“No, chum. I don’t. I sound like I don’t give a damn whether there’s anything there or not. If we pick up nothing, what does that prove? The animal could have been scared off, could have got killed by a predator, could be hibernating… Even if it never existed, that doesn’t put this on Pat. Maybe the noises were something to do with the subsidence, or the plumbing, and he overreacted and read too much into them. That would make him a guy under stress, which we already knew. It wouldn’t make him a killer.”
Richie didn’t argue with that. He leaned back on a desk, pressing his fingers into his eyes. After a moment he said, more quietly, “It’d tell us something. That’s all I’m asking for.”
The argument, or fatigue, or Dina, had heartburn rolling up into my throat. I tried to swallow it down without grimacing. “OK,” I said. “You fill out the request form. I’ve got to head, but I’ll sign it before I leave—better have both our names on there. Don’t go requesting any strippers.”
“I’m doing my best here,” Richie said, into his hands. There was a note in his voice that caught at me: something raw, something lost, something like a wild call for help. “I’m just trying to get this right. Man, I swear to God, I’m trying.”
Every rookie feels like the world is going to stand or fall on his first case. I didn’t have time to hand-hold Richie through it, not with Dina out there, wandering, shooting off the kind of fractured strobe-light glitter that draws predators from miles around. “I know you are,” I said. “You’re doing fine. Double-check your spelling; the Super’s picky about that.”
“Yeah. OK.”
“Meanwhile, we’ll forward this link to Whatshisname, Dr. Dolittle—he might spot something in there. And I’ll have Kieran check out Pat’s account on this board, see if he sent or received any private messages. A couple of these guys sounded like they were getting pretty invested in his story; maybe one of them got into some kind of correspondence with him, and Pat gave him a few more details. And we’ll need to find the next discussion board he went to.”
“There mightn’t be a next one. He tried two boards, neither one of them was any use… He could’ve given up.”
“He didn’t give up,” I said. On my monitor, cones and parabolas moved gracefully in and out of one another, folded in on themselves and vanished, unfurled and began their slow dance all over again. “The man was desperate. You can take that any way you want to, you can say it was because he was losing his marbles if that’s what you want to believe, but the fact remains: he needed help. He’d have kept looking online, because he had nowhere else to look.”
* * *
I left Richie writing up the request form. I already had a mental list of places to look for Dina, left over from the last time and the time before that and the time before that: her exes’ flats, pubs where the barman liked her, dive clubs where sixty quid would get you plenty of ways to fry your brain for a while. I knew the whole thing was pointless—there was every chance in the world that Dina had caught a bus to Galway because it looked so pretty in some documentary, or entranced some guy and gone back to look at his etchings—but I didn’t have a choice. I still had my caffeine tablets in my briefcase, from the stakeout: a few of those, a shower, a sandwich, and I would be good to go. I slapped down the cold little voice telling me that I was getting too old for this, and much too tired.
When I put my key in the door of my flat, I was still running through addresses in my head, working out the fastest route. It took me a second to realize that something was wrong. The door was unlocked.
For a long minute I stood still in the corridor, listening: nothing. Then I put down my briefcase, unsnapped my holster and slammed the door open.
Debussy’s Sunken Cathedral chiming softly through the dim sitting room; candlelight catching in the curves of glasses, glowing rich red in dark wine. For one incredible, breath-robbing second, I thought: Laura. Then Dina uncurled her legs from the sofa and leaned forward to pick up her wineglass.
“Hi,” she said, raising the glass to me. “About bloody time.”
My heart was slamming at the back of my throat. “What the fuck?”
“Jesus, Mikey. Take a chill pill. Is that a gun?”
It took me a couple of tries to get the snap done up again. “How the hell did you get in here?”
“What are you, Rambo? Overreact much?”
“Christ, Dina. You scared the shit out of me.”
“Pulling a gun on your own sister. And here I thought you’d be happy to see me.”
The pout was a mock one, but the glitter of her eyes in the candlelight said to be careful. “I am,” I said, bringing my voice down. “I just wasn’t expecting you. How did you get in?”
Dina gave me a little smug grin and shook her cardigan pocket, which jingled merrily. “Geri had your spare keys. Actually, you know something, Geri has the whole of Dublin’s spare keys—Little Miss Reliable, sorry, Mrs. Reliable, isn’t she exactly who you’d want checking your house if you got burgled on holiday or something? Like if you were making up the person who has everyone’s spare key, wouldn’t she be exactly like Geri? God, you should’ve seen it, give you a laugh: she’s got them lined up on hooks in the utility room, all nice and labeled in her best handwriting. I could’ve robbed half her neighborhood if I’d felt like it.”
“Geri’s going out of her mind worrying about you. We both were.”
“Well, duh, that’s why I came here. That and to cheer you up. You looked so stressed the other day, I swear if I had a credit card I’d have booked you a hooker.” She leaned over to the table and held out the other wineglass. “Here. I brought you this instead.”
Either bought out of Sheila’s babysitting money, or shoplifted—Dina finds it irresistible to try and trick me into drinking stolen wine, eating hash brownies, going for a ride in her latest boyfriend’s untaxed car. “Thanks,” I said.
“So sit down and drink it. You’re making me nervous, hovering like that.”
My legs were still shaking from the bang of adrenaline and hope and relief. I retrieved my briefcase and closed the door. “Why aren’t you at Geri’s?”
“Because Geri could bore the tits off a bull, is why. I was there, what, like a day, and I’ve heard every single thing that Sheila and Colm and Thingy have ever done in their lives. She makes me want to get my tubes tied. Sit down.”
The faster I got her back to Geri’s, the more sleep I would get, but if I didn’t show some appreciation for this little scene, she would blow a fuse until God knew what hour of the morning. I dropped into my armchair, which folded around me so lovingly that I thought I would never be able to get up again. Dina leaned over the coffee table, balancing herself on one hand, to give me the wine. “Here. I bet Geri thought I was dead in a ditch.”
“You can’t blame her.”
“If I’d been feeling too crap to go out, then I wouldn’t have gone out. God, I feel sorry for Sheila, don’t you? I bet whenever she goes to her friends’ houses, she has to ring home every half hour or Geri’ll think she’s been sold into slavery.”
Dina has always been able to make me smile even when I’m trying my best not to. “Is that what this is in honor of? One day with Geri, and all of a sudden you appreciate me?”
She curled back up in the corner of the sofa and shrugged. “I felt like being nice to you, that’s what it’s in honor of. You don’t get enough taking care of, since you and Laura split up.”
“Dina, I’m fine.”
“Everyone needs someone to take care of them. Who’s the last person that did anything nice for you?”
I thought of Richie holding out coffee, smacking Quigley down when he tried to bad-mouth me. “My partner,” I said.
Dina’s eyebrows shot up. “Him? I thought he was some itty-bitty baby newbie that couldn’t find his arse with both hands. He was probably just licking up to you.”
“No,” I said. “He’s a good partner.” Hearing myself say the word sent a quick wave of warmth through me. N
one of my other trainees would have argued with me over the camera: once I said no, that would have been the end of that. Suddenly the argument felt like a gift, the kind of shoving match that partners can have every week for twenty years.
“Hmm,” Dina said. “Good for him.” She reached for the wine bottle and topped up her glass.
“This is nice,” I said, and a part of me meant it. “Thanks, Dina.”
“I know it is. So why aren’t you drinking that? Are you scared I’m trying to poison you?” She grinned, little white cat teeth bared at me. “Like I’d be obvious enough to put it in the wine. Give me some credit.”
I smiled back. “I bet you’d be very creative. I can’t get pissed tonight, though. I’ve got work in the morning.”
Dina rolled her eyes. “Oh God, here we go, work work work, shoot me now. Just throw a sickie.”
“I wish.”
“So do it. We’ll do something nice. The Wax Museum just opened up again, do you know in my whole entire life I’ve never been to the Wax Museum?”
This wasn’t going to end well. “I’d love to, but it’ll have to be next week. I need to be in bright and early tomorrow, and it could be a long one.” I took a sip of the wine, held up the glass. “Lovely. We’ll finish this, and then I’m going to take you back to Geri’s. I know she’s boring, but she does her best. Cut her some slack, OK?”
Dina ignored that. “Why can’t you throw a sickie tomorrow? I bet you’ve got like a year of holidays saved up. I bet you’ve never thrown a sickie in your whole life. What are they going to do, fire you?”
The warm feeling was vanishing fast. I said, “I’ve got a guy in custody, and I’ve got till early Sunday morning to either charge him or release him. I’m going to need every minute of that to get my case sorted. I’m sorry, sweetheart. The Wax Museum’s going to have to wait.”
“Your case,” Dina said. Her face had sharpened. “The Broken Harbor thing?”
There was no point in denying it. “Yeah.”
“I thought you were going to swap with someone else.”
“Can’t be done.”
“Why not?”
“Because it doesn’t work that way. We’ll catch the Wax Museum as soon as I’ve wrapped things up, OK?”
“Fuck the Wax Museum. I’d rather stab myself in the eyes than go stare at some stupid doll of Ronan Keating.”
“Then we’ll do something else. Your choice.”
Dina shoved the wine bottle closer to me with the toe of her boot. “Have more.”
My glass was still full. “I have to drive you to Geri’s. I’ll stick with what I’ve got. Thanks.”
Dina flicked a fingernail off the edge of her glass, a sharp monotonous pinging, and watched me under her fringe. She said, “Geri gets the papers every morning. Of bloody course. So I read them.”
“Right,” I said. I pushed down the bubble of anger: Geri should have been paying more attention, but she’s a busy woman and Dina is a slippery one.
“What’s Broken Harbor like now? In the photo it looked like shit.”
“It is, pretty much. Someone started building what could have been a nice estate, but it never got finished. At this stage, it probably never will. The people living there aren’t happy.”
Dina stuck a finger in her wine and swirled it. “Fuck’s sake. What a totally shitty thing to do.”
“The developers didn’t know things were going to turn out like this.”
“I bet they did, too, or anyway they didn’t care, but that’s not what I meant. I meant what a shitty thing to do, getting people to move out to Broken Harbor. I’d rather live in a landfill.”
I said, “I’ve got a lot of good memories of Broken Harbor.”
She sucked her finger clean with a pop. “You just think that because you always have to think everything’s lovely. Ladies and gentlemen, my brother Pollyanna.”
I said, “I’ve never seen what’s so bad about focusing on the positive. Maybe it’s not cool enough for you—”
“What positive? It was OK for you and Geri, you got to go hang out with your friends; I was stuck sitting there with Mum and Dad, getting sand up my crack, pretending I was having fun paddling in water that practically gave me frostbite.”
“Well,” I said, very carefully. “You were only five, the last time we went there. How well do you remember it?”
A flash of blue stare, under the fringe. “Enough that I know it sucked. That place was creepy. Those hills, I always felt like they were staring at me, like something crawling on my neck, I kept wanting to—” She smacked the back of her neck, a vicious reflexive slap that made me flinch. “And the noise, Jesus Christ. The sea, the wind, the gulls, all these weird noises that you could never figure out what they were… I had nightmares practically every night that some sea monster thing stuck its tentacles in the caravan window and started strangling me. I bet you anything someone died building that shitty estate, like the Titanic.”
“I thought you liked Broken Harbor. You always seemed like you were having a good time.”
“No I didn’t. You just want to think that.” For a second, the twist to Dina’s mouth made her look almost ugly. “The only good thing was that Mum was so happy there. And look how that turned out.”
There was a moment of silence that could have sliced skin. I almost dropped the whole thing, went back to drinking my wine and telling her how delicious it was—maybe I should have, I don’t know—but I couldn’t. I said, “You make it sound like you were already having problems.”
“Like I was already crazy. That’s what you mean.”
“If that’s how you want to put it. Back when we were going to Broken Harbor, you were a happy, stable kid. Maybe you weren’t having the holiday of a lifetime, but overall, you were fine.”
I needed to hear her say it. She said, “I was never fine. This one time I was digging a hole in the sand, little bucket and spade and everything all adorable, and at the bottom of the hole there was a face. Like a man’s face, all squashed up and making faces, like he was trying to get the sand out of his eyes and his mouth. I screamed and Mum came, but by then he was gone. And it wasn’t just at Broken Harbor, either. Once I was in my room and—”
I couldn’t listen to any more of this. “You had a great imagination. That’s not the same thing. All little kids imagine things. It wasn’t till after Mum died—”
“It was, Mikey. You didn’t know because when I was little you could just put it down to ‘Oh, kids imagine stuff,’ but it was always. Mum dying had nothing to do with it.”
“Well,” I said. My mind felt very strange, juddering like a city in an earthquake. “So maybe it wasn’t Mum dying, exactly. She’d been depressed all your life, off and on. We did our best to keep it away from you, but kids sense things. Maybe it would actually have been better if we hadn’t tried to—”
“Yeah, you guys did your best, and you know what? You did a great job. I hardly remember being worried about Mum ever, at all. I knew she got sick sometimes, or sad, but I didn’t have a clue that it was a big deal. It’s not because of that, the way I am. You keep trying to organize me, file me away all neat and make sense, like I’m one of your cases—I’m not one of your fucking cases.”
“I’m not trying to organize you,” I said. My voice sounded eerily calm, artificially generated somewhere far away. Tiny memories fell through my mind, blooming like flakes of flaming ash: Dina four years old and shrieking blue murder in her bath, clinging to Mum, because the shampoo bottle was hissing at her; I had thought she was trying to dodge having her hair washed. Dina between me and Geri in the back of the car, fighting her seat belt and gnawing her fingers with a hideous worrying sound till they were lumpy and purple and bleeding, I couldn’t even remember why. “I’m just saying of course it was because of Mum. What else would it be? You were never abused, I’d swear to that on my life, you were never beaten or starved or—I don’t think you ever even got a smack on the backside. We all loved you. If it wasn
’t Mum, then why?”
“There isn’t any why. That’s what I mean, trying to organize me. I’m not crazy because anything. I just am.”
Her voice was clear, steady, matter-of-fact, and she was looking at me straight on, with something that could almost have been compassion. I told myself that Dina’s hold on reality is one-fingered at best, that if she understood the reasons why she was crazy then she wouldn’t be crazy to begin with. She said, “I know that’s not what you want to think.”
My chest felt like a balloon filling with helium, rocking me dangerously. My hand was clamped on the arm of my chair as if it could anchor me. I said, “If you believe that. That this just happens to you for no reason. How do you live with that?”
Dina shrugged. “Just do. How do you live with it when you have a bad day?”
She was slouching into the corner of the sofa again, drinking her wine; she had lost interest. I took a breath. “I try to understand why I’m having a bad day, so I can fix it. I focus on the positive.”
“Right. So if Broken Harbor was so great and you have all these great memories and everything’s so positive, then why is it wrecking your head going back there?”
“I never said it was.”
“You don’t need to say it. You shouldn’t be doing this case.”
It felt like salvation, to be having the same old fight, back on familiar ground, with that slantwise glitter waking in Dina’s eyes again. “Dina. It’s a murder case, just like all the dozens of others I’ve worked. There’s nothing special about it, except the location.”
“Location location location, what are you, an estate agent? This location is bad for you. I could tell the second I saw you the other night, you were all wrong; you smelled funny, like something burning. Look at you now, go look in mirrors, you look like something shat on your head and set you on fire. This case is fucking you up. Phone your work tomorrow and tell them you’re not doing it.”
In that instant I almost told her to fuck off. It astonished me, how suddenly and how hard the words slammed up against my lips. I have never, in all my adult life, said anything like that to Dina.