“Either we talk tonight, or I come back in the morning when you have customers. You want a homicide detective hanging around, interrogating your clientele?”
“You don’t have any right to interrogate my clientele.”
“I’m the Garda, lady. That gives me all the rights I need. I can and will make your life miserable. Try me.”
“What do you want?” I growled.
“It’s cold and wet out here.” He cupped his hands, blew on them. “How about a cup of tea?”
“How about you go screw yourself?” I flashed him a saccharine smile.
“What, my overweight, middle-aged brother-in-law was good enough for you, but I’m not?”
“I did not have sex with your brother-in-law,” I snapped.
“Then what the fuck was he doing with you?” he snapped back.
“We’ve already been through this. I told you. If you want to interrogate me again, you’re going to have to arrest me, and this time I’m not saying a word without an attorney.” I glanced over his shoulder. The Shades were moving restlessly, vigorously, as if stirred up by our discord. Our arguing seemed to be . . . exciting them. I wondered if anger or passion made us taste even better to them. I forced the macabre thought from my mind.
“Your answers were no answers at all, and you know it.”
“You don’t want the real answers.” I didn’t want the real answers. Unfortunately, I was stuck with them.
“Maybe, I do. However . . . difficult to believe . . . they might seem.”
I gave him a sharp look. Though he wore his usual determined dog-with-a-bone expression, there was a subtle new component to it that I’d missed before. It was the same component I’d glimpsed in O’Duffy’s eyes the morning he’d come to see me, the morning he’d died, a wary, maybe-my-world-isn’t-quite-what-I-thought-it-was look. A sure sign that, like O’Duffy, Jayne was about to start poking into matters that were probably going to get him killed. Although O’Duffy’s method of death seemed to imply a human murderer, I had no doubt he’d been killed for what he’d been learning about the new kids in town—the Fae.
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?”
“Funny, Ms. Lane. I took a long lunch yesterday and went to Lisle Street. I tried to take a cab, but the driver insisted there was no such address and refused to go there. I ended up having to walk. Care to hear what I saw?”
“No. But I’m pretty sure you’re going to tell me anyway,” I muttered, massaging my temples.
“The warehouse is still there, but the city around it seems to have been . . . forgotten. I mean, completely forgotten. The streets aren’t being cleaned. The trash isn’t being collected. The lamps are out. Sewage has backed up into the gutters. My cell phone couldn’t get a signal there. Right in the middle of the city, I couldn’t get a bloody signal!”
“Not getting what this has to do with me,” I said in my most bored voice.
He didn’t hear me, and I knew he was walking the desolate, debris-filled streets in his mind again. A Dark Zone doesn’t just look abandoned; it oozes death and decay, makes you feel slimy with it. It leaves an indelible mark on you. It will wake you up in the middle of the night, heart in your throat, terrified of the dark. I sleep with all the lights on. I carry flashlights, 24/7.
“I found cars abandoned in the middle of the streets with the doors wide open. Expensive cars. The kind that get stripped for parts before the owner can even return with petrol. Explain that,” he barked.
“Maybe Dublin’s crime rate is decreasing,” I offered, knowing it for the lie it was.
“It’s skyrocketing. Has been for months. Media’s been crucifying us over it.”
They certainly had. And after what I’d seen tonight, the local escalation in violent crime was a fact I was especially interested in. I had an idea germinating.
“There were piles of clothing outside the cars with wallets in the pockets. Some of them were stuffed with cash, just waiting to be stolen. For Christ’s sake, I found two Rolexes on the sidewalk!”
“Did you pick them up?” I asked with interest. I’d always wanted a Rolex.
“But you know what the strangest thing was, Ms. Lane? There were no people. Not a single one. As if everyone had agreed at exactly the same moment to vacate twenty-some city blocks, right in the middle of whatever they were doing, without taking a single thing, not their cars, not even their clothes. Did they all walk out naked?”
“How would I know?”
“It’s happening right here, Ms. Lane. There’s an area missing on these maps right next to your bookstore. Don’t tell me you never look down that way when you leave.”
I shrugged. “I don’t leave much.”
“I follow you. You leave all the time.”
“I’m pretty self-engrossed, Inspector. I rarely look around.” I glanced behind him, for the dozenth time. The Shades were still behaving shadily, trapped in their darkness, licking thin, dark, nasty Shade lips.
“Bullshit. I interrogated you. You’re smart and sharp, and you’re lying.”
“Okay, you explain it. What do you think happened?”
“I don’t know.”
“Can you think of anything that might explain what you found?”
A muscle worked in his jaw. “No.”
“Then what do you expect me to tell you? That evil creatures of the night have taken over Dublin? That they’re right down there“—I flung my arm out to the right—“and they’re eating people and leaving the parts they don’t like behind? That they’ve claimed certain territories as their own, and if you’re stupid enough to walk or drive into one after dark, you’ll die?” There, that was as close to warning him as I could get.
“Don’t be a fool, Ms. Lane.”
“Ditto, Inspector,” I said sharply. “You want my advice? Stay out of places you can’t find on maps. Now go away.” I turned my back on him.
“This isn’t over,” he said tightly.
It seemed, lately, everyone was saying that to me. No, it certainly wasn’t, but I had a sinking feeling I knew how it was going to end: With one more death on my conscience to occupy my already sleepless nights. “Leave me alone, or go get a warrant.” I slid the key into the door and unlocked it. As I opened it, I glanced over my shoulder.
Jayne was standing on the sidewalk, in almost exactly the same spot I’d occupied five minutes earlier, staring down into the abandoned neighborhood, brows drawn, forehead furrowed. He didn’t know it, but the Shades were staring back, in that faceless, eyeless way they have. What would I do if he began walking down there?
I knew the answer and I hated it: I’d whip out my flashlights and follow him in. I’d make a complete and utter spectacle of myself rescuing him from something he couldn’t and wouldn’t ever be able to see. Probably get locked up in the mental ward at the local hospital as thanks for my trouble.
My headache was turning brutal. If I didn’t get aspirin soon, it was going to spike right back up to vomiting pain.
He looked at me. Although Jayne had perfected what I call cop-face—a certain imperturbable scrutiny coupled with a patient certainty that the person they’re dealing with will eventually sprout several extra assholes and turn into a complete one—I’ve gotten better at reading people.
He was scared.
“Go home, Inspector,” I said softly. “Kiss your wife, and tuck your children in. Count your blessings. Don’t go hunting for curses.”
He looked at me a long moment, as if debating the criteria of cowardice, then turned and stormed off toward Temple Bar.
I heaved a huge sigh of relief and limped into the bookstore.