by Catie Murphy
A rush of people went by, collecting some of the listening guards on their way past. Two of them, carrying a stretcher, were in paramedic uniforms. Megan sat up straighter to watch them go into the back end of the restaurant.
“Is he actually back there? Inside?”
“He’s on the stairs,” Fionn whispered. “It looked like somebody came up behind him on his way down and just—” She shuddered and picked up her cooling coffee to drain it again. “I stepped in the blood before I understood what I was seeing.”
“Oh! That’s why you’re barefo—” Megan silenced herself, but Fionn gave her a weak, ill-looking smile.
“I didn’t want to be tracking blood all over the restaurant. My shoes are still in the . . .” She shuddered again. “Mess. Why would anybody murder poor Martin?” Her voice rose in bewilderment. “He was a bit of a prick, but he’d done well and he donated to the boxing clubs and the youth centres and bought equipment for the GAA all where he’d grown up.”
“And where was that?” Paul Bourke asked it like he knew the answer, which he probably did; even Megan knew Martin Rafferty had grown up in Bray, south of Dublin proper, because every article about him in the Times or the Independent mentioned it, making a fuss over a small-town boy done well.
Fionnuala said, “Bray” anyway, and the detective noted it down on a pad that he had, Megan realized, been taking notes on all along, even while he sipped his tea. She didn’t think of note-taking as a subtle activity, but Bourke had evidently mastered it. “He went to university in Canada and came home again with a business degree that he’s been turning to profit ever since.”
“Where in Canada?”
Fionn looked blank for a moment. “Ontario, I think.”
“Any enemies there?”
“Jesus, how would I know?” Fionn stared over Bourke’s shoulder, thinking, but shook her head. “I know he had a girlfriend while he was there and it ended when he asked her to come home with him, but she didn’t want to live in Ireland. He said she called it a God-plagued state and he couldn’t argue, even if the Church has lost a lot of power. But otherwise . . .” She shook her head again.
“Do you know who his beneficiaries are?”
“God, no. His mum and dad, maybe? They’re still out in Bray, I think, but I don’t know.” Tears stood in Fionnuala’s eyes again and she pushed her coffee cup aside so she could put her face in her hands. “I can’t even think what this will do to the restaurant,” she said into her palms. “We’d the capital to keep going through the health inspection and all, I think, but we’ll be closed again tonight and for how long after that, Detective?” She lifted her face. “It’s a crime scene now.”
“I’m afraid it’ll be up to a week. You’ll have insurance against this sort of thing, though. That will help ease you through.”
“If we can get patrons back in after two murders on our doorstep in less than a week.” Fionn thinned her lips. “ ‘We’. There’s no ‘we’ anymore. Ah, God, Martin . . . !” This time emotion overwhelmed her and she lowered her head on the table, hidden in her arms, to sob. Megan put a tentative hand on her shoulder, then scooted over to pull her into a hug as she cried. After a few minutes, Fionn pushed her away, not unkindly, and mumbled something about the loo.
Megan let her go, sighed, and turned to Bourke, who had watched the entire scene with an understated sympathy. Apparently, she had a question in her eyes, because he tilted his head slightly, inviting it. “I didn’t want to ask in front of her, Detective, but . . . do you think Liz and Martin’s deaths are related?”
Grim consideration slid across his sharp features like he’d been holding the thought at bay and now, faced with it, didn’t like the implications. “I’m afraid they almost certainly are.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
The detective refused any further speculation, though truthfully, Megan was surprised he’d answered her at all. She could see for herself clearly enough that there were no surface connections between Liz Darr and Martin Rafferty, but both of them dying more or less on the Canan premises within forty-eight hours of each other pushed the bounds of coincidence beyond credulity.
Megan finally left after Fionn’s boyfriend arrived and went outdoors to consider what all of those individual pieces of information meant. The bright, sunny afternoon came as a surprise after the hard light inside the restaurant, and Megan squinted her way across Suffolk Street to lean on, rather than unlock, Brian’s bike and think.
The crowd had disappeared while she’d talked with Fionn and Bourke. So had most of the police, for that matter, and she supposed they’d taken the excitement with them. The bodybuilder was still there, hanging around looking somewhere between curious and distressed, and when Megan didn’t leave immediately, he came up to her with a surprisingly diffident air for so big a man. “What’s the story? They’re saying Martin Rafferty’s dead.”
“Um.” Megan glanced back at the restaurant. “I don’t know if I’m allowed to talk about what’s going on in there.”
“So he’s dead.” At Megan’s surprised glance, the big man shrugged. “Yis wouldn’t be all shifty about it if he was still alive.”
Megan sighed. “You’re probably right. Do you know him?”
“In passing, like. I work a couple nights a week at the nightclub, after my dinner shift.” He thrust a thumb toward the restaurant across the street. “And after that woman dying, Jayzus, that’s hard luck. Will Canan’s open again, do yis think?”
“I hope so. The owner’s a friend of mine.”
The big guy squinted. “I thought Rafferty was after owning the place.”
“Co-owner. She’s the chef.”
“Oh, the one that looks like the Little Mermaid?”
Megan stared, partly because she didn’t expect a guy built like this one to say something like that, and partly because Fionn’s auburn hair and heart-shaped face did make her look a little like Ariel. She laughed. “Yeah, I guess so. I never thought about it.”
“I’ve got kids,” the bodybuilder said half-defensively, and Megan held up her hands, smiling.
“No judgement here, mate. Anyway, if you work at the club, I’m sure they’ll be contacting you and everybody to let you know what’s going. I really don’t know, myself.”
“Cheers.” The big guy went back to the restaurant across the street, which wouldn’t be open for an hour yet anyway. Megan unlocked Brian’s bicycle and rode it home, noticing, now that she wasn’t in a terrible rush, how much too big it was for her. She stopped outside her own apartment, sent him a text, found out he’d gone home, and biked the rest of the way up Rathmines Road to deliver it back to him. He met her at the front door with a book in hand—one of his own publications, something about Lucy Boston, whose novels Megan had loved as a child—and an inquisitive look in his brown eyes.
“Martin is dead,” she reported as she wheeled his bike into the house. “Murdered. Fionn’s not really a suspect and the cops won’t say how Liz and Martin’s deaths are connected, probably because they don’t know. What do an Irish entrepreneur and an American food blogger have in common? Besides Canan’s, I mean.”
Brian, dryly, said, “You don’t seem terribly distraught” and took the bike to park it in the back garden. Megan followed him through the house and out into the sunshine.
“I didn’t know him very well and didn’t like him very much. He had that—he always had to know the answer, you know? Even if you knew it already, he’d explain it to you. I guess it worked for him in business, but it drove me nuts. Still, it wasn’t a killing offense. Especially getting his throat cut from behind in a dark stairwell. Seriously,” she said, as Brian glanced at her, eyebrows elevated. “It’s practically Gothic.”
“You’re saying that to appeal to my sense of the macabre. I’m not helping you solve a murder, Megan. Tea?” Brian locked up the bike and gestured back to the house. Megan preceded him, talking over her shoulder as they went into a kitchen that had last been updated when teal was a hig
hly fashionable interior decorating colour.
“I’m not solving a murder myself! I just want to figure out what they had in common. And I’d like to know where Cíara O’Donnell is. I’m a little worried about her.”
“Why?” Brian took down green tea, which Megan made a face at, so he made her a cup of berry tea instead while she moved books, mostly from his own press, into stacks on the small, square table tucked beneath the galley kitchen’s window.
“I don’t know, because she was mixed up with Liz and nobody’s seen her since Friday afternoon.” Books sorted, Megan sat and pulled her feet up on the straw-seated chair, putting her chin on her knees.
“You mean, no one in your very limited circle of people who know her has seen her since Friday afternoon, which was less than a full day ago, as if she is not a twentysomething whose work got closed down and left her with time to do whatever she wanted?” Brian brought the tea to the table and sat in the other chair while Megan unfolded and tried to frown at him over the edge of her teacup.
“Well, when you put it that way, it makes me sound a little over the top. Seriously, though, I’m not going off the deep end. I’d just like to know where she is. And I’m sure the cops would, too.”
“The cops, who have the actual resources to find missing—assuming she’s missing at all—people? Those cops?”
“You’re mocking me.” Megan pointed a stern finger at her fellow American, then slid down, not very comfortably, in her chair. “I guess it’s not just that. I just—I want to know what’s going on and the only way I can think to do that is to find Cíara.”
“All right, okay. If I can’t talk you out of this, I’ll try to be helpful. If you were mixed up in a murder, even tangentially, where would you hide?”
Megan grunted. “My first response is ‘at home,’ but then, that’s where anybody would look for me, right? Not at home like where I’m living now, but home-home, where I grew up.”
“And where did Miss O’Donnell grow up?”
“I have no idea and the stupid internet is no help. Cíara O’Donnell is not a usefully unique name and if she’s out there under some internet alias, I don’t know what it is. Because why would I?”
Brian laughed. “I don’t know, why would you? Can you go get her employment history off Fionn? That might help.”
“Fionn is already dealing with a suspicious death, a murder on her premises, lost her business partner, might lose her business, and had to think hard about getting me Cíara’s current address. Asking her to ante up again would not be fair.”
“Well, all right.” Brian looked pensively into his tea, but Megan pointed a finger at him, a thought shaking loose.
“I could ask her coworkers, though, maybe. Maybe they’d know something about her. I mean, I guess I’d have to get their information from Fionn too. . . .” Megan deflated, making a face, then extracted her phone as it rang, the garage’s number coming up. She muttered, “Oh, come on, Orla, it’s not my fault they didn’t want to stay out all day,” and she looked apologetically at Brian as she answered the phone. He waved it off, settling down with his tea and a book so he could pretend he wasn’t paying attention as Megan said, “Well, what is it?” into the phone.
To her astonishment, Tymon’s voice came over the line. “Sorry, Megs, I know you’ve got the rest of the day off—”
“What? No, it’s okay. Is everything all right?”
“It’s grand so, but the car you drove the Darrs in was going out again and when I was wiping it down, I found a USB stick wedged in the back seat.” Tymon sounded distressed. “I don’t know how I missed it when I detailed the car, but—”
Megan’s heart had lurched, taking up residence in her throat, and it took a moment to get past it so she could say, “Well, it’s no worry, as long as Orla didn’t catch you missing it.”
“N-n-nooo . . .” He sing-songed the word guiltily. “I told her I found it, though, and when she realized I’d missed it on Friday, she said to throw it out straight-away. She didn’t want whatever kind of trouble it would bring. I did, but—” Megan could almost hear him blushing with guilt now—”as soon as she left, I dug it out of the rubbish again and called you. It’s probably nothing, but it might be important, right? It was stuck so deep in the seats it couldn’t have been an accident.”
“I’ll be there in ten minutes. I’m just down the road. You get back to work and I’ll swing by, pick it up, and we’ll pretend this never happened.”
A preposterously deep sigh of relief emptied the young man’s lungs. “Grand. Thanks, Megs. You’re a legend.”
Megan said, “It’s true, I am” and hung up with her heart still racing. Odds were that Tymon was wrong, that it was nothing, and that probably someone else entirely had lost the USB stick weeks ago, giving it time to get worked deeply into the upholstery. Except no one had contacted the company about missing it and the cars were thoroughly detailed every time they came in. Megan could see a wedged USB stick being missed once but not—as proven by Tymon just now—twice. She explained the whole situation to Brian and hurried off to the garage.
Tymon just happened to be taking a break, hanging out at the corner, as Megan approached. “Just happened,” Megan figured, like it just happened that 2+2=4.
He handed the USB stick off to her like they were conducting a surreptitious, albeit in broad daylight, drug deal and hardly made eye contact before striding back toward the garage. Megan wanted to laugh, but even she suffered from the occasional moment of terror dealing with Orla, and she was twice Ty’s age and a veteran to boot. She settled for a broad grin and took the long way home again, unashamed to admit it was to avoid Orla’s gimlet eye.
Mama Dog, who had thus far shown no particular interest in going for a walk, veritably danced at the door when Megan arrived home. If a dog could cross its legs and hop desperately, she would have. Megan groaned, got the leash, and took Mama for a walk that lasted, to Megan’s perception, about six hours. Mama had not previously needed to sniff everything along the way, or stop to get scratched by strangers, or have a walk all the way around the block, and after about twenty minutes, Megan said, dryly, “You’re sick of puppies already, aren’t you? They’re only two days old. Be glad you won’t have to take care of them for eighteen or twenty years, and let’s go home.”
Mama gave her a positively doleful look and moped along home with her head lowered, her ears down, and her stubby tail attempting to drag sadly on the ground. “Monday,” Megan warned. “Monday I’m taking you to the vet to see if you have a chip. Maybe somebody will be overwhelmed with joy to get you and a bonus pair of puppies back again.”
The little Jack Russell had no response to this save to walk mournfully back to her dog bed when they returned to the apartment, and to flop into the soft plush with a sigh that came from the depths of her doggy soul.
The puppies wiggled around her happily, had something to eat, and fell asleep again. Megan could feel Mama giving her tragic glances from over the bed’s rim and heartlessly turned her back on the three of them so she could get her laptop and plug in the USB.
It was password protected, which Megan knew in the abstract could be done but had never actually encountered. Flabbergasted, she stared at it a while, then, with a shrug, typed in “mollymalone,” figuring the odds of that working were slim to nothing.
The memory stick opened, leaving Megan prim-mouthed with the general feeling that passwords shouldn’t be that easy to guess, although upon reflection, she remembered reading somewhere that a very high percentage of passwords were simply “1234,” which meant this one was better than average. “Still,” she said aloud, partly to herself and partly to the dogs, before remembering she was ignoring Mama’s soulful gaze.
Only after the fact did she realize that it opening with that password meant it was almost certainly Liz Darr’s USB stick. Megan’s hands went cold with excitement even as an embarrassed flush crawled up her face. Detecting presumably required understanding things like th
at first, instead of getting caught up in good password protocol. Still blushing and generally feeling like a sneak, she jumped about three inches when her phone rang and gave it a furious look that melted instantly when she saw Niamh’s picture come up.
“Jesus, did you hear about Martin?” came Niamh’s opening salvo and Megan laughed ruefully in response.
“I did, and Fionn’s a wreck, and I’ve just—” She looked at the still-unopened files on her computer screen and decided to leave that out for the moment. “I’ve just been trying to figure out how everything ties together. It must somehow. What do you know about Martin Rafferty, Nee?”
“That,” Niamh said in sepulchral tones, “will take a drink or two to talk out. Meet me at the Library Bar at five?”
Megan squinted at the time on her computer screen: a quarter to three. “Haven’t you got a show tonight?”
“I do, but call isn’t until seven. I’ll see what more I can learn about Martin between now and then. There’s got to be gossip. There always is, about a lad who goes away and comes back successful.” She paused and said, “There’s always gossip about a lass, too, for that matter” with a little less cheer.
“I can’t really imagine,” Megan said honestly. “The whole point of the American Dream is to go forth, better yourself, and brag about it. All right, I’ll see you in a couple of hours.”
Niamh said, “Mwah,” and hung up, leaving Megan to her guilt about digging through a dead woman’s files. It lasted long enough for her to open the first folder, after which she simply dug through them in astonishment.
Liz Darr had been a tidier soul at heart than anybody Megan knew. Her files were in folders named sensible things like “vlogs” and “blogs,” and every folder within was broken down into years, then months, and finally “development” and “posted.” There were no random files saved somewhere just because it was fast and convenient, and photograph files even had cross-referenced notes in their names. Megan hoped she had an assistant who did all that, because someone organized enough to blog, vlog, write books, do photography, and keep it all cataloged systematically . . .
