Authors: Tana French
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Tana French
“We haven’t a clue,” Cassie said, through a mouthful of marker cap; she was scribbling a timeline of Katy’s last day across the whiteboard. “We might have a better idea once Cooper comes back with the results from the post, but right now it’s wide open.”
“We don’t need you to look into the parents, though,” I said. I was BluTacking crime-scene photos to the other side of the board. “We want you to take the motorway angle—trace the phone calls to Devlin, find out who owns the land around the site, who has a serious stake in the motorway staying put.”
“Is this because of my uncle?” Sam asked. He has a tendency to directness that I’ve always found slightly startling, in a detective. Cassie spat out the marker cap and turned to face him. “Yeah,” she said.
“Is that going to be a problem?”
We all knew what she was asking. Irish politics are tribal, incestuous, tangled and furtive, incomprehensible even to many of the people involved. To an outside eye there is basically no difference between the two main parties, which occupy identical self-satisfied positions on the far right of the spectrum, but many people are still passionate about one or the other because of which side their great-grandfathers fought on during the Civil War, or because Daddy does business with the local candidate and says he’s a lovely fella. Corruption is taken for granted, even grudgingly admired: the guerrilla cunning of the colonized is still ingrained into us, and tax evasion and shady deals are seen as forms of the same spirit of rebellion that hid horses and seed potatoes from the British.
And a huge amount of the corruption centers on that primal, clichéd Irish passion, land. Property developers and politicians are traditionally bosom buddies, and just about every major land deal involves brown envelopes and inexplicable rezoning and complicated transactions through offshore accounts. It would be a minor miracle if there weren’t at least a few favors to friends woven into the Knocknaree motorway, somewhere. If there were, it was unlikely that Redmond O’Neill didn’t know about them, and equally unlikely that he would want them to come out.
“No,” Sam said, promptly and firmly. “No problem.” Cassie and I must have looked dubious, because he glanced back and forth between us and laughed. “Listen, lads, I’ve known him all my life. I lived with them for a couple of years when I first came up to Dublin. I’d know if he was into anything dodgy. He’s straight as a die, my uncle. He’ll help us out any way he can.”
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“Perfect,” Cassie said, and went back to the timeline. “We’re having dinner at my place. Come over around eight and we’ll swap updates.” She found a clean corner of whiteboard and drew Sam a little map of how to get there. By the time we had the incident room organized, the floaters were starting to arrive. O’Kelly had got us about three dozen of them, and they were the cream of the crop: up-and-comers, alert and smooth-shaven and dressed for success, tipped to make good squads as soon as the openings arose. They pulled out chairs and notebooks, slapped backs and resurrected old in-jokes and chose their seats like kids on the first day of school. Cassie and Sam and I smiled and shook hands and thanked them for joining us. I recognized a couple of them—an uncommunicative dark guy from Mayo called Sweeney, and a well-fed Corkman with no neck, O’Connor or O’Gorman or something, who compensated for having to take orders from two nonCorkonians by making some incomprehensible but clearly triumphalistic comment about Gaelic football. A lot of the others looked familiar, but the names went straight out of my head the moment their hands slid away from mine, and the faces merged into one big, eager, intimidating blur. I’ve always loved this moment in an investigation, the moment before the first briefing begins. It reminds me of the focused, private buzz before a curtain goes up: orchestra tuning, dancers backstage doing last-minute stretches, ears pricked for the signal to throw off their wraps and leg warmers and explode into action. I had never been in charge of an investigation anything like this size before, though, and this time the sense of anticipation just made me edgy. The incident room felt too full, all that primed and cocked energy, all those curious eyes on us. I remembered the way I used to look at Murder detectives, back when I was a floater praying to be borrowed for cases like this one: the awe, the bursting, almost unbearable aspiration. These guys—a lot of them were older than I was—seemed to me to have a different air about them, a cool, unconcealed assessment. I’ve never liked being the center of attention. O’Kelly slammed the door behind him, slicing off the noise instantaneously. “Right, lads,” he said, into the silence. “Welcome to Operation Vestal. What’s a vestal when it’s at home?”
Headquarters picks the names for operations. They range from the obvious through the cryptic to the downright weird. Apparently the image of 82
Tana French
the little dead girl on the ancient altar had piqued someone’s cultural tendencies. “A sacrificial virgin,” I said.
“A votary,” said Cassie.
“Jesus fuck,” said O’Kelly. “Are they trying to make everyone think this was some cult thing? What the fuck are they reading up there?”
Cassie gave them a rundown on the case, skipping lightly over the 1984
connection—just an off-chance, something she could check out in her spare time—and we handed out jobs: go door-to-door through the estate, set up a tip line and a roster for manning it, get a list of all the sex offenders living near Knocknaree, check with the British cops and with the ports and airports to see if anyone suspicious had come over to Ireland in the last few days, pull Katy’s medical records, her school records, run full background checks on the Devlins. The floaters snapped smartly into action, and Sam and Cassie and I left them to it and went to see how Cooper was getting on. We don’t normally watch the autopsies. Someone who was at the crime scene has to go, to confirm that this is in fact the same body (it’s happened, toe tags getting mixed up, the pathologist ringing a startled detective to report his finding of death from liver cancer), but mostly we palm this off on uniforms or techs and just go through the notes and photos with Cooper afterwards. By squad tradition you attend the post-mortem in your first murder case, and although supposedly the purpose is to impress you with the full solemnity of your new job, nobody is fooled: this is an initiation rite, as harshly judged as any primitive tribe’s. I know an excellent detective who, after fifteen years on the squad, is still known as Secretariat because of the speed with which he left the morgue when the pathologist removed the victim’s brain. I made it through mine (a teenage prostitute, thin arms layered with bruises and track marks) without flinching, but I was left with no desire to repeat the experience. I go only in those few cases—ironically, the most harrowing ones—that seem to demand this small, sacrificial act of devotion. I don’t think anyone ever quite gets over that first time, really, the mind’s violent revolt when the pathologist slices the scalp and the victim’s face folds away from the skull, malleable and meaningless as a Halloween mask. Our timing was a little off: Cooper was just coming out of the autopsy room in his green scrubs, a waterproof gown held away from him between finger and thumb. “Detectives,” he said, raising his eyebrows. “What a sur-In the Woods 83
prise. If only you’d let me know you were planning to come, I would of course have waited until you managed to fit us in.”
He was being snotty because we were too late for the post-mortem. It was, in all fairness, not even eleven o’clock, but Cooper gets into work between six and seven, leaves by three or four, and likes you to remember it. His morgue assistants all hate him for this, which doesn’t bother him because he mostly hates them, too. Cooper prides himself on instant, unpredictable dislikes; as far as we’ve been able to figure out so far, he dislikes blond women, short men, anyone with more than two earrings and people who say “you know” too much, as well as various random people who don’t fit into any of these categories. Fortunately he had decided to like me and Cassie, or he would have made us go back to work and wait until he sent over the post-mortem results (handwritten—Cooper writes all his reports in spidery fountain pen, an idea I sort of like but don’t have the courage to try out in the squad room). There are days when I worry, secretly, that in a decade or two I might wake up and discover I’ve turned into Cooper.
“Wow,” Sam said, trying. “Finished already?” Cooper gave him a chilly glance.
“Dr. Cooper, I’m so sorry to burst in on you at this hour,” Cassie said.
“Superintendent O’Kelly wanted to go over a few things, so we had a hard time getting away.” I nodded wearily and raised my eyes to the ceiling.
“Ah. Well, yes,” Cooper said. His tone implied that he found it slightly tasteless of us to mention O’Kelly at all.
“If by any chance you have a few moments,” I said, “would you mind talking us through the results?”
“But of course,” Cooper said, with an infinitesimal, long-suffering sigh. Actually, like any master craftsman, he loves showing off his work. He held the autopsy-room door open for us and the smell hit me, that unique combination of death and cold and rubbing alcohol that sends an instinctive animal recoil through you every time. Bodies in Dublin go to the city morgue, but Knocknaree is outside the city limits; rural victims are simply brought to the nearest hospital, and the post-mortem is done there. Conditions vary. This room was windowless and grubby, layers of grime on the green floor-tiles and nameless stains in the old porcelain sinks. The two autopsy tables were the only things in the room that looked post-1950s; they were bright stainless steel, light flaring off those grooved edges.
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Katy Devlin was naked under the merciless fluorescent lights and too small for the table, and she looked somehow much deader than she had the previous day; I thought of the old superstition that the soul lingers near the body for a few days, bewildered and unsure. She was gray-white, like something out of Roswell, with dark blotches of lividity down her left side. Cooper’s assistant had already sewn her scalp back together, thank God, and was working on the Y incision across her torso, big sloppy stitches with a needle the size of a sailmaker’s. I felt a momentary, crazy pang of guilt at being late, at leaving her all on her own—she was so small—through this final violation: we should have been there, she should have had someone to hold her hand while Cooper’s detached, gloved fingers prodded and sliced. Sam, to my surprise, crossed himself unobtrusively.
“Pubescent white female,” Cooper said, brushing past us to the table and motioning the assistant away, “aged twelve, so I’m told. Height and weight both on the low side, but within normal limits. Scars indicating abdominal surgery, possibly an exploratory laparotomy, some time ago. No obvious pathology; as far as I can tell, she died healthy, if you’ll pardon the oxymoron.”
We clustered around the table like obedient students; our footsteps threw small flat echoes off the tiled walls. The assistant leaned against one of the sinks and folded his arms, chewing stolidly on a piece of gum. One arm of the Y incision still gaped open, dark and unthinkable, the needle stuck casually through a flap of skin for safekeeping.
“Any chance of DNA?” I asked.
“One step at a time, if you please,” Cooper said fussily. “Now. There were two blows to the head, both ante-mortem—before death,” he added sweetly to Sam, who nodded solemnly. “Both were struck with a hard, rough object with protrusions but no distinct edges, consistent with the rock Ms. Miller presented to me for inspection. One was a light blow to the back of the head, near the crown. It caused a small area of abrasion and some bleeding, but no cracks to the skull.” He turned Katy’s head to one side, to show us the little bump. They had cleaned the blood off her face, to check for any injuries underneath, but there were still faint swipes of it across her cheek.
“So maybe she dodged, or she was running away from him while he was swinging,” Cassie said.
We don’t have profilers. When we really need one we bring one over from England, but most of the time a lot of the Murder guys just use Cassie, on the In the Woods 85
dubious basis that she studied psychology at Trinity for three and a half years. We don’t tell O’Kelly this—he considers profilers to be one step up from psychics, and only grudgingly lets us listen even to the English guys—but I think she’s probably fairly good at it, although presumably this is for reasons unrelated to her years of Freud and lab rats. She always comes up with a couple of useful new angles, and usually turns out to be quite close to the mark. Cooper took his time thinking about it, to punish her for interrupting. Finally he shook his head judiciously. “I consider that unlikely. Had she been moving when this blow was struck, one would expect peripheral grazing, but there was none. The other blow, in contrast . . .” He tilted Katy’s head to the other side and hooked back her hair with one finger. On her left temple a patch of skin had been shaved to expose a wide, jagged laceration, splinters of bone poking out. Someone, Sam or Cassie, swallowed.
“As you see,” Cooper said, “the other blow was far more forceful. It landed just behind and above the left ear, causing a depressed skull fracture and a sizable subdural hematoma. Here and here”—he flicked his finger—
“you’ll observe the peripheral grazing to which I referred, at the proximal edge of the primary impact point: as the blow was struck, she appears to have turned her head away, so the weapon skidded along her skull briefly before achieving its full impact. Do I make myself clear?”
We all nodded. I glanced covertly across at Sam and was heartened by the fact that he looked like he was having a hard time, too.
“This blow would have been sufficient to cause death within hours. However, the hematoma had progressed very little, so we can safely say that she died of other causes within a short time of receiving this injury.”
“Can you tell whether she was facing towards him or away from him?”
Cassie asked.
“The indications are that she may have been prone when the harder blow was struck: there was considerable bleeding, and the flow was directed inwards across the left side of the face, with some pooling apparent around the central line of the nose and mouth.” This was good news, if I can use the term at all in this context: there would be blood at the scene, if we ever found it. Also, it meant we were probably looking for someone left-handed, and, while this wasn’t Agatha Christie and real cases seldom hinge on that kind of thing, at this point any tiny lead was an improvement.