Chapter 42 The Woman at Every Scene — Ii
“Sit back,” she said. “Breathe. I’m not arresting a woman for saving a man’s life.
But I need you to see what I see, because if I can see it, so can he.
” She didn’t have to say who. “Rourke. If Cody Rourke is half as good at reading a scene as you are, then sooner or later he clocks the same thing I did — that there’s somebody in this town cleaning up after him, ahead of the marshal, every single time.
And a man who’s gone off his leash, who’s started to like it, who’s getting cornered?
He is not going to like finding out there’s a woman undoing his work.
That makes you competition. Worse, it makes you a witness.
I’ve been treating your habit of being at every fire as my problem.
It’s about to be your problem, and it’s a lot bigger than mine. ”
I stopped crying. Just like that, the flat voice came up out of me and took the wheel, because Pike had just said the one thing that reorganizes everything, the way a scene reorganizes when you finally see the second hazard.
“He’ll come looking for who’s been ahead of him,” I said, level. “And I’ve been ahead of him at six scenes. I’ve left prints on his work. Not real prints. Behavioral ones. He’ll see the same map I built, running the other direction. He’ll build a Birdie.”
“Now you’re getting it,” Pike said. “So here’s my offer, and it’s a real one, because that little speech about the cinder block turned me all the way around, and I don’t turn easy.
” She put both hands flat on the table. “You stop being a woman I can’t explain, and you become a woman I can.
Officially. Marshal’s consultant, on paper, with me knowing exactly why you’re good at this—” she held up a hand before I could bolt “—no, I don’t need the whole résumé, Calder made it clear there’s a résumé and it’s not mine to pull.
I need enough. I need to be able to explain you if a defense attorney ever tries to make you the story.
Because right now, undocumented, you’re the easiest thing in the world for a scared man or a slick lawyer to point at, and I’d rather point back with paperwork than with a shrug. ”
The horrible comedy of it was not lost on me even in the booth.
I had spent three years perfecting a woman so harmless that a jury would laugh her off a witness stand, so jumpy and sweet and useless that no one could possibly imagine her responsible for anything more dangerous than a dropped casserole.
And I’d done my job too well. I’d built the perfect suspect.
A woman with no visible skills who nonetheless turns up, calm and early, at every single fire, who has no alibi because the whole point of her life is that nobody’s watching her, who moved a cinder block at the one house that burned.
Birdie the town coward was, on paper, the most suspicious person in Halford, and I’d made her myself, by hand, over three careful years, as a place to hide.
And here is the thing that undid me, sitting in Fran’s booth with cold coffee and a wrecked face: what Pike was offering me, in her flat procedural way, was to be seen — on purpose, on paper, on the record, the exact catastrophe I’d built a whole disguise to prevent — and it was also, for the first time, the only thing that could keep me safe.
The mask had finally stopped protecting me.
The mask had become the danger. A woman nobody can explain is a woman a cornered man can make disappear.
“You clocked that too,” I said. “Wes and me.”
“Miss Vance,” Pike said, dry, “you two look at each other like a house looks at a match. I’m a detective.
It’s insulting that you thought I missed it.
” She almost, almost smiled. “For what it’s worth, and it’s not my business, he’s a good one.
Quietest man I’ve ever worked with and the only one I’ve never caught in a lie.
You could do worse in this town. You could do worse in most towns. ”
“I need to talk to Wes,” I said.
“You need to talk to Wes,” Pike agreed, and there was the ghost of something warm under the flat, because of course she’d clocked that too, she clocked everything, she was almost as bad as me.
“Talk to Wes. Then come do it right. Because Miss Vance — the version of you that hides is the version that gets you hurt now. I don’t know what changed the math, but it changed. ”
I did know what changed the math. A cornered man had started to like the fire, and I’d been leaving my fingerprints all over his masterpiece, and the safest thing I could do was the one thing I’d never once been willing to do in three years: stand where people could see me, and put my real name on it.
I paid for both coffees. My hand didn’t shake at all, which Pike noticed, and filed, and didn’t mention.