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very cleanly, at a slant.
    ‘His hands? Well, they’ve both gone missing,’ said the technician. ‘A couple of the guards went searching through the whole house top to bottom but they couldn’t find a trace of them. It looks like your man must have taken them away with him for a keepsake.’
    ‘It was a woman, according to the witness.’
    The technician looked back down at the grisly hollow of the dead man’s face. ‘A
woman
? Jesus. She must have taken some rabbie, and no mistake. I’ll tell you what’s interesting, though. Whoever did it, they shot this feller while he was lying down, right here.
In situ
.’
    ‘Both shots?’
    The technician nodded. ‘The both of them. Straight through his head and into the sofa cushions.’
    ‘But she used a shotgun … and even if it was a sawn-off shotgun …’
    ‘That’s right, ma’am. She would have had to be standing on the bed with her feet either side of him, pointing the gun down at his face. Especially since she was a woman, and probably not so tall as a man.’
    ‘So, any sign of footprints?’
    ‘That’s what’s interesting – no. No indentations in the cushions, no dirt smudges on the sheets from somebody’s shoes, nothing.’
    Katie slowly raised both hands as if she were holding up a crucifix beside the altar in church. ‘Maybe she simply stood where I’m standing now and held up the shotgun vertical with the muzzle downwards and the stock up in the air. Then she could have pushed the trigger up with her thumb.’
    ‘It’s possible. They have a fair recoil in them, though, those shotguns. Your average twelve-bore can kick back at you with anything up to twenty foot-pounds – even more, depending on your load. That’s like being punched by a middleweight boxer.’
    Katie looked around the bedsit. ‘I see,’ she said. ‘Any other forensics you want to show me?’
    ‘There’s over a thousand blood spatters, ma’am, as well as flesh fragments and bone fragments and brain tissue. There’s also urine and excrement and stray hairs that probably came off the young girl who was hiding in here. Until we move the body off the bed we won’t know the full extent of it for sure, but all of the exposed areas of the sheet and the blanket that we’ve been able to examine so far have numerous semen samples on them.’
    ‘Numerous? How numerous?’
    ‘Too many to give you even a guesstimated figure yet, but I’d say they run into hundreds.’
    ‘It doesn’t take a genius to work out what’s been happening in here, then,’ said Katie. She went across to the window and looked down into the street, where even more crowds had gathered. ‘God, don’t these people have anything better to do? Don’t they know that
Elev8
starts in a minute?’ She was talking about the children’s programme on RTÉ2.
    She turned around. ‘How about the door?’ she asked the technician.
    ‘Well, look at it, the lock’s not up to much, Hickey’s cheapest, but it wasn’t forced and the key’s still in it.’
    ‘Okay, that might help,’ said Katie. ‘But it’s no good trying to recreate a scenario simply from what we have here. We have no way of telling if the perpetrator came into the room and surprised the victim and the girl together, or if the perpetrator brought them both here from some other location, or if the girl and the perpetrator were here first and the victim burst in on them.
    ‘According to those two fellers who found her, the girl knew the victim, or at least she knew what his name was, but we don’t know if she knew who the perpetrator was. That’s our number one priority. The sooner we can find out the victim’s identity, the sooner we’ll have some idea of why he was killed and who might have killed him.’
    Sergeant ó Nuallán was jotting in her notebook. ‘I’ll go to the Tattoo Zoo and ask them for a list of African clients who might have had their lips tattooed lately, and if any of those had their genitals tattooed, too. That’ll