"Leary?" Gingerly, Murphy mounted the stairs.
Those creaked, too, which didn't help his heart rate any. Jesus, he hated walking into something like this. He'd walked in on one too many crime scenes, and in almost every one the victim had greeted him with wide eyes, as if still startled by what had happened.
"Leary? You up here?"
He got three fourths of the way up the stairs and saw her.
Alive. Sitting in the first bedroom on the left, on top of an old mahogany sleigh bed. Disheveled and pale, cross-legged and dressed in a pink sweat suit, a punk Buddha of the Flea Market.
"What the hell's wrong with you?" Murphy demanded, trying as hard as hell to calm his heart down. He was still half-expecting to see a gun-wielding madman forcibly keeping her in the room.
She didn't move. "I should have remembered to lock the door."
She was way too quiet. Her body language was all wrong. Tight, curled, her fingers tapping like a typist's against something in her lap. Murphy suspected she'd slept in that sweat suit, and at the foot of her bed sat a sealed brown evidence box and a phone that dangled a broken chord. This was going to be complicated, and he hadn't even had breakfast yet. He climbed the rest of the stairs and made for her room.
"What's wrong?" he asked.
"I'm out of practice," she said in an odd, small voice, her attention back on whatever she was mangling in her lap. "I can't remember the whole piece."
She was way, way too quiet.
Then Murphy saw what she'd been holding. A tin whistle. The kind of thing you saw the Chieftains play jigs and stuff on, all high, sharp notes that could shatter glass. She'd been playing that? She'd been playing Barber on that?
"You play that thing?" Murphy found himself asking.
"Maudlin, but appropriate, don't you think?"
"Aren't you supposed to play, like, 'MacNamara's Band' and stuff like that?"
She almost smiled. Lifted the thing to her mouth and spun off about thirty bars of the most complicated jig Murphy had ever heard. Then she dropped it back in her lap and went back to battering it.
Murphy decided it was wiser to stay where he was and leaned against the doorway where she wouldn't notice how uncomfortable she was making him. "Wanna tell me what's going on?"
She shrugged, still not facing him. "I'm just sitting here."
"You're not answering your calls."
She shrugged again, fingered the instrument. Made him even more nervous. This just wasn't the Leary he'd come to know and fear.
"I saw your article on my father," she said. "You did a good job."
Murphy couldn't contain his surprise. "I didn't think you'd read it."
She nodded absently. "You were right. He really did make an impact on the town. On everybody he met, really. He's never known a stranger or had a dollar that didn't need to be in somebody else's pocket more. My mother always yelled at him because he spent his paychecks at the bars. The truth is, he never paid for two drinks in the same night. But he never said no if a person needed help."
"I'm just sorry I didn't know him before," Murphy said.
Unbelievably, she smiled. She smiled fondly, as if they'd never had the conversation the day before. "You would have loved him," she admitted. "I probably wouldn't have been able to pry you two out of the saloon for a month."
Murphy was itching again. He had the most insane urge to look over his shoulder, as if the real conversation were going on right behind him. He sure couldn't figure this one out. So he lobbed a test missile.
"I heard we have another set of statistics," he said.
She started a little, as if she'd come in contact with a live wire. Then she just tightened up a little more. "Maybe," she said. "Maybe not. After all, like everybody said, she was old and she had Alzheimer's. Maybe it was just her time to go."
Murphy blinked in surprise. "You believe that?"
She looked out the window, then back at her hands. "Ah, who knows? I think it's one of the great conceits of the modern world that so many people know just what other people need or want or believe. I don't think I want to do that anymore."
Now he knew he was nervous. "You don't."
She shook her head. "My mother does that, and she doesn't have any friends left. Only dependents."
"And you think that's what this is all about."
Another shrug. Another silence.
"I will tell you one thing I've figured out," she said as if continuing a thought. "An awful lot of people are trying to cover up something they haven't figured out yet. They think maybe patients are being murdered in their geriatric center, but they don't want to know for sure. Landry because it would hurt the hospital. Mary Jane because it would hurt Alex. Davies because it would hurt research, and Van Adder because it might interfere with his towing business. Oh, and the nurses up in the nursing care wing because it could hurt their reputations as good nurses. You know what I haven't heard as a reason yet, Murphy?"
"What's that?"
She looked at him, and he saw what she'd been hiding. Tight, old eyes that glittered with shame. "Those patients. Not one person is doing what they're doing because they think maybe they're helping those poor little old people." She sucked in a shaky breath. Shook her head. "Maybe if one person..."
She shook her head again, uncrossed her legs. Climbed out of bed, as if the words demanded action.
"Leary?"
"It's a question we all ask," she explained, standing there looking out her window into the trees, her hands cradling that tin whistle as if it were a relic. "What's best for the poor old gomers we have to take care of all the time. You know, just how hard should we fight to save them? When does it stop being sensible and become obscene instead? I could understand if any one of the people who's covering this up had said they were doing it because deep in their hearts they really believed it was better for those old people. Because they really did think whoever's doing this was giving them peace. A chance to be rid of all of us, ya know?"
He'd thought it when he'd finally sat down with Joe Leary. "Yeah. I know."
"But not one person really even thought about it. Not one." She turned on him, her eyes accusing. "Not even me. And that's just the most enlightening thing of all."
She was trembling. Murphy wasn't even sure she knew it, but he could see it in her hands and along her arms. She looked like she was going to break, those big blue eyes of hers bleaker than any survivor's waiting at a mine shaft. And Murphy didn't know what to do about it.
"What happened, Leary?" he asked.
She laughed. "Happened?" She hesitated a heartbeat, as if battling something. When she turned away from him, Murphy had the most unholy feeling she'd lost. "Nothing happened. Nothing at all."
This wasn't helping his peace of mind.
"All right," he said. "Let's try this. What's in the box?"
She didn't move. "Nothing."
"You just developed a fetish for evidence boxes."
"Uh-huh."
Murphy had been able to weasel the truth out of four embezzling senators, a bomb-hiding revolutionary, and several dozen reticent whistle-blowers. He stood at the edge of Leary's room and didn't have a clue what to say next.
"And you have nothing to say about this Alice Hampton, or whoever, who died last night."