I leaned over-slowly, the way you would reach out towards a terrified animal-and took her hand; that much, at least, I managed to do. She gave a quick breath of a laugh, squeezed my fingers, then let them go. "Anyway. Finally he came up to me one day, in the Buttery-all these girls were trying to stop him, but he sort of shook them off bravely and came over to me and said, loud, so they could hear him, 'Please, stop ringing me in the middle of the night. What have I ever done to you?' I was completely stunned, I couldn't figure out what he was talking about. All I could think of to say was, 'But I haven't rung you.' He smiled and shook his head, like, Yeah, right, and then he leaned in and said-just quietly, in this chirpy businesslike voice-'If I ever did break into your flat and rape you, I don't think the charges would stick, do you?' Then he smiled again and went back to his mates."

"Hon," I said finally, carefully, "maybe you should put in an alarm on this place. I don't want to scare you, but-"

Cassie shook her head. "And what, never leave the flat again? I can't afford to start getting paranoid. I've got good locks, and I keep my gun beside my bed." I had noticed that, of course, but there are plenty of detectives who don't feel right unless they have their guns within reach. "Anyway, I'm pretty sure he'd never actually do it. I know the way he works-unfortunately. It's a lot more fun for him to think that I'm always wondering than to just do it and get it over with."

She took a last pull on her cigarette, leaned forward to stub it out. Her spine was so rigid that the movement looked painful. "At the time, though, the whole thing freaked me out enough that I dropped out of college. I went over to France-I've got cousins in Lyons, I stayed with them for a year and worked as a waitress in this café. It was nice. That's where I got the Vespa. Then I came back and applied to Templemore."

"Because of him?"

She shrugged. "I guess. Probably. So maybe one good thing came out of it. Two: I've got good psychopath sensors now. It's like an allergy: you get exposed once, from then on you're supersensitized." She finished her drink in a long swallow. "I ran into Sarah-Jane last year, in a pub in town. I said hi. She told me he was doing fine, 'in spite of your best efforts,' and then walked off."

"Is that what your nightmares are about?" I said gently, after a moment. I had woken her from these dreams-flailing at me, gasping incomprehensible spates of words-twice before, when we had worked rape-murders, but she would never tell me the details.

"Yeah. I dream he's the guy we're after, but we can't prove it, and when he finds out I'm on the case, he…Well. He does his thing."

I took it for granted, at the time, that she dreamed this guy followed through on his threat. Now I think I was wrong. I failed to understand the one crucial thing: where the real danger lay. I think this may have been, in the face of stiff competition, my single biggest mistake of all.

"What was his name?" I asked. I was desperate to do something, fix this somehow, and running a background check on this guy, trying to find something to arrest him for, was the only thing I could think of to do. And I suppose a small part of me, whether through cruelty or detached curiosity or whatever, had noticed that Cassie refused to say it, and wanted to see what would happen if she did.

Cassie's eyes finally focused on mine, and I was shaken by the concentrated, diamond-hard hatred. "Legion," she said.

We pulled Jonathan in the next day: I rang him up and asked him, in my best professional voice, if he would mind coming in after work, just to help us out with a few things. Sam had Terence Andrews in the main interview room, the big one with an observation chamber for lineups ("Jesus, Mary and the Seven Dwarves," O'Kelly said, "all of a sudden we've suspects coming out of the woodwork. I should've taken away your floaters sooner, got ye three off your lazy arses"), but this was fine with us: we wanted a small room, the smaller the better.

We decorated it as carefully as a stage set. Photos of Katy, alive and dead, spanning half a wall; Peter and Jamie and the scary runners and the grazes on my knees across the other half (we had a shot of my broken fingernails, but it made me far more uncomfortable than it could possibly have made Jonathan-my thumbs have a very distinctive turn to them, and already at twelve my hands were almost man-sized-and Cassie said nothing when I slid it back into the file); maps and charts and every bit of esoteric-looking paperwork we could find, the blood work, timelines, files and cryptically labeled boxes stacked in corners.

"That ought to do it," I said, surveying the final result. It was actually quite impressive, in a nightmarish way.

"Mmm." A corner of one of the post-mortem shots was peeling away from the wall, and Cassie absently pressed it back into place. Her hand lingered there for a second, fingertips lying lightly across Katy's bare gray arm. I knew what she was thinking-if Devlin was innocent, then this was wanton cruelty-but I had no room to worry about this. More often than we like to admit, cruelty comes with the job.

We had half an hour or so before Devlin got off work, and we were far too antsy to start on anything else. We left our interview room-which was beginning to freak me out a little, all those round watching eyes; I told myself this was a good sign-and went into the observation chamber to see how Sam was getting on.

He had been doing his research; Terence Andrews now had a nice big section of whiteboard all to himself. He had studied commerce at UCD, and though his marks had been unimpressive he had apparently gained a firm grasp of the essentials: at twenty-three he had married Dolores Lehane, a Dublin debutante, and her property-developer daddy had set him up in the business. Dolores had left him four years ago and was living in London. The marriage had been childless but hardly unproductive: Andrews had a bustling little empire, concentrated in the greater Dublin area but with outposts in Budapest and Prague, and rumor had it that Dolores's lawyers and the Revenue knew about less than half of it.

According to Sam, though, he had got a little overenthusiastic. The flashy executive pad and the pimpmobile (customized silver Porsche, tinted windows, chrome, the whole enchilada) and the golf-club memberships were all bravado: Andrews had barely more actual cash than I did, his bank manager was starting to get restive, and over the past six months he had been selling off bits of his land, still undeveloped, to pay the mortgages on the rest. "If that motorway doesn't go through Knocknaree, and fast," Sam said succinctly, "the boy's banjaxed."

I had disliked Andrews well before I knew his name, and I saw nothing that changed my opinion. He was on the short side, balding badly, with beefy, florid features. He had a massive paunch and a squint in one eye, but where most men would have tried to conceal these infirmities he used them as blunt weapons: he wore the belly thrown out in front of him like a status symbol-No cheap Guinness in here, sunshine, this was built by restaurants you couldn't afford in a million years-and every time Sam got distracted and glanced over his shoulder to see what Andrews was looking at, Andrews's mouth twitched into a triumphant little smirk.

He had brought his lawyer with him, of course, and was answering about one question out of ten. Sam had managed, working his way doggedly through a dizzying pile of paperwork, to prove that Andrews owned large amounts of land in Knocknaree; upon which Andrews had quit denying that he'd ever heard of the place. He wouldn't touch questions about his financial situation, though-he clapped Sam on the shoulder and said genially, "If I were on a cop's salary, Sam, boy, I'd be more worried about my own finances than anyone else's," while the lawyer murmured colorlessly, in the background, "My client cannot disclose any information on that subject"-and both of them were profoundly, smoothly shocked at the mention of the threatening phone calls. I fidgeted and checked my watch every thirty seconds; Cassie leaned against the glass, eating an apple and abstractedly offering me a bite now and then.