I look at the map again. There’s something there, some pattern I’m not seeing. All night, I scan my notes, trying to arrange them into some order that will make sense.
When I sleep, I dream of Erin, Erin running through the woods, someone after her. I am her; I can feel the cool damp of the air in the trees and then I’m falling, tripping, and when I turn, I see someone looming over me and his face is familiar, his name almost on my lips, but then I’m rising up through sleep and wheezing to wakefulness again in my bed in the hotel and I’ve forgotten his face, forgotten the name.
39
TUESDAY, JUNE 7,
2016
Roly calls at seven. I’m still in bed, staring at the ceiling, and I jump up and scramble for the phone. “Roly? What is it? What did Wilcox say? Did you interview Conor?”
I hear traffic noise on the other end, the echo of his car phone system. “Hang on,” he says. “Can you be downstairs in thirty minutes? Around the corner by Morelands?”
“Yeah, I guess, but what’s going on? Won’t the reporters be there?”
“They’ve moved on. There’s a lot happening. Be outside in thirty minutes, D’arcy.”
I’m dressed in jeans and a sweater and boots, standing on the sidewalk around the corner from the Westin and holding two lattes when he pulls up to the curb.
He waits until we’re heading north on O’Connell Street to take a sip and say, “They arrested Robert Herricks this morning. Your tip was a good one. They went to talk to him in Baltinglass last night.” Before I ask he says, “Yeah, they let Griz in on it. I’m not sure what it was that tipped them off, but he had some very disturbing videos on his computer and they talked to the young one who used to work at the golf course. She said he raped her, right around the time Teresa McKenny went missing. She was embarrassed back then, ashamed to tell us what happened, so she tried to point us in the right direction by saying he’d been spying in the loos. But we fucking missed it. We didn’t ask the right questions.”
He looks over at me. “I’m suspended until further notice. Wilcox told me to stay home and cut my grass for the foreseeable future. He ordered Griz and Joey and John White to go back to the reviews they were working on before all this started.”
“Roly, I’m so sorry. It’s all my fault.”
“Yeah, well. I accept your apology.” He doesn’t look mad, just resigned. And tired. But there’s something else there, too. Something to the set of his jaw, the way he’s gripping the steering wheel as he drives in and out of rush hour traffic.
“So where are we going?”
“We’re going to visit Bernie.”
* * *
The nursing home is in Drogheda, up by the border with Northern Ireland, an hour or so from Dublin. The drive is boring, motorway and fields. Roly seems to want to be quiet so I listen to the Top 40 radio he puts on and look out the window at the flashing green pasture, the distant spires and gray roofs of towns off the motorway.
Finally I say, “Why do you want to see Bernie?”
“I haven’t visited in a while,” he says. “It’s been too busy.”
“Why else?”
He takes a deep breath. “I tell her everything about my cases. I go up and I tell her about what’s going on and she gives me … not advice, exactly. But it helps to tell her. I haven’t gone since before we found Erin’s scarf. I want to ask her what she thinks about the receipt, about Katerina Greiner.” He looks over at me. “It’s seventeen days, D’arcy. If Niamh’s not already dead, then she’s about to be. It feels like we’re getting there, like something’s going to break. I’m off the case, but I’m not giving up. I want to talk to Bernie.”
“Will she be able to tell us anything?”
“She’s got this breathing thing,” he says. “It makes it really hard for her to talk, so I try to ask questions she can answer with a nod or a simple yes or no.”
“Is her mind okay? Can she remember things?”
“Oh, she can remember things. That’s what makes it so fucking tragic. Her mind is basically fine, but her body’s falling apart. She gets pneumonia because she can’t clear her airways. She almost died last year.”
“What happened, Roly? You only told me she was shot as part of an operation that went wrong.”
“She was on the drugs squad. You know that. And they were going after some fella who had been bringing heroin from Spain and dealing out of some businesses in Crumlin. Bernie was convinced someone was passing information to him. He kept managing to stay just out of their way. She tried to figure out who it was and wasn’t able to. Anyway, they knew there was a shipment coming in and they went to one of the businesses and got ambushed. She got shot in the back. Bullet tore into her spinal column. For quite a long time, they didn’t think she was going to survive.”
“Did they ever figure out who was leaking?”
“No.” His hands are gripping the steering wheel. The veins in his neck stand out against his pale skin. I let him be for a bit.
“So this receipt,” he says finally. “Griz thinks it shows that something happened when Erin was down in Wicklow. She came back to Dublin and got money and then she took off again. Who was she meeting? Who was she going with?”
“Niall Deasey?” I say. “You know what I thought back then. He definitely recognized me, or thought he did. He didn’t say, ‘Oh, didn’t we meet at a pub once?’ That would be the normal thing to say, right? And he didn’t.”
“Yeah, but he’s a professional gangster, like. They don’t give anything away, D’arcy. We checked him out. He has a great alibi: He was in hospital in London when June Talbot was killed, getting his appendix out.”
“What about Teresa McKenny? He was still living here and operating the garage when she was killed.”
“The ex-wife was pretty sure there was nothing funny going on. You could tell how much she hated him, so I think she might have been only too happy to give him up if she’d had something on him. But she didn’t.”
I watch the fields flash by outside the window. “Okay, but let’s say he had something to do with Erin’s disappearance. Let’s say he recruited her to transport something, drugs, money, guns, whatever, between Ireland and the US. Let’s say something happened and he killed her. Then what’s the connection to Katerina Greiner?”
“She’d been missing for a while. Maybe she’d been with him. Maybe she got wrapped up in something dangerous, too.”
I look over at Roly. “Drugs stuff? Prostitution? Arms smuggling?”
“Maybe,” he says. “We didn’t find any evidence of that, but…”
“But what about Niamh Horrigan and the other two? If he was recruiting Erin or something, if it was something related to Northern Ireland, then what about now? Does that stuff go on anymore? After ninety-eight? The location where Katerina Greiner was found has to be significant, right?”
“I don’t know, D’arcy. It’s hard to explain to ya. This thing, it’s different now. There’s peace. Yeah, there are fellas who still get up to it. Up north, yeah, there’s always the politics. But especially down here, it’s more drugs, organized crime these days.” Roly slows the car. There’s a sign up ahead for the exit to Drogheda and Donore. The M1 continues on to Belfast. “Will we?” he says quietly to himself.