and down the drive to get things from the car. It took all the willpower I had not to scan the tangle of houses for a blink of movement, a flash of light off lenses, but I never once looked up.

The dog was a shining, muscled Alsatian that picked up a scent off the sleeping bag in a split second, trailed it to the end of the road and lost it. I had the handler walk the dog through the house—if our man was watching, I needed him to think that was why we had called them in. Then I had the search team take over the weapon hunt, and sent the floaters out on new assignments. Go down to Emma’s school—fast, before it lets out for the day—talk to her teacher, talk to her friends and their parents. Go down to Jack’s preschool, ditto. Go around every shop near the schools, find out where Jenny got those carrier bags that Sinéad Gogan saw, find out if anyone saw someone following her, if anyone has CCTV footage. Go to the hospital where Jenny’s being treated, talk to whichever relatives have shown, track down whichever ones haven’t, make sure all of them know to keep their mouths shut and stay far from the media; go to every hospital within a sixty-mile radius, ask them about last night’s crop of knife wounds, and hope our boy got cut in the struggle. Go ring HQ and find out if the Spains made any calls to the police in the last six months; go ring the Chicago PD and have them send someone to break the news to Pat’s brother, Ian. Go find anyone who lives in this godforsaken place, threaten them with everything up to and including jail time if they tell the media anything they don’t tell us first; find out if they saw the Spains, if they saw anything strange, if they saw anything at all.