It’s the middle of the night in Alexandria, but I can’t stop myself. I call the house landline. Brian answers on the fourth ring, his voice full of sleep. “Yeah? Hello? Maggie?”
“Yeah, it’s me. Everything’s fine. I just missed her so much suddenly. I just wanted to make sure she’s—you’re both—okay.”
“Yeah, we’re fine. She’s good. Are you okay?” I can hear him coming awake, remembering. “Do they know anything?”
“They did find remains, but there’s a lot of work to do. And there’s this other woman missing. I don’t want to tell Danny yet, but can you keep an eye on him? If they get an ID, I’ll call you before I tell him so you can be with him. I’m worried about his heart.”
He takes a deep breath. He loves Danny. “Yeah, just let me know.”
“So everything’s good at school?”
“She got an A on her English paper. She was pretty happy about that. She let me read some of it and I could barely understand parts of it.” I can hear the pride in his voice and I feel a surge of appreciation for it, that I have someone to share my joy in her accomplishments with. “She’s a smart girl.”
“Yes, she is. Is she helping out with dinner and dishes and everything?”
“She’s been busy with school. I don’t mind. I haven’t had a lot of hours this week, so it’s okay.”
Good.” There’s a long silence, dead air across the wide, dark ocean. “Brian, thanks so much for this. I really appreciate it.”
I can’t tell if he’s sad or just tired, but he sighs again and says, “Of course, Mags. Anytime.”
I recognize the compulsion in my voice, figure he can hear it, too, but still I ask, “You’re setting the alarm, right? And you remember the combination for the gun safe?”
“Yeah, don’t worry. Everything’s good.”
“Okay, tell her I love her and I miss her a lot. Sorry to wake you. I’ll call again tomorrow when she’s up.”
Breakfast at the hotel is coffee and lukewarm oatmeal sprinkled with dried cranberries and walnuts. I check my cell phone to make sure Roly hasn’t called, and take a left out of the hotel, crossing College Street and walking under the main gate of Trinity College. I have the words memorized. Dr. Conor Kearney, Associate Professor of History, Room 4000, Arts Building, Trinity College Dublin 2.
I think about just finding the Arts Building and climbing the stairs to room 4000, but I don’t have the nerve. So I get a cup of tea at the little student dining hall and sit there, my heart pounding, looking around me, waiting for him to walk through the door. But of course he doesn’t. It’s all students and it occurs to me that there must be a separate place for the professors to have lunch.
I search on my phone and find it. The staff common room is upstairs. Back outside, I find a spot to sit on a low concrete wall across from the steps. The Book of Kells is around the corner and the tourists have already started streaming in. They’ve still got students doing tours. The campus looks exactly the same, except for how the students are dressed, the girls in jeans and high boots instead of short skirts and Doc Martens. My stomach is tight with anxiety, the coffee and tea and oatmeal sloshing around, sending nauseous jitters through my veins.
Out in the courtyard, it’s breezy. The air is cold but it carries the promise of sun and spring and a salty, peaty scent.
If this were a movie, I think, if this were a movie, he’d come down those steps right now and I’d look up and he’d look up and …
But it’s not a movie, and I sit there for thirty minutes getting thoroughly chilled, scrolling nervously through my phone and trying not to look at the door to the dining hall. Finally I decide to get a cup of tea and wander the city until it’s time to meet Roly and the team. It’s a city of new, translucent layers, I discover, as I walk through the lanes behind Grafton Street, down Duke Street and Lemon Street and around to Clarendon Street and across Dame Street down to Temple Bar. It’s the same and not the same, shinier, newer, but filled with shops and pubs that seem familiar, too. I find Essex Street and it takes me a few minutes to find the café. It’s been painted a tasteful gray and it’s now the Bistro Le Mer. The pubs seem the same, the bright red one and the yellow one and the blue one basically as I remember them. I walk back to the hotel by the quays. The Liffey is black and silver, the brick red faces of the buildings on the north side staring like a crowd of faces waiting in line.
* * *
I’m carrying two coffees when I meet Roly in front of the Westin at two.
“What is that, a latte? Lovely, lovely.”
“Your tune seems to have changed, huh? I remember when you thought fancy coffee was ridiculous.”
He grins and takes the coffee. “I am a man who is open to new experiences, D’arcy. Right, then, I’m going to introduce you to some of the lads, but you’re here to answer questions about Erin and help us find any links between these cases so maybe we can get this guy before he kills Niamh Horrigan. They know you’re a cop but I have to be very careful here. Capiche?”
“Capiche.”
“You all right, then?”
“Yeah, mostly. I called home at midnight, US time, just to check on Lilly. I think I’m more anxious than I realize.”
“Well, we should have something from the state pathologist’s office by tomorrow.”
Roly works out of a new extension on the back of the Pearse Street Garda Station, around the corner from the hotel. The offices are brand-new, modern, tastefully decorated. The chairs are even comfortable. Roly explains that members of the team spend some of their time here and some at local Garda stations, depending on which stage of a review they’re in.
“This is nice,” I say. “You should see the dump Suffolk County Homicide has to work out of.”
“Ah, now, I’d have thought you’d have nothing but the best over there.”
“We’re a society in decline, Roly.”
“Ah, you know I’d say you are, now. The girls like to watch this Kardashian thing on the telly. That’s what made me realize.”
The Serious Crime Review Team has a small suite of rooms full of desks and phones and filing cabinets that I get just a tiny glance at before Roly hustles me into a conference room, which smells of fresh paint and cake. I sit there alone for a few minutes before he comes back with a young guy.
“Joey. This is Detective Maggie D’arcy. Maggie, this is a young up-and-comer, Detective Garda Joey Brennan. He’s going places.”
“Ah, yeah. Today I’m after going to the Spar.” He turns to me and makes an expert shift in tone. “You’re very welcome to Dublin. Sorry it’s under these circumstances.” He’s a wholesome-looking guy, maybe thirty, tall, with black hair, olive skin, and a country accent, softer than Roly’s, more stereotypically Irish. I shake his hand and he sits down across from me, setting a laptop on the table and spreading out paper files.
“When’s Griz getting here?” Roly asks.
“She texted she’s on her way,” Joey says. “Ah, there we are.”
A slight young woman with light blue eyes and brown hair cut in a short-banged pageboy comes in, holding a paper cup that’s leaking brown liquid from the top. She’s wearing jeans and boots and a trendy-looking corduroy jacket. “Hiya,” she says, grinning at us. “The Luas was packed.” The thought pops into my head that she looks more like an artist than a police detective, and I tell myself to fuck off. I hate it when people tell me I don’t “look like” a cop.
“This is Detective Garda Katya Grzeskiewicz,” Roly says. “That’s G-R-Z-E-S-K-I-E-W-I-C-Z. Most of us call her Griz because we’re a fuckin’ bunch of barbarians and we can say ‘O’Coughlihulihan’ but we can’t say ‘Grzeskiewicz.’”
“Apparently they can’t say ‘Katya,’ either,” she says, then grins. Her accent’s Dublin like Roly’s, but with a tiny bit of something else. “To be honest, now, I can barely say ‘Grzeskiewicz’ myself.”
I shake hands with her and Roly tells her and Joey to get the rest of the team into the confe
rence room. While he does the introductions, I make a little tree in my notebook. Roly is the detective inspector in charge of the team, and a stocky dark-haired guy my age or a little older named John White seems to be the next most senior member, with a rank of detective sergeant. I write him in. Then there are Joey and Griz, who both have the rank of detective garda, which would be a detective on my squad. I know that all of Ireland is policed by the Garda Síochána, with local and regional stations having jurisdiction and specialist teams like Roly’s and technical bureaus and labs aiding in investigations as necessary. “The rest of the team is still out on other cases,” Roly says. “We’ll bring them in if we need to, but for now, you’re stuck with this shower. They have some questions to ask you based on their review of Erin’s case, if that’s all right.”
“Of course.”
Roly looks around the table, makes eye contact with each of them. I can feel the energy coming off him; he’s practically hovering over his chair at the head of the table, his right leg vibrating, his fingers making tiny, tight circles on the table in front of him.
He smiles briefly, then wipes it off his face and says, “Okay, Detective D’arcy is all yours. What are you going to ask her?”
9
1993
I met Roly Byrne for the first time at the Irishtown Garda Station. When we got back from Glenmalure, Emer and Daisy and I went straight to the station to report Erin missing and hand over the necklace. It seems impossible now that I didn’t even think about preserving it as evidence at the scene, but our only nod to procedure was to wrap it in Saran wrap—which Emer called “cling film”—when we got back to Dublin. It sat on the table in front of me while I gave all of Erin’s vital statistics to the young guard they sent out to talk to me. They said they would get in touch with the station down in Wicklow and contact the American embassy for me. The next day, they called and said we should come back to speak with the detectives assigned to the case.
We had been waiting for twenty minutes when Roly Byrne exploded into the room. We heard him first, an Irish accent I was starting to recognize as Dublin, fast and loud out in the hallway. The door slammed open and a young guy, only a few years older than me, with a thatch of blond hair and a sharp, hawky face, burst through it as though he’d been at a full run on the other side. He was wearing a dark suit that fit him well and he stopped in front of me. There was so much energy behind him that when he stopped, he swayed a bit on his black leather wingtips.
He thrust out a hand and said, “Detective Garda Roland Byrne.”
A tall woman in a navy pantsuit entered the room behind him and shut the door. She had short, bowl-cut dark hair and very pale skin, delicate reddish freckles spattered haphazardly across her nose and cheeks. She was broad-shouldered, and her black blazer, with wide lapels and large brass buttons, looked uncomfortable, like she’d stuffed her arms into it. She didn’t look happy to see me.
“This is my partner, Detective Garda Bernadette McNeely,” Byrne said. “Now, tell us about your … cousin, is it?”
I gave them the basics, Erin’s full name, age. I told them she had moved to Dublin in January, that she’d been working at the café and that it was the photographs in her room and my conversation with Conor Kearney that made me think she might have gone down to Glenmalure. Byrne nodded his head, but McNeely had a little scowl on her face, like she didn’t quite believe me.
When I was done, they asked Emer and Daisy about how Erin had ended up living in their house.
They were friends from back home in somewhere called Ballyconnell and they’d come to Dublin for college, computers, they said, at someplace called DCU. The house belonged to Emer’s aunt, an inheritance from her husband’s side of the family. “Sure, she’s got a house in Killashandra now, so she had no use of it,” Emer said. “She said we could have it if we wanted. We put a sign up in the corner shop for a roommate and Erin rang up.”
Erin had been living with them since January. Everything had seemed fine. She’d traveled without telling them before, and when they got home the evening of the sixteenth and realized that she was gone, they just figured she’d gone to Galway or something.
“So it wasn’t out of the ordinary for her not to tell you where she was going?”
“No,” Daisy said. “She’s a lovely girl. But we’re not in each other’s pockets. She doesn’t usually let us know where she is or what time she’ll be home or anything. She sometimes … stays out for the night.”
“So no one rang or anything that day?”
“Well, we were out all day. There weren’t any messages on the answerphone, anyway.”
McNeely looked at them and then at me. “She have a fella?”
They shook their heads and said there didn’t seem to be anyone regular, and Byrne asked me, “Did your cousin tell you or her father about anyone she’s seeing?”
“No. She told my uncle that she was having fun, but he said he didn’t think she had a boyfriend or any really close friends here.”
“Any fellas ring her up?” That was for Emer and Daisy.
“A few,” Emer said. “An Irish fella named Donal rang her a couple times. He had sort of a Limerick accent. She said she met him at a pub and gave him her number and then wished she hadn’t.”
Byrne thought that was interesting. “Donal. Do you think he might have tried to contact her again?”
Emer shrugged. “It was back in January and he only rang twice. I wouldn’t think so.”
Daisy said, “There was another fella who rang a few times in the summer. He had sort of a funny accent. American or Canadian, but not really, a bit neither here nor there, if you know what I mean. I can’t remember his name, but the last time he said to tell Erin he was meeting some friends at O’Brien’s on Pearse Street if she wanted to join.” McNeely wrote that down.
“Anyone ever stay the night at your place?” he asked Emer and Daisy. They said no, never.
“So, she left on, what day was it now?” McNeely got out a little paper date book and turned it to September.
“The sixteenth,” Daisy said.
“What was the longest she’d been gone before when you didn’t know where she was?” Byrne asked Daisy.
She looked up. “She went up to Belfast in April, I think it was. She was gone ten days, eleven days, something like that.”
“And she hadn’t said anything to you?” Byrne asked me again. “She didn’t tell you or your uncle she was going on a holiday? She hadn’t been depressed, in trouble, anything like that?” When he said “in trouble,” Emer and Daisy both looked down at the ground.
“I haven’t talked to her in a while,” I said. Since she left. I haven’t talked to her since she left. The beach. Her face wet with rain. “My uncle said she called him a few weeks ago and said she was having fun, but nothing about a trip.”
I’d brought a photograph—Erin’s high school graduation portrait—and I handed it over. Then he asked me for my full name, date of birth, address. “So, you’re twenty-two years of age, then. Erin is twenty-three?” I nodded. “And there’s nothing you can think of that might tell us what was on her mind?”
I shook my head. “Nothing specific.”
They took some more information down and I told them I’d be staying in Erin’s room until we knew more.
I thought we were finished, but McNeely turned to me. “Why did Miss Flaherty come over here? She’s not a student. Does she know anyone in Dublin?” McNeely’s accent was different from Byrne’s and Emer’s and Daisy’s, Northern Irish, I was pretty sure. Her sentences headed toward Scotland, veering up at the ends, reminding me of a guy from Belfast I knew at Notre Dame.
“Erin is impulsive sometimes,” I said. “I … I don’t really know why she moved here. We’re Irish, Irish American—Erin and I practically grew up in my uncle’s bar. It’s called Flaherty’s. Maybe she wanted to … I don’t know, live here for a bit. Learn about Ireland.” My voice caught and I swallowed. “She … we’d had a hard year.
My mother died a year ago last summer and Erin had a rough time. She just wanted to try something new, I guess.”
I took a deep breath and proceeded. They were going to find out. “And her mother was Irish. She left right after Erin was born and they never had a relationship. We don’t think she was looking for her or anything like that, but maybe she wanted to see where she … where she was from. I don’t know.”
“Do you know her mother’s name?” McNeely looked interested all of a sudden. There was something there. They could feel it.
“Brenda Flaherty. I think her maiden name was Donaghy. But we really don’t think she ever contacted Erin.”
Emer and Daisy were staring at me. It was obvious Erin had never told them her mother was Irish.
“Had she been to Ireland before?” McNeely asked. Her eyes were a dark, navy blue. Her freckles swam together in front of my eyes for a moment.
“No. Neither have I,” I said.
“We’ll look into it and we’ll be back to you, Miss D’arcy. We’ll get on to the bus stations and that. The lads down in Wicklow. We’ll check with her job.” McNeely studied me thoughtfully and asked, “Could your cousin have wanted to harm herself?”
I froze. “I don’t know. She was … She’d had problems before.” I tried to keep my face neutral.
“What kind of problems?”
How to say it? “She got depressed sometimes and she would go off by herself when that happened. She dropped out of college a couple years ago and since then she’s been pretty up and down.”
“All right, all right,” Byrne said finally. “They’ll search the walking paths tomorrow.” His light blue eyes swept across us. He was distracted, antsy, fiddling with the buttons on his suit. McNeely put a hand on his arm, as if he were a child and she was reminding him of his manners, and he stood and shook my hand and gave me a card with the station number on it.
The Mountains Wild Page 6
