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."

The Devlin girls' school records had that same ambiguous, mocking quality. Katy was bright but not outstanding, solid Bs with the occasional C in Irish or A in PE; no behavioral problems bigger than a tendency to talk in class, no red flags except the stark patches of absence. Rosalind was more intelligent, but also more erratic: streams of straight As, broken up by clumps of Cs and Ds and frustrated teachers' comments about lacking effort and skipping class. Jessica's file, unsurprisingly, was the thickest. She had been in the "special" class since she and Katy were nine, but Jonathan had apparently hassled the health board and the school into running a battery of tests on her: her IQ was somewhere between 90 and 105, and there were no neurological problems. "Nonspecific learning disability with autistic features," the file claimed.

"What do you think?" I asked Cassie.

"I think this family just keeps getting weirder. Going by this, you'd swear that, if one of them's being abused, it's Jessica. Perfectly normal kid up until she's around seven; then all of a sudden, bam, her schoolwork and her social skills start going downhill. That's way too late for the onset of autism, but it's a textbook reaction to some kind of ongoing abuse. And Rosalind-all that upsy-downsy stuff could just be normal teenage mood swings, but it could also be a response to something weird going on at home. The only one who looks just fine-well, fine psychologically-is Katy."

Something dark loomed up in the corner of my vision and I whipped around, sending my pen skittering across the floor. "Whoa," Sam said, startled. "It's only me."

"Jesus," I said. My heart was racing. Cassie's eyes, across the table, gave away nothing. I retrieved my pen. "I didn't realize you were there. What've you got?"

"The Devlins' phone records," Sam said, waving a sheaf of paper in each hand. "Out and in." He put the two bundles on the table and squared off the edges carefully. He had color-coded the numbers; the pages were striped with neat lines of highlighter pen.

"For how long?" Cassie asked. She leaned across the table, looking at the pages upside down.

"Since March."

"That's it? For six months?"

That was the first thing I had noticed, too: how thin the piles were. A family of five, three adolescent girls; surely the line should have been busy nonstop, someone constantly yelling for someone else to get off the phone. I thought of the underwater hush in the house the day Katy was found, Auntie Vera hovering in the hall. "Yeah, I know," Sam said. "Maybe they use mobiles."

"Maybe," Cassie said. She didn't sound convinced. I wasn't either: almost without exception, when a family cuts itself off from the rest of the world it's because something is badly wrong. "But that's expensive. And there's two phones in that house, one in the downstairs coat closet and one on the upstairs landing, with a cord long enough that you could take it into any of the bedrooms. You wouldn't need to use a mobile for privacy."

We had gone through Katy's mobile records already. She had had an allowance, ten euros of credit every second Sunday. She had mostly used it on text messages to her friends, and we had reconstructed long, cryptically abbreviated conversations about homework, classroom gossip, American Idol; not one unidentified number, not one red flag.