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much point straightening the place up if she was about to be discharged.
    The only thing about the medical reports that caught her eye was the proliferation of negatives. No sign of . . . No evidence of . . . No indication that . . . Schizophrenic disorders can be ruled out . . . However many times they threw down their net, it always came up empty. Jennifer was unfathomable.
    They sent her home. It was nearly the holidays. The TV crew would have camped on the Knoxes’ doorstep if they’d dared, but with an aboriginal family that was never an option. The Band chief had publicly requested that they stay away, and no producer in Canada was going to pick a fight with the First Nations. The story went quiet. For a couple of weeks nothing was added to the file. Cope must have been praying that the case had drifted quietly to join all his other unresolved and forgotten failures. Every RCMP station had a hinterland full of cases like that. By then, too, wild conspiracy theories about a worldwide computer virus were starting to emerge. Someone had coined a suitably newsworthy name for it: the Plague. There were countries where government departments and major industries were beginning to deny they were affected, ensuring that the whole Internet assumed the opposite. The stories from England were getting more lurid by the week: people setting fire to piles of banknotes, bands of Satanists roaming the snow, students proclaiming the dawning of the Age of Something or Other. The news cycle moved on.
    And then it cycled back, with a vengeance. Goose remembered going out one morning not long after Christmas and passing the papers stacked outside the convenience store. There on the front page was a close-up of that first photo of Jennifer, looking stern and frightening and interesting, under the headline: MURDERER!
    Ms. Knox had changed her story completely. She’d been trying to protect her girl all along, she claimed, but she just couldn’t do it anymore. According to the new statement she gave Cope, what had really happened that night was that she’d come home to find Carl blundering around outside the house in the dark. He and Jennifer had had a fight and she’d locked him out and broken the light. When his mother arrived he’d been going through the yard, looking for something to break down the door. She shouted up to the bedroom; Jennifer swore at them and told them she’d kill them if they came inside. They broke the door down and went upstairs to try to calm her. She pushed Carl, he fell all the way down, and when she saw she’d broken his neck she passed out.
    Goose hadn’t appreciated it when she read the story online down in Victoria, but now that she’d worked through the police records in sequence she saw Cope’s dilemma very clearly. On the one hand the mother was a terrible witness. On top of that, she’d just spent two weeks at home with a baby, a ten-year-old boy with serious problems, and a daughter who (presumably) wouldn’t acknowledge her existence with so much as a word. It wasn’t hard to imagine her motive for coming up with this new story. On the other hand, the new version fitted the facts as well as the old one, if not slightly better, and it had the priceless bonus of doing away with the need for a suspect. If there’d never been an intruder, there was no housebreaker and child molester on the loose; there was no one Cope had failed to catch.
    Now, of course, everyone wanted a piece of the case again. The sarge was on TV every other day, visibly trying to remember media training courses he’d taken in the days when the Internet was a cult mystery known only to a handful of geeks. The Band insisted that tribal mediation and traditional justice should be the first resort. The word aphasia was introduced to millions of Canadians for the first time. Free Jennifer groups were formed before she’d even been