“I’ll be mannerly,” Trey assures him. “Just watch.” Cal doesn’t feel reassured.

The detective is called Nealon. He’s got scrubby graying hair and a lumpy, humorous face, and he looks like a guy who would run a prosperous mom-and-pop business, maybe a hardware store. Cal has no doubt that he knows how to use that look: the guy is no dummy. He makes nice with Rip and Banjo till they settle down, and then accepts a cup of tea so he can take a seat at the kitchen table and make small talk with Cal and Trey while they prepare it, giving himself a chance to place them. Cal sees his glance skim Trey’s outgrown jeans and non-haircut, and slaps down the urge to tell Nealon straight out that this is no neglected delinquent, this is a good kid on a good path, with respectable people at her back to make sure no one fucks with her.

Trey is doing a fine job of establishing her respectability all by herself. She’s being what Cal considers suspiciously polite: asking Nealon and the uniform whether they take milk, laying out cookies on a plate, giving full-sentence answers to the bullshit questions about school and weather. Cal would give a lot to know what she’s playing at.

He himself, he knows, is harder to place, and the bruises won’t help. Nealon asks where he’s from and how he likes Ireland, and he gives the practiced, pleasant answers that he gives everyone. He’s leaving his occupation unmentioned for a while, so he can see how this guy operates in its absence.

“Now,” Nealon says, once they’ve all got acquainted with their tea and cookies. “You’ve had some day already, yeah? And it’s not even lunchtime. I’ll try and make this quick enough.” He smiles at Trey, sitting across from him. The uniform has faded off to the sofa and taken out a notebook and pen. “D’you know who that fella was, that you found?”

“Mr. Rushborough,” Trey says readily. She’s even sitting up straight. “Cillian Rushborough. My dad knew him from London.”

“So he’s over here visiting your daddy?”

“Not really. They’re not mates, not properly. Your man’s family was from round here. I think he mostly came ’cause of that.”

“Ah, yeah, one of those,” Nealon says tolerantly. Cal can’t place his accent. It’s faster than he’s used to, and flatter, with a snap that gives ordinary sentences an edge of challenge; it has a city ring. “What’s he like? Nice fella?”

Trey shrugs. “I only met him a coupla times. Didn’t take much notice. He was OK. Bit posh.”

“Will we see can we work out what time you found him?”

“Haven’t got a phone,” Trey explains. “Or a watch.”

“No worries,” Nealon says cheerfully. “We’ll do a bitta the aul’ maths instead. Let’s see do I have this right: you found the body, you walked straight down here to Mr. Hooper, and the pair of yous drove back up to the scene. Is that it?”

“Yeah.”

“Mr. Hooper rang us at nineteen minutes past six. How long before that did yous reach the scene?”

“Coupla minutes, only.”

“We’ll say quarter past, will we? Keep our lives simple. How long would you take driving up there?”

“Ten minutes. Maybe fifteen. The road’s not great.”

“D’you see what I’m doing, now?” Nealon asks, smiling at Trey like a favorite uncle.

“Yeah. Counting backwards.”

Trey is playing it well: attentive, serious, cooperative but not over-helpful. It’s taken Cal a minute to realize that that’s what she’s doing, and why she seems suddenly unfamiliar. He’s never seen the kid play anything any way before. He didn’t know she had the capacity. He wonders if this is something she learned by watching Johnny, or if it was in there all along, waiting for the need to arise.

“That’s it,” Nealon says. “So we’re at around six o’clock when you left this place. How long were you here?”

“Like a minute. I told Cal and we went.”

“Still around six, so. How long would it take you to walk down here?”

“Half an hour, about. Maybe a bit more. I was walking quick. So I musta started just before half-five.”

Cal’s need to know what Trey is doing has intensified. In normal circumstances, the kid would no more volunteer an unnecessary word to a cop than she would gnaw off her own fingers.

“Now you’re sucking diesel,” Nealon says approvingly. “How long were you up by the body, before you headed here?”

Trey shrugs, reaching for her mug. For the first time, there’s a hitch in her rhythm. “Dunno. A bit.”

“A long bit?”

“Fifteen minutes, maybe. Coulda been twenty. Haven’t got a watch.”

“No problem,” Nealon says easily. Cal knows he caught the reluctance, and that he’ll come back to this once Trey thinks he’s forgotten about it. Cal has played out this scene so many times before that it feels like he’s seeing it double: once from his accustomed seat in Nealon’s chair, calibrating and recalibrating his balance of amiability and insistence as his assessment develops in more detail; once from his actual perspective, an entirely different place where the balance is a defensive one and the stakes are suddenly sky-high and visceral. He doesn’t like either position one little bit.

“So,” Nealon says, “what time’s that we’re at now? When you first found him?”

Trey thinks. She’s back on track, now that they’ve moved away from that gap by the body. “Like just after five, musta been.”

“There you go,” Nealon says, pleased. “We got there in the end. Didn’t I tell you?”

“Yeah. We got there.”

“Just after five,” Nealon says, tilting his head at a friendly angle, like a bushy dog’s. “That’s awful early to be up and about. Had you got plans?”

“Nah. I just…” Trey moves one shoulder in a half-shrug. “I heard noises, during the night. Wanted to see what was the story, had anything happened.”

That has to prick up Nealon’s ears, but he doesn’t show it. The guy knows what he’s doing. “Yeah? What kind of noises?”

“People talking. And a car.”

“Just before you got up? Or earlier in the night?”

“Earlier. I wasn’t sleeping right; too hot. Woke up and heard something outside.”

“Would you know what time?”

Trey shakes her head. “Late enough that my mam and my dad were asleep.”

“Did you call them?”

“Nah. I knew it wasn’t on our land, too far away, so I wasn’t worried, like. I went out to the gate, but, to see what was the story. There was lights down the road, like headlights. And men talking.”

Nealon is still at ease in his chair, drinking his tea, but Cal can feel the attention humming from him. “Down the road where?”

“Towards where your man was, at the fork. Coulda been there, coulda been a bit closer.”

“Did you not go check, no?”

“Went a little way down the road, but I stopped. I thought maybe they wouldn’t want anyone seeing them.”

This is plausible enough. Stuff goes on, up the mountain: moonshining, dumping, diesel-running from across the border, probably more hard-core stuff. Any mountain kid would know to stay clear. But Trey mentioned none of this to Cal.

“Looks like you might’ve been right,” Nealon says. “Did you see them?”

“Sorta. Men moving around, just. The car lights were in my eyes, and they were outside the light. Couldn’t tell what they were doing.”

“How many of them?”

“A few. Not a crowd, like; maybe four or five.”

“Did you recognize any of them?”

Trey thinks back. “Nah. Don’t think so.”

“Fair enough,” Nealon says easily, but Cal hears the unspoken for now: if Nealon comes up with a suspect, he’ll be back. “Did you hear any of what they were saying?”

Trey shrugs. “Small bits, only. Like one fella said, ‘Over that way,’ and another one said, ‘Jesus, take it easy.’ And someone said, ‘Come on ta fuck’—sorry for cursing.”

“I’ve heard worse,” Nealon says, with a grin. “Anything else?”

“The odd word, just. Nothing that made sense. They were moving around, like, so that made it harder to hear.”

“Did you recognize any of the voices?” Nealon asks. “Take your time, now, and think back.”

Trey thinks, or else gives a good impression of it, frowning into her mug. “Nah,” she says in the end. “Sorry. It was all men, but. Like, not my age. Grown men.”

“What about the accents? Could you tell were they Irish, were they local, anything at all?”

“Irish,” Trey says, without a pause. “From round here.” Cal’s head goes up at the note in her voice, clean and final as an arrow slicing straight to the heart of the target, and he knows.

Nealon says, “Round here like what? This county, this townland, the West?”

“Ardnakelty. Even just over the other side of the mountain, or across the river, they talk different. These were from round here.”

“You’re certain, now, yeah?”

“Definite.”

The whole story is bullshit. Cal understands at last that Trey has never been her father’s minion in this; she’s playing a lone game, and has been all along. When the opportunity came her way, she aimed Ardnakelty down a phantom path after imaginary gold. Now that things have shifted, she’s aiming Nealon, meticulously as a sniper, at the men who killed her brother.

She gave Cal her word never to do anything about Brendan, but all this is just distant enough from Brendan that she can convince herself it doesn’t count. She saw clearly that she would never get a chance like this again, so she took it. Cal’s heart is a heavy relentless force in his chest, making it hard to breathe. When he worried that Trey’s childhood had left cracks in her, he had it wrong. Those aren’t cracks; those are fault lines.

Nealon’s expression hasn’t changed. “How long would you say you were out there?”

Trey considers this. “Coupla minutes, maybe. Then the car engine started up, and I went back in the house. Didn’t want them seeing me if they came our way.”

“Did they?”

“Don’t think so. By the time they drove off I was in my room, it’s at the back; I wouldn’ta seen their lights go past. But the car sounded like it was going the other way. I wouldn’t swear, but. Sound echoes funny, up there.”

“True enough,” Nealon agrees. “What’d you do after that?”

“Went back to bed. It was nothing to do with us, whatever they were at. And everything had gone quiet anyway.”

“But when you woke up early, you went to have a look.”

“Yeah. Couldn’t get back to sleep; too hot, and my sister, that I share the room with, she was snoring. And I wanted to see what they’d been at.”

Cal knows now why Trey brought her find to him instead of to Johnny. There was nothing sentimental about it; she didn’t trust him more in a pinch, or turn to him from the shock. She wanted the chance to tell this story. Johnny would have tossed Rushborough down that ravine and made damn sure Trey had seen nothing, heard nothing, and never got near a detective. Cal is better behaved.

“And that’s when you found him,” Nealon says.

“My dog found him first.” Trey points at Banjo, sprawled with Rip in the shadiest corner by the fireplace, his side rising as he pants in the heat. “The big fella there. He was up ahead, and he howled. Then I got there and saw.”

“It’s a shock,” Nealon says, just sympathetically enough and not too sympathetically. The guy is good. “Did you get up close to him?”

“Yeah. Up next to him. Went to see who it was, what was the story.”

“Did you touch him? Move him? Check was he dead?”

Trey shakes her head. “Didn’t need to. You could tell by him.”

“You were there about twenty minutes, you said,” Nealon reminds her, without any particular emphasis. His little blue eyes are mild and interested. “What were you doing all that time?”

“Just kneeling down there. I felt sick. Hadta stay put for a bit.”

Trey’s answering readily this time, now she’s had a chance to plan, but Cal knows better. He’s seen Trey taken apart by an animal’s suffering, but never by a dead creature. Whatever she was doing by Rushborough’s body, she wasn’t waiting for her stomach to settle. The thought of her screwing around with evidence makes him flinch.

“Sure, that’s only natural,” Nealon says soothingly. “It takes all of us like that, the first few times. I know one Garda that’s been on the job twenty years, great big lump of a fella, the size of Mr. Hooper here, and he’d still get the head-staggers when he sees a dead body. Did you get sick, in the end?”

“Nah. I was grand in a bit.”

“Did you not want to get away from your man?”

“Yeah. Thought if I stood up I might puke, but, or get dizzy. So I stayed put. Kept my eyes shut.”

“Did you touch the man at all?”

He asked that already, but if Trey notices, she doesn’t show it. “Nah. Fuc— Sorry. No way.”

“I don’t blame you. I wouldn’t fancy touching him myself.” Nealon gives Trey another smile. She manages a half-smile back. “So you took a little break to get your head together, and once you were all right, you came straight here.”

“Yeah.”

Nealon takes another cookie and mulls that over. “That fella Rushborough,” he says, “he was only, what is it, a few minutes from your own gate. Why didn’t you go tell your mammy and daddy?”

“He usedta be a detective,” Trey says, nodding at Cal. “I reckoned he’d know what to do, better’n they would.”

It only takes Nealon a fraction of a second to come back from that and change the surprise to a big grin. “Jaysus,” he says. “They say it takes one to know one, but I hadn’t a notion. A colleague, hah?”

“Chicago PD,” Cal says. His heart is still slamming, but he keeps his voice easy. “Back in the day. I’m retired.”

Nealon laughs. “My God, what are the odds? You come halfway across the world to get away from the job, and you trip over a murder case.” He glances over his shoulder at the uniform, who has stopped scribbling and is looking up at them open-mouthed, unsure what to make of this development. “We got lucky today, hah? A detective for a witness; Jaysus, you couldn’t ask for better.”

“I’m no detective here,” Cal says. He can’t tell whether there was a fine needle under the words—he’s still waiting to find out how long you have to live in Ireland before you can reliably identify when people are giving you shit—but he’s seen enough turf wars to make this much clear straightaway. “And I never worked Homicide anyway. About all’s I know is to secure the scene and wait for the experts to get there, so that’s what I did.”

“And I appreciate it, man,” Nealon says heartily. “Go on, give us the rundown: what’d you do?” He leans back in his chair to leave Cal the floor, and gets to work on his cookie.

“When I got to the scene I recognized the man as Cillian Rushborough, I’ve met him a couple of times. I gloved up”—Cal pulls the gloves out of his pocket and lays them on the table—“and I confirmed that he was dead. His cheek was cold. His jaw and his elbow were in rigor, but his fingers still moved, so did his knee. I didn’t touch him anywhere else. I backed off and called you guys.”