“This is nice,” I say. “You should see the dump Suffolk County Homicide has to work out of.”
“Ah, now, I’d have thought you’d have nothing but the best over there.”
“We’re a society in decline, Roly.”
“Ah, you know I’d say you are, now. The girls like to watch this Kardashian thing on the telly. That’s what made me realize.”
The Serious Crime Review Team has a small suite of rooms full of desks and phones and filing cabinets that I get just a tiny glance at before Roly hustles me into a conference room, which smells of fresh paint and cake. I sit there alone for a few minutes before he comes back with a young guy.
“Joey. This is Detective Maggie D’arcy. Maggie, this is a young up-and-comer, Detective Garda Joey Brennan. He’s going places.”
“Ah, yeah. Today I’m after going to the Spar.” He turns to me and makes an expert shift in tone. “You’re very welcome to Dublin. Sorry it’s under these circumstances.” He’s a wholesome-looking guy, maybe thirty, tall, with black hair, olive skin, and a country accent, softer than Roly’s, more stereotypically Irish. I shake his hand and he sits down across from me, setting a laptop on the table and spreading out paper files.
“When’s Griz getting here?” Roly asks.
“She texted she’s on her way,” Joey says. “Ah, there we are.”
A slight young woman with light blue eyes and brown hair cut in a short-banged pageboy comes in, holding a paper cup that’s leaking brown liquid from the top. She’s wearing jeans and boots and a trendy-looking corduroy jacket. “Hiya,” she says, grinning at us. “The Luas was packed.” The thought pops into my head that she looks more like an artist than a police detective, and I tell myself to fuck off. I hate it when people tell me I don’t “look like” a cop.
“This is Detective Garda Katya Grzeskiewicz,” Roly says. “That’s G-R-Z-E-S-K-I-E-W-I-C-Z. Most of us call her Griz because we’re a fuckin’ bunch of barbarians and we can say ‘O’Coughlihulihan’ but we can’t say ‘Grzeskiewicz.’”
“Apparently they can’t say ‘Katya,’ either,” she says, then grins. Her accent’s Dublin like Roly’s, but with a tiny bit of something else. “To be honest, now, I can barely say ‘Grzeskiewicz’ myself.”
I shake hands with her and Roly tells her and Joey to get the rest of the team into the conference room. While he does the introductions, I make a little tree in my notebook. Roly is the detective inspector in charge of the team, and a stocky dark-haired guy my age or a little older named John White seems to be the next most senior member, with a rank of detective sergeant. I write him in. Then there are Joey and Griz, who both have the rank of detective garda, which would be a detective on my squad. I know that all of Ireland is policed by the Garda Síochána, with local and regional stations having jurisdiction and specialist teams like Roly’s and technical bureaus and labs aiding in investigations as necessary. “The rest of the team is still out on other cases,” Roly says. “We’ll bring them in if we need to, but for now, you’re stuck with this shower. They have some questions to ask you based on their review of Erin’s case, if that’s all right.”
“Of course.”
Roly looks around the table, makes eye contact with each of them. I can feel the energy coming off him; he’s practically hovering over his chair at the head of the table, his right leg vibrating, his fingers making tiny, tight circles on the table in front of him.
He smiles briefly, then wipes it off his face and says, “Okay, Detective D’arcy is all yours. What are you going to ask her?”
9
1993
I met Roly Byrne for the first time at the Irishtown Garda Station. When we got back from Glenmalure, Emer and Daisy and I went straight to the station to report Erin missing and hand over the necklace. It seems impossible now that I didn’t even think about preserving it as evidence at the scene, but our only nod to procedure was to wrap it in Saran wrap—which Emer called “cling film”—when we got back to Dublin. It sat on the table in front of me while I gave all of Erin’s vital statistics to the young guard they sent out to talk to me. They said they would get in touch with the station down in Wicklow and contact the American embassy for me. The next day, they called and said we should come back to speak with the detectives assigned to the case.
We had been waiting for twenty minutes when Roly Byrne exploded into the room. We heard him first, an Irish accent I was starting to recognize as Dublin, fast and loud out in the hallway. The door slammed open and a young guy, only a few years older than me, with a thatch of blond hair and a sharp, hawky face, burst through it as though he’d been at a full run on the other side. He was wearing a dark suit that fit him well and he stopped in front of me. There was so much energy behind him that when he stopped, he swayed a bit on his black leather wingtips.
He thrust out a hand and said, “Detective Garda Roland Byrne.”
A tall woman in a navy pantsuit entered the room behind him and shut the door. She had short, bowl-cut dark hair and very pale skin, delicate reddish freckles spattered haphazardly across her nose and cheeks. She was broad-shouldered, and her black blazer, with wide lapels and large brass buttons, looked uncomfortable, like she’d stuffed her arms into it. She didn’t look happy to see me.
“This is my partner, Detective Garda Bernadette McNeely,” Byrne said. “Now, tell us about your … cousin, is it?”
I gave them the basics, Erin’s full name, age. I told them she had moved to Dublin in January, that she’d been working at the café and that it was the photographs in her room and my conversation with Conor Kearney that made me think she might have gone down to Glenmalure. Byrne nodded his head, but McNeely had a little scowl on her face, like she didn’t quite believe me.
When I was done, they asked Emer and Daisy about how Erin had ended up living in their house.
They were friends from back home in somewhere called Ballyconnell and they’d come to Dublin for college, computers, they said, at someplace called DCU. The house belonged to Emer’s aunt, an inheritance from her husband’s side of the family. “Sure, she’s got a house in Killashandra now, so she had no use of it,” Emer said. “She said we could have it if we wanted. We put a sign up in the corner shop for a roommate and Erin rang up.”
Erin had been living with them since January. Everything had seemed fine. She’d traveled without telling them before, and when they got home the evening of the sixteenth and realized that she was gone, they just figured she’d gone to Galway or something.
“So it wasn’t out of the ordinary for her not to tell you where she was going?”
“No,” Daisy said. “She’s a lovely girl. But we’re not in each other’s pockets. She doesn’t usually let us know where she is or what time she’ll be home or anything. She sometimes … stays out for the night.”
“So no one rang or anything that day?”
“Well, we were out all day. There weren’t any messages on the answerphone, anyway.”