I sighed. I wanted out of my nasty, wet clothes. I wanted to wash my disgusting hair. “Let it go, will you? Just let it go. I didn’t have anything to do with O’Duffy’s murder, and I don’t have anything else to tell you.”

“Yes, you do. You know what’s going on in this city, Ms. Lane. I don’t know how or where you fit into things, but I know you do. That’s why Patty came to see you. He didn’t stop by that morning to tell you anything about your sister’s case. He came to ask you something. What was it? What had been burning such a hole in his brain all night that he couldn’t wait until Monday to talk to you, that he sent his family on to church and missed Mass? What did Patty ask you the morning he died?”

He was good. I’d give him that. But nothing more.

“Will I die, too, Ms. Lane, now that I’ve come to see you?” he said roughly. “Is that how it works? Should I have woken my children and kissed them good-bye before I left this morning? Told my wife how much I loved her?”

Stung, I said, “It’s not my fault he died!”

“Maybe you didn’t kill him, but maybe you didn’t save him, either. Did you answer his questions? Is that why he died? Or if you had, would he still be alive?”

I glared at him. “Go away.”

He reached inside his coat and withdrew a handful of folded maps from an inner pocket.

I glanced away sharply, hating everything about the moment. This was a déjà vu I never wanted to revisit.

Patty O’Duffy had brought me maps, too. That Sunday morning he’d come to see me at the bookstore, he’d illustrated in cartographic detail a graphic impossibility, a discovery I’d beat him to by nearly two weeks: Parts of Dublin were no longer being printed on the maps. They were disappearing, falling off the plats and out of human memory, as if they’d never existed. He’d discovered the Dark Zones. He’d been scouting them out, going into them, a mere dusk away from dying.

Jayne leaned closer until his nose was inches from mine. “Looked at any of these lately?”

I said nothing.

“I found a dozen of them on Patty’s desk. He’d circled certain areas. It took me a while to figure out why. The Garda have a warehouse on Lisle Street seven blocks from here. You can’t find it on a single map published in the last two years.”

“So? What’s your point? That in addition to murder, I’m part of some vast mapmaking conspiracy? What will you charge me with next, colluding to get tourists lost?”