Before You Knew My Name (36)

‘She is not giving up her secrets easily,’ they say to each other. As if there are better ways for a dead girl to behave.

Detective O’Byrne is different. He doesn’t give up on me so easily. In these earliest days, he thinks about it like this: I am simply a song he can’t quite remember. A melody he used to know, but for now he can only hear a fragment, a note hanging in the air as it repeats, over and over. The name of the song is tantalisingly close, but he can’t quite get there. Can’t get to that place, far enough inside his own head, where other people, other men, sing out. I see him trying hard, see the times he places his thick fingers at both temples and pushes down, elbows against desk, eyes squeezed shut.

The note hangs between us. He knows that he knows.

Someone took a photograph of him like this once. Printed it out, labelled it ‘The Thinker’. It’s still pinned on a precinct wall, some cluttered wall, amongst dozens of other snapshots documenting people and places and murders long solved. No matter that the real Thinker has his hand at his mouth. The photographer recognised the intent, the turning in on oneself, the folding of thoughts over and over until they’ve been reduced to something small and true. The truth wants to be told; Detective O’Byrne knows this most of all. He will get to that place, soon enough, he is sure of it. He will find the man who did this because signatures, calling cards, are always left on the bodies of murdered girls. This is why he keeps coming back to the list of potential weapons. Thumbs his way down the possibilities. Displaced fragments. Round in shape. Something brought down with extreme force against the right temple. Fresh hemorrhage. This came first, she was still alive. Before hands went to neck, before the crushing, the strangulation that killed her. Was that initial strike an accident? A moment of white-hot rage? Both of these things, intertwined? Thumb on words, pressing against the possibilities. Then fingers back to temple. A tap, mimicking the blow of a—what?

Figure out the weapon and you figure out the man.

For Detective O’Byrne, failure is not an option. It’s nothing personal, he thinks. Just his job. He would obsess over any case this complex, has to make it his priority. That’s what he’s paid to do, and what he does well.

It’s nothing personal. He is not making it personal when he puts his head in his large hands and aches over the already indisputable details of this case. Those grim facts written out across a young woman’s body that he knows for sure to be true.



There is evidence of a struggle.

Something you should know. I did not want to die. I don’t know if it makes any difference, but when the time came, I fought really hard to stay in my body. I tried my best, but I just couldn’t hold on. I did not want to die. And now I am—

Well. Ruby and Detective O’Byrne are not only ones looking for answers. Turns out they don’t teach you how to be out of the world any more than they teach you how to be in it.





TWELVE

U OK?

Ruby has been staring at her phone screen for twenty minutes. It is the first message she has received from Ash in three days. Three days. It’s been three whole days since she found Jane’s body. Jane. That’s what the media call the girl—me—now. Jane Doe, an unidentified white female found murdered in Riverside Park. Blonde. Thought to be aged between 15 and 24 years old. 5'5 tall, 125 pounds. A scatter of freckles across her nose. No identifying marks, no tattoos, and no major dental work done. She looks like no one and everyone, and they have named her Jane.

The girl is now Jane.

Police say they are investigating every single tip phoned in. They hold press conferences, their faces like stone. Standing at podiums, they warn women to be careful, to avoid situations. News stories lead with Vicious Attack and Brutal Slaying; the growing consensus is that this was a random attack, which puts my murder on the tip of all the tongues up here where it happened, though the whole city is spooked. Who is she, people ask? And how could this have happened? Nobody young and pretty gets murdered in New York City these days. Correction: nobody young and pretty gets raped and murdered in New York City these days. Quotes from ‘police sources’ on the exact nature of the assault dominate the story in the tabloid papers. It makes Ruby feel sick to her stomach.

(Others delight in it. They crawl right into the muck.)

Is Ruby okay, then? No. Like I said, she has not chosen the easy path here. She could have let me go already, turned me over to the people whose job it is to think about me. Instead, her need to know who I am has come on like a fever; after her interview with Detective O’Byrne, she has stayed holed up inside her room, moving between the bed and the bathroom, as if taking a third or fourth shower might cool her down. It never does, so she crawls back under the sheets, half wet, stares at the ceiling, until she switches on her laptop again, goes back to her search for fresh headlines and threads of new information about the investigation. The city honks and buzzes outside her window, beyond her closed blinds there are millions of people going about their days and their nights, doing the things they always do, good or bad, or both, but Ruby wants to shut all that living out. Now that she feels closer to the dead.

Cassie says she should come home. Says she was right to question Ruby’s safety and the wisdom of her travelling alone.

Away from her laptop, there is only one safe place Ruby can think of.

The precinct is on a regular, residential street decorated with thin-trunked trees. Spears of metal make the first-floor windows of the street’s ornate row houses look like little jail cells, but for the most part, the location feels innocuous, homely, and Ruby would not have guessed there was a police station nestled in the neighbourhood. When she’d walked here for her formal interview, she’d followed the blue dot on her phone and was confused when she arrived, thinking: this is a street where people should be making dinner and playing with children, not investigating robberies and assaults and all the hidden, broken things. But then again, so much happens behind closed doors. Perhaps, she reasoned, it made sense for the police to slot themselves in amongst all that domesticity, amongst the kitchens and lounge rooms and curtains being closed around everyday life.