“Are the phone records in there?” I ask, pointing to the file. “I always wondered who called the house on the sixteenth and if there was anything interesting there.”
“Not really,” Griz says. “There was a call from a pay phone on O’Connell Street that morning, but I think the roommates thought it was one of their friends.” She leafs through the papers in the file. “Yeah, it’s in Emer’s statement. She figured it was a friend of hers calling about homework.”
“They never talked to the friend, though?”
“Doesn’t look like it.” She looks up at me and raises her eyebrows. “Was there anything else in those boxes?” she asks. “I checked our files and I didn’t see anything, but your uncle ended up with everything from her room, right?”
“Actually, I have them in my basement. I’ll call my ex-husband later and see if he can look. But I’m pretty sure I went through everything.” I look at the receipt. “Wow. Nice work, Griz. We figured she’d come back to Dublin but we didn’t have proof. But what was she up to?”
Griz doesn’t say anything.
“I’ll say it if you won’t,” I say. “It looks like she was getting ready to run.”
* * *
We gather everything together and Griz starts putting things back in the files. We have two main points for further follow-up: Robert Herricks and Erin’s AIB receipt. There’s likely nothing in either of them that can help Niamh, but it feels good to have something, scraps, even if they lead nowhere.
When we’re done, I tell Griz I’m taking her for a pint. We walk down to the Palace Bar, blinking at the late evening sunlight. Everything looks throbbing with color and light after our conference room prison. It’s Wednesday night, early summer on the air, and the streets are filling with early drinkers and shoppers.
“Did you always know you wanted to be a guard?” I ask her once we’re settled in against a wall with our pints.
She laughs. “It was about the last thing I thought I’d be.”
“So, what happened?” I’m curious about how her family ended up in Ireland, curious about how she became a guard.
“We came here when I was eleven,” she says. “There were a lot of Poles, lots of Czechs coming over then. The EU, you know. There were jobs. Everyone thought it would be easy since Ireland’s a Catholic country. It wasn’t easy. My father couldn’t find work and went back. My mother had lots of cleaning work but she hated it. I did well at school but I never felt Irish, even though I worked my arse off to get rid of my accent. There was a nun who was pushing me to apply to university. There was some scheme to get recent immigrants to take the leaving cert and go for university places and they held an information night. The Guards were there, too. I’d always loved detective novels and shows. My mam and I used to watch Law and Order.” She grins. “I imagined myself as the detectives, not the solicitors. So I guess there was something there. But joining the Guards, it was totally impulsive. I didn’t even know you could be one if you weren’t a huge big blondy lad from the country with an Irish name. But I signed up that night. Best decision I ever made.”
“You’re good,” I tell her. “You’re really good. I’d hire you to my team in about two seconds. But Roly would kill me.”
She grins. “I don’t know, America might be fun. Thanks.”
“What’s it like being … not Irish? Not originally Irish.”
“Ah, better than it used to be. Ireland’s changed. You wouldn’t know it looking at that lot.” She points back toward Pearse Street. “Though Joey’s ma is from Pakistan and there was a guy who was born in Nigeria in my class at Templemore. It’s getting better. I think it’s harder being a woman, honestly. What about you?”
I take a nice long sip of my Guinness, starting to relax, just a little. “Before … Erin, I had thought I was going to get my graduate degree in literature. But there was something about all of that, about the frustration of not finding her. I wanted to know, you know? And it drove me crazy that we didn’t know. There were these two cops, detectives on the organized crime squad, and they came into my uncle’s bar all the time and I loved listening to them discussing their cases. I asked them how someone could become a detective, and it turned out that the academy was giving the test that summer. Like you, I just … jumped. It was hard when I was in uniform, when I had a baby. The fucking sexism. It’s better now, though. Too.” I smile. “The homicide squad is my place. I love it there.”
Griz gets another round. When she’s back, she looks at me seriously and says, “Can I ask you a question? When you found Anthony Pugh, did you know? Was it a feeling, an instinct? How did you do it?”
I feel the panic start. His name makes it especially bad, I think because it must bring back the aftermath, the days and weeks when his name was in the paper every day, every time I turned on the radio. I take a deep breath. “I just worked it. That’s all I can say. The FBI thought he was a doctor or a nurse, someone with a healthcare background, because of the drugs they found in his victims’ blood. But I wondered about him being a veterinarian instead. I caught his last victim. I went out and saw the scene; he dumped them on the beach. Her name was Maria. Anyway, I stuck with the vet angle, mostly because no one else was and it was a place I could get some space, you know? I made lists of all the vets on Long Island, figured out where they lived.”
She’s watching me with wide eyes, completely focused on my story. This happens a lot, with other cops; people hear my name, make the connection with the Anthony Pugh case, and they want to hear the story. I hate it.
“I started mapping it out, like, ‘This guy lives here, that guy lives there, this is his route to work. This is where he drives every day.’ And I looked at where the women had been picked up, where they’d been dumped, and I started to see it, on the map. Dr. Anthony Pugh. He had a vet practice in a town called Northport and he lived about ten miles away, and it just … it just made sense. I asked some other vets about him. Most of them said they’d heard he was good, but this one young woman, just out of vet school, she said she’d treated a dog, the owner said she’d taken him to Pugh for a stomach problem but the dog had ended up with a broken leg. The vet told me that she’d heard a rumor about him operating on animals without anesthesia.”
Griz looks horrified.
“I started driving by his office on my way home. It was out of the way. He liked to drive around kind of aimlessly, you know, and that made me wonder. Anyway, a call came in that a woman was missing. Her friend didn’t want to give her name—they were both working as escorts—but she said that her friend Andrea had been picked up by this guy and hadn’t come back when she was supposed to. I knew. I just knew. I put his plates out, a description of his car. A uniform in King’s Park called it in. He was behind the car and the guy was driving erratically.”
I have the line memorized for times I have to tell the story, and now I say it even though all I want to do is jump up off my stool and run out into the street and keep running until I can’t remember the stale smoke smell of his car, the way he never looked at me or the guys arresting him, the way the drugs made her look frozen: “I got there just as they were cuffing him. She was in the trunk, in bad shape, but still alive. He was heading for the beach.”