The Mountains Wild

by Sarah Stewart Taylor

  He turns to me and I can see the frustration on his face.

  “Get your clogs on, D’arcy. I’m taking you home for dinner.”

  12

  FRIDAY, MAY 27,

  2016

  “Laura won’t mind you springing a guest on her?” I ask Roly once we’re out of a traffic jam around College Green and heading toward Clontarf to the north.

  “Not at all. She’s been looking forward to meeting you.”

  I’m sorry I wasn’t more helpful,” I tell him. “I feel like they thought I was withholding something.”

  “They know you’re not. It’s just, this case. I’ve never had another one like it. But maybe…”

  I know what he was going to say. “It’s okay,” I tell him. “I’m hoping we can get some evidence from Erin’s remains, too.” I catch myself. “If they’re hers, I mean. I’m hoping we can find something that will help with the Niamh Horrigan case. It’s okay to say it.”

  “If they’re connected, D’arcy. That’s what I need to keep telling myself. If they’re connected.”

  We drive in silence for a bit and then I say, “Let me ask you something. How long has John White been a guard?”

  “Long as I have. No, maybe a few years less. Why?”

  “Just wondering. Would I have met him on the original investigation?”

  “Wouldn’t think so. I think he started out at some godforsaken country station, Donegal or somewhere. Why?”

  “He looks familiar. I’m just trying to figure out where I’ve met him.”

  “Dublin’s small like that,” Roly says. “I’m always running into people I met on cases or from school. The other week now, I was having lunch at the Stag’s Head and I looked over and there was this fella and we kept looking at each other, but I couldn’t figure out where I knew him from. Finally, it hit me. We’d been standing in line for pints at my local the week before. Don’t know why I remembered his face and all. Ah, here we are, then.”

  Roly and Laura have a big, semidetached house on a quiet cul-de-sac. I smell roasting meat and cinnamon when we come through the front door. It’s out of a design magazine, lots of gray and cream and natural fibers. A handwoven blue-and-white rug hangs on one wall, a gleaming blue ceramic vase holds a single orchid. As we come in, a dog barks and two little blond boys run in with a miniature poodle and surround us. Roly introduces them as Diarmuid and Daragh and they say hello very politely and then run off to some other part of the house.

  Laura is tall, blond, elegant. She makes me conscious of my makeup-free face, my scuffed boots. Roly kisses her and introduces us and she shakes my hand and says warmly that it’s wonderful to meet me finally, after all this time. Roly hands me a glass of red wine and we sit in the living room. Roly and Laura’s girls, Áine and Cecelia, come in to say hi. Áine looks just like Laura, and Cecilia has Roly’s angular face and pale blond hair.

  “Do you live in New York?” Áine asks me.

  “Nearby,” I tell her. “Long Island.”

  “Áine’s going to go to New York someday to be a fashion designer,” Roly says.

  “Dad, a fashion industry executive.”

  “Oh yeah, sorry. Only I thought you wanted to be a designer.”

  “Dad!”

  “Does Dublin seem different to you?” Laura asks me once we’re all at the table, digging into roast pork and potatoes and apples. “It’s been, what, twenty years?”

  “It does and it doesn’t,” I say. “I haven’t really explored, but there are so many new buildings on the river. Everything seems … I don’t know, fancier.”

  Laura laughs. “Wait until you see Ringsend. I was raised in Irishtown. When my mam told me they were making the gasworks into luxury flats, I nearly died. The gasworks! But sure we’ve all gotten used to it now.”

  “I have a cousin who works for Facebook,” Roly says. “He’s making three hundred thousand euros a year. Little bollix. He used to nick sips of my lager at Christmas. It’s mad.”

  They tell me about the other changes, describe their neighbors who lost everything during the recession.

  “It was the way we all went house mad,” Laura says. “We did as well. We bought a rental property down the road, thinking we’d double our money. We’re lucky. We can just about pay the mortgage with what we’re getting for rent, but it’s still a bit touch and go. A lot of people we know never recovered.”

  I help Laura clear and Roly and I stack the dishes.

  “Have you been by that place Erin lived?” Roly asks me, a dish towel over his shoulder.

  “Not yet. I checked it out on Google Earth, though.” Laura hands me a glass of whiskey and we all sit in the living room. There’s a gas fire and she turns it on and puts a plate of thin slices of fruitcake out on the coffee table. “It looks like someone’s fixed it up. I should have bought it way back when.”

  I take a piece of fruitcake, crumbling it into pieces on my plate. It’s good, dark and spicy and full of dates and raisins.

  “Ah, that’s the Dublin game these days. ‘I should have bought this one, I should have bought that one.’ We’re all potential billionaires in our minds.”

  “The young ones she lived with have moved on,” Roly tells me. “One of ’em works for one of these software yokes down by the canal.”

  “Yeah?” It’s something I’ve been thinking about, the silences, the whispered conversation in Irish. “I always felt there was something they weren’t telling us.”

  Laura stretches her feet out toward the fire. “You mean, like they knew something about what happened?”

  “No, just … I don’t know. Something they were holding back.”

  “Funny, Bernie thought so, too,” Roly says. “She was convinced they knew something, but we never got anything out of them.”

  “How is she really?” I ask after a moment.

  “She’s at a place near Drogheda, a sort of nursing home.” Roly looks away. “It’s grim, I’m telling you, D’arcy.”

  “He visits every week or two,” Laura says. “He drives up there and spends an hour or two with her. Everyone else has stopped going.”

  One of the boys shouts from the other end of the house.

  “We’ll know a lot more tomorrow, anyway,” Roly tells me.

  “It must have been awful for you and your uncle all these years,” Laura says. “Not knowing.”

  “Yeah, that’s the worst of it. He hasn’t gotten over it, you know? He can never move past it.” I think about how on some level, all of us have been stuck back there in the mountains—me, Roly, Uncle Danny, Jessica, Emer and Daisy, probably even Conor and Laura and Brian and Lilly.

  Roly reaches over to pat Laura’s knee. He looks at me and suddenly it’s twenty-three years ago and he’s walking ahead of me on the sidewalk, looking back over his shoulder, his blue eyes meeting mine. “I hope we’ll have something soon,” he says. “I’d like to do that for your family.”

  13

  SATURDAY, MAY 28,

  2016

  In the morning, I find myself a quiet table in the hotel’s dining room and spread out my notes and laptop and a piece of paper on which I’ve written “Erin.”

  When I first joined Suffolk County Homicide, I worked under a guy named Len Giacomo. He was a legend in the Suffolk County P.D., and by the time I met him, he’d solved more cases and had more convictions under his belt than anyone who’d ever worked homicide on Long Island. Len was a true intellectual; he liked opera and modernist literature and wine and he and his wife traveled a ton, to Rome and Thailand and Guatemala, and any topic of conversation that came up, Len had something to say about it. But he wasn’t showy, and when I look back at how he worked, it was the fact that he was completely unbiased that was probably his greatest asset. He’d go into a case with an absolutely open mind; he told me once that he had a strategy for this, a meditation technique he’d learned on an ashram in India. He would write the victim’s name in the center of a piece of paper and as the case went on, he
would slowly add pertinent information to the paper, with everyone he met surrounding the victim so he could see the relationships, the dynamics.

  He taught me this technique when we were working a domestic homicide case together, and over the years I’ve refined it for my own purposes.

  I start by writing in “Emer Nolan” and “Daisy Nugent” up at the top. I can’t find anything on Daisy, but a few minutes of Googling Emer’s name turns up the software company Roly mentioned. Under “About Us” there’s a picture of Emer and a biography and email. I send her a message, saying that I’m in town and I’d love to see her, just to catch up. Then I go back to my diagram. I write in “Conor Kearney,” “Hackman O’Hanrahan Jr.,” and “Niall Deasey.” Then I add in “other girls at the café,” “neighbors,” and “Jessica, Chris, Lisa, Brian,” and, because Len taught me well, I write in my own name and Uncle Danny’s and my dad’s, too. Everyone in her orbit. We were all in her orbit.

  I’m about to put the paper away when I think of another Len lesson. Don’t get ahead of yourself. I make a little circle at the bottom of the paper and write “?” The unknown person, the man I’ve come to think of as the gray shadow. Who is he?

  Back in my room, I turn on the television and catch the noon news. There’s a short update on the Niamh Horrigan case. It sounds like they’re still searching the hills and doing door-to-doors in the area. The Army Reserve is helping, along with various mountain rescue and hiking groups. Niamh’s parents have offered a ten thousand–euro reward for information leading to her safe return. That’s what they talk about on the television. What they don’t talk about is everything else that’s going on, the interviews that Galway police must be doing with anyone who ever knew Niamh, the frantic scouring of sex offender databases, the tearing apart of every social media account or electronic device Niamh’s ever used.

  “Niamh has been missing for a week now and her family and friends are starting to ask the Gardaí why there has been so little progress on finding her. The Gardaí say every measure is being taken to locate Niamh, but given the fates of the other women who have disappeared under similar circumstances, the family feels time is growing short to find Niamh safe and well,” the announcer says.

  “In a related development, the cousin of Erin Flaherty, the American student who disappeared in 1993 and is widely believed to be the first victim of the so-called Southeast Killer, has arrived in Dublin as the Gardaí examine the remains discovered in Wicklow this week to determine if they are Flaherty’s.”

  My cell rings and I switch off the television. It’s Roly. I can hear that there’s something as soon as he says, “D’arcy? Where are you?”

  “At the hotel. What? Have you identified her? Is it Erin?”

  I know from the way he hesitates. I can feel the hotel room shrinking around me. My vision narrows. I take a deep breath.

  “It’s more complicated than that,” he says. “It’s not Erin. But they found something with the remains. Something of hers.”

  * * *

  What they found is a student ID card from the year Erin had spent as a student at C.W. Post. It’s laminated, which is why it’s held up all this time. Roly meets me in the hotel lobby and takes me into the bar to show me a photograph of the card.

  Erin Mary Flaherty, it reads. DOB 3/14/1970. The photograph is a little cloudy, but I remember the frosted pink lipstick she liked to wear. She has on the leather jacket; I can just see the collar and top button in the photo. I nod. It’s hers. As if there’s any doubt.

  “But who is it? Whose remains are they?” I’m practically shouting at him. “If it’s not her, Roly, who the fuck is it? And how did the ID and the scarf get in there with her?”

  He glances over at me. His eyes are lined. He looks about a hundred years old. “I’m heading over to talk to the state pathologist. We hope she’ll be able to give us something more.”

  I walk him outside. He’s parked in an illegal space around the corner from the hotel. I know I shouldn’t, but I can’t help myself, and I say, “Let me come with you. I may be able to help. You’re going to have to review missing persons reports. You’re going to have to figure out who that was who was buried up there, look for links to the other victims, to Erin. I can help with that. I know how to do it.”

  My voice is whining. I’m ashamed and yet I want in on this so much, I don’t care what he thinks of me.

  Roly rubs his eyes, watches a group of teenage boys cross the street in front of us. Finally he says, “D’arcy, I’m doing everything I can, but you are a civilian.” He puts a hand up when I start to protest. “Yes, when you’re here, you’re a civilian. And I know that if it was you at the top of the investigation, you would be saying the same thing as well. You have a role to play here. You knew her better than any of us did and you were here twenty-three years ago and I know you’re a fucking amazing detective. I read the stories.” He fixes his gaze on me. His eyes are a pale ice blue in the direct sunlight. “I know what you did. But this is my show, and even more importantly, it’s Wilcox’s show, and if I let a civilian sit in on a briefing with the deputy state pathologist, Wilcox will have my head and we won’t be any closer to figuring out what happened to Erin or to saving Niamh Horrigan from whatever psychopathic piece of shite plucked her out of the mountains.”

  Sirens scream outside, somewhere up near O’Connell Street.

  “Okay,” I say. “I know. You’re right.”

  Roly’s hair looks thinner somehow. I have that displaced feeling of déjà vu, except of course it actually is happening again. His words, his exhausted face and voice.

  He reaches across me to open my door. “I’ll ring you as soon as I’ve got anything to report.”

  He pulls out so fast he almost clips me before I can jump onto the curb, and I’m still startled, stumbling back toward the Westin’s main lobby door, when a large man, his belly stretching his shirt beneath a voluminous tweed jacket, his eyes friendly behind round glasses, puts himself between me and the hotel. He has a straggly dirty-blond-and-gray ponytail. He was one of the reporters standing outside the pub in Glenmalure.

  “Are you Detective Lieutenant Maggie D’arcy?” he asks.

  “Yes.” His face lights up in a smile and he sticks out a hand. I shake it, feeling vaguely manipulated.

  “I’m Stephen Hines,” he says. “I’m a reporter for the Independent and I’m wondering if I could ask you a few questions.” He doesn’t wait for an answer, just plows ahead before my training kicks in and I can shut him down. “Is that your cousin they found in Glenmalure? Is that Erin Flaherty? Do you think she was a victim of the Southeast Killer? Are you going to help them find Niamh Horrigan?”

  “I’m not going to comment on that,” I say, pushing past him.

  “You’re an excellent detective,” he calls after me. “You got that psycho guy on Long Island. Shouldn’t they be using you to find Niamh Horrigan?”

  I keep walking until I’m through the hotel’s revolving door and safe in the elevator heading up to my room. It’s not until the elevator doors close that I realize I’m still holding my breath.

  14

  1993

  While Roly Byrne and Bernie McNeely searched the bed-and-breakfast in Glenmalure and questioned neighbors and possible witnesses, Emer and Daisy went to classes, and at home Uncle Danny smoked too much and tried to get in touch with Jessica Friedman’s mom, I walked the streets of Dublin.

  Over the Grand Canal, past the building painted with the words Bolands Flour Mills as the chilled wind whipped my face, fast up Pearse Street, past gray shops and around the back of Trinity College on Westland Row and onto Nassau Street, where I could see boys in striped shirts running back and forth on green lawns, around the black gates to College Green, where it felt like all of Dublin opened up before me, a wide avenue reaching across the Liffey, and the big round fortress of the Bank of Ireland.

  From this side, the pale gray facade of Trinity rose above the street, the blue clock and huge bron
ze statue of Edmund Burke. I had seen them before, on a poster and in a brochure in the Notre Dame career counseling office. I had imagined myself walking beneath the archway, heading to classes.

  I stood there in the forecourt, wondering where exactly Conor Kearney studied the history of Ireland in the twentieth century, and then I wandered the city some more, taking shortcuts down little side streets, finding my way back to Grafton Street, Dame Street, Nassau Street. Dublin was a city of lanes and alleys and gray cobbles, of pubs and old men and teenagers. Everywhere I looked, I saw them, boys in leather jackets, talking, smoking, watching people walk by, girls in jeans and sweatshirts or school uniforms, laughing and grabbing hands as they dashed across the street to bus stops.

  By lunchtime I was back to Temple Bar, not far from the Garden of Eating, and I ducked into a little pub called the Raven, painted a bright yellow, and ordered a cup of coffee, enjoying the warmth and the cozy interior. I recognized the décor—if it wasn’t exactly the same as Flaherty’s, it was what Uncle Danny was going for: tin ceiling, stained glass, dark wood bar with bottle-lined mirrored shelves behind it, old photos of Dublin on the walls. It was a little touristy; there was a line of backpacks just inside the front door and I picked out Australian and American accents in the orders being shouted up to the bar.

  I downed the coffee and ordered a Guinness, taking a long sip and sighing in pleasure. The bartender, an old guy with a gray moustache and a kind smile, grinned and said, “That’s the best review I’ve had all week.” Tat’s.

  I grinned back. “My uncle has a bar on Long Island. We have a sign up over the bar that says, ‘Best Guinness Outside of Dublin.’”

  He laughed. “Is it?”

  “It might be, but it’s not this good. Don’t tell him I said so.”