A Terrible Beauty

by Graham Masterton

  "She wasn't gagged? And she had the flesh cut off her arms and legs with nothing but a few aspirin to deaden the pain? God, she must have screamed."

  "She probably did," said Dr. Reidy, unblinking.

  "That means that she must have been held somewhere isolated-in a place where nobody could hear her. Either that, or somewhere soundproof, like a cellar."

  "That would be my opinion."

  "How about the holes in the thighbones?"

  "They were both drilled with a number eight steel masonry bit. Brand new, by the clean way it drilled through, and there are traces of thin oil, too. We've found some microscopic fragments of metal so we should be able to identify that, too."

  "All right," said Katie. "You've got all the forensic evidence all I have to do is find this monster and make an arrest."

  Dr. Reidy draped two sheets over the autopsy tables. "That's right, Superintendent. I'd say you've got your work cut out for you, wouldn't you?"

  Jimmy O'Rourke knocked on her office door at 4:45P.M. and said, "Boss? The Meagher's Farm victim. We think we know who she is." He held out an E-mailed attachment with a color photograph on it. Katie took it and held it under her desk lamp.

  It was datelined 6:00P.M. the previous day, from the Santa Barbara Sheriff's Department, 1745 Mission Drive, Solvang, California, and it was addressed to Garda Headquarters in Phoenix Park. "We have received an urgent inquiry from Mr. and Mrs. Donald F. Kelly of Paseo Delicias, Solvang, regarding the whereabouts of their daughter Fiona Kelly who is currently undertaking a three-week solo backpacking tour of Co. Limerick, Co. Kerry, and Co. Cork, in the Republic of Ireland. Ms. Kelly arranged to contact her parents by telephone every two-three days in order to reassure them that she was safe. However-"

  Katie looked at the photograph. A young, bright, blond-haired girl standing on a white-painted veranda, laughing.

  "Fiona is twenty-two years old, five feet ten inches tall, weighs one hundred and forty-seven pounds. She is likely to be wearing blue jeans and a navy-blue windcheater with turquoise panels on the front. She is carrying a navy-blue Nike backpack."

  "Oh, shit," said Katie.

  At 9:25P.M., Katie spoke on the phone with Chief Deputy Fred Olguin of the Santa Barbara Sheriff's Department.

  "I have to warn you that we're investigating a murder here. A young blond girl who may be American."

  "I see. I'm real sorry to hear that. Naturally I won't say anything to the Kellys yet awhile. But they're pretty upset. It seems like Fiona always made a point of calling them, almost every afternoon."

  "I need a list of every location from which Fiona called her parents since her arrival. Failing that, the telephone numbers."

  "I'll get you all of that information, ma'am. Don't you worry about that."

  The list came by E-mail only twenty minutes later, along with a map on which Mr. and Mrs. Kelly had been carefully tracing their daughter's progress by marking red crosses on a map of the Irish Republic.

  Katie asked Liam to call customs officers at Shannon and the garda stations in Limerick, Killarney, and Bandon. Within an hour she had built up a reasonably detailed picture of most of Fiona's movements from the moment she had stepped off the plane from Los Angeles.

  At 9:50 Dermot O'Driscoll came in with a blacky ham sandwich in one hand and a mug of tea in the other and asked how she was getting on. She nodded toward the map and the photograph of Fiona pinned up next to it. "I've got a really bad feeling this is our victim."

  "American, then? Not Irish."

  "Irish by ancestry."

  Gardaí called that evening at seven different bed-and-breakfasts where Fiona had stopped for the night, and interviewed every landlady. Almost every one of them said she was "very sweet, very friendly, and very trusting." Mrs. Rooney from The Atlantic Hotel in Dingle said, "She was so innocent I have to say that I was feared for her. Hitchhiking isn't safe like it used to be when I was young."

  The last call Fiona had made to her parents was from The Golden Shamrock bed-and-breakfast in Ballyvourney, near Macroom, which was less than an hour's drive west of Cork City.

  • • •

  Just before 8:00A.M. the following morning, Garda John Buckley from Macroom talked to Denis Hennessy, who ran a news agent's and confectionery on the main Cork road. He had been tying up the previous day's unsold newspapers when he saw Fiona hitchhiking just outside his shop. "You wouldn't forget her, you know? She looked like one of those girls inBaywatch."A dirty pale-blue pickup had stopped for her, with the nameC & J O'Donoghue Builderspainted on the back.

  By 11:05A.M., Detective Garda Patrick O'Sullivan had tracked down Con and Jimmy O'Donoghue, two young brothers who ran their own building business in Mallow, twenty miles north of Cork. They were restoring a row of old Victorian cottages out near Cecilstown. They remembered stopping for Fiona just outside Macroom and offering to give her a lift as far as The Angler's Rest pub a few miles south of Blarney.

  "There's nothing happened to her, is it? She was an angel all right."

  "Did she say where she was going?"

  "Oh, sure. She was going to kiss the Blarney Stone. She couldn't stop chattering on about it."

  Patrick called Katie on his cell phone. "Stay where you are," Katie told him. "Talk to the landlord at The Angler's Rest and any of his customers who might have seen her. I'll come out and join you."

  The autumn sun shone brightly in her rearview mirror as she took the long straight road west out of Cork and headed for The Angler's Rest. Most of the leaves had fallen now, and the landscape was lit in orange and red and yellow, as if she were looking at it through a stained-glass window.

  Patrick was waiting for her in the pub car park, with his windcheater collar turned up against the cold, and his breath smoking.

  "You've talked to the landlord?" she said, climbing out of the car.

  "He didn't see anything, but there's a fellow here who did."

  The fellow was sitting at the bar with a pint of Beamish in front of him and a whiskey chaser. He was small and red in the face, and the top of his head was curiously flat, as if you could have balanced a cup and saucer on it. He wore the jacket that had once belonged to a bronze-colored suit and the trousers that had once belonged to a dull blue suit.

  "What's your name?" Katie asked him.

  "Ricky Looney. Like my father before me. He was Ricky Looney, too."

  The fire was crackling in the hearth and all of the drinkers in The Angler's Rest were staring at Katie in shameless, unwavering curiosity. "Well, Ricky, my name's Katie Maguire." She produced the photograph of Fiona Kelly and held it up in front of his face. "Detective Garda O'Sullivan tells me that you saw this girl."

  "I did so."

  "Can you remember what day that was?"

  "Not exactly, but it was the day that Cork lost the junior hurling to Killarney."

  "Thursday," put in Patrick.

  "That's right. You're right. That would be the day before Friday."

  "Were you sitting in here when you saw her?" asked Katie.

  "I was, yeah."

  "So where was she?"

  "She was across the road there, like. There was this blue pickup, like, and she climbed out of it and crossed the road there, like. And I was watching her thumbing for a lift, you know."

  "And did she get a lift?"

  "Oh, yes. Only a minute or two, and this big black car pulls up and in she gets, and that's it, like, she's gone."

  "Do you know what make of car it was?"

  "Mercedes, I'd say. With one headlight only."

  "You didn't see the registration plate?"

  He shook his head. "It was all covered up with mud at the back. Like he'd been driving it through a field."

  She put out a call for every black or dark-colored Mercedes to be pulled over and the drivers asked to account for their movements on Thursday last week.

  Dermot O'Driscoll rang her back and he wasn't at all happy. "We have a lorry strike blocking the Jack Lynch Tunnel tomorrow
. If you stop every dark-colored Mercedes as well, it's going to be chaos."

  "I'm on my way to Blarney, sir. I'll talk to you later."

  "Katie-I want you back by five. I've arranged another news conference."

  "I'm sure you can handle that, sir. You know just as much as I do."

  "Katie-"

  "Sorry, sir. You're breaking up."

  Katie and Patrick O'Sullivan arrived in the village of Blarney and parked outside the castle. Blarney was a tourist trap, a small village with a supermarket, two big pubs that catered to thousands of foreign visitors in the summer, and souvenir shops selling Guinness T-shirts, leprechaun key rings, and Waterford crystal goblets at €100 each. This afternoon, however, Blarney was almost deserted, with only one coach in the car park.

  Katie went to the castle ticket office and produced the photograph of Fiona Kelly. The woman in the pay booth said, "No, love, I'm sorry and even if she was here, I wouldn't recognize her. They're all just faces, you know, one face after another."

  They walked through the grounds toward the castle itself. A giggling party of Japanese tourists were having their photographs taken on one of the wooden bridges, with the river beneath them sparkling with hundreds of pennies, where visitors had thrown them for luck.

  After they had passed the Japanese, however, the lawns and the pathways were peaceful and chilly, with only the cawing of crows and the slowly sinking sunlight. They climbed the steps that led to the foot of the dark fifteenth-century tower, but when they reached the entrance, Katie said, "That's it, Patrick. You can go up to the top on your own. You won't catch me climbing four hundred steps, even in the name of duty."

  She stayed by the souvenir shop until Patrick reappeared, sweaty and out of breath, in spite of the chill. "You took your time," she chided him.

  "I talked to the photographers," he panted. "They don't recall any girl like that kissing the Blarney Stone, not in the past two or three weeks. But they're going to give me copies of every picture they've taken since Wednesday last. Like they said themselves, you can't imagine an American girl coming here on her own and not having her picture taken, so that she could send it to her parents back home."

  "All right, Patrick. Good work. Make sure they send you those pictures ASAP. But my feeling is that she never got here."

  "The dark Mercedes?"

  "More than likely. It's only six kilometers from The Angler's Rest to the middle of Blarney-don't tell me that any innocent driver wasn't going to bring her all the way."

  "So he took her off to Knocknadeenly and tied her up and killed her."

  "It looks like it, doesn't it? And he took her somewhere very isolated. A cottage or a barn. A cottage is my guess. He couldn't have tortured her and cut her up all in one night, so he would have needed somewhere to rest, and sleep, and make himself something to eat. A two-bedroom cottage, probably. Get onto the letting agents in Cork and Mallow and Fermoy."

  "Anything else?"

  "Yes. I want a twenty-four-hour guard on Meagher's Farm. And I want at least half a dozen squad cars out tomorrow morning, and have them knock at every door in Ballyhooly and Glanworth and Killavullen and Castletownroche. I want them to drive up and down every single side road and stop at every single farmhouse and bungalow and outbuilding, no exceptions.

  "Whoever did this, I want him found, Patrick, and very quickly."

  Patrick scribbled in his notebook with a blunt HB pencil, then clapped it shut and said, "Right. Sorry. What was that first thing you wanted me do?"

  There was a message waiting for her when she arrived back at Anglesea Street. A virtual bouquet of red roses on her computer screen, with the message, "I'm sorry, Katie. I'm such a gom sometimes. All my love, Paul."

  She looked at it for a moment, and then she deleted it. She wished he hadn't bothered. It would be so much easier not to love him if he didn't keep giving her glimpses of what he had been like when they first got married.

  26

  Dr. Reidy called Katie just after 10:30 on Wednesday morning and said, "Our victim is Fiona Kelly, not an ounce of a doubt."

  "You're absolutely sure?"

  "Oh, yes. The dental records match exactly."

  "All right, then. Anything more?"

  "Not at the moment. I'm going to Hayfield Manor to have a belated breakfast. I find it hard to dissect when I'm hungry. By the way, what was the name of that Italian restaurant you recommended? I thought I might go there tonight."

  "Florentino's, halfway down Carey's Lane."

  Katie put the phone down. Fiona's parents were due to fly to Ireland this afternoon, although Katie had warned Chief Deputy Olguin that even if the body was Fiona, there was no question of them being allowed to see her. She remembered seeing Seamus, in his little white casket. Her darling boy had looked so perfect that she almost expected him to open his eyes and smile at her.

  Just before lunch, Jimmy O'Rourke came into Katie's office with full-size photographs of more than twenty complete and partial footprints from the field where Fiona's body had been found. They had been made by a new pair of men's rubber boots, size ten. She sent five detective gardaí to call at every shoe shop and men's outfitters in Cork, and before 5:00P.M. they returned with a pair of Primark boots, which were exclusive to Penney's, a large low-cost department store in Patrick Street. Penney's had sold twenty-seven pairs of this particular boot since they had gone on sale on October 12. Eleven customers could be traced through their credit or debit card records, but the remainder of the boots had been bought for cash. They were only €9.99, after all.

  Katie sent her team back out to interview all eleven identifiable customers, but she had very little hope that the killer was among them. Not unless he actuallywantedto be caught.

  By 10:35P.M., the technical officers were back with information about a tire track they had found in the muddy verge by the entrance to Meagher's Farm. It had been a dry night when Fiona's body had been arranged in the field, so there were no distinctive tracks on the asphalt that led up to the farm buildings. But the perpetrator had probably been driving without lights, and had turned into the farm gates a little too sharply, leaving a triangular impression sixty-six millimeter's long and thirty-seven millimeter's wide. The tread had been checked against the database in Dublin, and it had been matched to a ContiTouring Contact CH95 all-season steel-belted radial, size 215/55R16. Among many other vehicles, this was the tire normally fitted to Mercedes-Benz E-series sedans.

  The search of cottages and farmhouses in the Knocknadeenly area had so far proved fruitless, although one garda discovered an illegal still and more than seven hundred bottles of poteen in a shed in Ballynoe; and another came across a borrowed CAT earthmover hidden under bales of hay in Templemichael. The poteen was confiscated and a low-loader was sent out to repossess the earthmover, but no arrests were made. Katie needed all the public cooperation she could get.

  She didn't get home until the early hours of Thursday morning. As she took off her coat she heard screams and shouting from the bedroom. Paul must have fallen asleep in front of the television again. She went into the kitchen and switched on the light. Sergeant looked up from his basket resentfully, and yawned.

  She made herself a mug of tea and sat at the kitchen table to drink it. Her mind was too crowded to think of going to bed just yet. It had been a week now since Fiona had been abducted, and her murderer could have left Ireland the day after he laid her body out in Meagher's field. Yet somehow she felt as if he were still very close, as if he had unfinished business. It was only a feeling, nothing more, and it was probably brought on by exhaustion, and because she desperately needed to believe that she was going to find him.

  At last, at 2:36A.M., she drained the last dregs of her tea into the sink, switched off the light, and went upstairs. Sergeant settled down in his basket with a grunt of relief.

  27

  She didn't reach Garda headquarters until 10:25 the next morning. She had set her alarm for 7:30A.M. but when it beeped she was deeply
involved in a dream about her mother. In her dream it was a warm day in August, with blue skies and rolling Atlantic clouds, and she was sitting in the garden telling her mother that she was expecting a baby. The birds twittered, the leaves gossiped in the breeze. Her mother frowned and said, "Another baby, or the one who died?"

  She sat up with a jolt. Her hair was all sweaty. She looked at the clock and she couldn't believe it was 9:07A.M. Paul was still buried in the pillow beside her, snoring in a high, sinister cackle.

  She dressed hurriedly, in a black coat-suit and a gray sweater, snagging her new black pantyhose with her fingernail. She managed to gulp down half a glass of orange juice before hopping out of the house with the back of one shoe squashed awkwardly beneath her foot and a folded piece of bread and Flora clenched between her teeth. As she neared Cork she found that the main road was jammed with over a mile and a half of traffic. The Jack Lynch Tunnel was closed by striking truck drivers and there was a checkpoint opposite the Silver Springs Hotel, where four gardaí were flagging down every black and dark-colored Mercedes. When she eventually managed to reach the checkpoint, one of them sardonically saluted her. "Sorry about the delay, Superintendent." It began to rain.