Taken for Dead (Kate Maguire) by Graham Masterton Read Free Book Online

of Erin in school. Some of them were real, weren’t they, but most of the stories about them … well, they’re just legends, with witches and fortune-tellers and talking trees and all that kind of nonsense?’
    ‘That’s right,’ said Katie. ‘But I remember our history teacher telling us that the High Kings were always fighting each other, and they were always cutting each other’s heads off. They reckoned that if a fellow didn’t have a head, he couldn’t wear a crown.’
    ‘Well, fair play to them, you have to admire their logic,’ said Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán. ‘You think there might be a connection with Micky Crounan having his head cut off like that?’
    ‘I have no idea. Maybe it was just simple extortion by somebody with a very warped sense of humour. Maybe somebody had a serious grudge against him. If you can get Horgan and Dooley on to that aspect of things – get them to dig into his past and find out if anybody hated him enough to kill him. Even pillars of the community like Micky Crounan can have their shady secrets. Look at that bank manager, what was his name? Martin O’Shea. Having sex with his own daughters like that. No wonder they poured petrol through his letter box.’
    ‘And then, of course, there’s Michael Gerrety,’ said Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán.
    ‘I detest any man who thinks he has a right to take advantage of vulnerable girls like that. It wouldn’t be their heads I’d be cutting off first.’

6
    Back at the station, Katie called Dr O’Brien at the state pathologist’s office in Dublin to arrange for a post-mortem examination of Micky Crounan’s remains. Dr O’Brien was one of Ireland’s two deputy pathologists, and Katie liked working with him. He was very rigorous, but he would often come up with a highly creative theory as to how and why the corpse he was examining had met its end.
    Instead, she was put through to the state pathologist himself, Dr Owen Reidy.
    ‘Oh, it’s you, Detective Superintendent,’ he said, grumpily. ‘Can it not wait until later? I have a meeting with the commissioner in five minutes and I don’t want to be gasping for breath when I get there.’
    ‘Actually, I wanted to talk to Dr O’Brien if he’s there,’ said Katie.
    ‘Dr O’Brien is in Horseleap, in Offaly. A woman’s body has been dug out of a bog. She’s almost perfectly preserved, so she could have been there for six months or sixteen hundred years, like Old Croghan Man.’
    ‘That’s interesting.’
    ‘Interesting? It’s highly annoying, I’ll say that. Examining bog bodies is time-consuming and very expensive, as you’re well aware, especially if we have to bring in a forensic archaeologist. It’s only October and my budget is stretched to the limit already. But what did you want?’
    ‘We have the severed head of a homicide victim here which needs examining.’
    ‘Only the head? What about the rest of him?’
    ‘The rest of him hasn’t been found yet.’
    ‘In that case, why don’t you send us the head by courier? If you do that, I could have Dr Sanjay looking at it by tomorrow morning at the latest.’
    Katie thought about Mary Crounan, tearfully pleading to see her husband one more time before his interment, and then thought about Micky Crounan’s head being driven to Dublin in a cooler box by First Direct, and it was both absurd and tragic at the same time. But she needed every scrap of evidence that the pathologists could find.
    ‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’ll arrange it. You can expect it later today.’
    ***
    Katie spent most of the afternoon with her five-strong drugs team, led by Detective Niall Brannigan, who was stocky and brown-haired and bristled like a bull terrier that has scented a hedgehog. He was planning a series of coordinated raids against premises in Blackpool and Farranree.
    For the past three weeks the clubs and pubs in Cork had been flooded with crack cocaine and other controlled drugs like ecgonine and crystal meth.