There are no pictures on the desk, of family or the doc himself. But on the wall above the printer there is a large Chagall print. The first page in Peter Costello’s art book. The same image that was in the downstairs toilet of the Costello house.
I lift my phone and take a picture of it.
The man stops in his task. “Are you allowed to do that?”
I lower my phone. “I just love that painting is all,” I chirp, not attempting to hide the lie.
Removing my card, I pass it to him.
“Have Burke call me as soon as he gets back, please.”
He tries to return it. “I’m not his secretary, only his understudy.”
I give him a tight smile. “Great. You’ll be talking to him when he gets back, so you can let him know then.”
* * *
—
I STOP ABRUPTLY OUTSIDE the microbiology labs, where Baz is waiting. I frown at him. “What are you doing out here?”
“He said he’d be with me shortly.”
I glare at him. “Jeez, if he told you to run off a cliff, would you do it?”
“Ha. Ha. You’re hilarious. I’m trying to keep him on our side. He doesn’t have to answer our questions.”
I put my hand on the door. “People often value their reputations more than their integrity, Baz. He’ll answer our questions because he wants to get shot of this mess.”
When I walk into the lab, the white-coated students, who are gathered round a workbench at the front of the room, stop listening to their tutor to stare at us.
“Mr. Murphy.” I give him a cold smile. Feign confidence. I could be thrown off what’s left of this case just for approaching him without his lawyer present.
His face drops and then there is anger in his eyes.
“Write this up,” he barks at his students. “I’ll be back in no more than five minutes.” He stalks by me, snapping off a pair of latex gloves and dropping them in a bin on the way out the door.
I swallow. Baz grimaces and leads me out. “Let me,” he whispers.
Murphy turns and walks about ten strides away from the lab door. “What the hell are you doing? I asked you to wait.”
Baz holds up his palms. “Lorcan, please. The case is choked up. It’s dead and all we wanna do is follow through on a lead. But we can’t do that without your help.”
Murphy can’t help stepping forward; his neck strains; spittle gathers at the corner of his mouth.
“Your utter incompetence hasn’t got anything to do with me. You’ve dragged my reputation through the mud. How dare you come back here.”
“Nicole is missing,” Baz states.
Murphy blinks, draws back. “What?”
“We’ve been trying to reach her for days,” he says. “Please, just answer a couple of questions.”
“You—” He glances about. “You think this guy has Nicole?”
The shoulders lift beneath Baz’s thick woolen coat.
Lorcan looks down. “I know what you found round my house and that. It doesn’t look good.” He shakes his head. “But that was what we did. It’s a turn-on, a sex thing. That’s all.”
“To cut someone?” I ask.
Murphy bristles and Baz glares at me.
“Eleanor liked to cut herself. You have to be into it to understand.” He looks around. “Fuck. If this gets out, no one will work with me. Do you know that? You will have fucked up my career for good. Eleanor was dominant, I was submissive. You see? She liked to cut me. She liked to cut herself when we were . . . you know . . . It was her thing. Pain.”
“Sure it was. And you were a helpless victim? Why don’t you tell us about your relationship with Nicole?”
Murphy’s lip quivers with restrained anger. He pushes the edges of his white coat aside; his fingers work down the buttons on his shirt. Opening them. It’s my turn to be nervous. What the hell is he doing?
“Actually, yes, I was a victim,” he says between clenched teeth.
When he lifts the side of his shirt he points down his left side. From the bottom of his rib cage to the top of his waist, there are numerous puckered scars. Some appear as if from shallow injuries; others look more traumatic.
I look away. I can’t bring myself to meet his eyes without screaming at him.
Baz peers at the scars. “Eleanor did this?”
He tugs his shirt closed, his fingers marching up the buttons, fastening them. “Yes.”
“Why didn’t you tell us sooner?”
A scowl, a flash of triumph lights his eyes. “Because, Detective, it’s none of your fucking business.”
My teeth bite down on my anger. A sting of pain at the back of my tongue. “People are dead, Lorcan.”
His lips draw tight. “Look, I had my interests, Eleanor had hers. They were nothing to do with me.”
Baz leans in. “What interests?”
Lorcan shrugs. “She arranged for Amy and Peter to get together. Peter was the only real innocent in the entire fucked-up ring. It was an obsession. She spent years orchestrating her husband’s downfall. She’d tell me that she could beat him, torture him. I didn’t doubt it. She was a manipulative tour de force.”
“That’s one way of describing it,” I murmur.
“You wouldn’t get it. The control, the planning it takes to pull off what Eleanor could pull off. The affair was just another way to keep him down. Peter sought refuge in Amy, not knowing that Eleanor was pulling the strings so that she could use his guilt against him.”
My ears are banging, the blood thumping around my head. My fingers curl into my palm; the muscles all along my arm tighten, shorten, ready to strike Lorcan Murphy down.
He’s gazing at the floor now, a soft half-smile dreaming on his lips. Remembering. Finally, he sighs, looks up, meets my eyes. Hard clash.
“You could’ve told us this weeks ago, Mr. Murphy,” I say, teeth pressed together.
He tilts his head. “I could’ve. Yes.”
“You are aware that I could arrest you for obstructing the course of justice?”
“I’m not sure I wouldn’t enjoy that, Detective.” The smile breaks across his face.
Baz puts a hand on mine. Restrains.
“Nicole, Mr. Murphy,” I manage.
“I don’t know where Nicole is. I never had a relationship with her. We had a few dates and a kiss or two, but we didn’t share the same . . . tastes, shall we say?”
“Thanks for your time again, Mr. Murphy.”
“Is that all?”
“Thanks,” Baz says.
“Next time you show up to question me without my lawyer present, I won’t even wait for a hello before I’m on the phone to your superiors!” he shouts down the hallway.
Baz comes up behind me. “You could’ve at least tried to be nice.”
I keep walking. “To that? Nice is wasted on men like him.”
“He was angry. Pushing buttons.”
“He’s no right to be fucking angry. It’s not my fault Costello’s blood was found in his vehicle, Eleanor’s on his sheets. It’s not my fault that he didn’t tell us about their sick little sexual rituals before we arrested him. He’s kept his secrets regardless of what it’s cost our case. The guy’s a fucking coward.”
“Frankie!”
I stop.
He runs a hand over his face. “Sorry. But this is our job. Not his.”
I turn heel and leave the university. Out into the cold air, my fingers are already dialing Nicole Duarte’s ma.
“Hello?”
“Mrs. Duarte?”
“Yes, who is this?”
“Mrs. Duarte, this is Detective Frankie Sheehan. Has your daughter been in touch with you?”
There’s a nervous swelling in my stomach.
“Detective, I reported my daughter missing da
ys ago.” Her words are spoken with a thick Spanish accent.
“I know, I’m sorry. And the team are working on it.” I wince. “But has she tried to call, or managed to contact you?”
I can hear the sharp intake of breath, of impatience and anger, on the other side of the line. “Do you think I’d be wasting your time, Detective, if she had? The way you seem happy to waste mine? Her daughter asks for her every day. It’s coming up to Christmas, she should be with her mama. Where you looking? How you looking that you have to ask me if I’ve seen her?”
A rush of students exit the building. Laughter and banter swell out into the cold afternoon in soft clouds of vapor. I put my hand over the mouthpiece and move farther round the building.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Duarte. Really I am. But I only got news of Nicole going missing recently and am running to catch up on what I can.”
“Well, run faster, Detective, because in case you didn’t realize, she has a young daughter here. A young girl that’s missing her mama.”
“Mrs. Duarte, did Nicole ever mention anyone called Lorcan Murphy?”
“Nicole is a very closed person. She’d given birth before she told me she’d been pregnant. She doesn’t share that kind of thing with me.”
I nod into the phone. “I see.”
* * *
—
BAZ IS LEANING up against the door and smoking. “Well? What did Dr. Burke have to say for himself?”
“Nothing,” I answer, clicking the car open. “He wasn’t there. Gone away.”
He straightens. “Away, huh?”
“Apparently.” I get into the driver’s seat and wait for Baz to fold his long limbs into the car. “But there was a Chagall print in his office that matches the one we found in the Costello house. Did anything ever come up from those prints we dusted from that picture?”
“We?”
“Jesus! Okay, you?”
“Nothing, but then we don’t have Burke’s prints on record.”
“We might be able to lift some from his notes on Eleanor. The ones he gave you?”
Baz grimaces. “We should be so lucky.”
I sigh. “We have to be. Call the office. Get Helen to phone his clinic, see when he gets back.”
Baz takes out his phone, makes the call to Helen.
CHAPTER 28
CLANCY HAS BEEN absent all morning. I suspect he’s leaving me to it, looking the other way while I break all sorts of protocol. But he doesn’t have to worry. I’ve run up the road and into the ditch—there’s nowhere else to go. The thin line of investigation has been whittled down to “he said, she saids.” Circumstantial evidence.
I move to Helen’s desk. She has the Black Widow site open on one screen and is working on reports with the other. Totting up her work over the past few months so that the summary can be stacked away in a “Case Unsolved” box.
“Anything?” I ask her. “On the Black Widow site?”
“Maybe. I’ve been hanging out around the greetings board. Newbies, like me, are more likely to share. There’s been a new administrator of the website appointed. It seems that the original site founder has been found dead. I trawled through the historical posts—well, as far as I could before the site automatically deletes for security. But it seems the founder was female and was murdered over two months ago. She was known as the Black Widow.”
“Eleanor?”
“I’m almost certain.”
I lean over her desk. Peer into the screen. Scan down the posts. “Who’s taken over?”
“They’ve not announced it yet. But I reckon it’s our man. TrustMe57. There’s been a ballot.”
“How democratic.”
“That’s what I thought.”
A painful flutter of hope bats in my chest. I squeeze Helen’s shoulder.
“Good work. Hey, did you phone that doc?”
“Dr. Burke? Sorry, it was late. I left a message on their machine, though.”
“Thanks.”
I head to my office to gather my notes and bag. I don’t want to be there when the investigation board is taken down. Failure is already dragging at my heels, I can’t cope with the impending despair at the death of this case. I can’t watch our investigation grind to a stop while Nicole Duarte is still missing.
Her case will remain in Missing Persons, who will sit on it until it becomes a murder, and then, when the investigation’s as cold as Eleanor Costello’s bones in the ground, we’ll have to start the whole thing again. I collapse into the chair and swing round, watch the gray light of the morning on the frosted window.
I type out a quick text to Baz and am about to hit send when his name flashes up on my screen.
“Hey,” I answer.
“Hey,” he replies. He sounds breathless.
“You all right?”
“Fine,” he says. He doesn’t sound fine. “Listen, sorry I haven’t been in this morning. It was a bit of a late one last night.”
“Drowning sorrows without me? I thought you were a friend?”
“I went to Murphy’s house. He wasn’t there.”
I shrug, even though I know he can’t see me. “So? He probably went out to find a new toy to play with.”
“His car was gone. I waited all night for him to return. Had a feeling, you know?”
“Best not to tell anyone about those,” I answer.
“I’m serious, Frankie. I think he’s run. Or he’s hiding something. So, I went to the university this morning. He’s not shown up. Bear in mind that after his beloved tutor was murdered, he turned up to work immediately afterward. I spoke to the dean; he says he’s not known Lorcan Murphy to be a no-show in the time he’s been working at the uni.”
“Where is he?”
“That’s it, no one knows.”
“Nicole,” I breathe.
Baz swears. “Look, maybe Jack will give us an extension on this. This has to be something?”
“Clancy has said his piece. Unless we have a body or a firm suspect, we move on this afternoon.” I shake my head. Sigh. “Murphy is allowed to disappear, Baz. He’s not a suspect.”
“Yet.” His voice stabs out the word.
“We have a few hours, keep working on Duarte. We need to find her. My guess is, we find her, we find Murphy.”
“Right, I’ll get in touch with Duarte’s local Garda station. See if I can retrace her steps.”
I chew down on my lip. “We might be looking for a body,” I say.
“You think she’s dead?”
“It would fit his MO. I know Steve is monitoring the site for another snuff movie. And I think he’s right.”
I can feel Baz’s anger down the line. “Fuck it.”
“Yeah. See you later. Get in touch if anything comes up,” I say. I hang up, rub the tender spot on my temple. Our twenty-four hours is almost up.
* * *
—
IT’S PISSING DOWN when I get to Bray, a drip of a day and no sign in the dirty sky of it letting up. People are pushing down the promenade, hoods up and clenched to their chins against the drizzle. The sea is a slate of dark gray, small white waves curling lazily on the brown sand. The smell of seaweed hangs beneath the dampness, and the air is cold enough to draw my fingers up my sleeves.
I step onto the Costello drive and make my way toward the house. It looks lonely and quiet. The garden has grown up along the driveway, and long brown grasses bend over the fence. Two Gardaí, one female, one male, are hunched under the porch, the door behind open but covered in black plastic; yellow tape crisscrosses the entrance.
I’ve never kept uniforms on a scene this long. Normally, we’ve a scene pinned down, scooped out, in a couple of days. The longest stretch, three weeks. But this case has crashed forward, spitting out victims once clamped between the jaws of Eleanor Costello, and I couldn’t hel
p keep my guard up, keeping that scene mine until the end. Now we’ve run dry, that effort to preserve seems somewhat futile.
I nod at the guards. “How’s it goin’?”
“Afternoon, Chief.”
I pull up my sleeve, check the time. Where has the morning gone? The hand has moved by midday.
“Afternoon,” I answer. “All quiet?”
The woman stands, knocks some wall moss from her backside. “Quiet. Apart from the neighbor, not much. No press or journos about at all.”
Even the media has moved on.
“Well,” I say. “You can head back now.”
The man straightens, adjusts his stab vest. “But we’re on till three.”
“Get back to your station. You’ll be on till three somewhere else. I’m cleaning up here.”
“Right so,” he replies. Not one bit happy that he has to spend the rest of his shift actually working rather than sitting on his arse, smoking fags.
“See ya, Chief,” the woman says. She walks down the drive, gets into their vehicle, and starts the engine.
They pull away slowly and I’m left staring at the onetime family home of the Costellos. A house that’s a keeper of dark secrets and witness to years of pain both physical and psychological. The black plastic rattles in the sea breeze; a stray end of yellow tape flaps out over the side of the porch like a torn flag.
I begin tearing the plastic from the doorway. Inside, the house smells of the sea and the outdoors; none of the musky scents of family living linger in the hallway. The doors to the rooms are open, and even though the house is still fully furnished, my footsteps echo on the wooden floor when I walk across the living room. The Chagall book is still under the coffee table. I reach down, straighten it, bring the corner of the book in line with the others, the way Eleanor Costello would have liked it.
I move round the house, drawing the curtains and pulling down blinds. I’m sure the solicitors will waste no time in getting to the house, but the case will have left a sourness in many. Mrs. Fagan was like a tree felled after the news of her brother; who knows how long it will take before she can set foot in her brother’s home again?
Too Close to Breathe Page 25
