How It All Goes Down
- Rob tracks down everyone who is wearing a tracksuit, has worn a tracksuit, or will wear a tracksuit, but comes up with no leads.
- Meanwhile, Sam has done his work on the motorway.
- He draws up a huge map that diagrams who owns what in and around Knocknaree.
- There's a lot of money tied up in this highway business, so much so that it's not out of bounds to think one of the landowners may have hired a hit man.
- Later, Rob tries to remember what happened in the woods.
- He remembers watching Sandra have sex with the boy in the Metallica shirt in the clearing, and he also remembers finding a "secret garden" (10.59), though he doesn't think that memory could possibly be real.
- On Wednesday, Cassie suggests that the Devlins fed the story of the tracksuit to Jessica to throw the cops off the trail.
- Rob calls Rosalind to follow up with her, but she doesn't call back.
- Cassie and Rob travel to Knocknaree to interview Peter's and Jamie's parents.
- While Cassie talks to Peter's parents, Rob waits in the car.
- But for some reason he does decide to go inside to talk to Jamie's mother, Alicia Rowan, though.
- Alicia wonders if Jamie would be alive if she hadn't tried to send her to boarding school.
- She still keeps her bedroom the way Jamie left it, but Rob can't bear to look at it, so he returns to the car while Cassie checks it out.
- Cassie thinks it's weird. She mostly just wants to know what Rob remembers.
- He's pretty mean, telling her, "We've been through this. Once more, with feeling: I remember sweet shining f***-all" (10.149).
- Tell her how you really feel, Rob.
- On the road back to the station, Rob sees a mysterious creature run in front of the car and slams the brakes.
- Cassie didn't see it. She doesn't know why Rob stopped.
- Back at the station, Sam says he found a journalist who has been covering the roadway thing.
- The journalist, Michael Kiely, believes that there's a curse or something in the woods, because the injury and fatality rate there is three times the national average.
- He has more concrete information, at least: the names of the men behind the three development companies that have bought up all the land in the woods.
- Time for a conference with O'Kelly, who tells them they're scaling back operations.
- O'Kelly swears they're not giving up (although Rob thinks they are), it's just that there are other cases that now need more attention.
- He allows them to keep two floaters.
- That night, they hit the pub, and Rob hits on a girl named Anna, but it doesn't go anywhere with her.
- Back at Cassie's flat, they wonder where Katy was killed and how the killer got her to the kill site.
- Cassie relays a story about a janitor at school who tried to molest her.
- He asked if she wanted marbles, and then tried to unbutton her shirt—she says, "kids don't connect things in the same ways grown-ups do" (10.242).
- The chapter ends with some interior thought of Rob insisting that he and Cassie are, and will always be, platonic friends. Something about this insistence raises our doubts…