There’s nothing but overgrown gorse behind the house. When I put my face to a window, I just see a bare floor, dirty walls.
“It looks fairly abandoned,” I say, peering through the window. “I don’t think anyone’s been here for years.”
Roly nudges me over and peers through the window, too. “Yeah, you’re right. It was probably a bit far out for the door-to-doors.”
“We could ask someone at one of those houses back there. See if anyone knows.”
Twenty-three years.
It’s started raining now, but the air is warm. It feels like spring. Something’s blooming up in the hills and the scent drifts down to us. I can hear water trickling somewhere, snowmelt and gravity creating little streams running to the sea. There’s a half-moon casting a little light on the hills. I turn around and look back east toward the mountains. Something tugs at my brain. Erin on the trail. She looks up. She sees him.
“There’s no one here,” I tell Roly. “I don’t think this is it.”
“Ah, sure. D’arcy, there’s something there that we’re missing. Something obvious.”
44
TUESDAY, JUNE 7,
2016
We sit in the car in the dark, trying to decide where to go next.
“What are you thinking?” Roly asks me. “About Niall Deasey?”
“If Erin was back in Dublin by the eighteenth, he could have met her then and…” Roly knows what I’m thinking. And brought her here to the house in Ballyclash, where they could have hidden out until the searches for her were over.
And then…?
And then…?
“I guess you should be getting back home,” I say. “Laura’s probably wondering what happened to you.”
“Ah, she’s all right. She knows by now that if she’s not getting a visit from the uniforms, everything’s grand. The house got me thinking. Somehow he got them back to wherever he got them back to. His vehicle. If it was one of those cars on the CCTV, then why—” He stops talking.
“What?”
“D’arcy,” he says slowly. “Do you remember any of the names of the people whose cars were captured on the CCTV? You take any notes?”
“You mean the day Teresa McKenny was taken?”
“Yeah. And June Talbot.”
“No. You told me not to copy any files.”
He makes a funny face at me. “I’m an eejit.” He dials Griz’s number, puts her on speaker.
When she answers she says, “Jaysus, Roly. It hasn’t been an hour. I’m not a fuckin’ mind reader. Give me a few—”
“It’s not that, Griz. I need you to see if you can find the contacts for the vehicles caught on CCTV for the McKenny and Talbot disappearances. Horrigan, too. Names, numbers if you have them. I know what I’m asking. You’ll have to go into the files.”
She doesn’t hesitate. “Okay. I’ll be back to you as soon as I can.”
“Let’s get out of this car while we wait,” he says. He’s pulled over into a little verge. We get out and walk over to the edge of a field.
“I’m not going to tell you what I’m thinking yet,” he says. “I’ll tell ya in a minute.”
“Okay.” I take a pack of gum out of my coat pocket and hand him a piece. “Moments like these, I wish I was a smoker, you know?”
“Ah, no,” he says. “It’s a nasty habit. Fucking ruins your clothes.”
I laugh. “You and your clothes.”
“Let me ask you something, D’arcy. Your big case. When did you know he was the one? That Pugh sicko?” I take a deep breath. Roly looks over at me. “You don’t have to.”
“No. I have this … It’s okay.” I take another breath. I lean against the hood of the car. “I didn’t know for sure until we arrested him, but it was like a … dawning sense of the patterns, I’d say. You know the basics?” He nods. “The detail in the medical examiner’s report had been bugging me. The victims had powerful tranquilizers in their systems and we’d looked at doctors, nurses. Someone mentioned they might be something a vet would have on hand. I just started looking at it, making lists, dropping pins on maps, thinking, putting it together. The way it was reported, that the FBI didn’t believe me—it wasn’t like that. They were just following up on other leads and I started on this thing. I just started working it. It took a year. I just kept picking at it, like a loose thread. I kept working at it until I had a sense of him. When Andrea Delaurio went missing, I knew, I just fucking knew, Roly. That was when I was sure it was him. I knew him by then, you see. I had a feel for his brain. When they got him, he had her in the trunk. He’d had her for hours and hours. He was going to the beach, to kill her and dump her. She was drugged up so he could…” I can’t breathe now. I can feel my lungs seizing up. I wheeze, slow it down, get ahold of myself.
“It’s okay, you don’t have to tell me.” I can hear the alarm in his voice. He puts an arm around me and pulls me in. I lean into him for a second and then I say, “We got him. She was in bad shape but we got her to the hospital. We got him, Roly.”
There’s a long silence and then I say, “She got out of the hospital, she went home, not to her house, to her parents’ place. I went and saw her. We interviewed her a few times. I was spending all my days with him, in interrogation rooms, trying to get him to talk. He claimed she’d asked him to do it, to give her the drugs and everything. She was working as an escort. He said he’d been about to take her home.”
I don’t want to go on. This is the part that makes me freeze up, that takes my breath and paralyzes me.
“Yeah?” Roly knows there’s something coming.
The clouds part for a moment and the moon washes the field with pure, pearly light. I whisper, “Her mother called me to tell me. Because I’d saved her life, she said. I still can’t believe she had it in her to do that. They found her in the bathtub. She’d cut herself, taken aspirin, warm water. She knew what she was doing.”
“Ah shit, D’arcy. I didn’t know, like. That wasn’t in the stories. Ah, D’arcy. No.”
We’re silent for a long time.
Finally I say, “They got him for the kidnapping, but that was all they could do. Without her to testify. There was no physical evidence to link him to the other women, even though we knew. He served two years and then he got out, last year, right around the time the leaves turned. I thought, right after, that maybe it was meant to be, you know? If Erin hadn’t gone missing, maybe I wouldn’t have become a cop. Maybe I wouldn’t have saved Andrea. It gave it a purpose. But then … Anyway, I keep tabs on him, I have a couple guys in Suffolk County PD who help me, but he’s out there. He’s fucking out there, Roly, and there’s not much I can do.”
Roly doesn’t say anything. He just pulls me in and lets me rest against him.
And then, we both see it, something moving at the other end of the field. “Shhh. Look,” Roly says, touching my shoulder. He’s pointing at something long and low, moving slowly against the darkness of the trees, and then it turns and we can see the flash of moonlight in its eyes.