In the Woods

The detectives find a hair clip at the murder scene that looks identical to one worn by Rob’s childhood friend, Jamie. Using this pretext, Rob obtains the Missing Persons case file. He takes it home to review it in the evening, knowing he’ll have to interview the two detectives assigned to the case, Kiernan and McCabe.

The witness statements mention three teenage bikers at the scene. One is named Jonathan Devlin. This links Katy’s father to the cold case. Rob vaguely remembers a trio of teenagers who used to hang out in the woods with two girls unnamed in the report.

When they arrive at the station, Rob and Cassie commandeer an incident room to start tacking up crime scene photos on a whiteboard. Sam joins them. He’s been assigned the motorway angle because his uncle is a powerful local political figure. Sam is told to find out who owns the land around the site and who made the threatening phone calls to Jonathan. They agree to meet at Cassie’s flat for dinner that night to discuss the case.

Shortly after the detectives get the incident room organized, their floaters arrive. These are officers who haven’t received permanent squad assignments yet. O’Kelly has assigned three dozen of them to the Devlin case. Rob says, “I’ve always loved this moment in an investigation, the moment before the first briefing begins. It reminds me of the focused, private buzz before a curtain goes up” (114). O’Kelly enters and welcomes the crew to Operation Vestal, the name HQ has assigned to the Devlin murder.

Later, Rob, Cassie, and Sam go to the morgue to get Katy’s autopsy results. Cooper, the forensic pathologist, recaps what he found. Katy was struck on the head twice with a rock. The killer was probably left-handed. The killer then covered her head with a plastic bag and twisted it off at the neck. She died of suffocation. After death, she was raped with a wooden implement of some kind. Finally, she was placed on the stone slab and positioned as the diggers found her.

Rob and Cassie drive out to the dig site to pick up Mark for interrogation. On the way back to the station, Rob speculates about coincidence. If the chain of events leading up to the assignment had shifted minutely, Rob and Cassie would never have gotten the Devlin case. Rob has “a sense of things stirring, rearranging themselves in some imperceptible but crucial way, tiny unseen cogs beginning to shift” (128-29).

Rob and Cassie bring Mark into an interrogation room. He’s furious and resentful about missing time at work. He wants to salvage as many artifacts as possible before the motorway construction begins.

He denies camping in the woods until Cassie presents him with an evidence bag containing his smoked cigarettes. Mark explains that he wanted to spend time at a sacred Bronze Age site before it’s gone. He poured wine on the ground as a libation. When Rob suggests that this is a religious ceremony, Mark gives a heated denial. He hates all religions. He was merely honoring the past.

Mark admits to camping in the woods on Monday night. While there, he saw a flashlight beam moving across the field at about one in the morning. He couldn’t tell the size or shape of the person carrying it. On Tuesday, he stayed in the team house. Embarrassed, he admits that he spent the night with Mel. She can confirm his statement. Cassie says they will drive Mark back to the site and ask Mel about Tuesday night.

Rob is pulled out of interrogation by a phone call. The caller is Rosalind. She wants to talk in person. She’s afraid of saying anything over the phone. Rob gives Rosalind his mobile number, and she promises to call him the next day to arrange a meeting.

After he gets off the phone, Rob goes down to the evidence room to retrieve a blood sample from the sneakers he wore on the day his friends disappeared. Forensics wants to see if they can match it to an old bloodstain found at the Devlin crime scene. Struck by heavy realization, Rob thinks, “It was only then that it hit me, there in the chilly basement with half-forgotten cases all around […] the immensity of what I had set in motion” (144).

Rob has changed his identity. No one associates him with the boy named Adam Ryan. If the bloodstain is a match, he’ll never simply be Detective Rob Ryan again.

The detectives drive Mark back to the site and question Mel. She confirms Mark’s story. Then Cassie and Rob go to see the Foleys. Aunt Vera Foley often invites the Devlin girls over for sleepovers with her own three children. Rosalind and Jessica were there the night Katy disappeared. During the conversation, one of the Foley girls says that Rosalind ran away some months earlier after a fight with her father.

The detectives leave, determined to find out if child abuse caused Rosalind’s disappearance. They spend an hour going door to door in the neighborhood asking if anyone saw something suspicious, but no one had.

By 6:00 p.m., they stop at a pub for a drink. The TV is broadcasting the Devlin story and then covers the earlier missing persons case as well. Cassie asks if Rob is going to tell O’Kelly who he is. He insists that he wants to work the Devlin case. It might trigger a memory that will help solve the disappearance of his friends. Cassie agrees to keep his secret.

They take a walk on the beach. Cassie asks about Peter and Jamie. Rob thinks to himself, “My memories of them had rubbed thin with overuse, worn to frail color transparencies flickering on the walls of my mind” (161). He tells Cassie that Jamie was a tomboy and Peter was the leader of their group. After they disappeared, Rob missed them terribly.

When Rob’s parents moved, they sent him away to boarding school. His first year there, he was so homesick that he could barely function. Rob wonders if his parents sent him away because they were afraid of him:

Like some monstrously deformed child who should never have lived beyond infancy, or a conjoined twin whose other half died under the knife, I had—simply by surviving—become a freak of nature. (167-68)