53 pages • 1 hour read
In the Woods
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Chapters 22-24Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 22 Summary
Late that night, Cassie calls Rob at home. She says it’s important, but he hangs up on her. When he arrives at work the next day, O’Kelly reads him the riot act. The boss has learned about Rob’s past and says the detective should have excused himself from the Devlin case.
The ramifications are major. If Rob is accused of withholding evidence, every felon who he’s ever put in jail can demand a retrial. Rob assumes he’s now off the Devlin case, but O’Kelly doesn’t want to call attention to the situation. He forbids Rob from actively involving himself in the investigation and will suspend him the minute Damien’s trial is over.
When Rob encounters Cassie in the incident room, he accuses her of tattling to O’Kelly. Cassie denies revealing his secret and says she called the night before to warn him. Cassie is furious at the accusation. She hurls a videotape at Rob, ordering him to watch it.
The tape is of Rosalind’s interview. The girl wants to talk to Rob instead of Cassie. When she’s told she can’t, she accuses Cassie of jealousy and suggests she has been sleeping with Rob. Undeterred, Cassie presses on. Rosalind says she prefers Rob because he has a special connection to her sister’s case. She identifies him as Adam Ryan, the boy who lost two childhood friends. Cassie covers by saying that Rob will tell a suspect whatever they want to hear to establish rapport.
At that moment, O’Kelly calls Cassie out of interrogation. He accuses her of covering for Rob. If the facts check out, they’ll both be lucky to keep their jobs. Realizing this is the end of his Murder Squad career and the end of his partnership with Cassie, Rob thinks, “Somewhere at the back of my head I heard a click, tiny and irrevocable. Memory magnifies it to a wrenching, echoing crack but the truth is that it was the very smallness that made it so terrible” (501).
Chapter 23 Summary
Sam and Cassie make a plan to interrogate Damien. They hope to pin down his motive. Rob is excluded from the discussion, but he watches from the observation room.
Damien talks about joining the Move the Motorway group. He first met Rosalind when she was working the sign-up table on campus. Damien denies knowing her, but Sam shows him multiple phone and text records from Rosalind. Damien protests that he doesn’t want her dragged into this business.
Damien finally admits that they dated in secret because Rosalind told him her father had forbidden her to have boyfriends. She sometimes came to the dig site late at night to talk. From the observation room, Rob thinks:
It carried the primal, irresistible power of myth: the cruel father, the fair maiden imprisoned in her tower, hedged in by thorns and calling for rescue. They had made their own nocturnal, stolen world, and to Damien, it must have been a very beautiful one. (507)
Damien and Rosalind even went away together for a weekend. Rosalind told him that Katy made up terrible stories to get her father angry at Rosalind and Jessica. He broke Rosalind’s skull with a poker and threw Jessica into a wall. He also sexually abused all three girls, but Katy was the only one who liked it. She was his favorite.
Listening from the other side of the glass, Rob feels sick. He knows that none of Rosalind’s awful stories are true because he’s seen the medical files on all the girls.
The detectives ask why Damien went after Katy instead of her father. He says Rosalind explained that the Devlins need their dad’s financial support and that he would only beat them if Katy provoked an attack. Then Damien admits that he came up with the idea of killing Katy.
Damien made sure Rosalind has an alibi for the night of the murder. She planned a sleepover at the Foley house. They also cooked up a story to get Katy to the dig site late at night. Rosalind said she’s bought an artifact for Katy with the picture of a dancer to bring her luck. Katy needed to pick it up herself because workers aren’t supposed to sell objects that they find at the dig site.
When Katy arrived, Damien told her to check one of the shelves. While her back was turned, he hut her with a rock. Rosalind had insisted that Katy be raped so she could feel what Jessica has gone through. Damien lost his nerve and used a trowel instead of raping Katy himself. Later, Rosalind told him she was disappointed that Katy was already dead at the time. She also felt that Damien let her down by bungling the murder. She didn't want to see him anymore.
After the interrogation ends, O’Kelly comes to speak to Sam, Cassie, and Rob. He tells Cassie he’s docking her five vacation days for withholding information about Rob’s past. He assigns Rob to desk duty instead of firing him.
They all discuss the status of their case against Damien. Cassie wants them to go after Rosalind because she’s the brains behind the murder scheme. Cassie believes Rosalind has been poisoning Katy for years. Cassie also says that trying to scare a confession out of Rosalind won’t work. Psychopaths have very low anxiety levels. Rob is shocked to realize how easily Cassie could see through Rosalind’s act.
Cassie proposes wearing a wire while talking with Rosalind. If she appeals to Rosalind’s desire for power and need to brag about her exploits, the police may get the confession they need.
Chapter 24 Summary
Cassie and her team arrive at the estate the following morning so Cassie can intercept Rosalind before she leaves for school. Cassie is wearing a hidden wire that will transmit her conversation to the recording equipment in a police van. Rob insists on coming along, even though no one wants him there. They all listen in as Cassie sets the trap.
She lures Rosalind out of the house for a walk, saying that it’s a private matter. As they stroll along, Cassie asks how Rosalind knew she was having an affair with Rob. Rosalind says that he told her. This lie shatters all of Rob’s illusions about Rosalind. He realizes that “underneath the myriad shimmering veils, this was something as simple and deadly as razor wire” (541).
Cassie asks Rosalind to tell no one about the affair. In exchange, she says she can help Rosalind. Damien has already been arrested for Katy’s murder, but he’s confided to Cassie that he did it for Rosalind. No one knows this yet. Cassie will keep quiet if Rosalind promises not to reveal her affair with Rob.
Rosalind believes she has Cassie in her power. Emboldened by this victory, she decides to reveal the details of her plot to kill Katy. Cassie cunningly advises Rosalind of her right to remain silent, knowing the girl won’t heed her.
Rosalind says everything was fine until Katy started by learning ballet. Rosalind decided to slow her progress by mixing toxic substances into Katy’s juice. Katy innocently believed Rosalind when she said the tonic would improve her dancing.
Eventually, Katy realized what Rosalind was doing and refused to drink anything else. Rosalind didn’t like Katy’s newfound independence. That was when Rosalind got the idea of putting an end to Katy’s dancing ambitions once and for all.
With enough prompting, Damien came up with the murder scheme, though “it would have been quicker to train a monkey” (553). Rosalind broke up with him afterward because she was bored and he made a mess of the plan.
Once Rosalind confesses her involvement, Cassie arrests her. They begin to scuffle. The rest of the squad runs out of the van to assist Cassie. Rosalind claws at Cassie’s face before they finally subdue her:
Dazed and unstrung, her face branded with those fierce markings, she looked like some pagan priestess emerging from a rite too bright and merciless to be imagined: still half somewhere and someone else. (556)
When Rosalind is placed in an interrogation room back at headquarters, she immediately calls for her parents and a lawyer. She insists that, as a minor, she has a right to have a parent present when she is questioned.
Rob is confused because Rosalind told him she was 18. He double-checks the file. Her 18th birthday is still several months away. This means her recorded confession will be inadmissible in court.
Chapters 22-24 Analysis
In the last segment, we saw Rosalind’s façade beginning to erode. In this set of chapters, we see her mask completely stripped away. We watch this process from Rob’s point of view. His function in these chapters is simply to bear witness to Rosalind’s unmasking.
Rob has been relegated to the status of onlooker because his active involvement could compromise the whole case. He now assumes the same role he held in the missing children’s case. He has once again become a witness to the tragedy of others. This time, he has no memory loss to prevent him from confronting the truth. Ironically, it’s only when Rob ceases to be an active participant in the investigation that he can finally see the facts clearly.
While Rob watches Cassie and Sam interrogate Damien, he’s struck by the number of lies Rosalind told Damien to gain his sympathy. She claims her father beat his daughters and forced them to have sex with him. The medical reports that Rob has read contradict these statements.
Rob is furious with Damien’s gullibility mainly because it mirrors his own:
I am of course fully aware of both the irony and the tedious psychological explanations of this reaction, but at the time all I could think of was slamming into the interview room and shoving Damien’s face into the medical reports. (515)
Rob’s perception of Rosalind isn’t fully upended until Cassie extracts her confession. From the surveillance van, Rob hears Rosalind’s disembodied voice blithely admitting to Katy’s murder. Because Rob can’t see Rosalind’s face, he can focus on her words, and the truth finally penetrates his consciousness.
When the squad rushes out to subdue and arrest Rosalind, Rob finally sees her as she really is. “And for the first time I saw in starkly allegorical relief how ugly she was,” he says (556).
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