by Catie Murphy
“I thought you said you’d make a terrible criminal!”
“Maybe I’m improving!”
Niamh rolled her eyes extravagantly. “All right. I’ll ask around a bit before the matinee and give you a ring. This is going to look terrible for my career if anyone passes it on, Meg.”
“I feel like I should say something very dramatic, like, ‘A man’s life is at stake, woman! Careers be damned!’ Except it’s too late for that; Liz is already dead, so I guess it’s probably not that urgent. I’ll see if I can figure out how to buy illegal drugs on my own this morning and you can call me this afternoon if you haven’t heard back from me by curtain.”
“Remember how yesterday I said everyone has these strange moments in their lives?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m beginning to reconsider. You might be unusually mad.” Niamh waved and Megan, shaking her head and smiling, ended the connection.
She might have to wait on Niamh’s contacts, but the whole conversation had given her another idea.
A few minutes’ walk took her up Rathmines Road to the Leprechaun Limos office. The door dinged as she let herself in, and Orla appeared from the back, all charm and smiles until she saw it wasn’t a client. “Oh, it’s your own self. You’re not working today. What do you want?”
Megan threw herself into one of the big leather chairs and smiled at her pinch-faced boss. “Who are our absolute shadiest competitors?”
“What would you want to know that for?”
“Research. I want to know if I’m being underpaid.”
Offense coloured two red circles on Orla’s cheeks. “I’ll have you know I’ve never underpaid a driver in me life—”
Megan actually believed that. Orla might be ready to skin every penny she could from a client, and happy to dock pay to—for example—cover the cost of an unapproved pet in a flat she was landlord of—but truthfully, Megan didn’t doubt she paid fair wages. She wanted good, reliable drivers who would stay on with Leprechaun Limos for years, and cheating a driver out of their paycheck was false economy. It cost a lot more to find, hire, and train a new driver than it did to pay a good one what they were worth. “No,” Megan said loudly to stop Orla’s insulted rant, “no, really, I’m just wondering how much illegal drug couriering is done by driving companies and I thought you’d know who was most likely to be involved in that kind of thing. You’re too good at what you do not to have some sense of who’s got a side business going.”
Orla, her jaw thrust out with suspicion, stared at Megan for a long time. “Are yis messin with me?”
“No, not at all. I know we don’t always get on, but honestly, I wouldn’t work for you if you didn’t run a tight ship, and you know more about Dublin than most of us ever will. Especially me.”
“Ah, quit yer plamásing.”
Megan stared, then laughed. “My what? Plah-maws? I don’t know that one.”
“It means flattery,” Orla said in the tone of a woman who’d won a round. “Blarneying. Buttering me up, so.”
“Oh! No! Or, yes, maybe I am, a little, but I’m also telling the truth. You know more about this city than I ever will,” Megan said. “So who’s shady in the driving business?”
“Well, shite, if yis want a quick hit, it’s the rickshaws ye’d go to first.” Orla Keegan’s contempt for the bicycle-driven, two-person carts was legendary, though up until that moment, Megan had always thought it was because they took late-night taxi business and regarded the rules of the road as guidelines that didn’t particularly apply to them. “Loads of those lads are just in the country for a few months, running drugs and making quick sales and then gone again before the guards even know who they were.”
“How do they know how to meet dealers if they’re new?” Megan asked, fascinated despite herself. Orla gave her a look that suggested she was both naïve and simple.
“Who d’yis think is sending them into the country to start with? And then a nice local lad says to himself, those lads are making more than I am and no one’s coming after them, and so he says to them, how do I get in on this, and . . .” Orla shrugged expressively. “Next thing yis know, it’s all of them.”
Megan doubted that, but neither did she want to stop Orla with a discussion of veracity. “And the limo services?”
“And taxis,” Orla said with a sniff. “Now, there’s more guards looking out for that sort of thing, so it’s riskier, see? Though they’ve cracked down on the rickshaws,” she added with satisfaction. “I heard about it on the radio, the gardaí task forces going after those lads. About time they did something, though it’s not enough. But then there’s never enough guards, except when you don’t want them. Last month, there were four of them after Cillian for running a red light—”
“But the CCTV showed he hadn’t,” Meg reminded her reassuringly. “Your drivers know better, and not because we’re afraid of the guards. We know you’d skin us all alive.”
Orla chortled, pleased, and got back on topic. “The point is, they track taxi drivers close like, busting them all the time, a few thousand quid of coke here, a few thousand of heroin there. The car services, they’re dearer and they might run the same route for a week, but then they’re not back to it for months, or never. There aren’t as many patterns. I wouldn’t put it past the Liffey Car Service, though, or Traveller’s Wagon.”
Megan sucked her cheeks in to keep herself from asking if that was a real possibility or a bias against the name; the Travellers in Ireland, known for generations as tinkers, were still looked down upon as itinerant outsiders by the larger Irish community, and a name like the Traveller’s Wagon would prejudice plenty of settled Irish against a company. But, like Leprechaun Limos itself, the romance of the name drew in tourists, who were the larger part of a driving service’s clientele anyway. “When you say you wouldn’t put it past them . . . ?”
“Far be it from me to start rumours,” Orla said with an innocence that no adult human being could legitimately lay claim to, but Megan, recognizing when she’d been shut down, smiled her thanks and went to look for some drug dealers.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Ten a.m. on a Monday morning probably wasn’t the best time to find drug-dealing rickshaw drivers, but, lacking a time machine to jump forward twelve or fifteen hours, Megan reckoned it was the best she could do. Grafton and O’Connell Streets usually hosted a few of the drivers at any time of day, and Grafton was only a short bus ride away.
Megan slapped her Leap Card—green, embellished with a frog, and the cheapest way to use Dublin’s public transportation—onto the bus fare . . . calculator—she was sure the thing had a proper name, but she didn’t know what it was—and watched the Grand Canal go by under them as they crossed a bridge. The canal still ran most of the way to the River Shannon, and thence to the Atlantic Ocean, a journey Megan wanted to take someday.
The bus left the canal behind in a moment, though, and drove through more of Georgian Dublin, the old three- and four-storey homes, many of them now converted into businesses, and as tall as most buildings were allowed to be under Dublin’s city ordinances. Megan got off on George’s Street and walked past the Central Hotel, where she’d met Niamh at the Library Bar the night before, and down past Canan’s.
Fionnuala’s restaurant was still cordoned off by yellow police tape. Molly Malone and her sad burden of wilting flowers, testament to those who mourned Liz Darr, looked incongruently serene to Megan, knowing what lay behind the statue in the old church. Guards who looked like they’d rather be at home sleeping, or at least walking around rather than policing a quiet crime scene, nodded at Meg as she went by and answered questions from curious tourists.
Megan passed them all and went up to the corner of Grafton and Nassau, where Molly had stood for decades before road works had moved her to Suffolk Street.
A couple of rickshaws idled where she’d once stood. Megan tapped on one of their shells—red and white, emblazoned with a local food delivery company—and got the at
tention of the driver. He, like every other rickshaw driver as far as Megan could tell, was a young man in his twenties, with a ready grin and a pitch about where he could drive her already on his lips. She interrupted with, “Hi. I’m not a cop.”
The driver, skinny, around twenty-two, and made primarily of a beard and sunglasses, pulled the glasses down to look at her. “A cop would say so, wouldn’t she? You look kind of like a cop.”
“Probably because I was in the US military for twenty years.”
“Yeh?” Distrustful hope came into the kid’s eyes. “You looking to hook up or something? ‘Cause you’re fit.”
“Ha. Thanks, but no. I do have some weird questions and will pay you the equivalent of a ten-kilometre lift to answer them.”
A predatory gleam replaced the lad’s hope. “We work for tips. I could use a solid one.”
“Tips for tips, then, assuming you give me some useful information.”
“Deal.”
Megan sat in the rickshaw. The kid turned in his seat, hanging his arm over its back to look at her curiously. Megan took a ten out of her wallet, held it up, then folded it into her palm. “If a person were—theoretically—interested in purchasing certain illegal substances, where would she source them from?”
Suspicion warred with curiosity on the rickshaw driver’s face. “Are you sure you’re not a cop?”
“Positive. Even if I was, I’d be out of my jurisdiction, wouldn’t I? I’m obviously not Irish.” She laid on her Texan twang there, and the driver relaxed a little.
“Theoretically, I might know a lad or two.”
“Brilliant.” Megan took out another ten, held it up, and folded it into her palm with the first. “Theoretically, if a person was looking for something specific—let’s say sleeping pills—would your lads know where to find them?”
“That shite’s easy. How much is this theoretical buyer looking for?”
Another tenner brought the euro amount Megan was laying out to well over what a ten-klick lift would cost. “The theoretical buyer is interested in the theoretical supply line, not the actual product. I’m trying to understand where someone who was himself a dealer would get prescription drugs in large enough numbers to sell.”
Suspicion arose in the driver’s face again. “Are you a reporter?”
“Honestly, I’m just a busybody.” Megan took out a twenty this time and wished she could expense it to somebody. “So let’s say I’m a well-off white American—”
“I dunno, that seems like a stretch.”
Megan laughed. “Yeah. Use your imagination. So, I’m a well-off white American—a doctor, let’s say—and I’ve dealt prescription drugs in the States. Now I’m looking to set up shop in Ireland. What do I do?”
By now, the driver had the same expression Orla had worn earlier, one implying Megan had a remarkable combination of naivety and stupidity. “You mean theoretical, don’t you,” he said slowly, as if talking to a child. “You’re no dealer. You should go home and stick to what’s safe.”
“Probably, but let’s assume I’m not going to.”
“Theoretically, if you weren’t an absolute eejit, you would figure out that there’s pharmacists and chemists who’ll skim a little off the top, or miscount their product, or claim a shipment got lost, and sell out the back door. Theoretically, if you’re a doctor, you might have mates at a pharmaceutical company anywhere in the world who’d ship you what you need in exchange for a cut of the profits.”
“How would I get that past customs?”
“You’d have another mate on the ship, or in customs, or both, or ye’d drop it in the ocean and send some young, dumb gobshite out for it. D’ye not even read the papers, then?”
“The papers,” Megan pointed out, “mention the big busts off the coast, not the ones that get through. It’d be easy to think—if you were an eejit—that they catch it all.”
“If you were an absolute muppet,” the driver agreed. Megan tried, as she always did, not to laugh at the term, which, broadly, meant fool in Irish parlance, and invariably brought puppetry to her American mind. The kid, seeing nothing funny about the word, rolled his eyes and went on. “But if they caught it all, there wouldn’t be any busts on land, would there? Look, lady, you seem nice, so lemme suggest something. Don’t do crime. It won’t end well for yis.”
Megan laughed again and handed him the fifty euros. “I think I’ll take that advice. Thanks for your help.” She climbed out of the rickshaw, then stopped, leaning on its shell. “Wait, one more thing. If I wanted to talk to one of those pharmacists who can’t count, where would you suggest I go?”
“I’d never say.” The driver shook his head violently. “That gets into territory I’m not going near. You’ll get yourself in trouble.”
“It was worth a shot.” Megan whacked the rickshaw shell in farewell and meandered north, toward the river, with the vague supposition that a less wealthy part of town would be the best place to find drug dealers. Then again, rich people had money for drugs, so she might be barking up the wrong tree. Her phone rang in her butt pocket—she’d tried on the knee-length shorts in the store to make certain the pockets were deep enough to hold the phone—and she took it out, glancing at the time before she answered the local, but unknown, number. “This is Megan.”
“Ms. Malone.” An American woman’s shaky voice came over the line. “This is Ellen Dempsey, Liz’s mother.”
Megan stopped short at the corner of College Green, a space that hadn’t actually been green for at least a century but did front Trinity College, a glorious old university founded by Elizabeth I. Traffic beeped and rumbled past, suddenly loud in Megan’s ears. She pressed her finger to her open ear, hearing her heartbeat rush. “Mrs. Dempsey? Is everything all right?”
“No,” Mrs. Dempsey wailed. “Liz has posted another blog!”
* * *
It took Megan, almost running, less than five minutes to backtrack up Grafton Street and over to the Shelbourne Hotel. She took the stairs up to the Dempseys’ room two at a time, her heart bursting in her chest as she knocked and, gasping, was given access.
Simon’s laptop computer—or Liz’s, more likely, because it was the one she’d used, the one that had the passwords to Liz’s blog saved—sat open on their desk. Mr. Dempsey slumped in front of it, his skin tones so grey, Megan feared for his heart. He lifted his gaze dully to Megan, then rose and moved away from the computer, but speech was apparently beyond him; it was Mrs. Dempsey, voice still quaking, who said, “We were reading the comments. So many of them are so lovely. She touched so many lives. But then—then—” She made a tremulous gesture at the computer and the chair. Megan sat down.
There had only been two vlogs from the USB stick left unpublished: this was one, the one from Newgrange, filmed the morning before she’d died. Vibrant and laughing, she looked into the camera, her voice full of cheer as she said, “We’re here for the wrong solstice—smile for the camera, Si!—” and turned it on her husband, who, embarrassed, waved and ducked his head, moving himself out of the lens’s view. It swung back around to Liz, who said, “Such a handsome guy shouldn’t be so shy about cameras. Anyway, this is Newgrange, one of the world’s oldest Neolithic—that means ‘stone age,’ aren’t I fancy?—sites, older than the pyramids or Stonehenge! And at the winter solstice, the sun spills right into what’s called the birthing chamb—oh, wait, did I make that up? I made that up. It’s a passage tomb, that’s what it is, that’s why it reminds me of a birthing chamber; anyway, it lights it up and apparently it’s simply amazing, buuuuuuuut you have to win a lottery to be here for the winter solstice. So it’s almost the summer solstice now, the other half of the year, and I’m just going to take you right in. . . .”
She did, too, going in with the camera ahead of her, so her viewers would see what she saw. It was the same video Megan had watched before—the same video, in fact, that she had stored on her own hard drive at home, not that she’d mentioned as much to Detective Bourke.
<
br /> The same video save for one thing.
This one had a sweet rendition of “Molly Malone” mixed over it, thin tones of an unsupported soprano singing in the background.
Megan closed the laptop and steepled her fingers in front of her mouth, trying to absorb—to imagine—what that meant. After a moment, she turned to the Dempseys, who huddled forlornly on the bed. “I have a copy of this video without the music. One of my company’s valets found a USB drive with backups of Liz’s files on it, this included.”
“Then who put the music on it? Why would they do that? And that awful song again—” Mrs. Dempsey shrank at her husband’s side. He put his arm around her but seemed unable to speak.
“I don’t know,” Megan said with quiet determination. “I don’t know, Mrs. Dempsey, but I’m going to find out. You’re still leaving tomorrow?”
“We’re supposed to,” Mrs. Dempsey whispered. “They released her body. We can fly her home, have a funeral . . . we didn’t want to wait. Even though Simon is . . . is . . .”
“Simon is in trouble.” Megan’s voice sounded hard to her own ears and she struggled to soften it. “Even if he’s innocent of Liz’s murder, it appears he’s been dealing prescription drugs illegally. And not just in the States but here, too.”
Mr. Dempsey’s face tightened with anger. “I knew it. I knew it!” Mrs. Dempsey only collapsed farther, her face in her hands. Peter continued above the soft sounds of her crying. “He always had either too much or too little money. Even before they got married he admitted to Liz that he’d had a gambling problem in college. He said he’d worked through it, but I’m sure he didn’t. I’m sure he kept it up, because Liz would sometimes mention that money had gone missing, but he’d always have an answer and she always wanted to believe him. Those real estate investments? He didn’t come from money. Those were a front. New doctors aren’t paid that well, not enough to throw around cash like he did, and I told Liz—she came to us worried about his finances, wondering how he could afford—I told her—but she didn’t want to believe me . . .”
