In the first two weeks of Operation Vestal we did everything you can think of, everything. Between us and the floaters and the local uniforms, we talked to everyone who lived within a four-mile radius of Knocknaree and anyone who had ever known Katy. There was one diagnosed schizophrenic on the estate, but he had never hurt anyone in his life, even when he was off his meds, which he hadn’t been in three years. We checked out every Mass card the Devlins got and tracked down every person who’d contributed towards Katy’s fees, and set up surveillance to see who brought flowers to lay on the altar stone.
We interviewed Katy’s best friends—Christina Murphy, Elisabeth McGinnis, Marianne Casey: red-eyed, shaky, brave little girls, with no useful information to offer, but I found them disconcerting nevertheless. I have no time for people who sigh about how quickly children grow up nowadays (my grandparents, after all, were working full-time by sixteen, which I think trumps any number of body piercings in the adulthood stakes), but all the same: Katy’s friends had a poised, savvy awareness of the outside world that jarred with the happy animal oblivion I remembered enjoying at that age. “We wondered if Jessica had a learning disability, maybe,” Christina said, sounding about thirty, “but we didn’t want to ask. Did…I mean, was it a pedophile that killed Katy?”
The answer to this appeared to be no. In spite of Cassie’s feeling that this hadn’t really been a sex crime, we checked out every convicted sex offender in south Dublin, as well as plenty whom we’ve never been able to convict, and we spent hours with the guys who have the thankless job of tracking and trapping pedophiles online. The guy we mostly talked to was called Carl. He was young and skinny, with a lined white face, and he told us that after eight months on this job he was already thinking of quitting: he had two kids under seven, he said, and he couldn’t look at them the same way any more, he felt too dirty to hug them good night after a day of doing what he did.
The network, as Carl called it, was buzzing with speculation and titillation about Katy Devlin—I’ll spare you the details—and we read through hundreds of pages of chat transcripts, dispatches from a dark and alien world, but we came up empty. One guy seemed to empathize a little too strongly with Katy’s killer (“I think he just LOVED HER TO MUCH she didn’t understand so he got UPSET”), but when she died he had been online, discussing the relative physical merits of East Asian versus European little girls. Cassie and I both got very drunk that night.
Sophie’s gang went over the Devlins’ house with a fine-tooth comb—ostensibly collecting fibers and so on, for elimination purposes, but they reported back that they had found no bloodstains and nothing matching Cooper’s description of the rape weapon. I pulled financial records: the Devlins lived modestly (one family holiday, to Crete, four years earlier on a credit-union loan; Katy’s ballet lessons and Rosalind’s violin; a ’99 Toyota) and had almost no savings, but they weren’t in any debt, their mortgage was almost paid off, they had never even fallen into arrears on their phone bill. There was no dodgy activity on their bank account and no insurance policy on Katy’s life; there was nothing.
The tip line got a record number of calls, an incredible percentage of which were utterly useless: the people whose neighbors looked funny and refused to join the Residents’ Association, the people who had seen sinister men hanging around halfway across the country, the usual assorted whackjobs who had had visions of the murder, the other set of whackjobs explaining at length how this was God’s judgment on our sinful society. Cassie and I spent a full morning on one guy who rang up to tell us that God had punished Katy for her immodesty in exhibiting herself, dressed only in a leotard, to thousands of Irish Times readers. We had high hopes of him, actually—he refused to talk to Cassie, on the grounds that women shouldn’t be working and that her jeans were also immodest (the objective standard for female modesty, he informed me vehemently, was Our Lady of Fatima). But his alibi was impeccable: he had spent the Monday night in the minuscule red-light district off Baggot Street, drunk as a skunk, shrieking fire and brimstone at the hookers and writing down their clients’ plate numbers and getting forcibly removed by the pimps and starting all over again, until the cops had finally thrown him in a cell to sleep it off at around four in the morning. Apparently this happened every few weeks or so; everyone concerned knew the drill and was happy to confirm it, with the odd pungent remark about the guy’s probable sexual proclivities.
Those were strange weeks, strange disjointed weeks. Even after all this time, I find it difficult to describe them to you. They were so full of little things, things that at the time seemed insignificant and disconnected as the jumble of objects in some bizarre parlor game: faces and phrases and sitting rooms and phone calls, all running together into a single strobe-light blur. It was only much later, in the stale cold light of hindsight, that the little things rose up and rearranged themselves and clicked neatly into place to form the pattern we should have seen all along.
And then, too, it was so excruciating, that first phase of Operation Vestal. The case was, though we refused to admit this even to ourselves, going nowhere. Every lead I found ran me into a dead end; O’Kelly kept giving us rousing, arm-waving speeches about how we couldn’t afford to drop the ball on this one and when the going gets tough the tough get going; the papers were screaming for justice and printing photo enhancements of what Peter and Jamie would look like today if they had unfortunate haircuts. I was as tense as I have ever been in my life. But perhaps the real reason I find it so difficult to talk about those weeks is that—in spite of all that, and of the fact that I know this to be a self-indulgence I cannot afford—I miss them still.
Little things. We pulled Katy’s medical records, of course, straight away. She and Jessica had been a couple of weeks premature, but Katy, at least, had rallied well, and until she was eight and a half she had had nothing but the normal childhood stuff. Then, out of nowhere, she had started getting sick. Stomach cramping, projectile vomiting, diarrhea for days on end; once she had ended up in the emergency room three times in one month. A year ago, after a particularly bad attack, the doctors had done an exploratory laparotomy—the surgery Cooper had spotted, the one that had kept her out of ballet school. They had diagnosed “idiopathic pseudo-obstructive bowel disease with atypical lack of distension.” Reading between the lines, I got the sense that this meant they had ruled out everything else and had absolutely no idea what was wrong with this kid.
“Munchausen by proxy?” I asked Cassie, who was reading over my shoulder, arms folded on the back of my chair. She and I and Sam had staked out a corner of the incident room, as far as possible from the tip line, where we could have a modicum of privacy as long as we kept our voices down.
She shrugged, made a face. “It could be. But there’s stuff that doesn’t fit. Most Munchausen mothers have a background around the edges of medicine—nurse’s aide, something like that.” Margaret, according to the background check, had left school at fifteen and worked in Jacobs’s biscuit factory until she got married. “And check out the admission records. Half the time Margaret’s not even the one bringing Katy into the hospital: it’s Jonathan, Rosalind, Vera, once it’s a teacher…. For Munchausen-by-proxy mothers, the whole point is the attention and sympathy they get from doctors and nurses. She wouldn’t let someone else be at the center of all that.”
“So we rule out Margaret?”
Cassie sighed. “She doesn’t match the profile, but that’s not definitive; she could be the exception. I just wish we could have a look at the other girls’ records. These mothers don’t usually target one kid and leave the others alone. They skip from kid to kid, to avoid suspicion, or else they start with the oldest and then move on to the next when the first one gets old enough to kick up a fuss. If it’s Margaret, there’ll be something weird in the other two’s files—like maybe this spring, when Katy stopped getting sick, something went wrong with Jessica…. Let’s ask the parents if we can look at them.”
“No,” I said. All the floaters seemed to be talking at once and the noise was like a heavy fog coating my brain; I couldn’t focus. “So far, the Devlins don’t know they’re suspects. I’d rather keep it that way, at least until we have something solid. If we go asking them for Rosalind and Jessica’s medical records, it’s bound to tip them off.”
“Something solid,” Cassie said. She looked down at the pages spread out on the table, the jumble of computerized headings and scribbled handwriting and photocopy-smudges; at the whiteboard, which had already blossomed into a multicolored tangle of names, phone numbers, arrows and question marks and underlining.
“Yeah,” I said. “I know.”