He remembered the case, though, every detail. In all Ireland's brief disorganized history as a nation, fewer than half a dozen children have gone missing and stayed that way, and Kiernan had never been able to forget that two of these had been given into his hands and he had failed them. The search, he told Cassie (a little defensively, she said, as though this was a conversation he had had many times in his mind), had been massive: dogs, helicopters, divers; policemen and volunteers had combed miles of wood and hill and field in every direction, starting at dawn every morning for weeks and going on into the late summer twilights; they had followed leads to Belfast and Kerry and even Birmingham; and all the time a nagging whisper had insisted, in Kiernan's ear, that they were looking in the wrong directions, that the answer was right in front of them all along.
"What's his theory?" Sam asked.
I flipped the last steak onto its roll and handed round the plates. "Later," Cassie said, to Sam. "Enjoy your sandwich first. How often does Ryan do something that's worth appreciating?"
"You are speaking to two talented men here," I told her. "We can eat
"I'm impressed," Cassie said. "OK"-her eyes went to me for a second; I looked away-"Kiernan's theory was that the kids never left Knocknaree. I don't know if you guys remember this, but there was a third kid…" She leaned sideways to check her notebook, open on the arm of the sofa. "Adam Ryan. He was with the other two that afternoon, and they found him in the wood, a couple of hours into the search. No injuries, but there was blood in his shoes and he was pretty shaken up; he couldn't remember anything. So Kiernan figured that, whatever happened, it must have been either in the wood or very nearby, otherwise how had Adam got back there? He thought someone-someone local-had been watching them for a while. The guy approached them in the wood, maybe lured them back to his house, and attacked them. Probably he hadn't planned to kill them; maybe he tried to molest them and something went wrong. At some point during the attack, Adam escaped and ran back into the wood-which probably means they were either in the wood itself, in one of the estate houses that back onto it, or in one of the farmhouses nearby; otherwise he'd have gone home, right? Kiernan thinks the guy panicked and killed the other two children, possibly stashed the bodies in his house until he saw his chance, and then either dumped them in the river or buried them, in his garden or, more likely-there were no reports of unexplained digging in the area over the next few weeks-in the wood."
I took a bite of my sandwich. The taste, pungent and bloody, almost made me retch. I forced it down, unchewed, with a swallow of wine.
"Where's young Adam these days?" Sam inquired.
Cassie shrugged. "I doubt he'd be able to tell us anything. Kiernan and McCabe kept going back to him for years, but he never remembered any more. In the end they gave up, figured the memory was gone for good. The family moved out of the area; Knocknaree gossip says they emigrated to Canada." All of which was true, as far as it went. This was both more difficult and more ridiculous than I had expected. We were like spies, communicating over Sam's head in careful, stilted code.
"They must have been going mental," Sam said. "An eyewitness right there…" He shook his head and took a big bite of sandwich.
"Yeah, Kiernan said it was frustrating, all right," Cassie said, "but the kid was doing his best. He even participated in a reconstruction, with two local kids. They were hoping it would help him remember what he and his mates had done that afternoon, but he froze up as soon as he got into the wood." My stomach flipped. I had no memory of this at all. I put down my sandwich; suddenly and intensely, I wanted a cigarette.
"Poor little bastard," Sam said peacefully.
"Was this what McCabe thought, too?" I asked.
