'The Mountains Wild' Chapters 7 & 8

 

We spend a couple of hours back at the site. The skull and shovel — spade —are four feet under, not far from where they found the scarf. Roly goes up with the techs and I wait in the car. When he comes back he tells me they’re doing another large-scale search for Niamh Horrigan tomorrow. The family will be coming back from Galway. Everyone’s worried about coordination, jurisdiction. Roly, who they know is working the cold cases, is putting everyone on edge, now that they’ve found the remains.

“What do you want to do?” Roly asks me once we’re back in the car. “I can drop you at the hotel. I can take you home to Laura. She’d love to make you a cup of tea and some toast and put you right. Sure, I don’t like thinking of you in a hotel room.”

I watch the orange vests, still moving up in the hills.

I imagine the excavation site suddenly, a dark hole, up among the trees. I push it away but something else comes to me, unbidden — Erin’s face, alive, laughing, her blue eyes fixed on me, her brown curls falling across her face, running away from me on a beach. Sun on the water. The smell of suntan lotion and salt. Erin’s nose peeling from her sunburn. I push that away, too.

I look over at Roly. “I know you have to be careful, Roly. I know you can’t tell me everything. But I want to help you work this case, however I can. I know things about Erin no one else knows. I was here. I have a sense of her. I found the necklace.”

I can see him getting ready to protest, to tell me that there are procedures and rules and protocols for a reason, that you have to keep a line between the family and the investigation, that you have to keep details back from the public.

I meet his eyes and stare him down. “If I can help you find the sicko who killed Erin, they might be able to find Niamh Horrigan before he kills her. I want to help you work this case, Roly. I want to do whatever I can.”  

 

 

Chapter 8

Friday, May 27, 2016  

 

I WAKE UP AT 5 A.M. in the hotel, disoriented, jet-lagged, a caffeine headache starting. Friday morning. I’m longing for Lilly. It’s been years since she snuck into bed with me in the morning, curling her little warm body against mine, tangling her fingers in my hair. It was a habit she got into after Brian moved out and she kept it up until she was ten or eleven. I can distinctly remember a morning when she came in and lay down next to me but didn’t snuggle herself around me.

I’m grieving for that Lilly now, wishing I could go back and have that small body next to mine one more time.

It’s what people say when someone dies: “I’d kill for one more minute with him.” I remember feeling that way about my mother after she died. Days after that last moment of stillness, it hit me that I’d never feel her hand on my head ever again. And because I’ve been thinking nonstop of Erin, I remember the feeling of her hand in mine. Let’s go, Maggie. Let’s run!

It’s the middle of the night in Alexandria, but I can’t stop myself. I call the house landline. Brian answers on the fourth ring, his voice full of sleep. “Yeah? Hello? Maggie?”

“Yeah, it’s me. Everything’s fine. I just missed her so much suddenly. I just wanted to make sure she’s — you’re both — okay.”

“Yeah, we’re fine. She’s good. Are you okay?” I can hear him coming awake, remembering. “Do they know anything?”

“They did find remains, but there’s a lot of work to do. And there’s this other woman missing. I don’t want to tell Danny yet, but can you keep an eye on him? If they get an ID, I’ll call you before I tell him so you can be with him. I’m worried about his heart.”

He takes a deep breath. He loves Danny. “Yeah, just let me know.”

“So everything’s good at school?”

“She got an A on her English paper. She was pretty happy about that. She let me read some of it and I could barely understand parts of it.” I can hear the pride in his voice and I feel a surge of appreciation for it, that I have someone to share my joy in her accomplishments with. “She’s a smart girl.”

“Yes, she is. Is she helping out with dinner and dishes and everything?”

“She’s been busy with school. I don’t mind. I haven’t had a lot of hours this week, so it’s okay.”

Good.” There’s a long silence, dead air across the wide, dark ocean. “Brian, thanks so much for this. I really appreciate it.” I can’t tell if he’s sad or just tired, but he sighs again and says, “Of course, Mags. Anytime.”

I recognize the compulsion in my voice, figure he can hear it, too, but still I ask, “You’re setting the alarm, right? And you remember the combination for the gun safe?”

“Yeah, don’t worry. Everything’s good.”

“Okay, tell her I love her and I miss her a lot. Sorry to wake you. I’ll call again tomorrow when she’s up.”

Breakfast at the hotel is coffee and lukewarm oatmeal sprinkled with dried cranberries and walnuts. I check my cell phone to make sure Roly hasn’t called, and take a left out of the hotel, crossing College Street and walking under the main gate of Trinity College. I have the words memorized. Dr. Conor Kearney, Associate Professor of History, Room 4000, Arts Building, Trinity College Dublin 2.

I think about just finding the Arts Building and climbing the stairs to room 4000, but I don’t have the nerve. So I get a cup of tea at the little student dining hall and sit there, my heart pounding, looking around me, waiting for him to walk through the door. But of course he doesn’t. It’s all students and it occurs to me that there must be a separate place for the professors to have lunch.

I search on my phone and find it. The staff common room is upstairs. Back outside, I find a spot to sit on a low concrete wall across from the steps. The Book of Kells is around the corner and the tourists have already started streaming in. They’ve still got students doing tours. The campus looks exactly the same, except for how the students are dressed, the girls in jeans and high boots instead of short skirts and Doc Martens. My stomach is tight with anxiety, the coffee and tea and oatmeal sloshing around, sending nauseous jitters through my veins.

Out in the courtyard, it’s breezy. The air is cold but it carries the promise of sun and spring and a salty, peaty scent.

If this were a movie, I think, if this were a movie, he’d come down those steps right now and I’d look up and he’d look up and ...

But it’s not a movie, and I sit there for thirty minutes getting thoroughly chilled, scrolling nervously through my phone and trying not to look at the door to the dining hall. Finally I decide to get a cup of tea and wander the city until it’s time to meet Roly and the team. It’s a city of new, translucent layers, I discover, as I walk through the lanes behind Grafton Street, down Duke Street and Lemon Street and around to Clarendon Street and across Dame Street down to Temple Bar. It’s the same and not the same, shinier, newer, but filled with shops and pubs that seem familiar, too. I find Essex Street and it takes me a few minutes to find the café. It’s been painted a tasteful gray and it’s now the Bistro Le Mer. The pubs seem the same, the bright red one and the yellow one and the blue one basically as I remember them. I walk back to the hotel by the quays. The Liffey is black and silver, the brick red faces of the buildings on the north side staring like a crowd of faces waiting in line.

 

***

 

I’m carrying two coffees when I meet Roly in front of the Westin at two.

“What is that, a latte? Lovely, lovely.”

“Your tune seems to have changed, huh? I remember when you thought fancy coffee was ridiculous.”

He grins and takes the coffee. “I am a man who is open to new experiences, D’arcy. Right, then, I’m going to introduce you to some of the lads, but you’re here to answer questions about Erin and help us find any links between these cases so maybe we can get this guy before he kills Niamh Horrigan. They know you’re a cop but I have to be very careful here. Capiche?”

“Capiche.”

“You all right, then?”

“Yeah, mostly. I called home at midnight, US time, just to check on Lilly. I think I’m more anxious than I realize.”

“Well, we should have something from the state pathologist’s office by tomorrow.”

Roly works out of a new extension on the back of the Pearse Street Garda Station, around the corner from the hotel. The offices are brand-new, modern, tastefully decorated. The chairs are even comfortable. Roly explains that members of the team spend some of their time here and some at local Garda stations, depending on which stage of a review they’re in.

“This is nice,” I say. “You should see the dump Suffolk County Homicide has to work out of.”

“Ah, now, I’d have thought you’d have nothing but the best over there.”

“We’re a society in decline, Roly.”

“Ah, you know I’d say you are, now. The girls like to watch this Kardashian thing on the telly. That’s what made me realize.”

The Serious Crime Review Team has a small suite of rooms full of desks and phones and filing cabinets that I get just a tiny glance at before Roly hustles me into a conference room, which smells of fresh paint and cake. I sit there alone for a few minutes before he comes back with a young guy.

“Joey. This is Detective Maggie D’arcy. Maggie, this is a young up-and-comer, Detective Garda Joey Brennan. He’s going places.”

“Ah, yeah. Today I’m after going to the Spar.” He turns to me and makes an expert shift in tone. “You’re very welcome to Dublin. Sorry it’s under these circumstances.” He’s a wholesome-looking guy, maybe thirty, tall, with black hair, olive skin, and a country accent, softer than Roly’s, more stereotypically Irish. I shake his hand and he sits down across from me, setting a laptop on the table and spreading out paper files.

“When’s Griz getting here?” Roly asks.

“She texted she’s on her way,” Joey says. “Ah, there we are.” A slight young woman with light blue eyes and brown hair cut in a short-banged pageboy comes in, holding a paper cup that’s leaking brown liquid from the top. She’s wearing jeans and boots and a trendy-looking corduroy jacket. “Hiya,” she says, grinning at us. “The Luas was packed.” The thought pops into my head that she looks more like an artist than a police detective, and I tell myself to stop. I hate it when people tell me I don’t “look like” a cop.

“This is Detective Garda Katya Grzeskiewicz,” Roly says. “That’s G-R-Z-E-S-K-I-E-W-I-C-Z. Most of us call her Griz because we’re a bunch of barbarians and we can say ‘O’Coughlihulihan’ but we can’t say ‘Grzeskiewicz.’ ”

“Apparently they can’t say ‘Katya,’ either,” she says, then grins. Her accent’s Dublin like Roly’s, but with a tiny bit of something else. “To be honest, now, I can barely say ‘Grzeskiewicz’ myself.”

I shake hands with her and Roly tells her and Joey to get the rest of the team into the conference room. While he does the introductions, I make a little tree in my notebook. Roly is the detective inspector in charge of the team, and a stocky dark-haired guy my age or a little older named John White seems to be the next most senior member, with a rank of detective sergeant. I write him in. Then there are Joey and Griz, who both have the rank of detective garda, which would be a detective on my squad. I know that all of Ireland is policed by the Garda Síochána, with local and regional stations having jurisdiction and specialist teams like Roly’s and technical bureaus and labs aiding in investigations as necessary. “The rest of the team is still out on other cases,” Roly says. “We’ll bring them in if we need to, but for now, you’re stuck with this shower. They have some questions to ask you based on their review of Erin’s case, if that’s all right.”

“Of course.”

Roly looks around the table, makes eye contact with each of them. I can feel the energy coming off him; he’s practically hovering over his chair at the head of the table, his right leg vibrating, his fingers making tiny, tight circles on the table in front of him.

He smiles briefly, then wipes it off his face and says, “Okay, Detective D’arcy is all yours. What are you going to ask her?”

 

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