“The young ones she lived with have moved on,” Roly tells me. “One of ’em works for one of these software yokes down by the canal.”
“Yeah?” It’s something I’ve been thinking about, the silences, the whispered conversation in Irish. “I always felt there was something they weren’t telling us.”
Laura stretches her feet out toward the fire. “You mean, like they knew something about what happened?”
“No, just … I don’t know. Something they were holding back.”
“Funny, Bernie thought so, too,” Roly says. “She was convinced they knew something, but we never got anything out of them.”
“How is she really?” I ask after a moment.
“She’s at a place near Drogheda, a sort of nursing home.” Roly looks away. “It’s grim, I’m telling you, D’arcy.”
“He visits every week or two,” Laura says. “He drives up there and spends an hour or two with her. Everyone else has stopped going.”
One of the boys shouts from the other end of the house.
“We’ll know a lot more tomorrow, anyway,” Roly tells me.
“It must have been awful for you and your uncle all these years,” Laura says. “Not knowing.”
“Yeah, that’s the worst of it. He hasn’t gotten over it, you know? He can never move past it.” I think about how on some level, all of us have been stuck back there in the mountains—me, Roly, Uncle Danny, Jessica, Emer and Daisy, probably even Conor and Laura and Brian and Lilly.
Roly reaches over to pat Laura’s knee. He looks at me and suddenly it’s twenty-three years ago and he’s walking ahead of me on the sidewalk, looking back over his shoulder, his blue eyes meeting mine. “I hope we’ll have something soon,” he says. “I’d like to do that for your family.”
13
SATURDAY, MAY 28,
2016
In the morning, I find myself a quiet table in the hotel’s dining room and spread out my notes and laptop and a piece of paper on which I’ve written “Erin.”
When I first joined Suffolk County Homicide, I worked under a guy named Len Giacomo. He was a legend in the Suffolk County P.D., and by the time I met him, he’d solved more cases and had more convictions under his belt than anyone who’d ever worked homicide on Long Island. Len was a true intellectual; he liked opera and modernist literature and wine and he and his wife traveled a ton, to Rome and Thailand and Guatemala, and any topic of conversation that came up, Len had something to say about it. But he wasn’t showy, and when I look back at how he worked, it was the fact that he was completely unbiased that was probably his greatest asset. He’d go into a case with an absolutely open mind; he told me once that he had a strategy for this, a meditation technique he’d learned on an ashram in India. He would write the victim’s name in the center of a piece of paper and as the case went on, he would slowly add pertinent information to the paper, with everyone he met surrounding the victim so he could see the relationships, the dynamics.
He taught me this technique when we were working a domestic homicide case together, and over the years I’ve refined it for my own purposes.
I start by writing in “Emer Nolan” and “Daisy Nugent” up at the top. I can’t find anything on Daisy, but a few minutes of Googling Emer’s name turns up the software company Roly mentioned. Under “About Us” there’s a picture of Emer and a biography and email. I send her a message, saying that I’m in town and I’d love to see her, just to catch up. Then I go back to my diagram. I write in “Conor Kearney,” “Hackman O’Hanrahan Jr.,” and “Niall Deasey.” Then I add in “other girls at the café,” “neighbors,” and “Jessica, Chris, Lisa, Brian,” and, because Len taught me well, I write in my own name and Uncle Danny’s and my dad’s, too. Everyone in her orbit. We were all in her orbit.
I’m about to put the paper away when I think of another Len lesson. Don’t get ahead of yourself. I make a little circle at the bottom of the paper and write “?” The unknown person, the man I’ve come to think of as the gray shadow. Who is he?
Back in my room, I turn on the television and catch the noon news. There’s a short update on the Niamh Horrigan case. It sounds like they’re still searching the hills and doing door-to-doors in the area. The Army Reserve is helping, along with various mountain rescue and hiking groups. Niamh’s parents have offered a ten thousand–euro reward for information leading to her safe return. That’s what they talk about on the television. What they don’t talk about is everything else that’s going on, the interviews that Galway police must be doing with anyone who ever knew Niamh, the frantic scouring of sex offender databases, the tearing apart of every social media account or electronic device Niamh’s ever used.
“Niamh has been missing for a week now and her family and friends are starting to ask the Gardaí why there has been so little progress on finding her. The Gardaí say every measure is being taken to locate Niamh, but given the fates of the other women who have disappeared under similar circumstances, the family feels time is growing short to find Niamh safe and well,” the announcer says.
“In a related development, the cousin of Erin Flaherty, the American student who disappeared in 1993 and is widely believed to be the first victim of the so-called Southeast Killer, has arrived in Dublin as the Gardaí examine the remains discovered in Wicklow this week to determine if they are Flaherty’s.”
My cell rings and I switch off the television. It’s Roly. I can hear that there’s something as soon as he says, “D’arcy? Where are you?”
“At the hotel. What? Have you identified her? Is it Erin?”
I know from the way he hesitates. I can feel the hotel room shrinking around me. My vision narrows. I take a deep breath.
“It’s more complicated than that,” he says. “It’s not Erin. But they found something with the remains. Something of hers.”
* * *
What they found is a student ID card from the year Erin had spent as a student at C.W. Post. It’s laminated, which is why it’s held up all this time. Roly meets me in the hotel lobby and takes me into the bar to show me a photograph of the card.
Erin Mary Flaherty, it reads. DOB 3/14/1970. The photograph is a little cloudy, but I remember the frosted pink lipstick she liked to wear. She has on the leather jacket; I can just see the collar and top button in the photo. I nod. It’s hers. As if there’s any doubt.
“But who is it? Whose remains are they?” I’m practically shouting at him. “If it’s not her, Roly, who the fuck is it? And how did the ID and the scarf get in there with her?”
He glances over at me. His eyes are lined. He looks about a hundred years old. “I’m heading over to talk to the state pathologist. We hope she’ll be able to give us something more.”
I walk him outside. He’s parked in an illegal space around the corner from the hotel. I know I shouldn’t, but I can’t help myself, and I say, “Let me come with you. I may be able to help. You’re going to have to review missing persons reports. You’re going to have to figure out who that was who was buried up there, look for links to the other victims, to Erin. I can help with that. I know how to do it.”