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    The victims lay together on the bed, both fully naked. The girl’s eyes were closed, her dark hair fanned out prettily on the pillow, looking for all the world as though she was having a post-coital nap – apart from the gaping hole low in her chest and half the contents of her companion’s head sprayed across her cheek.
    They were achingly young, in their early-twenties at the most. Chris’s stomach turned over. Their boss was right – what kind of country was it that a kid barely out of his teens could get his hands on a gun? And a posh kid at that. Judging by his lightly tanned skin and toned rugby-player physique, he suspected that the boyfriend wasn’t some malnourished scumbag the girl had taken up with to piss off her well-to-do parents. And he had one of those stylized oriental tattoos on his upper right arm, not the Celtic cross favored by the working classes.
    His eyes quickly scanned the area. The murder weapon lay on the sheets – a 9 mm. It must have fallen out of the shooter’s hand.
    He briefly exchanged nods with state pathologist, who was conducting her preliminary examination of the bodies before their removal to the morgue. He gave an involuntary shiver. Sometimes Karen Thompson unsettled him more than the victims did. A serious woman with oversized dark eyes, Roman nose, and an exceptionally long neck, Chris figured she was perfectly suited for the strain of medicine where the absence of a bedside manner was a good thing. Briefly noting the arrival of the detectives, she resumed her examination of the bodies.
    Several uniforms were busy around the apartment, some taking notes, most simply observing and helping guard the scene – a crime like this always drew a crowd. The GFU crew, dressed head to toe in white dust suits, were wandering around the area; dusting for prints on surfaces, gathering material and trace evidence, bagging everything as they went.
    One of the forensics squatted low against the bed as he pointed and flashed his camera at the victims. And although he hadn’t yet spotted Reilly Steel, Chris knew she had to be somewhere amongst the mix.
    ‘Christ,’ Kennedy muttered. ‘What age were these two – fifteen?’
    ‘College students according to Reilly, so they’ve got to be older than that.’
    ‘But not by much. Fucking hell.’
    Although in the course of their work they came across young victims on a regular basis, they were usually junkies or fledgling gang members who’d come from such troubled backgrounds it was almost impossible to imagine them ending up any other way. These kids, though – healthy, educated, middle class – could just as easily have been Kennedy’s own son or daughter and for those reasons alone, it made it different.
    ‘What the hell was he thinking?’
    ‘Where the hell did he get the gun is what I want to know,’ Chris ruminated.
    Illegal weapons were increasingly finding their way out of the hands of paramilitaries and onto the city streets and, while any criminal worth his salt would know how to get hold of a gun at short notice, it should be a different story for a middle-class college kid.
    He turned to the uniformed officer standing in the bedroom doorway. ‘Who was first on the scene?’
    ‘A unit from Blackrock,’ the man replied, indicating a group of officers gathered in the living room – one of them decidedly shaky-looking. ‘Young Fitzgerald is not long out of training,’ he added with a slight shake of the head. ‘Talk about throwing him in at the deep end.’
    Chris cursed inwardly. He’d spotted Fitzgerald as soon as he’d stepped into the living room – he looked as young as the victims, he’d probably only just started shaving.
    He stepped into the living room. Like the bedroom, it had tall French windows opening out onto a balcony with a sea view. A massive plasma TV screen filled one wall and a deep fireplace dominated the other. The whole place smelled of money. Chris wondered if there had been a robbery