by Catie Murphy
She sighed. Usually, she’d finish that thought with a hyperbolic “deserved to be killed a little bit,” but in the wake of Elizabeth’s actual death, that seemed neither funny nor appropriate. Probably it was never either, especially because saying what she really meant—which, in this case, was that Liz’s organizational skills should be envied and admired—was more flattering than “I could kill her.” She wondered briefly if other languages expressed envy and admiration in murderous terms, or if English just had a particularly violent bent to it.
A folder labeled “personal” and buried—not at all suspiciously, Megan thought—deep in the photography archives, also required a password. Megan tried “mollymalone” again, unsurprised to find it didn’t work, and sat there for a few minutes, frowning at the cursor as if its steady blink would render a clue as to what would unlock it.
Obviously, Detective Bourke, or one of his coworkers, would be the key, figuratively if not literally. But the gardaí would never let Megan see the files, and while she knew perfectly well she’d be bringing the USB to the guards, she—selfishly, humanly—really wanted to know what was hidden in them. After a little while, feeling guilty—but not so guilty she didn’t do it—she looked up “breaking folder password encryption” on the internet and, because she’d guessed the main password, was able to get past the administrative lock and open the folder. “I have a future in hacking,” she announced to Mama Dog, who put her chin on the edge of her bed and blinked sadly at Megan. “Don’t worry,” Megan muttered. “I’ll use my powers for good.”
By which she meant copy the folder to her own computer and open it, apparently, although she didn’t think that really fell under anybody’s definition of “good.” Most of the files in Liz’s personal folder were equally well-organized journal pages. Megan opened several of the most recent ones, hoping to find a smoking gun of some kind—a passionate love letter to Cíara O’Donnell, or maybe a rough-draft divorce letter to Simon—and found, instead, entries about hoping to settle in Ireland, and wondering, with real concern, if Simon would be as happy at home, raising kids, as he claimed he would be. Megan said, “Hnh” aloud, wondered if she’d always talked to herself aloud or if she’d just started because Mama Dog was there to listen, and flagged the entry so she could look at it again later, since it seemed at odds with Simon’s job hunting.
Nothing in Liz’s journal mentioned anything about his job hunting either. A coil of concern tightened into dread as Megan went through more of the entries, hoping for something that at least indicated Liz had known he was interviewing at local hospitals. Instead, going farther back, she found a cryptic comment about problems I don’t even want to talk about here, you know what I mean, which presumably Liz had, since she’d been writing to herself. Eventually, buried even deeper in the personal folder, she found another one marked “just stuff,” and by that time, she didn’t even feel guilty about cracking the password. Elizabeth Darr was obviously not the kind of woman to drop meaningless junk in a folder called “just stuff.”
Except apparently she was, because the only file in the folder was a plain text document that said “HD $whw3t$3&n.”
Megan flung her hands in the air, noticing, as she did so, that a fierce headache had crawled up from the base of her neck to reside in the back of her skull. She diagnosed it as hunger and tension, put the laptop aside, and got up to stretch and find something to eat. It was too warm for cooked food, so she got cold cuts, cheese, crackers, and fruit—a meal she thought of as her personal variation on the commercial Lunchables—and some sweet iced tea, a drink she had to brew on her own, as it was one variation of tea the Irish simply didn’t understand.
She ate sitting on the floor beside the puppies, rubbing their tummies and ears and tickling their little pink paw pads. Mama Dog squirmed around to put her chin hopefully on Megan’s knee, her brown gaze focused entirely on the food, and got a slice of apple for her efforts. She crunched it down, but went back to looking greedily at the cheese and meat. Megan said, “Nope. Not unless you can tell me what ‘HD whewten’ means.” She approximated the jumble of numbers and letters as best she could aloud. “I mean, the whewten thing is a password, but HD is what, hard drive? I don’t have her hard drive. I guess the Dempseys might let me look at her computer, but I don’t know, isn’t that the sort of thing cops take away when they’re investigating murders? Or have I just watched too much TV? I definitely didn’t talk to myself this much before adopti—babysitting—dogs.”
She took her plate and glass from where she’d been sitting and did an “Uptown Funk” slide across the floor—at least, what she thought of as being an “Uptown Funk” slide, although it was probably from the classic movie dances video that had been set to it—and sang, “HD? Hot damn?” to herself as she did so. “HD—Hodor? HD—high def? HD—hot dog!” She slid again, amused at herself, and kept singing. “HD—hard drive. HD—hidden dir—” She stopped abruptly, turning toward her computer. “Hidden directory?” The plate and glass went on the kitchen table, halfway to their ultimate destination, and Megan climbed over the back of the couch—a dangerous proposition, because it tilted—to pick up her computer again and search on how to find hidden USB stick directories.
A moment later, she breathed, “All hail the web, purveyor of fine answers everywhere” and, with a few keystrokes, convinced the USB stick to reveal that it did, in fact, have a hidden directory. She typed in the password and the directory spilled forth dozens of financial spreadsheets, each one more recent than the last. Megan scrolled through pages of them, watching the numbers dip and rise. Mostly dip really; there were close to a decade’s worth of bank statements, and Megan could see the steady fall of paying off student loans, car payments, rent, groceries, all set against monthly influxes of income. She didn’t keep particularly great track of her finances herself, but it wasn’t hard to tell, reading Liz’s spreadsheets, that the Darrs had been spending a lot more money than had been coming in: the category “miscellaneous” had enormous dollar amounts disappear into it, and gradually, as the years went by, it also started to have questions appended to it: misc. withdrawal, no receipts for cash spent? I asked him to keep receipts . . . and big withdrawal, said it was for gift . . . no gift came. Gift for who then?
And then there were the deposits, also labeled “miscellaneous”—sometimes enormous cash deposits, with notes like real estate sale, and then, later, need to get his realtor’s number, ask about these sales—that almost never made up for the amount that had been spent. One did, eventually, about three years earlier: a miscellaneous deposit of nearly seventy thousand dollars that brought their whole accounting system into the black. That, along with a large check from Liz’s first book deal, had been transferred immediately into a “House!” account, and the column labeled “Rent” turned into “Mortgage” not very long after that.
After that one big deposit, their finances seemed to turn around. The “miscellaneous income” column started filling up, while the “misc. outgoing” stopped bleeding so much cash. Megan rubbed her eyes, shook herself all over, and kept looking, until one of the side notes unrolled into a passionate, frustrated document file obviously written by a deeply frightened and worried Elizabeth Darr.
Simon Darr, it appeared, had solved a gambling problem by selling drugs.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“There were deposits that came out of nowhere. Huge ones. Liz’s notes said he claimed to have a real estate investment on the side where the money came from, and she believed him for the longest time, even when discovering the weirdest stuff, she said. Like finding prescription drugs—not a bottle, but a case—stuffed under the bed,” Megan said to Niamh a few hours later, over a drink that, in retrospect, she wished was alcoholic.
Five o’clock was early enough by hours that the Library Bar hadn’t yet overfilled. Its interior reminded Megan of a pool table: dark wainscoting below felt-green walls, broken by a deep, reddish-brown picture rail that matched the wainscoting as well as th
e glass-fronted, brass-embellished bookcases. Tall windows were framed with heavy, red-and-gold curtains that matched deeply winged chairs and Queen Anne–style couches that were crowded around low, polished wood tables that forbade more than a handful of people in any one group. Astonishingly, no music played, which made talking much easier, or would for another few hours, until dozens or hundreds of people crowded in, shouting at one another and moving around the chairs until the whole place’s librarylike ambience was lost. Apparently, long before Megan had moved to Dublin, the Library Bar had been regarded as a well-kept secret for someplace atmospheric and pleasant to meet for a pint and an actual chat, but then someone had written an article about well-kept-secret bars and ruined it for everyone. Megan liked it anyway, as long as she got there before the rush.
“How did he excuse the pills?” Niamh asked, one part genuinely fascinated and one part well-trained audience. She wore loose-legged, cream-coloured trousers that Megan suspected were actually seersucker, a puckered cotton she’d heard about but never seen anyone wear before, and a ballet-shouldered T-shirt in rose pink that made her look delicate and vulnerable. She also had on a straw hat—a cloche, Megan thought they were called, the kind that pulled down over the ears and cast a shadow with its brim—which helped hide her distinctive features. The hat exactly matched the shade of her trousers and its band went perfectly with both Niamh’s shirt and, once Megan thought to check, her two-inch, heeled sandals. Megan herself was suitably and comfortably dressed in bright yellow linen capris with roomy pockets and a white tank top—vest, and the fact that she had to remind herself suggested she’d never use that particular Irishism naturally—but Niamh looked like she’d pulled the flawless outfit together casually, which seemed vaguely unfair. On the other hand, image was, if not everything to an actor, at least a great deal, whereas Megan didn’t even have to think about what outfit to wear any day she went to work.
Megan spread her hands. “I mean, you hear about doctors getting loads of free samples from drug companies, you know?” Niamh quirked an eyebrow and Megan sighed. “Well, they do in the States, where the pharmaceutical companies are charging eye-bleeding prices for what you can get for a tenner here. So Simon just told her he’d gotten samples, or that he’d signed an exclusive for three months with some company and they’d given him a bag of product to offer his patients. Or he’d been out of the country and been able to pick up prescription drugs cheaper, so he could sell some under the table to poorer patients. It happens,” she said to Niamh’s dismayed expression. The actress accepted this with a nod, although Megan had the sense she was being humoured.
“Anyway, there was a long dry spell, where all the extra money seemed to vanish. Liz’s notes were really relieved, like she could finally just let it go and move past it, right? Only then, when they came here, it started up again. A lot of money, Nee.”
“And you took it to the guards, did you not?”
“I called Detective Bourke. I haven’t heard back from him, but it’s not like he’s got nothing to do, right? So I thought instead of waiting at home like a princess in a tower, I’d come talk to you and see what you’d learned about Martin, just in case you’d turned anything up about him being crooked or something, I don’t know.”
Niamh managed a solemn smile. “Sure and you’re only thinking of the case, not about whether you can impress the handsome detective, like?”
“Is he handsome? Charismatic. I’m not sure he’s exactly good-looking. But that smile . . . anyway, no, I’m not trying to—I mean, maybe I am trying to impress him, but not to get into his pants.” Megan scrunched her face and swirled the ice in her fizzy lemonade, wishing it had a shot of whiskey in it. But given that she’d had a headache from concentration earlier, she didn’t really think she needed to add booze on top of that. Niamh had a glass of red wine that she held lightly in both hands, fingertips on the glass so she wouldn’t warm the liquid. “Besides,” she added, “he’s already asked you out.”
“I believe you asked me out for him.”
“Oh. Right. But you didn’t object. Or do you? Now that you’ve thought about it?”
“No, it’s almost always better to date somebody a friend introduces me to, even if they’ve just met him, instead of some rando off the street. Can you imagine trying to use a dating site?”
“I can imagine me using one. In theory.” Megan pulled up her feet into the big, soft chair tucked beside one of the windows and watched a few young men come in through the bar’s double doors.
Niamh had taken the corner seat, her chair angled so its back blocked most of her from view, and Megan wasn’t sure the cloche did much to disguise her cheekbones or jaw if someone happened to look her way. Mostly people didn’t bother her, but a group of lads like the ones now at the bar might well, especially after a drink or two. “You, not so much.”
“You don’t need a dating site,” Niamh proclaimed. “You just walk along meeting charismatic officers of the law like his own self. I, on the other hand, meet wildly attractive costars whose romantic intentions last the length of a run or a filming, and leave with me poor heartbroken.”
Megan put down her lemonade and placed her hand on top of Niamh’s to say, solemnly, “It’s hard to be you.”
Amusement sparkled in Niamh’s brown eyes. “You’re mocking me.”
“Yes. And no. You have a weird kind of hard life.” Megan picked her drink back up and breathed into the glass, watching her breath steam on its far side. “I have this horrible feeling Liz’s autopsy report is going to come back with a prescription drug overdose. Except if her husband was selling prescription drugs while traveling around the world with her, he wouldn’t kill his excuse to be anywhere there might be profit to be made, would he? I shouldn’t jump to conclusions,” she said fiercely to her drink. “I don’t know that Liz Darr was murdered.”
“We do know it wasn’t food poisoning,” Niamh said. “Or we’re nearly certain, at least. And she hadn’t been ill. So we suspect, don’t we?”
“We suspect strongly,” Megan admitted. “Detective Bourke didn’t quite say they were both murders, but he thought Martin and Liz’s deaths had to be connected, and a bad-luck food poisoning death wouldn’t have any reason to be connected to a murder, would it? Not that we think Liz was food poisoned,” she concluded hastily.
“So maybe Simon poisoned her because she’d decided to stop traveling. You said they were thinking about settling here. So if he couldn’t get his drugs as cheaply here, to sell on . . .” Niamh took a sip of wine like it was rehearsed commentary on the situation.
Megan shook her head. “But honestly, if you were a doctor, would you use prescription drugs to kill someone? I’d do something horrific, like what happened to Martin, so it would seem less likely to be me.”
“Except after dinner, in the middle of Dublin city centre, without anybody seeing you do it?”
“Well, obviously not. All right, I suppose if you’re going for subtlety . . .”
“Maybe it’s a red herring,” Niamh suggested. “The obvious murder can’t be the simple answer, so do the obvious thing and they’ll look somewhere else. No one’s arrested Simon so far.”
“The gardaí don’t even have the USB yet,” Megan pointed out. “I wish Liz had been a little more forthcoming in her journal. ‘Dear Diary, next week I’m filing for divorce from my drug-running lout of a husband,’ or something like that. I never got into keeping a diary, but I thought the idea was to blurt out everything in the one private place you had access to.”
“Celebrities don’t have much privacy. If she—if I—kept a really intimate diary, when I died somebody would want to monetize it. The only way to absolutely prevent that from happening is not write it down, to just . . . remember. Even if that means the intensity of the moment fades.” Niamh shrugged gracefully.
Megan studied her for a moment. “I don’t think I’d want to be famous.”
“I did.” A rueful smile touched Niamh’s lips. “God, I wa
nted it so much. I never thought I would be—most actors aren’t, you know—but I was after wanting it from the time I can remember. I wanted to be—” She spread her hands like she was drawing a screen in the air. “I wanted to be up there, making people laugh and cry. Or in the theatre, where you know if you’ve made them laugh or cry, but to be really famous as an actor, you have to be in the movies. So that was what I wanted, wee Niamh O’Sullivan from County Clare. But that’s all nonsense. Did you find out who Simon Darr was selling to?”
“It wasn’t in Liz’s paperwork. Why would it be? She wasn’t a drug runner herself, not if she had all this secret paperwork.” Megan gnawed her lower lip and drank some lemonade, dismayed at her train of thought. “Of course, if he found out she’d been tracking him—and maybe he did; maybe that’s why he stopped before?—but if he’d gotten back into it and was afraid she might turn him in . . . there’s more motive for murder. Niamh,” she half-wailed, although not loudly, “how did I end up sitting in the Library Bar trying to figure out murder motives?”
“It’s the luck of the Irish in you,” Niamh said, straight-faced. Megan threatened to flick lemonade at her and she chuckled quietly. “Wrong place, wrong time. Mental things like that happen to everyone, once in a while.”
“Do they, though?” Megan sighed and brushed it off. “I wonder if I could just go ask Simon all this stuff. I mean, he’s busted now, right? What’s the point in hiding anymore? Obviously if I can find this information, the guards will be asking about it.”
“As you just said, the guards don’t have that USB drive yet,” Niamh reminded her. “But assuming you share with our attractive detective—”
“I’m going to share, Niamh! I’d get busted for obstruction of justice or something if I didn’t. Wouldn’t I?”
“Only if you got found out.”
