In the Woods

The Bronze Age ceremonial stone was a flat, massive block, maybe seven feet long by three wide by three high, chipped from a single boulder. The field around it had been crudely bulldozed away-not too long ago, judging by the way the ground gave under my shoes-but a cushion around the stone had been left untouched, so that it rode high like an island amid the churned earth. On top of it, something flashed blue and white between the nettles and long grass.

It wasn't Jamie. I had more or less known this already-if there had been a chance it might be, Cassie would have come to tell me-but it still blew my mind empty. This girl had long dark hair, one plait thrown across her face. That was all I noticed, at first, the dark hair. It didn't even occur to me that Jamie's body wouldn't have been in this condition.

I had missed Cooper: he was picking his way back towards the road, shaking his foot like a cat on every step. A tech was taking photos, another was dusting the table for prints; a handful of local uniforms were fidgeting and chatting with the morgue guys, over by their stretcher. The grass was scattered with triangular numbered markers. Cassie and Sophie Miller were crouching beside the stone table, looking at something on the edge. I knew it was Sophie right away; that backboard-straight posture cuts through the anonymous coveralls. Sophie is my favorite crime-scene tech. She is slim and dark and demure, and on her the white shower cap looks like she should be bending over wounded soldiers' beds with cannon fire in the background, murmuring something soothing and giving out sips of water from a canteen. In actual fact, she is quick and impatient and can put anyone from superintendents to prosecutors in their place with a few crisp words. I like incongruity.

"Which way?" I called, at the tape. You don't walk on a crime scene until the Bureau guys say you can.

"Hi, Rob," Sophie shouted, straightening up and pulling down her mask. "Hang on."

Cassie reached me first. "Only been dead a day or so," she said quietly, before Sophie caught up. She looked a little pale around the mouth; kids do that to most of us.

"Thanks, Cass," I said. "Hi, Sophie."

"Hey, Rob. You two still owe me a drink." We had promised to buy her cocktails if she got the lab to fast-track some blood analysis for us, a couple of months before. Since then we'd all been saying, "We have to meet up for that drink," on a regular basis, and never getting around to it.

"Come through for us on this one and we'll buy you dinner as well," I said. "What've we got?"

"White female, ten to thirteen," Cassie said. "No ID. There's a key in her pocket, looks like a house key, but that's it. Her head's smashed in, but Cooper found petechial hemorrhaging and some possible ligature marks on her neck, too, so we'll have to wait for the post for cause of death. She's fully dressed, but it looks like she was probably raped. This one's weird all round, Rob. Cooper says she's been dead somewhere around thirty-six hours, but there's been practically no insect activity, and I don't see how the archaeologists could have missed her if she'd been there all yesterday."

"This isn't the primary scene?"

"No way," Sophie said. "There's no spatter on the rock, not even any blood from the head wound. She was killed somewhere else, probably kept for a day or so and then dumped."

"Find anything?"

"Plenty," she said. "Too much. It looks like the local kids hang out here. Cigarette butts, beer cans, a couple of Coke cans, gum, the ends of three joints. Two used condoms. Once you find a suspect, the lab can try matching him to all this stuff-which will be a nightmare-but to be honest I think it's just your basic teenage debris. Footprints all over the place. A hair clip. I don't think it was hers-it was shoved right down into the dirt at the base of the stone, and I'd bet it's been there a good while-but you might want to check. It doesn't look like it belonged to some teenager; it's the all-plastic kind, with a plastic strawberry on the end, and you'd usually see them on younger kids."

blond wing lifting

I felt as though I had tilted sharply backwards; I had to stop myself jerking for balance. I heard Cassie say quickly, somewhere on the other side of Sophie, "Probably not hers. Everything she's wearing is blue and white, right down to the hair elastics. This kid coordinated. We'll check it out, though."

"Are you OK?" Sophie asked me.

"I'm fine," I said. "I just need coffee." The joy of the new, hip, happening, double-espresso Dublin is that you can blame any strange mood on coffee deprivation. This never worked in the era of tea, at least not at the same level of street cred.

"I'm going to get him an IV caffeine drip for his birthday," said Cassie. She likes Sophie, too. "He's even more useless without his fix. Tell him about the rock."