"I can stay with her," Sam said, without looking at him. We weren't about to point out that he spent half his time at my place anyway, and Frank knew it.

Frank raised an amused eyebrow. "Twenty-four seven? If she goes under, she'll be miked up, she can have someone listening to the mike feed day and night--"

"Not on my budget she can't," O'Kelly told him.

"No problem: it'll go on our budget. We'll work out of Rathowen station; anyone comes after her, we'll have guys on the scene in minutes. Will she get that at home?"

"If we think someone's out to kill a police officer," Sam said, "then she bloody well should get that at home." His voice was starting to tauten.

"Fair enough. How's your budget for round-the-clock protection?" Frank asked O'Kelly.

"Fuck that for a game of soldiers," O'Kelly said. "She's DV's detective, she's DV's problem." Frank spread his hands and grinned at Sam.

Cooper was enjoying this way too much. "I don't need round-the-clock protection," I said. "If this guy was obsessed with me, he wouldn't have stopped at one blow, any more than he would've if he was obsessed with Lexie. Everybody relax."

"Right," Sam said, after a moment. He didn't sound happy. "I think that's the lot." He sat down, hard, and pulled his chair up to his desk.

"She wasn't killed for her money, anyway," Frank said. "The five of them pool most of their funds--a hundred quid a week each into a kitty, to pay for food, petrol, bills, doing up the house, all the rest of it. On her income, that didn't leave much. She had eighty-eight quid in her bank account."

"What do you think?" Sam asked me.

He meant from a profiling angle. Profiling is nowhere near foolproof and I don't actually have much of a clue what I'm doing anyway, but as far as I could see, everything said she had been killed by someone she knew, someone with a hair-trigger temper rather than a well-nursed grudge. The obvious answer was either the kid's father or one of the housemates, or both.

But if I said that, then this meeting was over, at least as far as I was concerned; Sam would blow every gasket at the thought of me sharing a house with the odds-on favorites. And I didn't want that. I tried to tell myself it was because I wanted to make the decision, not have Sam make it for me, but I knew: this was working on me, this room and this company and this conversation, pressing subtly just like Frank had known they would. Nothing in this world takes over your blood like a murder case, nothing demands you, mind and body, with such a huge and blazing and irresistible voice. It had been months since I had worked like this, concentrated like this on fitting together evidence and patterns and theories, and all of a sudden it felt like years.

"I'd go with door number two," I said, finally. "Someone who knew her as Lexie Madison."