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.”

“Yeah, we found two interesting things,” said Sophie. “There’s a rock about this size”—she cupped her hands: about eight inches wide—“that I’m pretty sure is one of the weapons. It was in the grass by the wall. Hair and blood and bone fragments all over one end of it.”

“Any prints?” I asked.

“No. A couple of smudges, but they look like they came from gloves. The interesting parts are where it was—up by the wall; could mean he came over it, from the estate, although that could be what we’re meant to think—

and the fact that he bothered dumping it. You’d think he’d just rinse it and stick it in his garden, rather than carrying it as well as a body.”

“Couldn’t it have been in the grass already?” I asked. “He might have dropped the body on it, maybe getting her over the wall.”

“I don’t think so,” said Sophie. She was shifting her feet delicately, trying to nudge me towards the stone table; she wanted to get back to work. I looked away. I am not squeamish about bodies, and I was pretty sure I had seen even worse than this one—a toddler, the year before, whose father kicked him In the Woods 29

until he basically broke in half—but I still felt weird, light-headed, as though my eyes weren’t focusing clearly enough to take in the image. Maybe I really do need coffee, I thought. “It was blood-side down. And the grass underneath it is fresh, still alive; the rock hadn’t been there long.”

“Plus, she wasn’t bleeding any more by the time she was brought here,”

Cassie said.

“Oh, yeah—the other interesting thing,” Sophie said. “Come look at this.”