In the Woods

"Make it fast," he said. "I've to be somewhere at eight." His wife had left him the year before; since then the grapevine had picked up a series of awkward attempts at relationships, including one spectacularly unsuccessful blind date where the woman turned out to be an ex-hooker he had arrested regularly in his Vice days.

"Katharine Devlin, aged twelve," I said.

"The ID's definite, so?"

"Ninety-nine percent," I said. "We'll have one of the parents view the body when the morgue's patched her up, but Katy Devlin was an identical twin, and the surviving twin looks exactly like our victim."

"Leads, suspects?" he snapped. He had a sort of nice tie on, ready for his date, and he was wearing too much cologne; I couldn't place it, but it smelled expensive. "I'm going to have to give a fucking press conference tomorrow. Tell me you've got something."

"She was hit over the head and asphyxiated, probably raped," Cassie said. The fluorescent lighting smudged gray under her eyes. She looked too tired and too young to be saying the words so calmly. "We won't know anything definite till the post-mortem tomorrow morning."

"Fucking tomorrow

?" O'Kelly said, outraged. "Tell that shite Cooper to give this priority."

"Already did, sir," said Cassie. "He had to be in court this afternoon. He said first thing tomorrow is the best he can do." (Cooper and O'Kelly hate each other; what Cooper had actually said was, "Kindly explain to Mr. O'Kelly that his cases aren't the only ones in the world.") "We've identified four primary lines of inquiry, and-"

"Good, that's good," said O'Kelly, grabbing drawers open and rummaging for a pen.

"First, there's the family," said Cassie. "You know the stats, sir: most murdered kids are killed by their parents."

"And there's something odd about that family, sir," I said. This was my line; we had to get the point across, in case we ever needed a little leeway in investigating the Devlins, but if Cassie had said it O'Kelly would have gone off into a long snide boring routine about women's intuition. We were good at O'Kelly by this time. Our counterpoint has been polished to the seamlessness of a Beach Boys harmony-we can sense exactly when to swap the roles of front man and backup, good cop and bad cop, when my cool detachment needs to strike a balancing note of gravitas against Cassie's bright ease-and it is for use even against our own. "I can't put my finger on it, but there's something up in that house."

"Never ignore a hunch," said O'Kelly. "Dangerous." Cassie's foot, swinging casually, nudged my back.

"Second," she said, "we're going to have to at least check out the possibility of some kind of cult."

"Oh, God, Maddox. What, did Cosmo

run an article on Satanism this month?" O'Kelly's disregard for cliché is so sweeping that it almost has its own panache. I find this entertaining or irritating or mildly comforting, depending on my mood, but at least it makes it very easy to prepare your script in advance.

"I think it's a load of rubbish, too, sir," I said, "but we've got a murdered little girl on a sacrificial altar. The reporters were asking about it already. We'll have to eliminate it." It is, obviously, difficult to prove that something does not exist, and saying it without solid proof just brings out the conspiracy theorists, so we take a different tack. We would spend several hours finding ways in which Katy Devlin's death didn't match the putative MO of a hypothetical group (no bloodletting, no sacrificial garment, no occult symbols, yada yada yada), and then O'Kelly, who luckily has absolutely no sense of the absurd, would explain all this to the cameras.

"Waste of time," O'Kelly said. "But yeah, yeah, do it. Talk to Sex Crime, talk to the parish priest, whoever, just get it out of the way. What's third?"

"Third," Cassie said, "is a straight-up sex crime-a pedophile who killed her either to stop her talking or because killing is part of his thing. And if things point that way, we're going to have to look at the two kids who disappeared at Knocknaree in 1984. Same age, same location, and right beside our victim's body we found a drop of old blood-lab's working on matching it to the '84 samples-and a hair clip that fits the description of one the missing girl was wearing. We can't rule out a connection." This was definitely Cassie's line. I am, as I've said, a pretty good liar, but just hearing her say it made my heart rate go up annoyingly, and in many ways O'Kelly is more perceptive than he pretends to be.

"What, a serial sex killer? After twenty years? And how do you know about this hair clip anyway?"

"You told us to familiarize ourselves with cold cases, sir," said Cassie virtuously. It was true, he had-I think he heard it in a seminar, or maybe on CSI-but he told us a lot of things, and anyway none of us ever had time. "And the guy could have been out of the country, or in prison, or he only kills when he's under a lot of stress-"