In the Woods

But this: it was such a pointless lie. The Devlin girls had hung around the dig often enough that summer, and they were hardly inconspicuous; all the other archaeologists had remembered them; Mel, who had stayed a safe distance from Katy's body, had known her straight away. And Damien had given tours of the site; he was more likely than any of them to have spoken to Katy, spent time with her. He had bent over her body, supposedly to see if she was breathing (and even that much courage, I realized, was out of character). He had no reason in the world to deny having seen her before, unless he was clumsily dodging a trap we had never set; unless the thought of being linked to her in any way scared him so badly that he couldn't think straight.

"OK," Cassie said, "what about her father-Jonathan Devlin? Are you a member of Move the Motorway?" and Damien took a big gulp of cold tea and started nodding again, and we skated deftly away from the subject before he had a chance to realize what he had said.

* * *

Around three o'clock, Cassie and Sam and I went out for takeaway pizza-Mark was starting to bitch about being hungry, and we wanted to keep him and Damien happy. Neither of them was under arrest; they could decide to walk out of the building at any moment, and there would be nothing we could do to stop them. We were trading, as we so often do, on the basic human desires to please authority and to be a good guy; and, while I was pretty sure these would keep Damien in the interview room indefinitely, I was far from convinced about Mark.

"How are you getting on with Donnelly?" Sam asked me, in the pizza place. Cassie was up at the counter, leaning over it and laughing with the guy who had taken our order.

I shrugged. "Hard to tell. How's Mark?"

"Raging. He says he's spent half the year working his arse off for Move the Motorway, why would he risk scuppering the whole thing by killing the chairman's kid? He thinks this is all political…" Sam winced. "About Donnelly," he said, looking not at me but at Cassie's back. "If he's our man. What would…does he have a motive?"

"Not that we've found so far," I said. I did not want to get into this.

"If anything does come up…" Sam shoved his fists deeper into his trouser pockets. "Anything you think I might want to know. Could you call me?"

"Yeah," I said. I hadn't eaten all day, but food was the last thing on my mind; all I wanted was to get back to Damien, and the pizza seemed to be taking hours. "Sure."

* * *

Damien took a can of 7-Up, but he refused the pizza; he wasn't hungry, he said. "Sure?" Cassie asked, trying to catch strings of cheese with her finger. "God, when I was a student I'd never have turned down free pizza."

"You never turn down food, period," I told her. "You're a human Hoover." Cassie, unable to answer through a huge mouthful, nodded cheerfully and gave us the thumbs-up. "Go on, Damien, have some. You should keep your strength up; we're going to be here for a while."

His eyes widened. I waved a slice at him, but he shook his head, so I shrugged and kept it for myself. "OK," I said, "let's talk about Mark Hanly. What's he like?"

Damien blinked. "Mark? Um, he's OK. He's strict, I guess, but he sort of has to be. We don't have a lot of time."

"Ever seen him get violent? Lose his temper?" I wiggled a hand at Cassie; she threw me a paper napkin.

"Yeah-no…I mean, yeah, he gets mad sometimes, if someone's messing, but I never saw him hit anyone, or anything like that."

"Do you think he would, if he was angry enough?" I wiped my hands and thumbed through my notebook, trying not to get grease on the pages. "You're such a slob," Cassie told me; I gave her the finger. Damien glanced between us, flustered and off balance.

"What?" he asked at last, uncertainly.

"Do you think Mark could get violent if he was provoked?"

"I guess maybe. I don't know."

"What about you? Ever hit anyone?"

"What…no!"

"We should've got garlic bread," Cassie said.

"I'm not sharing an interview room with two people and garlic. What do you think it would take to make you hit someone, Damien?"

His mouth opened.

"You don't seem like the violent type to me, but everyone's got a breaking point. Would you hit someone if he insulted your mother, for example?"

"I-"

"Or for money? Or in self-defense? What would it take?"

"I don't…" Damien blinked fast. "I don't know. I mean, I've never-but I guess everyone's, like you said, everyone's got a breaking point, I don't know…"

I nodded and made a careful note of this. "Would you rather a different kind?" Cassie asked, inspecting the pizza. "I think ham-and-pineapple rules, personally, but they have some macho pepperoni-and-sausage thing next door."

"What? Um-no, thanks. Who's…?" We waited, chewing. "Who's next door? Am I, like, allowed to ask?"

"Sure," I said. "That's Mark. We sent Sean and Dr. Hunt home, awhile back, but we haven't been able to let Mark go yet."

We watched Damien turn a shade paler as he processed this information and its implications. "Why not?" he asked faintly.