I look over at Roly. “I know you have to be careful, Roly. I know you can’t tell me everything. But I want to help you work this case, however I can. I know things about Erin no one else knows. I was here. I have a sense of her. I found the necklace.”
I can see him getting ready to protest, to tell me that there are procedures and rules and protocols for a reason, that you have to keep a line between the family and the investigation, that you have to keep details back from the public.
I meet his eyes and stare him down. “If I can help you find the fucker who killed Erin, they might be able to find Niamh Horrigan before he kills her. I want to help you work this case, Roly. I want to do whatever I can.”
8
FRIDAY, MAY 27,
2016
I wake up at five a.m. in the hotel, disoriented, jet-lagged, a caffeine headache starting. Friday morning. I’m longing for Lilly. It’s been years since she snuck into bed with me in the morning, curling her little warm body against mine, tangling her fingers in my hair. It was a habit she got into after Brian moved out and she kept it up until she was ten or eleven. I can distinctly remember a morning when she came in and lay down next to me but didn’t snuggle herself around me.
I’m grieving for that Lilly now, wishing I could go back and have that small body next to mine one more time.
It’s what people say when someone dies: “I’d kill for one more minute with him.” I remember feeling that way about my mother after she died. Days after that last moment of stillness, it hit me that I’d never feel her hand on my head ever again. And because I’ve been thinking nonstop of Erin, I remember the feeling of her hand in mine. Let’s go, Maggie. Let’s run!
It’s the middle of the night in Alexandria, but I can’t stop myself. I call the house landline. Brian answers on the fourth ring, his voice full of sleep. “Yeah? Hello? Maggie?”
“Yeah, it’s me. Everything’s fine. I just missed her so much suddenly. I just wanted to make sure she’s—you’re both—okay.”
“Yeah, we’re fine. She’s good. Are you okay?” I can hear him coming awake, remembering. “Do they know anything?”
“They did find remains, but there’s a lot of work to do. And there’s this other woman missing. I don’t want to tell Danny yet, but can you keep an eye on him? If they get an ID, I’ll call you before I tell him so you can be with him. I’m worried about his heart.”
He takes a deep breath. He loves Danny. “Yeah, just let me know.”
“So everything’s good at school?”
“She got an A on her English paper. She was pretty happy about that. She let me read some of it and I could barely understand parts of it.” I can hear the pride in his voice and I feel a surge of appreciation for it, that I have someone to share my joy in her accomplishments with. “She’s a smart girl.”
“Yes, she is. Is she helping out with dinner and dishes and everything?”
“She’s been busy with school. I don’t mind. I haven’t had a lot of hours this week, so it’s okay.”
Good.” There’s a long silence, dead air across the wide, dark ocean. “Brian, thanks so much for this. I really appreciate it.”
I can’t tell if he’s sad or just tired, but he sighs again and says, “Of course, Mags. Anytime.”
I recognize the compulsion in my voice, figure he can hear it, too, but still I ask, “You’re setting the alarm, right? And you remember the combination for the gun safe?”
“Yeah, don’t worry. Everything’s good.”
“Okay, tell her I love her and I miss her a lot. Sorry to wake you. I’ll call again tomorrow when she’s up.”
Breakfast at the hotel is coffee and lukewarm oatmeal sprinkled with dried cranberries and walnuts. I check my cell phone to make sure Roly hasn’t called, and take a left out of the hotel, crossing College Street and walking under the main gate of Trinity College. I have the words memorized. Dr. Conor Kearney, Associate Professor of History, Room 4000, Arts Building, Trinity College Dublin 2.
I think about just finding the Arts Building and climbing the stairs to room 4000, but I don’t have the nerve. So I get a cup of tea at the little student dining hall and sit there, my heart pounding, looking around me, waiting for him to walk through the door. But of course he doesn’t. It’s all students and it occurs to me that there must be a separate place for the professors to have lunch.
I search on my phone and find it. The staff common room is upstairs. Back outside, I find a spot to sit on a low concrete wall across from the steps. The Book of Kells is around the corner and the tourists have already started streaming in. They’ve still got students doing tours. The campus looks exactly the same, except for how the students are dressed, the girls in jeans and high boots instead of short skirts and Doc Martens. My stomach is tight with anxiety, the coffee and tea and oatmeal sloshing around, sending nauseous jitters through my veins.
Out in the courtyard, it’s breezy. The air is cold but it carries the promise of sun and spring and a salty, peaty scent.
If this were a movie, I think, if this were a movie, he’d come down those steps right now and I’d look up and he’d look up and …
But it’s not a movie, and I sit there for thirty minutes getting thoroughly chilled, scrolling nervously through my phone and trying not to look at the door to the dining hall. Finally I decide to get a cup of tea and wander the city until it’s time to meet Roly and the team. It’s a city of new, translucent layers, I discover, as I walk through the lanes behind Grafton Street, down Duke Street and Lemon Street and around to Clarendon Street and across Dame Street down to Temple Bar. It’s the same and not the same, shinier, newer, but filled with shops and pubs that seem familiar, too. I find Essex Street and it takes me a few minutes to find the café. It’s been painted a tasteful gray and it’s now the Bistro Le Mer. The pubs seem the same, the bright red one and the yellow one and the blue one basically as I remember them. I walk back to the hotel by the quays. The Liffey is black and silver, the brick red faces of the buildings on the north side staring like a crowd of faces waiting in line.
* * *
I’m carrying two coffees when I meet Roly in front of the Westin at two.
“What is that, a latte? Lovely, lovely.”
“Your tune seems to have changed, huh? I remember when you thought fancy coffee was ridiculous.”
He grins and takes the coffee. “I am a man who is open to new experiences, D’arcy. Right, then, I’m going to introduce you to some of the lads, but you’re here to answer questions about Erin and help us find any links between these cases so maybe we can get this guy before he kills Niamh Horrigan. They know you’re a cop but I have to be very careful here. Capiche?”
“Capiche.”
“You all right, then?”
“Yeah, mostly. I called home at midnight, US time, just to check on Lilly. I think I’m more anxious than I realize.”
“Well, we should have something from the state pathologist’s office by tomorrow.”
Roly works out of a new extension on the back of the Pearse Street Garda Station, around the corner from the hotel. The offices are brand-new, modern, tastefully decorated. The chairs are even comfortable. Roly explains that members of the team spend some of their time here and some at local Garda stations, depending on which stage of a review they’re in.