“I know what the fuck it is -”

“Then you know it increases the effects of alcohol. She was knocked out. She did it to herself.”

He said nothing.

She stood by the window, looking at him, the muscles in her thighs jumping. “Or, on the other hand, maybe someone did it to her. Maybe Colin Eldwin did it. Gave her so many drinks she didn’t know what planet she was on. The problem is that you’ll never know now. Nobody saw them together that night, no one saw anything happen on the lake, nobody heard anything at all. All we have is a stolen rowboat, a body, a griefstruck relative, and you. And that doesn’t add up to anything but a tragedy. Whether you shoot me or not, Brenda Cameron’s going to stay in her grave a suicide.”

He was still sighting her straight down the length of the gun. “Well, if that’s your conclusion, then tell me where you want Eldwin’s body. I’ll do you the courtesy of leaving a trail you can follow this time.”

“You’ve got no reason to kill him.”

“I told Joanne Cameron I’d get her justice. But it doesn’t matter to me what size his cell is. I think you know I’d just as soon put him in a box.”

“And then what? Are you going to bring Brenda Cameron back from the dead? Maybe she’ll sell that necklace you gave her for some rock.”

It was as if he hadn’t heard her – he stood in the middle of the room, staring past her, out at the city. “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe this time, she’ll get out alive.” He pulled his gaze back and he was looking at her, his expression stone cold. “You can’t be everywhere at once,” he said. “But you can tell them what happens to them matters to at least one person. You light the way a little, and maybe it saves a couple of them. Maybe they come in before it’s too late.”

“Or maybe it has nothing to do with you. Maybe you’re one of them, except there’s something else in your pipe.”

His eyes travelled to the gun at the end of his arm and he raised it to his face and stared at it like he was trying to remember a name. Then he pressed the side of it hard against his temple, gritting his teeth, his eyes boring through her, his jaw shaking like he was going to blow up. It was a strange, desolate gesture, and she thought this is it, she’d reached him and flipped the switch. She didn’t want to see him put the gun in his mouth and she closed her eyes, but then there was silence. She looked again and he’d turned the muzzle back toward her. He gestured her away from the window. She came toward the centre of the room and he grabbed her again, holding her at arm’s length, the gun cocked beside his cheek, and pushed her toward the bed again. A space opened in her chest; it felt like a massive expanse, a pit she was going to fall into. He powered her down to the bed, her back against it this time, and held the barrel of the gun hard to her forehead. “Goodman,” she said quietly, “Dana…”

His weight was concentrated on the Glock and it felt like he was driving a bolt into her skull. “I took what was in me and gave it to you. To help you see.”

The pressure on her forehead made her eyes water. She felt her mind emptying out. She took his wrist in both her hands, as if she were holding the gun in place against her own head. “I don’t need your demons to see clearly,” she said. “I have my own.”

She heard a click then and wondered if, in her last moment on earth, the world was breaking up into parts. First the trigger, then the firing pin, then contact and the flare and the sound of the bullet firing, all of it in discrete sequence, and she wondered if she’d be able to feel the nose of the bullet at the instant it touched her, right before it entered her: an atom of steel against an atom of flesh. But there was nothing, just the sound of something hitting the floor. She realized he’d released the clip and now he was leaning over and pocketing it as she rose to a sitting position, too weak to stand now, and he tossed the gun at her.

“If you open your door any time in the next twenty minutes, or if I see your partner in the hallway, I’ll kill you both.” And then he was gone and she spun to her right and vomited on the bedspread, hacking and choking, her head filling with spinning black lace. She sat there hunched over, her insides knotted, and then collected herself and lunged for the phone. “He’s heading out to the street,” she said when Wingate picked up in his room, her voice tight in her chest. “Get down there, get your safety off.”

“What’s wrong? Who’s in the street?”

“Goodman. He was just here. He’ll be on the sidewalk any second now.”

“I don’t un -”

“GO!” She hung up on him and went to the window, but she had a view of the wrong side of the building. She was pouring sweat and her legs felt weak. She pushed open the window and looked down to see if Goodman was running down the alley between buildings, but the alleyway was empty and all she could hear was the sounds of traffic out on the boulevard. She pushed her face out into the air as far as the window would allow and felt the wind against her, against her living flesh. She craned her head toward the front of the hotel, but if their man was out there, he wasn’t making a scene. She imagined Wingate bursting out onto the sidewalk brandishing his sidearm and the people there suddenly flying apart in panic. And she knew he would find nothing: Goodman would have melted into the stream of people heading back to work after their lunches, he would already have transformed into Dean Bellocque, perfectly invisible because he didn’t exist.

A minute later, Wingate knocked at her door and she let him in. “I couldn’t…” He leaned over, winded. She let him catch his breath. “What was he doing here? What did he want?”

“He was in my room,” she said. “He was waiting for me here, for fuck’s sake.”

“My God, Hazel. Are you okay?”

“He tackled me. He held a gun to my head.”

Wingate sat on the end of the bed. He stayed motionless for many moments, and when he raised his eyes, they were bloodshot. He saw the vomit on the bedspread and looked at her searchingly. “What the hell did he want?”

“He wanted to give me one more chance to see things from his point of view.”

“Did you?”

“What do you think?”

They fell to silence and she thought she could hear both of their hearts thudding. She blew a jet of air out from pursed lips. “We have to get out of here. I don’t think Eldwin’s got much time left.”

“I’ll get the car.”

“I’m going to wash my face,” she said. “I’ll meet you outside in three minutes.”

She turned on the too-bright light over the sink and shielded her eyes until the pounding it caused subsided. She felt dazed and overwhelmed. The thought of getting back into the car and making that long drive home, having to start the paperwork, initiating what was bound to be a long and difficult process of ending or suspending this sad affair – it made her want to go to sleep on the spot. When this was over, she realized, there was going to be no one to hand the finished thing to, no one to succour with the result. Because that was what an investigation was, it was a work, like a painting, and at the end of it, someone looked at it and saw what you’d done and knew you’d seen it through. But an unfinished work… who wanted that?

She ran cold water in the sink and cupped her hands under the flow. It sluiced over her mouth and cheeks and she pushed her hands up into her hair. Her eyes looked as if someone had pressed their thumbs into them and driven them into her skull. She was exhausted. She was spent. In the middle of her forehead, she saw the perfectly round, fading pink imprint of her own gun-barrel, a target pointing to the part of her that had failed. The pale circle was like a hazy sun hanging over a body of water and she imagined gulls circling her eyes. That was where all this had begun: at water’s edge. She’d been waiting in the cruiser while Wingate was in the boat. No idea what would be waiting for them down there, what it would mean to them. The boat had come back and the two wetsuits – what were their names, Tate and someone? – had hauled something off the boat wrapped in green netting. She’d hobbled down to the dock to take a closer look and Tate had peeled away the covering for her to see the plastic body within. “Someone was holding it down there, made sure it wasn’t going anywhere,” he’d said, and she looked at him, and the marks his scuba mask had made around his eyes made him look like a raccoon.