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When Detective Horgan appeared, he looked pale and tired and he needed a shave. He told Katie that the technical team had completed their preliminary examination of Zakiyyah’s bedroom, and that Mister Dessie’s body had been taken away. Unlike the three previous murder scenes, where the victims’ clothes had all been missing, they had found Mister Dessie’s still lying on the floor.

‘His hands were gone, though. She must have taken those with her. She didn’t toss them out of the window because they weren’t to be found in the alley at the back.’

‘Now I come to think of it, she had a black plastic bag tied to her waist,’ said Katie. ‘She could have been carrying his hands away in that.
Erghh
! Makes me craw sick just to think about it.’

‘Oh – Dooley, by the way,’ said Detective Horgan.

‘Yes,
Dooley
! What on earth happened to him? The whole thing might have turned out different if Dooley
had managed to appear outside the window – although I doubt it. That Obioma isn’t scared of anything as far as I can make out. But where is Dooley? We’re going to need him tonight.’

Detective Horgan was trying not to smirk. ‘That fire escape has a gate with barbed wire on the top of it, so that people can’t access it from street level. Dooley tried to climb over it – well, he
did
climb over it, but his trousers got caught on the barbed wire and he fell and fractured his ankle and lost his phone.’

‘Oh God, poor Dooley. Where is he now?’

‘The Mercy, the last I heard from him, waiting to have his ankle put in plaster.’

‘He could at least have got in contact with me and let me know.’

‘I think he was kind of embarrassed about it, like. We found him lying on top of a heap of old milk crates in his underpants, shouting out for help.’

‘Hope you took some pictures,’ said Detective O’Donovan. ‘You could put them on Twitter. “Cork ’tec caught in Trousergate scandal.”’

‘Don’t you even think about it,’ said Katie. ‘If you do that,
you’ll
be the ones shouting out for help.’

She stood up and switched off her desk lamp. ‘Right, I’m going home now to get something to eat. We rendezvous with Sergeant Mulligan’s team at 02.00 hours in the car park outside Kent station. Double-check your firearms before you come out. This woman may have only one shot in her weapon but, believe me, you don’t want to be the one that she hits with it. Not unless you want to go home without a face.’

The clock in the hallway was chiming nine by the time she unlocked the front door. Barney came snuffling up to her as usual with his tail slapping against the radiator. John came out of the living room holding a bottle of Satzenbrau. His hair was messed up and his blue shirt was crumpled, but he came up to her smiling and gave her a kiss.

‘I did get your texts,’ he said. ‘It was just that I was in meetings and I couldn’t start prodding away at my iPhone.’

‘That’s all right. Sorry. It’s been a hell of a day.’

‘I saw something on the news. Another one of those pimp killings, huh?’

‘I was there when she did it. Face to face. Listen, I really don’t want to talk about it right now. Have you eaten?’

‘I had some minestrone soup. I wasn’t too hungry, to be honest. How about a drink?’

‘I can’t,’ said Katie. ‘I have to go out again about one-thirty. We think we’ve found out where the suspect lives and I’ve set up a raid.’

‘Jesus. I’m so glad I don’t have your job.’

Katie went into the living room and sat down. The nine o’clock news was still on, with the sound turned down, but they were showing an interview with a worried-looking dairy farmer in West Cork. John said, ‘Anything I can get you?’

‘I wouldn’t say no to a cup of tea, if you could put the kettle on. I’ll have a sandwich or something later, but not just yet. How was your day? I feel terrible. Your first day at ErinChem and I couldn’t even get home early to make you something special.’

‘Hey – if some crazy black lady wants to go around blowing people’s heads off, I can’t blame you for that.’

‘But how did it go?’

‘It went okay.’

‘Only okay? Did they read your proposal?’

‘Yes. Well, Aidan’s deputy did. I guess he’s my immediate boss. Guy called Alan McLennon.’

‘What did he think about it?’

‘He said it was much too upfront. Too much in your face. He said if I wanted to get endorsements from the Irish medical profession, I should cajole more. That was his actual word – ‘
cajole
’. Sweet-talk them, don’t be so direct. Make it sound more like craic than a sales pitch.’

‘Well, you have been living in America for years. He should take that into account.’

‘I guess you’re right. Cork must be the only place in the world where people say “I will” when they mean that they absolutely won’t. But – I don’t know. ErinChem’s a modern, well-financed company producing cutting-edge pharmaceutical products and they keep insisting that they want to update their sales strategy, yet their thinking about marketing is still so old-school. Aidan even calls it “the interweb”.’

‘John – it’s only your first day there. You’ll drag them into the future, don’t worry.’

‘Yeah. I guess so. Let me go put that kettle on.’

Katie made herself a corned-beef and tomato sandwich but she could only manage one bite. She kept seeing Mister Dessie’s face exploding.

She took a shower and then changed into jeans and a dark grey cotton sweater which was loose enough and long enough to hide most of her holster. For the rest of the evening she and John sat together on the couch, watching a crime drama on television but not really following who the cops were chasing, or why. It was just lights flickering and people running and angry-looking faces. John’s head began to press so heavily on Katie’s shoulder that after a while she had to nudge him and say, ‘Hey! You’re squishing me there, boy!’

There was no answer. ‘
John
?’ she said, but then she sat up a little and saw that he was fast asleep.

She eased herself off the couch and then tiptoed around and switched off the television and all the lights in the living room except for a single pink-shaded lamp. She covered John with a quilt that she brought in from the bedroom, and kissed his cheek. He murmured, but he didn’t open his eyes. He must have been under such stress, worrying about his new job and worrying about her, but he had probably felt that he couldn’t talk about it too much. The problems of developing online marketing for indigestion tablets hardly compared with hunting down a woman who cut off her victims’ hands and almost blew their heads off.

She shut Barney in the kitchen and then she left the house, closing the front door very quietly behind her. It was a cool night, cooler than it had been recently, and there was a soft breeze blowing, as if it were trying to whisper something to her. It was very clear, though. The moon was shining behind the trees and its reflection was glinting in the harbour.

As she backed out of her driveway and headed northwards on Carrig View, the road that led up the side of Passage West, she saw a car’s headlights switched on about two hundred yards behind her. The car pulled away from the kerb and followed her. It kept its distance as she drove up the winding roads of Fota Island, but just before she reached the main dual carriageway, it accelerated until it was almost tailgating her. She had to click down her rear-view mirror so that she wouldn’t be dazzled.

‘Jesus!’ she shouted. ‘What are you trying to do, you eejit?’ She stamped her foot down on the accelerator and pulled away. The other car fell back, making no attempt to stay close up behind her. There were only four or five cars on the road at this time of the morning, but when she looked in her mirror she couldn’t distinguish which car it was that had been tailing her.

‘Ah, come on, girl, you’re getting paranoid,’ she told herself. There were several times when she had been convinced that she was being followed, especially when she was involved in prosecuting members of one of Cork’s criminal gangs. Her husband, Paul, had suffered fatal injuries after her car had been rammed into the River Lee, and when other drivers came too close behind her it still gave her a deeply uncomfortable feeling.

She arrived at Kent train station. Four patrol cars were already parked outside, as well as three unmarked cars belonging to Detective Sergeant ó Nuallán, Detective O’Donovan and Detective Horgan.

Sergeant Mulligan came over to Katie as she climbed out of her car.

‘Good morning, superintendent. We’re all ready to go. We’ll be sending two men round the back of the house first, and when they confirm that they’re in position we’ll go in for the smash and bash. We’ve been keeping a discreet watch on the property all evening but nobody’s been in or out of it. There were lights on downstairs until 22.03, and somebody watching television in the first-floor flat until 23.26, but it’s all dark now. There’s a bedsit in the attic with a dormer window in the roof but we’ve seen no light from that at all.’

‘Very good,’ said Katie. ‘You’ve briefed your team on what they’re up against, haven’t you? A very highly motivated woman with terrorist training. We know for certain that she has one firearm, this single-shot pocket shotgun, but it’s quite possible that she may have others. However, I very much want her taken alive. She can provide valuable evidence for further prosecutions.’

Detective Sergeant ó Nuallán walked over. She was wearing a dark brown hoodie and black jeggings and ankle-boots.

‘Mother of God,’ said Katie. ‘If I saw you in the street dressed like that, I’d probably arrest you on suspicion.’

‘I just thought you’d like to know that I contacted Mary ó Floinn at Nasc,’ said Detective Sergeant ó Nuallán. ‘One of their volunteers took Zakiyyah for a drugs test. I haven’t heard the results yet, but Mary said that afterwards she would take her to the same family that are looking after that Romanian girl you saw.’

‘Little Corina, yes.’

‘She shouldn’t be staying with them for very long – just long enough for Nasc to sort out Zakiyyah’s legal rights and locate her family in Nigeria and arrange to send her back there, if that’s what she wants.’

‘Good,’ said Katie. ‘There’s a few saintly people in this world after all.’

Detective O’Donovan came up wearing a blue Kevlar vest and carrying two more. ‘Here you are, though I don’t know what earthly good these will do you if this Angel of Vengeance tries to blow your head off like Dessie O’Leary and those other langers.’

Sergeant Mulligan raised his hand to indicate to Katie that two of his officers were now in position at the back of the house. Katie and Detective Sergeant ó Nuallán got into Detective O’Donovan’s Mondeo and they followed the four patrol cars, with Detective Horgan following behind them. It wasn’t far to the house called
Sonas
, only five hundred metres under the railway bridge, but they took the cars to block off the road.

As soon as they slewed to a halt outside the house, the armed officers scrambled out of their patrol cars and went rushing to the front door. They didn’t knock or ring any of the doorbells, they just swung at the door with a 35-pound Ram-It. The door was old and rotten and it was torn off its hinges with the first blow, crashing flat on to the hallway floor.

The officers screamed, ‘
Armed gardaí! Armed gardaí!
’ and stormed into the house with their flashlights criss-crossing. They battered open the first door they came across, on their right, and jostled into the ground-floor flat. Katie approached the front door and she could hear an elderly man shouting, ‘What the
feck
is going on here? What are you doing knocking me fecking door down in the middle of the fecking night?’

The lights went on and Katie stepped into the hallway. She saw a white-haired man in blue-striped pyjamas watching helplessly as the officers went from his living room to his bedroom to his bathroom, opening every cupboard door and even crouching down to look under his bed.

Two more gardaí had already climbed the narrow staircase to the first-floor landing and were smashing down the door to the flat above. She heard a woman shouting and a baby screaming. She went into the ground-floor flat and approached the elderly man in his pyjamas.

‘Detective Superintendent Maguire,’ she said, showing him her badge. ‘I’m really sorry we’ve disturbed you like this, but we’re looking for a very dangerous young woman.’

‘What?’ he blinked. ‘Who did you say you were? I can’t see a fecking thing without me glimmers.’

‘I’m a detective, sir. I apologize for breaking into your flat like this, but we’re trying to catch a criminal and we suspect that she’s armed. A young black woman, who sometimes dresses all in black. Is she staying in this house? Have you seen her?’

‘The black girl? Of course I’ve seen her. Up and down stairs all hours of the fecking day and night in those clompy great boots of hers. I don’t sleep well as it is.’

‘Have you seen her today?’

‘This morning I saw her. She comes clomping down the stairs and slams the front door. I’m not racist meself but she’s enough to turn you that way.’

Katie heard more shouting and crying upstairs, and when she turned around she saw Detective Sergeant ó Nuallán heading towards the stairs. ‘Listen, I’ll have to leave you for a moment. I’m sorry about the damage. We’ll have somebody around to fix your door first thing.’

‘And what am I supposed to do now? Go back to bed and try to sleep while any thief who wants to can just stroll in off the street?’

‘I promise you we’ll make your flat secure before we go,’ said Katie. ‘You’ll be compensated, too, for any distress we’ve caused you.’

With that, she went back out into the hallway and climbed the stairs. The officers had battered open the door of the first-floor flat, too, and Detective Sergeant ó Nuallán was in there, trying to calm down a hysterical young mother and her screaming baby.

‘How can you
do
this?’ the young mother was protesting. ‘How can you just break into my flat? I have a five-month-old
baby
!’

The officers came out of her kitchen and squeezed past her in their bulky Kevlar jackets. The other two gardaí had already gone up to the attic and smashed down the door, and Katie could hear them walking about above her head. One of them shouted down, ‘Clear! Nobody in here, Sarge!’