"This isn't the primary scene?"

"No way," Sophie said. "There's no spatter on the rock, not even any blood from the head wound. She was killed somewhere else, probably kept for a day or so and then dumped."

"Find anything?"

"Plenty," she said. "Too much. It looks like the local kids hang out here. Cigarette butts, beer cans, a couple of Coke cans, gum, the ends of three joints. Two used condoms. Once you find a suspect, the lab can try matching him to all this stuff-which will be a nightmare-but to be honest I think it's just your basic teenage debris. Footprints all over the place. A hair clip. I don't think it was hers-it was shoved right down into the dirt at the base of the stone, and I'd bet it's been there a good while-but you might want to check. It doesn't look like it belonged to some teenager; it's the all-plastic kind, with a plastic strawberry on the end, and you'd usually see them on younger kids."

blond wing lifting

I felt as though I had tilted sharply backwards; I had to stop myself jerking for balance. I heard Cassie say quickly, somewhere on the other side of Sophie, "Probably not hers. Everything she's wearing is blue and white, right down to the hair elastics. This kid coordinated. We'll check it out, though."

"Are you OK?" Sophie asked me.

"I'm fine," I said. "I just need coffee." The joy of the new, hip, happening, double-espresso Dublin is that you can blame any strange mood on coffee deprivation. This never worked in the era of tea, at least not at the same level of street cred.

"I'm going to get him an IV caffeine drip for his birthday," said Cassie. She likes Sophie, too. "He's even more useless without his fix. Tell him about the rock."

"Yeah, we found two interesting things," said Sophie. "There's a rock about this size"-she cupped her hands: about eight inches wide-"that I'm pretty sure is one of the weapons. It was in the grass by the wall. Hair and blood and bone fragments all over one end of it."

"Any prints?" I asked.

"No. A couple of smudges, but they look like they came from gloves. The interesting parts are where it was-up by the wall; could mean he came over it, from the estate, although that could be what we're meant to think-and the fact that he bothered dumping it. You'd think he'd just rinse it and stick it in his garden, rather than carrying it as well as a body."

"Couldn't it have been in the grass already?" I asked. "He might have dropped the body on it, maybe getting her over the wall."

"I don't think so," said Sophie. She was shifting her feet delicately, trying to nudge me towards the stone table; she wanted to get back to work. I looked away. I am not squeamish about bodies, and I was pretty sure I had seen even worse than this one-a toddler, the year before, whose father kicked him until he basically broke in half-but I still felt weird, light-headed, as though my eyes weren't focusing clearly enough to take in the image. Maybe I really do need coffee, I thought. "It was blood-side down. And the grass underneath it is fresh, still alive; the rock hadn't been there long."

"Plus, she wasn't bleeding any more by the time she was brought here," Cassie said.

"Oh, yeah-the other interesting thing," Sophie said. "Come look at this."

I bowed to the inevitable and ducked under the tape. The other techs glanced up and moved back from the stone to give us room. They were both very young, barely more than trainees, and suddenly I thought of how we must look to them: how much older, how aloof, how much more confident in the little arts and negotiations of adulthood. It steadied me somehow, the image of two Murder detectives with their practiced faces giving away nothing, walking shoulder to shoulder and in step towards this dead child.

She was lying curled on her left side, as though she had fallen asleep on the sofa under the peaceful murmurs of adult conversation. Her left arm was flung out over the edge of the rock; her right fell across her chest, the hand bent under at an awkward angle. She was wearing smoke-blue combats, the kind with tags and zippers in peculiar places, and a white T-shirt with a line of stylized cornflowers printed on the front, and white runners. Cassie was right, she had taken trouble: the thick plait trailing across her cheek was secured with a blue silk cornflower. She was small and very slight, but her calf showed taut and muscular where one leg of the combats was rucked up. Ten to thirteen sounded about right: her breasts were just beginning, barely denting the folds of the T-shirt. Blood was caked on her nose and mouth and the tips of her front teeth. The breeze whirled the soft, curling fronds at her hairline.

Her hands were covered in clear plastic bags, tied at the wrists. "Looks like she fought," Sophie said. "A couple of nails were broken off. I wouldn't bet on finding DNA under the others-they look pretty clean-but we should get fibers and trace off her clothes."

For a moment I was dizzied by the impulse to leave her there: shove the techs' hands away, shout at the hovering morgue men to get the hell out. We had taken enough toll on her. All she had left was her death and I wanted to leave her that, that at least. I wanted to wrap her up in soft blankets, stroke back her clotted hair, pull up a duvet of falling leaves and little animals' rustles. Leave her to sleep, sliding away forever down her secret underground river, while breathing seasons spun dandelion seeds and moon phases and snowflakes above her head. She had tried so hard to live.

"I have that same T-shirt," Cassie said quietly, at my shoulder. "Penney's kids' department." I had seen it on her before, but I knew she wouldn't wear it again. Violated, that innocence was too vast and final to allow any tongue-in-cheek claim of kinship.

"Here's what I wanted to show you," said Sophie briskly. She doesn't approve of either sentimentality or graveyard humor at crime scenes. She says they waste time that should be spent working on the damn case, but the implication is that coping strategies are for wimps. She pointed to the edge of the stone. "Want gloves?"

"I won't touch anything," I said, and crouched in the grass. From this angle I could see that one of the girl's eyes was a slit open, as if she was only pretending to be asleep, waiting for her moment to jump up and yell, Boo! Fooled you! A shiny black beetle ticked a methodical path over her forearm.

A groove about a finger wide had been carved around the top of the stone, an inch or two from the edge. Time and weather had worn it smooth, almost glossy, but in one place the maker's handmade chisel had slipped, gouging a chunk out of the side of the groove and leaving a tiny, jagged overhang. A smear of something dark, almost black, clung to the underside.

"Helen here spotted it," Sophie said. The girl tech glanced up and gave me a shy proud smile. "We've swabbed, and it's blood-I'll let you know if it's human. I doubt it has anything to do with our body; her blood had dried by the time she was brought here, and anyway I'd bet this is years old. It could be animal, or it could be from some teenage scrap or whatever, but still, it's interesting."

I thought of the delicate hollow by Jamie's wrist bone, the brown back of Peter's neck bordered by white after a haircut. I could feel Cassie not looking at me. "I don't see how it could be connected," I said. I stood up-it was getting hard to balance on my heels without touching the table-and felt a quick head-rush.

Before we left the site I stood on the little ridge above the girl's body and turned full circle, imprinting an overview of the scene on my mind: trenches, houses, fields, access and angles and alignments. Along the estate wall, a thin rim of trees had been left untouched, presumably to shield the residents' aesthetic sensibilities from the uncompromisingly archaeological view. One had a broken piece of blue plastic rope heavily knotted around a high branch, a couple of feet dangling. It was frayed and mildewed and implied sinister Gothic history-lynch mobs, midnight suicides-but I knew what it was. It was the remnant of a tire swing.