Luminol reacts with even the tiniest amount of blood, making it glow under ultraviolet light. You can paint over a splattered wall, scrub a carpet till it looks brand-new, keep yourself off the radar for years or decades; luminol will resurrect the crime in delicate, merciless detail. If only Kiernan and McCabe had had luminol, I thought, they could have commandeered a crop-spraying plane and misted the wood, and fought down a hysterical desire to laugh. Cassie and I pressed back against the desk, inches apart. Sophie motioned to the boy tech for the spray, flicked on her black-light and switched off the overhead bulb. In the sudden darkness I could hear all of us breathing, five sets of lungs fighting for the dusty air.
Hiss of a spray bottle, the video camera's tiny red eye moving in. Sophie squatted and held her black-light close to the floor, near the shelves. "There," she said.
I heard Cassie's small, sharp intake of breath. The floor blazed blue-white with frantic patterns like some grotesque abstract painting: spattered arcs where blood had burst outwards, blotchy circles where it had pooled and started to dry, great swipes and scrub-marks where someone panting and desperate had tried to clean it away. It glowed like something radioactive from cracks between the floorboards, etched the rough grain of the wood in high relief. Sophie moved the black-light upwards and sprayed again: tiny droplets fanning across the bottom of the metal shelves, a smudge like a wild grabbing handprint. The darkness stripped away the finds shed, the messy papers and bags of broken pottery, and left us suspended in black space with the murder: luminescent, howling, replaying itself again and again before our eyes.
I said, "Jesus Christ." Katy Devlin had died on this floor. We had sat in this shed and interviewed the killer, smack bang on the scene of the crime.
"No chance that's bleach or something," said Cassie. Luminol gives false positives for anything from household bleach through copper, but we both knew Sophie wouldn't have called us in here until she was sure.
"We've swabbed," Sophie said briefly. I could hear the dirty look in her voice. "Blood."
Deep down, I think I had stopped believing in this moment. I had thought an awful lot about Kiernan, over the past few weeks: Kiernan, with his cozy seaside retirement and his haunted dreams. Only the luckiest of detectives makes it through a whole career without at least one of these cases, and some traitor part of me had insisted from the start that Operation Vestal-the last one in the world I would have chosen-was going to be mine. It took a strange, almost painful adjustment of focus to understand that our guy was no longer a faceless archetype, coalesced out of collective nightmare for one deed and then dissolved back into darkness; he was sitting in the canteen, just a few yards away, wearing muddy Docs and drinking tea under O'Gorman's fishy eye.
"There you go," Sophie said. She straightened up and switched on the overhead light. I blinked at the bland, innocent floor.
"Look," said Cassie. I followed the tilt of her chin: on one of the bottom shelves was a plastic bag stuffed with more plastic bags, the big, clear, heavy kind the archaeologists used for storing pottery. "If the trowel was a weapon of opportunity…"
"Oh, for fuck's sake," Sophie said. "We're going to have to test every bag in this whole bloody place."
The windowpanes rattled and there was a sudden, wild thrumming on the roof of the shed: it had started to rain.
20
It rained hard all the rest of the day, the kind of thick, endless rain that can soak you to the skin as you run the few yards to your car. Every now and then lightning forked over the dark hills, and a distant rumble of thunder reached us. We left the Bureau gang to finish processing the scenes and took Hunt, Mark, Damien and, on the off-chance, a deeply aggrieved Sean ("I thought we were partners here!") back to work with us. We found them an interview room each and started rechecking their alibis.
Sean was easy to eliminate. He shared a flat in Rathmines with three other guys, all of whom remembered, to some extent, the night Katy had died: it had been one of the guys' birthday and they had had a party, at which Sean had DJed till four in the morning, then thrown up on someone's girlfriend's boots and passed out on the sofa. At least thirty witnesses could vouch for both his whereabouts and his tastes in music.
The other three were less straightforward. Hunt's alibi was his wife, Mark's was Mel; Damien lived in Rathfarnham with his widowed mother, who went to bed early but was positive he couldn't have left the house without waking her. These are the kind of alibis detectives hate, the thin, mulish kind that can wreck a case. I could tell you about a dozen cases where we know exactly whodunit, how and where and when, but there is absolutely nothing we can do about it because the guy's mammy swears he was tucked up on the sofa watching The Late Late Show.
"Right," O'Kelly said, in the incident room, after we had taken Sean's statement and sent him home (he had forgiven me for my treachery and offered me a farewell high five; he wanted to know if he could sell his story to the papers, but I told him if he did I would personally raid his flat for drugs every night until he was thirty). "One down, two to go. Place your bets, lads: who do ye fancy?" He was in a much better mood with us, now that he knew we had a suspect in one of the interview rooms, even if we weren't sure which one.
"Damien," Cassie said. "He fits the MO, bang on."
"Mark's admitted he was at the scene," I said. "And he's the only one with anything like a motive."
"As far as we know." I knew what she meant, or thought I did, but I wasn't going to bring up the hired-gun theory, not in front of either O'Kelly or Sam. "And I can't see him doing it."
"I'm aware of that. I can."
Cassie rolled her eyes, which I actually found slightly comforting: a small savage part of me had expected her to flinch.
"O'Neill?" O'Kelly asked.
"Damien," Sam said. "I brought them all a cup of tea. He's the only one picked his up with his left hand."
After a startled second, Cassie and I started to laugh. The joke was on us-I, at any rate, had forgotten all about the left-handed thing-but we were both wound tight and giddy, and we couldn't stop. Sam grinned and shrugged, pleased at the reaction. "I don't know what ye two are laughing about," O'Kelly said gruffly, but his mouth was twitching, too. "You should've spotted that yourselves. All this jibber-jabber about MOs…" I was laughing too hard, my face going red and my eyes watering. I bit down on my lip to stop myself.
"Oh, God," said Cassie, taking a deep breath. "Sam, what would we do without you?"
"That's enough fun and games," O'Kelly said. "You two take Damien Donnelly. O'Neill, get Sweeney and have another go at Hanly, and I'll find a few of the lads to talk to Hunt and the alibi witnesses. And, Ryan, Maddox, O'Neill-we need a confession. Don't fuck this up. Ándele." He scraped back his chair with an ear-splitting screech and left.
"Ándele?" said Cassie. She looked perilously near to another bout of the giggles.
"Well done, lads," Sam said. He held out a hand to each of us; his grip was strong and warm and solid. "Good luck."
"If Andrews hired one of them," I said, when Sam had gone to find Sweeney, and Cassie and I were alone in the incident room, "this is going to be the mess of the century."
Cassie raised one eyebrow noncommittally. She finished her coffee: it was going to be a very long day, we had all been spiking ourselves up on caffeine.
"How do you want to do this?" I asked.