The Mountains Wild

by Sarah Stewart Taylor

  “Roly,” I say when I get back to the table, “I was just thinking about what Bernie asked us. Why did Erin go to the mountains? The mountains. I was thinking. Bernie once told me a story about Petey Deasey holing up in a cottage near Glenmalure or something? Am I making that up?”

  Roly looks surprised. “Petey Deasey … Yeah. That’s ringing the old bell. What was it? They were using a cottage down here as a place to stash arms. There was some kind of standoff. Bernie found out about it. What are you thinking?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “If he has a house down here we don’t know about and they never searched it … Maybe Erin was staying there, maybe they were somewhere else and then came back and…” I can’t make the pieces fit, though. “Maybe the other women … I don’t know. When Griz and I were looking over everything, that was the thing that struck me. The mountains. They’re important to this guy somehow.”

  Roly’s eyes are alive. His brain is already moving on this. “I don’t know where the place is. I need to get someone to look it up for me,” he says quietly.

  “What about Wilcox?”

  “Fuck Wilcox.” He thinks for a minute and then he takes out his phone and presses something. “Griz?” he says. “I need to ask you to do something for me. Fair warning, Wilcox won’t like it.” He listens for a minute and then he says, “Yeah, I need the location and anything you’ve got on a cottage down here where there was a standoff between Petey Deasey and the Guards. This would have been in 1967. Okay, thanks, Griz. Yeah, ring me back.”

  We finish eating and get coffee while we wait for Griz. It takes twenty minutes for Roly’s phone to buzz on the table.

  “Yeah, you got it, Griz? Go ahead.” He listens and then says, “Whose name is on it? Oh, yeah? All right, then. Yeah, text if you find anything else.”

  He looks at me. “In 1967 Petey Deasey holed up in a cottage in a townland called Ballyclash, the other side of Askanagap, she says. The Guards had been looking for him and he held them at bay for twenty-four hours before they arrested him. He served two years for various crimes. The cottage was packed with guns and TNT.”

  “Does Niall Deasey own the cottage?” I ask in a quiet voice.

  Roly shakes his head. “Nope. He must have sold it. Some woman’s name on it. Not Deasey.”

  “Oh.” I’d been so sure. “Where is it? Did Griz have an address?” I’m already putting it into my phone.

  “Just Ballyclash. Ah sure, we’ll be able to find it. It’s just a little place anyway. Let’s just go take a look.” Roly puts a twenty-euro note down on the table, jumps up from his chair. “Maybe this is it, D’arcy.”

  * * *

  It takes us nearly forty minutes on the tiny roads. The house is on the side of a narrow country lane stretching west from the signpost for Askanagap, pointing away from the mountains. It’s desolate out here, the stone walls alongside the road overrun with yellow gorse and scrubby brush. We wouldn’t know we were there if the GPS hadn’t told us we’d arrived.

  It’s a low gray stucco cottage, completely out of sight of any other house and shielded by an overgrown stand of pines that’s come up all around it, crowding it against the slope of the mountain.

  We pull into the driveway and get out. It looks utterly abandoned, as if no one’s been here in years. The roof is covered with green moss, the blue paint on the front door is peeling, and there aren’t any patio chairs or newspapers or flower pots or anything to indicate human habitation. We try the front door and find it locked, then knock. We don’t really wait for an answer before going around back.

  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.

  Roly’s phone buzzes and the animal, whatever it was, bounds away into the trees.

  * * *

  Griz has texted him five names, two from vehicles caught on CCTV around the time Teresa McKenny went missing and three from June Talbot. It’s all she can find. He writes them down on a little sheet of paper from his glove compartment and hands the McKenny ones to me. “Ring ’em up,” he says. “Ask them some basic questions about the car, when they got it, has it ever been stolen, where is it serviced?”

  “Are you…?”

  “Just do it.” He stands on one side of the car. I stand on the other. I call the first guy. He answers and when I tell him what I want, he sounds suspicious. Maybe it’s my accent, but it takes some convincing before he gives me what I need. I call the second one. He’s not home but his wife gives me everything I need.

  When Roly’s done, we get back in the car. “Well?” he asks me.

  “The cars have never been stolen. They’ve both been fairly dependable. The Skoda is serviced at Lewis Motors in Bray and the Ford at, uh, Ryan’s in Wicklow. What about you?”

  “Nothing good.”

  “You thought we were going to get a hit on Deasey’s garage.”

  “Yeah but. It fits, D’arcy. I was thinking, how could the same fella take different women without the same car showing up each time? I was thinking, who might have easy access to different cars, with different number plates? Fella who runs a garage.”

  “It was a good thought,” I say. “You need more IDs. You need them all.”

  “I know.”

  “Besides,” I say, “you told me that Niall Deasey had a solid alibi for Teresa McKenny and June Talbot. He’d left Ireland at that point, right? Moved to London.”

  “Croydon,” Roly says.

  Croydon.

  Croydon.

  “Call Griz,” I say quickly. “Put her on speakerphone.”

  “What?”

  “Do it.”

  When she answers she says, “For fuck’s sake, Roly.”

  “Griz,” I cut in. “That file you had. Of the serial murders in Ireland and the UK. Can you find it?”

  “Right here. Why?”

  “Can you read something to me? It had something about a series of murders in Croydon. What were the years?”

  She reads it out: “1999, 2000, 2007, 2011.”

  “Thanks, Griz. Hang on the phone, will you?” I can hear her breath over the speaker system.

  I turn to Roly, talk to his profile in the dark car. “Croydon, Roly. Croydon. We were trying to find the pattern in Ireland, the disappearances here. But it doesn’t fit.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Listen. He was here, Niall Deasey. He was here when Erin disappeared, 1993. And Katerina Greiner. And then … Teresa McKenny in 1998. Then he moves to London. To Croydon, Roly. And it didn’t seem like a pattern, because it wasn’t. Not here, anyway. It wasn’t a pattern here.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He was living in Croydon! After everything that happened, he moved to Croydon, where his half-brother had a garage, for almost twenty years. And when Griz and I were looking at murders and disappearances in Ireland—unsolved ones—she pulled the UK ones, because of the north, and I looked and there were four women who disappeared in Croydon. Four women picked up off the street or in parks. They disappeared and then their bodies were found in local parks around two weeks later, submerged in water. All four died of blunt head trauma.”

  “Jaysus.”

  “Look at it, Roly! Erin and Katerina Greiner, 1993. Teresa McKenny in 1998. Then he moves to Croydon and the first Croydon one was 1999. The second, 2000. The third, 2007. The fourth, 2011. And then in 2016, Niamh Horrigan goes missing.” But as I say it, I realize.

  “But what about June Talbot?” Roly says. “He was living in Croydon in 2006. And he was in hospital, remember.”

  “You’re right. Maybe she was … ah, shit.”

  We sit there in silence. On the other end, Griz is rustling papers. We can hear her. And then she calls out, “Guess what 2006 was? Guess what it was? Petey Deasey, Niall Deasey’s father, there’s all this stuff about him in the file. It has his birth date, too. September sixteenth, 1926. It was his eightieth birthday. How much do you want to bet the family had a big old party for him? Maybe they got him out of hospital to go or the dates are off or something?”

  “Griz, go check on it. See if you can find out when he was actually, definitely in hospital,” Roly says.

  “Yeah—Wait. Roly, Maggie. I just got a text from my friend at the tax office. He got the records on that house in Ballyclash. It is owned by a woman. Her name is Mary Sheehan. She’s dead now. But listen, he looked her up and guess what her maiden name was?”

  “What?”

  “Deasey! She was Petey Deasey’s sister, Niall Deasey’s aunt.”

  “Are ya serious?” Roly is hunched forward in his seat. “Griz, listen. Thank you. We’ll be in touch. We gotta figure out what to do here.”

  Roly starts up the car but doesn’t start driving. “Are you going to call Regan?” I ask him.

  He looks over at me. “I don’t know. There’s no one at that cottage now. Maybe there’s some evidence there that they can use to go nab him in Arklow. But if I call out everyone to go to an empty house … I’m not supposed to be looking at this.”

  “Wh
at we’ve got is pretty good,” I tell him. But even as I say it, I know he’s right. We’ve got a few circumstantial coincidences. And we’ve got an empty house owned by Niall Deasey’s aunt.

  “What do you want to do?” I ask Roly. “Check it out? We’d have to break and enter.”

  “Nah, we’d better not.” He starts up the car, pulls off the verge without even looking. “Let’s head back. We need to think about this, D’arcy. Griz is going to get on to the hospital. Regan might be able to get a search warrant for the garage.” We drive in silence for a good twenty minutes, back toward Kilmacurragh and the M11. The car is full of our frustration, like a bad smell. We’re almost to the motorway when he slows, slams his hand down on the steering wheel, and says, “Fuck it, I’m going back.”

  I grin at him. “Like I said, it’s your funeral.”

  45

  TUESDAY, JUNE 7,

  2016

  The cottage looks different now, the trees casting long shadows, the sound of our tires on the gravel driveway somehow louder.

  Roly has a flashlight and he gets it out and shines it on the front door and in through the front windows. He knocks half-heartedly and then he stares at the window next to the door for a minute.

  “Did you hear a dog whining?” Roly asks me. “I could swear I heard a dog whining inside.”

  “Yeah, you’d better check. It could be trapped in there.”

  “Yes,” Roly says in a fake voice. “You are correct. It could be trapped in there.”

  I take the flashlight from him and shine it on the lock. “Roly, look.” We hadn’t noticed before, but it’s new, the wood freshly chipped where the screws went in.

  “Yeah. Here, shine it on the window.” I shift the beam and he fools around with the sash. It doesn’t budge. “Shine it here,” he says. I do and he finds a good-sized rock, which he hands to me. Then he takes off his coat, wraps it around his arm, takes the rock back, and punches it through the window, then punches around the edges to break all the glass.