'They were both drilled with a number eight steel masonry bit. Brand new, by the clean way it drilled through, and there are traces of thin oil, too. We've found some microscopic fragments of metal so we should be able to identify that, too.'
'All right,' said Katie. 'You've got all the forensic evidence?all I have to do is find this monster and make an arrest.'
Dr. Reidy draped two sheets over the autopsy tables. 'That's right, Superintendent. I'd say you've got your work cut out for you, wouldn't you?'
Jimmy O'Rourke knocked on her office door at 4:45P.M. and said, 'Boss? The Meagher's Farm victim. We think we know who she is.' He held out an E-mailed attachment with a color photograph on it. Katie took it and held it under her desk lamp.
It was datelined 6:00P.M. the previous day, from the Santa Barbara Sheriff's Department, 1745 Mission Drive, Solvang, California, and it was addressed to Garda Headquarters in Phoenix Park. 'We have received an urgent inquiry from Mr. and Mrs. Donald F. Kelly of Paseo Delicias, Solvang, regarding the whereabouts of their daughter Fiona Kelly who is currently undertaking a three-week solo backpacking tour of Co. Limerick, Co. Kerry, and Co. Cork, in the Republic of Ireland. Ms. Kelly arranged to contact her parents by telephone every two-three days in order to reassure them that she was safe. However-'
Katie looked at the photograph. A young, bright, blond-haired girl standing on a white-painted veranda, laughing.
'Fiona is twenty-two years old, five feet ten inches tall, weighs one hundred and forty-seven pounds. She is likely to be wearing blue jeans and a navy-blue windcheater with turquoise panels on the front. She is carrying a navy-blue Nike backpack.'
'Oh, shit,' said Katie.
At 9:25P.M., Katie spoke on the phone with Chief Deputy Fred Olguin of the Santa Barbara Sheriff's Department.
'I have to warn you that we're investigating a murder here. A young blond girl who may be American.'
'I see. I'm real sorry to hear that. Naturally I won't say anything to the Kellys yet awhile. But they're pretty upset. It seems like Fiona always made a point of calling them, almost every afternoon.'
'I need a list of every location from which Fiona called her parents since her arrival. Failing that, the telephone numbers.'
'I'll get you all of that information, ma'am. Don't you worry about that.'
The list came by E-mail only twenty minutes later, along with a map on which Mr. and Mrs. Kelly had been carefully tracing their daughter's progress by marking red crosses on a map of the Irish Republic.
Katie asked Liam to call customs officers at Shannon and the garda stations in Limerick, Killarney, and Bandon. Within an hour she had built up a reasonably detailed picture of most of Fiona's movements from the moment she had stepped off the plane from Los Angeles.
At 9:50 Dermot O'Driscoll came in with a blacky ham sandwich in one hand and a mug of tea in the other and asked how she was getting on. She nodded toward the map and the photograph of Fiona pinned up next to it. 'I've got a really bad feeling this is our victim.'
'American, then? Not Irish.'
'Irish by ancestry.'
Gardai called that evening at seven different bed-and-breakfasts where Fiona had stopped for the night, and interviewed every landlady. Almost every one of them said she was 'very sweet, very friendly, and very trusting.' Mrs. Rooney from The Atlantic Hotel in Dingle said, 'She was so innocent I have to say that I was feared for her. Hitchhiking isn't safe like it used to be when I was young.'
The last call Fiona had made to her parents was from The Golden Shamrock bed-and-breakfast in Ballyvourney, near Macroom, which was less than an hour's drive west of Cork City.
? ? ?
Just before 8:00A.M. the following morning, Garda John Buckley from Macroom talked to Denis Hennessy, who ran a news agent's and confectionery on the main Cork road. He had been tying up the previous day's unsold newspapers when he saw Fiona hitchhiking just outside his shop. 'You wouldn't forget her, you know? She looked like one of those girls in
By 11:05A.M., Detective Garda Patrick O'Sullivan had tracked down Con and Jimmy O'Donoghue, two young brothers who ran their own building business in Mallow, twenty miles north of Cork. They were restoring a row of old Victorian cottages out near Cecilstown. They remembered stopping for Fiona just outside Macroom and offering to give her a lift as far as The Angler's Rest pub a few miles south of Blarney.
'There's nothing happened to her, is it? She was an angel all right.'
'Did she say where she was going?'
'Oh, sure. She was going to kiss the Blarney Stone. She couldn't stop chattering on about it.'
Patrick called Katie on his cell phone. 'Stay where you are,' Katie told him. 'Talk to the landlord at The Angler's Rest and any of his customers who might have seen her. I'll come out and join you.'
The autumn sun shone brightly in her rearview mirror as she took the long straight road west out of Cork and headed for The Angler's Rest. Most of the leaves had fallen now, and the landscape was lit in orange and red and yellow, as if she were looking at it through a stained-glass window.
Patrick was waiting for her in the pub car park, with his windcheater collar turned up against the cold, and his breath smoking.
'You've talked to the landlord?' she said, climbing out of the car.
