'You don't want to know,' I answered. 'I've got some unsettling news, but it doesn't sound like we should get into it now.'

'No. No, hold on. Let me just move the phone. Shit. I hate the way the cord gets twisted, you know what I mean? Goddamn it.' I could hear his heavy footsteps and a chair scraping. 'Okay, Doc. So what the hell's going on?'

'I spent most of today discussing the landfill cases with the state pathologist. Marino, I'm increasingly suspicious that Ireland's serial dismemberments are the work of the same individual we're dealing with in Virginia.'

He raised his voice. 'You guys hold it down in there!'

I could hear him moving farther away from his pals as I rearranged the duvet around me. I reached for the last few sips of Black Bush I had carried to bed.

'Dr Foley worked the five Dublin cases,' I went on. 'I've reviewed all of them. Torsos. Spines cut horizontally through the caudal aspect of the fifth cervical vertebral body. Arms and legs severed through the joints, which is usual, as I've pointed out before. Victims are a racial mix, estimated ages between eighteen and thirty-five. All are unidentified and signed out as homicides by unspecified means. In each case, heads and limbs were never found, the remains discovered in privately owned landfills.'

'Damn, if that don't sound familiar.' he said.

'There are other details. But yes, the parallels are profound.'

'So maybe the squirrel's in the U.S. now,' he said. 'Guess it's a damn good thing you went over there, after all.'

He certainly hadn't thought so at first. No one really had. I was the chief medical examiner of Virginia, and when the Royal College of Surgeons had invited me to give a series of lectures at Trinity's medical school, I could not pass up an opportunity to investigate the Dublin crimes. Marino had thought it a waste of time, while the FBI had assumed the value of the research would prove to be little more than statistical.