Outside, the sky was gray-white and wind was whipping leaves off the trees in the churchyard. Reporters were leaning over the railings, cameras firing in swift bursts. We found a discreet corner and scanned the area and the crowd, but unsurprisingly no one rang any alarm bells. "Some turnout," Sam said quietly. He was the only one of us who had gone up for Communion. "Let's get film off some of these lads tomorrow, check if anyone's here who shouldn't be."
"He's not here," Cassie said. She dug her hands into her jacket pockets. "Not unless he has to be. This guy won't even be reading the newspapers. He'll change the subject if anyone starts talking about the case."
Rosalind, moving slowly down the church steps with a handkerchief pressed to her mouth, raised her head and saw us. She shook off the supporting arms and ran across the grass, long black dress fluttering in the wind. "Detective Ryan…" She caught my hand in both of hers and raised a tear-stained face to me. "I can't bear it. You have to catch the man who did this to my sister."
"Rosalind!" Jonathan called hoarsely, somewhere, but she didn't look away. Her hands were long-fingered and soft and very cold. "We'll do everything we can," I said. "Will you come in and talk to me tomorrow?"
"I'll try. I'm sorry about Friday, but I couldn't…" She glanced quickly over her shoulder. "I couldn't get away. Please find him, Detective Ryan-please…"
I felt, more than heard, the spatter of the cameras. One of the photos-Rosalind's anguished, upturned profile, an unflattering shot of me with my mouth open-made it onto the front page of a tabloid the next morning, with PLEASE GIVE MY SISTER JUSTICE below it in letters an inch high, and Quigley gave me grief about it all week.
In the first two weeks of Operation Vestal we did everything you can think of, everything. Between us and the floaters and the local uniforms, we talked to everyone who lived within a four-mile radius of Knocknaree and anyone who had ever known Katy. There was one diagnosed schizophrenic on the estate, but he had never hurt anyone in his life, even when he was off his meds, which he hadn't been in three years. We checked out every Mass card the Devlins got and tracked down every person who'd contributed towards Katy's fees, and set up surveillance to see who brought flowers to lay on the altar stone.
We interviewed Katy's best friends-Christina Murphy, Elisabeth McGinnis, Marianne Casey: red-eyed, shaky, brave little girls, with no useful information to offer, but I found them disconcerting nevertheless. I have no time for people who sigh about how quickly children grow up nowadays (my grandparents, after all, were working full-time by sixteen, which I think trumps any number of body piercings in the adulthood stakes), but all the same: Katy's friends had a poised, savvy awareness of the outside world that jarred with the happy animal oblivion I remembered enjoying at that age. "We wondered if Jessica had a learning disability, maybe," Christina said, sounding about thirty, "but we didn't want to ask. Did…I mean, was it a pedophile that killed Katy?"
The answer to this appeared to be no. In spite of Cassie's feeling that this hadn't really been a sex crime, we checked out every convicted sex offender in south Dublin, as well as plenty whom we've never been able to convict, and we spent hours with the guys who have the thankless job of tracking and trapping pedophiles online. The guy we mostly talked to was called Carl. He was young and skinny, with a lined white face, and he told us that after eight months on this job he was already thinking of quitting: he had two kids under seven, he said, and he couldn't look at them the same way any more, he felt too dirty to hug them good night after a day of doing what he did.
The network, as Carl called it, was buzzing with speculation and titillation about Katy Devlin-I'll spare you the details-and we read through hundreds of pages of chat transcripts, dispatches from a dark and alien world, but we came up empty. One guy seemed to empathize a little too strongly with Katy's killer ("I think he just LOVED HER TO MUCH she didn't understand so he got UPSET"), but when she died he had been online, discussing the relative physical merits of East Asian versus European little girls. Cassie and I both got very drunk that night.
