“I’ve done as much nosing around as I could over the years,” I tell her. “After she left my uncle, she didn’t leave any tracks. I checked Social Security, DMV, marriage and death certificates. I couldn’t find anything. A few years after Erin went missing, my uncle had to admit to me that they’d never actually gotten married, so I wondered if she had a different name. He told me that she loved shrimp—she always ordered it when they went out to dinner—and that she used to tell him about going to the beach in somewhere called Sherries or Serries. My instinct is that Erin never found her, but obviously I can’t be sure.”
“Skerries. It’s a beach town north of the city. I’d say that’s what it was. I was wondering if maybe there was someone connected to Brenda Donaghy,” Griz says. “A brother or a friend or … I don’t know. Maybe it was when Erin went looking for her mother that she met the fella who … who killed her or who she’s with. Maybe he’s the same guy who killed Katerina Greiner. Maybe he’s our suspect for the others, too. I don’t know. We know who the rest of our suspects are. Like you said, maybe there’s someone here who we don’t know about yet.”
“It’s a good theory, Griz.” I can feel my pulse speed up a little. She’s right. If Erin made contact with Brenda or with her family in Ireland, then there’s a whole pool of known associates we haven’t identified yet.
“All right,” she says. “I’m going to put together something we can post up near Skerries. It’s worth a try, sure. Here’s the other thing you asked for—as part of the last review, we checked homicides and missing persons files in the Republic and up north, looking for patterns. There were a couple of disappearances near Newry that were being looked at as part of a pattern around 2006, but two of the women turned up years later and one was killed by her husband. He’d taken the body to a friend’s garage and they buried it at a junkyard.”
She lays the papers down on the desk and I flip through them: There’s a printout of unsolved homicides in Ireland and the UK: two teenage girls who went missing in Donegal in the ’70s, an unsolved murder of a forty-three-year-old woman in Cork. A woman raped and murdered in Limerick. Another woman raped and murdered in Limerick. A teenage boy in Tuam.
On the UK lists, Griz has highlighted the ones up north, the Newry ones and some unsolved murders of women in Belfast and Antrim. She’s crossed out some of the murders, ones she’s labeled “sectarian” and then ones in England, Scotland, or Wales. These are endless, lists of geographically linked murders or disappearances—five disappeared and then murdered women in East London, three teenagers murdered in a car in Manchester, four young women who’d gone missing in Croydon over ten years, their bodies found a couple of weeks after they’d disappeared; the murders of three women hiking near Snowdon Mountain in Wales; on and on and on. It strikes me that Ireland really is a lot safer than most other places in the British Isles. It seems important somehow.
It’s usually someone known to the victim.
Griz turns on the television for the news at one. Someone brings in ham sandwiches for us and we eat while we watch. They’re expanding the search in Glenmalure, around where they found the button, and the newspapers are full of pictures of Niamh Horrigan’s family, her mother tearfully pleading for anyone with any information to come forward. She’s been missing for eleven days.
We get back to work.
* * *
“Hang on,” Griz says. I look up from my files, my eyes throbbing from the focused effort over so many hours.
She has my accordion file emptied out on the table and she’s sorting pieces of paper into individual folders. “What have you got?” I ask her.
“Well, look. I was going through all these receipts and things and there’s one that I … well, look.” She pushes over an AIB bank receipt. I read it carefully. It looks like Erin changed $100 worth of traveler’s checks and got back 70 Irish punts. It shows the exchange rate on the day she changed them. It looks just like the other receipts that I found with Erin’s things at the house. As far as I remembered, she’d had them in the zippered pouch she’d used to hold all her financial documents. I’d looked through a lot of it when I was in Dublin and then I’d looked through them again when the boxes Emer and Daisy had packed had arrived in the US. I’d kept all the receipts together, but there hadn’t been anything very interesting there.
But I see why Griz picked this one out.
“The date is the eighteenth of September, 1993,” she says. “In Dublin.”
“You’re right. I didn’t notice it before because they all looked the same. Griz, this is a good catch.” I stare at the receipt. “You know what this means, right?”
Griz’s eyes are wide. “She came back to Dublin. She came back, she changed money, and she went back to the flat and left this there,” she says. “Why? To get something? To meet someone?”
“Yeah.” My mind is going a hundred miles an hour. This could explain why it seemed like she took a lot of clothes for a day or two. She didn’t, but she came back to the house to get more clothes because she knew she was going to be gone for a while.
“But why didn’t the roommates tell us that?” Griz asks.
“Because they weren’t there. They were mostly out during the day. They hadn’t checked her room so they wouldn’t have known if anything was missing. They would have had no way of knowing she came back. Can you find me the statements for Daisy and Emer?”
She finds the file. “Here.” Daisy and Emer both signed statements saying that they were out all day on the sixteenth. They came home that evening and found Erin gone. They were around the house on the seventeenth, but she didn’t come home. Then, my memory is right. Daisy and Emer said they were out all day on the eighteenth. They’d gone shopping on Grafton Street and then met some friends at a pub and hadn’t gotten home until late Saturday night.
I say, “So she was in Glenmalure on the sixteenth and the morning of the seventeenth. And she was still in Dublin on the eighteenth.”
“But what about the bus time on the piece of paper?” Griz asks. “Why did she have the bus time if she wasn’t going somewhere on the seventeenth?”
It hits me. “What if she was meeting someone at the bus station? It wasn’t so she could take a bus, it was so she could pick someone up?”
“That’s good,” Griz says. “That’s really good.”
“But who was she meeting and where did she sleep the night of the seventeenth?”
“I don’t know,” Griz says. “We should ask Roly. They must have interviewed the neighbors. Did anyone see her on the eighteenth?”
“Let’s check.” We find the interview reports and read through the door-to-doors on Somerset Road. It looks like Bernie did most of them, and her notes indicate that they talked to all the residents of the street, as well as the surrounding streets. No one saw anything on the seventeenth or eighteenth.
“I’ll see if I can find clerks who worked at the bank then who might remember her,” Griz says. We both know it’s a long shot.