In the Woods (21 page)

“Staging a sex crime to put us on the wrong track?”

Cassie shook her head. “I don’t know . . . If that was it, you’d expect him to make a point of it: strip her, pose her with her legs spread. Instead, he pulls her combats up again, zips them. . . . No, I was thinking maybe something more along the lines of schizophrenia. They’re almost never violent, but if you get one off his meds and in a full-on paranoid phase, you never know. He could have believed, for some reason of his own, that she had to be killed and raped, even though he hated doing it. That would explain why he tried not to hurt her, why he used an object, why it didn’t look more like a sex crime—he didn’t want her exposed, and he didn’t want anyone thinking of him as a rapist—even why he left her on the altar.”

“How’s that?” I took the cigarette packet back and tilted it at Sam, who looked like he could do with one, but he shook his head.

“I mean, he could’ve dumped her in the wood or somewhere, where she might not have been found for ages, or even just on the ground. Instead, he went out of his way to put her on that altar. It could be a display thing, but I don’t think so: he didn’t pose her, except to leave her lying on her left side, so the head injury was hidden—again, trying to minimize the crime. I think he was trying to treat her with care, respect—keep her away from animals, make sure she was found soon.” She reached for the ashtray. “The good thing is, if it’s a schizophrenic falling apart, he should be fairly easy to spot.”

“What about a hired killer?” I asked. “That would explain the reluctance, too. Someone—maybe the mystery phone caller—hired him to do it, but he didn’t have to like the job.”

“Actually,” Cassie said, “a hired killer—not a professional; an amateur 126

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who needed the money badly—might fit even better. Katy Devlin sounded like a fairly sensible kid, wouldn’t you say, Rob?”

“She sounds like the most well-adjusted person in that whole family.”

“Yeah, to me, too. Smart, focused, strong-willed—”

“Not the type to go off at night with a stranger.”

“Exactly. Especially not a stranger who’s clearly not all there. A schizophrenic going to pieces probably wouldn’t be able to act normal enough to get her to go anywhere with him. More likely this person is presentable, pleasant, good with kids—someone she’d known for a while. Someone she felt comfortable with. He didn’t seem like a threat.”

“Or she,” I said. “How much did Katy weigh?”

Cassie flipped through the notes. “Seventy-eight pounds. Depending on how far she was carried, yeah, a woman could have done it, but it would have to be a pretty strong woman. Sophie didn’t find any drag marks at the dump site. Just statistically speaking, I’d bet on a guy.”

“But we’re eliminating the parents?” Sam said hopefully. She made a face. “No. Say one of them was abusing her and she was threatening to tell: either the abuser or the other parent could have felt she had to die, in order to protect the whole family. Maybe they tried to stage a sex crime but didn’t have the heart to do it thoroughly. . . . Basically, the only thing I’m more or less sure of is that we’re not looking for a psychopath or a sadist—our guy couldn’t dehumanize her and didn’t enjoy seeing her suffer. We’re looking for someone who didn’t want to do it, someone who felt he was doing it out of necessity. I don’t think he’ll insert himself into the investigation—he won’t be getting off on all the attention, nothing like that—and I don’t think he’ll do it again any time soon, not unless he feels threatened somehow. And he’s almost definitely local. A real profiler could probably be a lot more specific, but . . .”

“You got your degree at Trinity, right?” Sam said.

Cassie gave a quick shake of her head, reached for more cherries. “I dropped out in fourth year.”

“Why’d you do that?”

She spat a cherry stone into her palm and gave Sam a smile I knew, an exceptionally sweet smile that scrunched up her face till you couldn’t see her eyes. “Because what would you people do without me?”

I could have told him she wouldn’t answer. I had asked her that question several times, over the years, and got answers ranging from “There was In the Woods 127

nobody of your caliber to annoy” to “The food in the Buttery sucked.”

There has always been something enigmatic about Cassie. This is one of the things I like in her, and I like it all the more for being, paradoxically, a quality that isn’t readily apparent, elusiveness brought to so high a level it becomes almost invisible. She gives the impression of being startlingly, almost childishly open—which is true, as far as it goes: what you see is in fact what you get. But what you don’t get, what you barely glimpse: this is the side of Cassie that fascinated me always. Even after all this time I knew there were rooms inside her that she had never let me guess at, let alone enter. There were questions she wouldn’t answer, topics she would discuss only in the abstract; try to pin her down and she would skim away laughing, as nimbly as a figure skater.

“You’re good,” Sam said. “Degree or no degree.”

Cassie raised one eyebrow. “Wait and see if I’m right before you say that.”

“Why did he keep her for a day?” I asked. This had been bothering me all along—because of the obvious hideous possibilities, and because of the nagging suspicion that, if he hadn’t needed to get rid of her for some reason, he might have kept her for longer, kept her forever; she might have vanished as silently and finally as Peter and Jamie had.

“If I’m right about all the other stuff, the distancing himself from the crime, then it wasn’t because he wanted to. He would’ve wanted to get rid of her as soon as possible. He kept her because he didn’t have a choice.”

“He lives with someone and had to wait till they were out of the way?”

“Yeah, could be. But I was wondering if maybe the dig wasn’t a random choice. Maybe he had to dump her there—either because it’s part of whatever grand plan he’s following, or because he doesn’t have a car and the dig was the only place handy. That would fit in with what Mark said about not seeing a car go past—and it would mean the kill site’s somewhere very nearby, probably in one of the houses at that end of the estate. Maybe he tried to dump her on Monday night, but Mark was there in the woods, with his fire. The killer could have seen him and been scared off; he had to hide Katy and try again the next night.”

“Or the killer could have been him,” I said.

“Alibi for Tuesday night.”

“From a girl who’s mad about him.”

“Mel’s not the ditzy stand-by-your-man type. She’s got a mind of her 128

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own, and she’s plenty smart enough to realize how important this is. If Mark had jumped out of bed halfway through the action to take a nice long walk, she’d have told us.”

“He could have an accomplice. Either Mel or someone else.”

“And what, they hid the body on the grassy knoll?”

“What’s your boy’s motive?” Sam inquired. He had been eating cherries and watching us with interest.

“His motive is he’s several hundred yards out of his tree,” I told him. “You didn’t hear him. He’s perfectly normal on most things—normal enough to reassure a kid, Cass—but get him talking about the site and he starts going on about sacrilege and worship. . . . The site’s under threat from this motorway: maybe he thought a nice human sacrifice to the gods, just like old times, would get them to step in and save it. When it comes to this site, he’s batty.”

“If this turns out to be a pagan sacrifice,” Sam said, “dibs I not be the one to tell O’Kelly.”

“I vote we get him to tell O’Kelly himself. And we sell tickets.”

“Mark is not batty,” Cassie said firmly.

“Oh, he is, too.”

“He is not. His work is the center of his life. That’s not batty.”

“You should have seen them,” I told Sam. “Honestly, it was more like a date than an interrogation. Maddox nodding away, fluttering her eyelashes, telling him she knew exactly how he feels—”

“Which I do, actually,” Cassie said. She abandoned Cooper’s notes and pulled herself backward onto the futon. “And I did not either flutter my eyelashes. When I do, you won’t miss it.”

“You know how he feels? What, you pray to the Heritage God?”

“No, you big eejit. Shut up and listen. I have a theory about Mark.” She kicked off her shoes, tucked her feet up under her.

“Oh, God,” I said. “Sam, I hope you’re not in a hurry.”

“I always have time for a good theory,” Sam said. “Can I have a drink to go with it, if we’ve finished working?”

“Wise move,” I told him.

Cassie shoved me with her foot. “Find whiskey or something.” I slapped her foot away and got up. “OK,” she said, “we all need to believe in something, right?”

“Why?” I demanded. I found this both intriguing and mildly disconcerting; I am not religious, and as far as I knew Cassie wasn’t either. In the Woods 129

“Oh, because we do. Every single society in the world, ever, has had some form of belief system. But now . . . How many people do you know who’re Christian—not just going to church, but actually Christian, like trying to do things the way Jesus would’ve? And it’s not like people can have faith in political ideologies. Our government doesn’t even have an ideology, as far as anyone can tell—”

“ ‘A Little Something for the Boys,’ ” I said, over my shoulder. “That’s an ideology, of sorts.”

“Hey,” said Sam mildly.

“Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean anyone specific.” He nodded.

“Neither did I, Sam,” said Cassie. “I just meant there isn’t one overall philosophy. So people have to make their own faith.”

I had found whiskey, Coke, ice and three glasses; I juggled them all back to the coffee table in one go. “What, you mean Religion Lite? All those New Age yuppies having tantric sex and feng shui-ing their SUVs?”

“Them, too, but I was thinking of the people who make a religion out of something completely different. Like money—actually, that’s the nearest thing the government has to an ideology, and I’m not talking about bribes, Sam. Nowadays it’s not just unfortunate if you have a low-paid job, have you noticed? It’s actually irresponsible: you’re not a good member of society, you’re being very very naughty not to have a big house and a fancy car.”

“But if anyone asks for a raise,” I said, whapping the ice tray, “they’re being very very naughty to threaten their employer’s profit margin, after everything he’s done for the economy.”

“Exactly. If you’re not rich, you’re a lesser being who shouldn’t have the gall to expect a living wage from the decent people who are.”

“Ah, now,” Sam said. “I don’t think things are that bad.”

There was a small, polite silence. I collected stray ice cubes from the coffee table. Sam by nature has a Pollyanna streak, but he also has the kind of family that owns houses in Ballsbridge. His views on socioeconomic matters, though sweet, could hardly be considered objective.

“The other big religion these days,” Cassie said, “is bodies. All those patronizing ads and news reports about smoking and drinking and fitness—”

I was pouring, looking at Sam for a signal to stop; he lifted a hand, smiled at me as I passed him the glass. “Those always make me want to see how many cigarettes I can fit in my mouth at once,” I said. Cassie had 130

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stretched her legs across the futon; I moved them out of the way so I could sit down, put them back across my lap and started making her drink, lots of ice and lots of Coke.

“Me, too. But those reports and stuff aren’t just saying things are unhealthy—they’re saying they’re morally wrong. Like you’re somehow a better person, spiritually, if you have the right body-fat percentage and exercise for an hour a day—and there’s that awful condescending set of ads where smoking isn’t just a stupid thing to do, it’s literally the devil. People need a moral code, to help them make decisions. All this bio-yogurt virtue and financial self-righteousness are just filling the gap in the market. But the problem is that it’s all backwards. It’s not that you do the right thing and hope it pays off; the morally right thing is by definition the thing that gives the biggest payoff.”

“Drink your drink,” I said. She was lit up and gesturing, leaning forward, her glass forgotten in her hand. “What does this have to do with batty Mark again?”

Cassie made a face at me and took a sip of her drink. “Look: Mark believes in archaeology—in his heritage. That’s his faith. It’s not some abstract set of principles, and it’s not about his body or his bank account; it’s a concrete part of his whole life, every day, whether it pays off or not. He lives in it. That’s not batty, that’s healthy, and there’s something seriously wrong with a society where people think it’s weird.”

“The guy poured a fucking libation to some Bronze Age god,” I said. “I don’t think there’s anything particularly wrong with me for considering that a little odd. Back me up here, Sam.”

“Me?” Sam had settled back into the sofa, listening to the conversation and reaching out to finger the tumble of shells and rocks on the windowsill.

“Ah, I’d say he’s just young. He should get himself a wife and a few kids. That’d settle him.”

Cassie and I looked at each other and started to laugh. “What?” Sam demanded.

“Nothing,” I said, “honestly.”

“I’d love to get you and Mark together over a couple of pints,” Cassie said.

“I’d soon sort him out,” Sam said serenely, sending Cassie and me into a fresh fit of giggles. I leaned back into the futon and took a sip of my drink. I was enjoying this conversation. It was a good evening, a happy evening; In the Woods 131

soft rain was pittering at the windows and Billie Holiday was playing in the background and I was glad, after all, that Cassie had invited Sam. I was starting to like him a lot more actively. Everyone, I decided, should have a Sam around.

“Do you seriously think we can eliminate Mark?” I asked Cassie. She sipped her drink, balanced the glass on her stomach. “Actually, I honestly do,” she said. “Regardless of the battiness question. Like I said, I get this very strong sense that whoever did this was in two minds about it. I can’t imagine Mark being in two minds about anything—at least, not anything important.”