“With all due respect, Chief, you haven’t been down there in a while. There’s something about these murders that scares the County to death. Even the friends I grew up with are afraid to talk. Not because of who I am, but because of who the killer is.”
Perelli grew still.
“What you’re telling me, Detective Kearney, is that the people in the County know who is committing these murders?”
“No,” Abbie said. “If they knew, the killer would be dead.”
“Exactly. Thank you. Thank you very fucking much. So what?”
“They know and they don’t know.”
Perelli threw up his hands. “I can’t … what does that mean?”
“Put it this way. If they don’t know who he is, they know why he is. They know where he came from. It has to do with what the Clan was up to. Something has come back, some old political fight, or some falling-out between the members.”
“I’m giving you seventy-two hours,” Perelli said in a conversation-ending tone.
“Seventy-two hours? You’re putting deadlines on my investigation now?”
“The mayor, the chief, and I agree that you’ve done good work here. You’ve established a link between the murders. But if the people won’t talk to you, you’re going to be severely hampered in what you can achieve.”
“That’s bullshit. I don’t need some Irish boy by my side to comfort the natives. That sends a bad message. They’ll go straight to whoever you send with me and I’ll be out in the cold.”
“Exactly where you are right now.”
Abbie strode over to Perelli’s desk. He watched her approach, his chin shoved down into his striped tie. She laid her fingers on the edge of his desk, like a cool and collected DA with all the facts on her side.
“Chief.”
She waited until he made eye contact.
“This killer has control of his agenda unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. He’s executing a plan and he’s not deviating from it. He’s already so far ahead of us that we’re barely able to understand what he wants. If you put someone fresh on this, he’ll finish his plan before we even know what hit us.”
Perelli stared at her with a pained look, as if he had a toothache. Abbie could tell that she’d just become his mother, his wife, another woman he didn’t want to listen to.
“Abbie, get something for me to wave in the mayor’s face. If you want backup, put some faces on this desk. Suspects. A chain of evidence. Enough with the ghost stories.”
He threw his right hand up in the air and let it slap back on the table, loud.
“Whatever the fuck you want to call it. Get me a living, breathing human being. Got it?”
“Will the killer do, or just anybody?”
Abbie was out the door before Perelli could react.
CHAPTER TWENTY
ABBIE CONSOLED HERSELF WITH A SUPER MIGHTY FROM THE MIGHTY TACO drive-thru and brought it back to headquarters. Z was at his desk as she sat down.
“Eating healthy, I see.”
“Word of advice. Don’t start with me today.”
“What happened?”
“Collins’s family clammed up. Wouldn’t even let me in the door. They’re taking the issue to the United Retard Irish Council, or whoever they expect to solve this thing. Damned voodoo Micks.”
Z shook his head.
“You’re going to tell me, ‘I told you so.’ ”
“Yeah,” he said. “I am.”
“What do you want me to do? Leave them to sort out their own dead, is that it?”
“Hell no. I’m just as frustrated as you are. I just think you’ve got to realize who you’re dealing with.”
“And who’s that?”
“Damned voodoo Micks. They don’t change.”
She sat back in her chair, pulled the burrito out of the bag and stared at it.
“You’ll never guess who’s guarding the widow Collins.”
Z looked up at her.
“Billy Carney.”
“No!” Z seemed genuinely shocked. “You thought he was dead for sure.”
Abbie took a bite of the burrito and nodded as she chewed. She could feel the nutrients pumping into her bloodstream, calming the rage. She really needed to eat better—and more often.
“He’s been reincarnated. As protection.”
Z shook his head. “Amateur bodyguards. Short life spans.”
Abbie nodded again.
Z got up and pulled on his heavy winter coat.
“I’m off.”
Abbie, lost in thought, nodded.
“Hold on,” she said.
Z turned.
“You’re right. We need to go around the County instead of hitting a brick wall there every time.”
Z spread his hands, saying What have I been telling you?
“Can you drop by Circuit Court for me? See who Marty Collins represented in the past, say, twenty years. Look for drug dealers, gang members, East Siders who look sketchy. Also, look for any County types he represented, anyone with a connection to the Gaelic Club. Maybe the link between our three victims is through a court case.”
“Should I pack a suitcase?”
“From what I remember in Miami, the court clerk can do a computer search by lawyer.”
“They do that in Miami? How nice. Here the records are probably six feet high and turning yellow.”
Abbie smiled. “Next time, lunch is on me, goombah.”
Z waved a hand and headed for the glass doors that led to the elevator.
She wiped the corner of her mouth with a napkin, set the burrito to the side, and whipped out her phone.
“Kearney.”
“It’s Dr. Reinholdt.”
“Yes, Doctor. What were you able to find out?”
“Well, it’s a pretty murky picture. There are quite a few possibilities. Are you sure you wouldn’t rather discuss this face-to-face?”
She rolled her eyes at Z’s empty cubicle.
“I’d love to, but I can’t.”
He sighed. “All right, then. The Clan na Gael is part of the IRA. There are no real distinctions in the context we’re discussing. The IRA laid its arms down in 1998 after the agreement with the British government. Many of its prisoners were released; its guns were turned in; its mission was effectively over. But of course 1921 repeated itself.”
“I’m sorry, Doctor, my knowledge of Irish history isn’t quite as sharp as yours. Please elaborate.”
“The IRA split, just as it did when Ireland first won its independence in 1921—without the six counties that now make up Northern Ireland. A faction didn’t recognize the agreement; they wanted all or nothing. So the IRA went to war with itself. The same thing happened about a decade ago. So today you have a rogue element—they call themselves the Real IRA, how original—still wearing the ski masks …”
Abbie stopped writing.
“Ski masks?”
“They’re called balaclavas in Ireland. Very popular with the boys. Lends a certain mystique to the kneecapping.”
“Okay, go on.”
“So the old IRA and the Real IRA are engaged in a low-level war for control. It’s resulted in quite a few dead bodies scattered all over the Republic and Northern Ireland.”
Abbie nodded. The idea of revolutionaries or terrorists or whatever you wanted to call them falling out with each other had already occurred to her. It fit the savagery of the crimes. But to reach all the way across the Atlantic and touch the County?
“Are you still there, Detective?”
“I’m here, Doctor. Please go on.”
“There’s more. The war with the British is still a live issue for the Real IRA. So they’re continuing to run guns into the country and raise money and buy plastic explosives. The whole gamut of terrorist infrastructure, you might say. They’ve even partnered with outfits like FARC in South America, sending their men over to train the rebels there and getting money and weapons in return.”
“And FARC runs drug
s.”
“Oh, they’re notorious for it.”
“Is it possible that the Real IRA is trying to open up a drug business in the States? Bringing a supply in through Canada, using their connections from the old fund-raising days?”
“It’s possible. Even some of the IRA members who laid down their arms couldn’t give up the taste for rebellion. Parts of the organization basically transformed itself into a criminal gang once the peace treaty was signed. Heroin in Belfast, cocaine in Limerick, it’s all run through the old revolutionary network.”
“Interesting,” Abbie said. “They had the transportation networks from gunrunning, they had the contacts in the underworld, and presumably they had money from their hardcore supporters.”
“Yes. I guess it’s not easy to become an insurance adjuster after you’ve been throwing bombs at police barracks.”
Abbie mm-hmmed and scratched a few final notes.
“Thanks for getting back to me.”
“I have nothing but time over here, Detective.”
Abbie checked her watch and decided a workout was in order. She jumped up, made a beeline for the elevator, and in twenty minutes was at her health club three blocks away. An hour on the treadmill and ten minutes each at three workout stations had her blood pressure percolating in her ears. A hunky guy on the abs cruncher watched her as she did shoulders, not even bothering to glance at the TV behind her. He had good hair and a rich guy’s smirk.
A steam shower brought her blood pressure the rest of the way down. On the way out of the club, she turned right and ducked into a Starbucks two storefronts down. She ordered a chai latte and reached into her bag to pay for it, pulling out her orange leather wallet.
Her cell buzzed as she pulled out the money. It was Z. “At County Clerk,” it said. “Get here now.”
Abbie walked into the County Clerk’s office tucked inside an old, castle-like building on Franklin Street that she’d always loved. It was cold enough to see her breath inside—she wondered if the city was having trouble paying its bills—so she kept her jacket on as she milled through the lawyers, frustrated citizens, and bond runners who were forming up lines. She checked her phone. No signal.
Damned Z, she said to herself. Why didn’t he tell me where in the building he was?
She ducked her head in three offices before stopping to think. She checked her watch. It was 11:45 p.m. She sighed.
“Ma’am,” she said, flagging down a passing guard dressed in a dark blue uniform with gold rope trim. “Where’s the cafeteria?”
The woman swiveled and pointed toward a door. “Two floors down, make your first left, then another.”
Abbie thanked the woman and headed to the stairs. When she pushed open the heavy wooden door two floors down, she made two lefts and smelled macaroni and cheese after the first one. She found Z sitting at the first table to the right in the near-empty cafeteria. He was nursing a coffee and eating a danish while he leafed through a six-inch-high stack of documents.
“Anything interesting?”
He looked up, then motioned with his coffee cup to the seat across from him.
“What’d I tell you about the stacks?”
“You’re going to get Cop of the Month. What’d you find?”
Z put down his coffee, placed the document he’d been reading to the left of the stack, and pulled a manila case folder from the top.
“This.”
Abbie flipped open the file and saw a mug shot of a man with burning black eyes and a six-day growth of dark beard.
“Seamus O’Murchu,” Z said, pronouncing the “ch” as a hard “k.” “Or ‘O-Mur-tchu.’ How the hell you say it I have no idea. In December 1980, he was caught coming across the Peace Bridge with a nine-millimeter tucked in his waistband.”
Abbie was reading the charge. “And Marty Collins took the case.”
“Yep. First call this guy makes. Must have had the number in his back pocket.”
“He was traveling on a British passport, resident of Clonmel in Northern Ireland. A record of arrests for intimidation, possession of a handgun …”
“And look who was driving the car.”
Abbie flipped ahead a page, then another. She began to read again.
“Jimmy Ryan.”
“None other.”
“Never charged, but he’s mentioned here in the arrest report. He said he’d gone up to Niagara Falls to do some gambling at the Indian casino when O’Murchu offered him twenty bucks for a ride back to Buffalo. O’Murchu claimed that he’d been cleaned out playing blackjack and couldn’t afford the bus back.”
Abbie looked up. “Z, that can’t be true. They only sell round-trip tickets on those bus coaches that go up there. You need proof that you can make it back to the United States before they let you in. The Canadian government didn’t want to be responsible for a bunch of broke gamblers.”
Z took a sip of his coffee and shook his head wonderingly. “How do you know this shit?”
“I had friends in high sch— Never mind, it’s not important. What’s important is that the guy lied.”
“And I’ll bet Jimmy Ryan knew it. Who goes up to Canada and gives a perfect stranger a ride back across a border? The guy could have been carrying heroin or his passport could have scanned for an outstanding warrant. Jimmy’s street-smart by this time, he’s not going to take that risk for twenty dollars.”
“You’re right. You think it was a meet?”
“Of course it was. He went up there to get this guy, and the idiot forgot about the gun he was carrying.”
She sat back in her chair. A bunch of lawyers walked into the cafeteria, arguing loudly about the hockey game the night before.
“This is August 1980. Jimmy’s mother said he started hanging out at the Gaelic Club right before he started at National Grid. When was that again?”
Z pulled a notebook out of his lapel pocket.
“Hold on, hold on. I have the interview with his boss here.”
Z licked his thumb and began flicking through pages.
“Nineteen eighty. He was hired in January.”
Abbie nodded. “So he’s been going by the Club by then. He’s got a record for minor drug offenses, small-time dealing, and I’m sure everyone there knew that; it’s impossible to keep something like that secret in the County. He has connections across the border. Then seven months later, he’s caught coming back with an armed IRA militant, who has Marty Collins’s number in his back pocket for emergencies. What does that tell you?”
“Jimmy’s in the Clan already.”
“And he’s their errand boy. Meeting their contacts and escorting them across the border.”
Z swirled his coffee in his cup, his shoulders hunched over. Abbie tapped the edge of the table.
“But for what?” she said. “A meeting? Were they setting up some kind of new drug route?”
“Could be.”
“It could be, but I’m not convinced. Look at where Jimmy Ryan lived; if there’s a house owned by a National Grid route-walker, it’s that. He didn’t have money for luxuries. His wife said he took out a second mortgage on the house just to pay for Catholic school for the kids. And Collins had money, but not drug distribution money. I want you to get his tax returns, see if they match up with his lifestyle.”
“Done.”
“If they were opening up Buffalo as a drug entryway to the U.S., don’t you think they would have lived better? Don’t you think Jimmy Ryan, from all we know about him, would have splurged on a fishing boat, or a vacation home up in Crystal Beach? But he didn’t have money like that for twenty years. And not to hear one whisper of his drug deals, not one? The County’s good at keeping secrets, but not that good.”
“Guns?”
“Same problem. If the Clan was exporting guns through Canada and across the Atlantic, where’s the money?”
“Maybe they were doing it for the cause.”
The face of Jimmy Ryan’s mother popped into Abbie’s mind. The prid
e in her boy was practically shining out of the woman’s face. Had Jimmy been involved in wholesaling cocaine to western New York, would her eyes have been glowing with motherly pride? Would she have accepted his death so easily?
And then there was Billy Carney’s transformation from a has-been to a sleek young gangster. She knew Billy; he’d been looking for a role to play ever since he tossed his baseball glove in the back of his closet. Fronting for a drug outfit? It was dirty, unheroic. It didn’t scan.
But running guns for the IRA? In the County, that would earn respect. A great deal of respect.
“Let’s think about what we know. We know the killer is hunting members of the Clan na Gael. We know the Clan is or was involved in supporting the cause of the IRA. Billy Carney said there were four members; two are dead. The Clan isn’t cooperating, and we can assume they’re hunting the killer, too. We know that Jimmy Ryan was bringing something across the border and there’s an IRA connection. We know Jimmy had a past with drugs. And we know the killings have been very well thought out and highly personal.”
“There’s the ski mask.”
“Right. He wears a mask. But we don’t know why. Is he protecting his identity against cameras and possible eyewitnesses, like any skel who’s going to rob a 7-Eleven? Or is he protecting it because people in the County would know his face?”
“He could just be cold. My fucking pipes froze last night.”
“He’s not just cold, Z.”
“My head is starting to hurt, which means it’s time to stop thinking. What else?”
“The monkeys.”
“Dead end. I checked with the manufacturer like you asked. Production started in 1968. They made millions of ’em. If you throw a stick on Genesee Street, you’re going to hit three people who played with them as a kid.”
“But it gives us a glimpse into motive. It’s personal. More than that, it feels—”
Z winced. He hated when she used that word in a professional context.
“It feels biographical,” she said, leaning in. “The murders involve the killer’s past in some way. Those toys were worn down with use. Someone loved them. Let’s put it this way: It could date the origin of the motive.”
Z hunched over and stared angrily into Abbie’s face.
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