Niamh Horrigan, 25, brown hair, blue eyes, Irish. Disappeared May 21, 2016, near Glenmalure, likely from road. Button from clothing found near road.
Then I start adding the persons of interest who orbited around each victim. Katerina Greiner doesn’t have many. Erin’s I’ve already done. Teresa McKenny had quite a lot: family, friends, the people she worked with at the golf course. June Talbot had fewer: her boyfriend, his family, her friends from work. For Niamh, Griz prints out the emailed list they’re working with down in Wicklow. All of hers are in Galway: family, friends, former boyfriends, the kids she taught and their families. I spread my sheets of paper out and look them over.
“So, the adhesive,” I say. “He kept them somewhere he was worried about being overheard. He had to duct tape their mouths. He has a place to bring them, but he can’t risk them being overheard.”
“Yeah, we had that, too,” Griz says. “We told Regan’s team. When they did the house-to-houses they had that in mind.”
“At the same time, though,” I say, thinking out loud, “the repeated sexual assaults. He had somewhere safe to keep them, somewhere he wasn’t too worried about being caught. He was able to rape them whenever he wanted.”
Griz doesn’t say anything. I look up and meet her eyes. “I know,” I say. “It’s awful. He has a place. A place where he can keep them, where he can do what he wants. That’s why we haven’t had any sightings of Niamh. She’s somewhere secure.”
I think of the outbuildings that Roly and I saw when we visited Drumkee, but Griz says, “They’ve searched all around there. They’ve visited every house. Twice. Probably three times by now. But it could be further out, it could be halfway across the country.”
“Yeah, but he’s got a territory. See if you can get a sense of those house-to-houses. Anything they might have missed.” I stare at the map they’ve brought me, with the locations of the abductions and the bodies, the places where Erin had visited and where Niamh was hiking. I draw a circle around the dots, Baltinglass to Aughrim to Glenmalure to Glendalough and back to Baltinglass. It’s a neat triangle, with the long green shape of the mountains in the center. “There’s some pattern here, some routine, that we’re just not seeing.”
Griz looks skeptical. They’ve spent years looking for patterns. “I know,” I say. “If there was one, someone would have found it. It’s just … his vehicle. He’s got some way of getting them into his vehicle. When Roly and I visited the spot, I felt like I could see it. A woman walking on a desolate road. A vehicle pulls over, she approaches it. For some reason she trusts him. Suddenly she realizes, but it’s too late.”
“We checked gardaí, mail deliverers, ambulance drivers. We’ve been over and over it.”
“Yeah. I know.” I don’t tell her what I’m thinking. What if they trusted the vehicle because there was a woman in the passenger seat?
“All right,” I say. “I’m going to take a look at all the persons of interest, see if anyone gets my Spidey sense going. Could you make a list of any eyewitness statements or surveillance video from all of the abduction sites? Try to keep the window fairly narrow—say, the day of the abductions? I know you guys probably tracked down anyone you saw, but I just want to see if there’s anything that jumps out.”
“Of course,” Griz says. “Good luck with the Spidey sense.”
* * *
We work all afternoon, Griz diligently going back and forth between the files and her computer, searching for the dates of the abductions and listing any witness statements from those days, then collating them with all the vehicles and pedestrians caught on video on the days of the abductions.
I start reading through interviews with persons of interest who were interviewed by the Guards. The ones for Niamh Horrigan aren’t all transcribed and filed yet, but I read about all of the people interviewed right after Teresa McKenny went missing and then everyone they spoke with after her body was found. Most of the interviews are straightforward, everyone saying that she never would have taken off, that something must have happened to her, then an interview with an ex-boyfriend who seems to have a strong alibi for the day she disappeared.
There’s an interview with a groundskeeper at the golf course where she worked that I read twice. When asked if he knew Teresa McKenny and how she seemed before the disappearance, he said, “She was a little minx. If she got into trouble, it were her own fault.”
“Griz,” I say. “Can we look for anything in the system on the groundskeeper at the golf course where Teresa McKenny worked? Robert Herricks. Anything at all. I don’t like how he describes her. It’s not in keeping with the other descriptions of her and it just gets my back up for some reason.”
“Sure. I’ll get going on it.”
I have the rest of the Teresa McKenny statements and then June Talbot and then all of Erin’s to review. I flip through the files of transcribed Garda interviews. Emer Nolan. Daisy Nugent. Conor Kearney. Maggie D’arcy. I can feel my brain starting to slow. When I look at my phone, it’s almost eight. “Find anything?” I ask Griz.
“Not really. I got everything in order, though. Do you want to take a look?”
“A quick one. I’m getting tired.” I skim the list. “Is this the list of vehicles?”
“Yeah. That’s Teresa McKenny. So June eighteenth, 1998. No CCTV there on the R747 at that point, but there was one camera, a homeowner’s private security job, a bit further along the road, closer to Woodenbridge. I guess the guards down in Wicklow thought to get that and they tried tracing all of the vehicles that passed the camera that day. They didn’t get all of them; the angle was weird and they couldn’t see all the number plates. And obviously, they didn’t know if those cars continued along the road to Aughrim. But this is the list.”
I scan the descriptions: gray Ford, white delivery van, blue Mercedes. The words swim together, their meaning not making its way to my brain.
“Okay,” I say. “What else?”
“Niamh Horrigan. We’ve got loads of CCTV footage from Saturday the twenty-first. We have her leaving the hostel in Glendalough. We have her passing a camera at the visitor’s center and walking towards the trails. A couple of walkers saw her on the paths, here and here.” She points to a spot on the map of the Wicklow Way. “So according to the statements from the walkers, she made it all the way to Mullacor. Then of course the button suggests she made it off the trails and onto the road.
“They did an analysis of all the CCTV around Glenmalure and on the main roads leading to and from the crossroads and in the other direction, to Laragh. There are about twenty vehicles that are in the right time frame. There aren’t any matches with the McKenny CCTV footage. Nobody who raised any red flags on the registrations. Here they are.” She hands over a typed list. I start scanning it: Red 2015 Ford Fiesta. 2008 Gray Skoda. White Citroën Dispatch. Skoda panel van. Blue Volkswagen. It looks typical for a Saturday.
“One of them must be it, though, right?”
“Well, maybe. Someone could have approached from a driveway between the site and where the cameras are. Some of them only drove to the crossroads. Some didn’t go as far as Glenmalure from the other direction. Or so they say. They were able to track down some of the drivers. Here they are. Everyone checked out okay.” I scan the statements. I was driving to see my mother in Templerainey. Our drivers make regular deliveries on that route every Saturday. I only drove to Greenane and back.