"Presumably," I said. I was still feeling like hell; the last thing I wanted to do was analyze Alicia Rowan's decor.
"What she said about Jamie coming in upset one day. Do you remember what that was about?"
"Cassie," I said, "we've been through this. Once more, with feeling: I remember sweet shining fuck-all. As far as I'm concerned, my life began when I was twelve and a half and on a ferry to England. OK?"
"Jesus, Ryan. I was just asking."
"And now you know the answer," I said, putting the car up a gear. Cassie threw up her hands, switched the radio on to something loud and left me to it.
A couple of miles later I took a hand off the wheel and rumpled Cassie's hair.
"Fuck off, dickface," she said, without rancor.
I grinned, relieved, and pulled one of her curls. She smacked my hand away. "Listen, Cass," I said, "I need to ask you something."
She gave me a suspicious look.
"Do you think the two cases are linked, or not? If you had to make a guess."
Cassie thought about this for a long time, looking out the window at the hedges and the gray sky, clouds chasing fast. "I don't know, Rob," she said at last. "There are things that don't match up. Katy was left where she'd be found right away, while…That's a big difference, psychologically. But maybe the guy was haunted by the first time, figured he might feel less guilty if he made sure the family got the body back this time round. And Sam's right: what are the odds of two different child-killers in the same place? If I had to put money on it…I honestly don't know."
I hit the brakes, hard. I think both Cassie and I yelled. Something had darted across the road in front of the car-something dark and low to the ground, with the sinuous gait of a weasel or a stoat, but much too big for either-and disappeared into the overgrown hedge on the other side.
We slammed forward in our seats-I had been going much too fast for a one-lane back road-but Cassie is fanatical about seat belts, which might have saved her parents' lives, and we were both wearing ours. The car came to a stop skewed at a wild angle across the road, one wheel inches from a ditch. Cassie and I sat still, stunned. On the radio some girl band ululated with insane cheer, on and on.
"Rob?" Cassie said breathlessly, after a minute. "Are you OK?"
I couldn't make my hands release their grip on the steering wheel. "What the hell was that?"
"What?" Her eyes were wide and frightened.
"The animal," I said. "What was it?"
Cassie was looking at me with something new in her eyes, something that scared me almost as badly as the creature had. "I didn't see an animal."
"It went straight across the road. You must have missed it. You were looking out the side."
"Yeah," she said, after what felt like a very long time. "Yeah, I guess I was. A fox, maybe?"
Sam had found his journalist within a few hours: Michael Kiely, sixty-two and semi-retired after a moderately successful career-he had sort of peaked in the late eighties, when he discovered that a government minister had nine family members on his payroll as "consultants," and had never quite recaptured those dizzy heights. In 2000, when the plans for the motorway were announced, Kiely had written a snide article suggesting that it had already achieved its primary goaclass="underline" there were a lot of happy property developers in Ireland that morning. Apart from an oratorical two-column letter from the Minister for the Environment, explaining that this motorway would essentially make everything perfect forever, there had been no follow-up.
It had taken Sam a few days to persuade Kiely to meet him, though-the first time he mentioned Knocknaree, Kiely shouted, "Do you take me for a fool, boy?" and hung up-and even then, Kiely refused to be seen with him anywhere in town. He made him trek out to a spectacularly down-market pub somewhere on the far side of the Phoenix Park: "Safer, my boy, so much safer." He had a swooping nose and an artfully windswept mane of white hair-"sort of poetic-looking," Sam said, dubiously, over dinner that evening. Sam had bought him a Bailey's and brandy ("Good God," I said-I had been having a hard time eating anyway; "Ooo," said Cassie, eyeing her booze shelf speculatively) and tried to bring up the motorway, but Kiely flinched and held up a hand, eyelids fluttering in exquisite pain: "Your voice, my boy, lower your voice…Oh, there's something there, no doubt about it. But someone-naming no names-someone had me ordered off the story almost before it began. Legal reasons, they said, no proof of anything… Absurd. Rubbish. It was purely, poisonously personal. This town, my boy: this dirty old town has a long memory."
By the second round, though, he had loosened up a little and was in a reflective mood. "Some might say," he told Sam, leaning forward in his chair and gesturing expansively, "some might say that place was bad news from the first. So much initial rhetoric, you know, about how it was going to be a new urban hub, and then-after all the houses in that lone estate had been sold-it simply fell through. They said the budget wouldn't allow for any further development. Some might say, my boy, that the only purpose of the rhetoric was to ensure that the houses sold for much more than one might expect of an estate in the middle of nowhere. Not I, of course. I've no proof."
He finished his drink and eyed the empty glass wistfully. "All I'll say is that there's been something just a little off kilter about that place all along. Do you know, the rate of injuries and fatalities during construction was almost three times the national average? Do you believe, my boy, that a place can have a will of its own-that it can rebel, so to speak, against human mismanagement?"
"Whatever one may say about Knocknaree," I said, "it did not put a fucking plastic bag over Katy Devlin's head." I was glad Kiely was Sam's problem and not mine. Normally I find this kind of absurdity entertaining, but the way I was feeling that week, I would probably have kicked the guy in the shin.
"What did you say?" Cassie asked Sam.
"I said yes, of course," he said serenely, trying to wind fettuccine onto his fork. "I'd've said yes if he'd asked me did I believe little green men were running the country."
Kiely had drunk his third round-Sam was going to have fun trying to get this one through expenses-in silence, chin sunk on his chest. Finally he had put on his coat, shaken Sam's hand in a long, fervent grasp, murmured, "Don't look at it until you're in a safe place," and swept out of the pub, leaving a twist of paper in Sam's palm.
"The poor bastard," Sam said, rummaging in his wallet. "I think he was grateful to have someone listen to him for once. The way he is, he could shout a story from the rooftops and no one would believe a word of it." He extracted something tiny and silver, holding it carefully between finger and thumb, and passed it to Cassie. I put down my fork and leaned in over her shoulder.
It was a piece of silver paper, the kind you pull out of a fresh cigarette packet, rolled into a tight, precise scroll. Cassie opened it out. On the back was written, in crabbed, smudged black felt-tip: "Dynamo-Kenneth McClintock. Futura-Terence Andrews. Global-Jeffrey Barnes amp; Conor Roche."
"Are you sure he's reliable?" I asked.
"Mad as a brush," Sam said, "but he's a good reporter, or he used to be. I'd say he wouldn't have given me these unless he was sure of them."
Cassie ran her fingertip over the scrap of paper. "If these check out," she said, "this is the best lead we've got so far. Fair play, Sam."