WHEN THE LIGHTS GO UP, the man’s hair gleams black, shadows stretch from his eyes, his nose. Baz is circling the body, eyes on the victim’s face.
“I reckon the doc’s on the ball. It’s not unlike the Alan Shine case, I mean the extent of decomposition.”
“McDonagh still in custody?”
“We released him at five this evening. Plainclothes report that he’s not moved from his house since. I don’t think we can pin this one on him. Not unless he’s perfected astral projection.”
“No,” I reply. I tip my head back, try to get a lungful of air that’s not tainted by death, and I feel the grip of frustration around my chest. No suspects. Not one. Around me is the hiss and clunk of cameras, the scatter and crunch of shale underfoot, and the crackle of plastic moving over the crime scene, yellow markers pushed into the sand indicating possible evidence.
“We might want to get a list of missing persons from the Dublin area.”
“Maybe it’s the male thing, you know,” Baz says from behind his hand. “The way the two men were held for a while. A fetish.”
Gloves on, I lean across the body, reach over the man’s head, follow the same path as Dr. Magee. “There were no signs of sexual abuse on Alan Shine’s body.”
He sighs, lifts his hand from his nose to push his hair back. “So not sexually motivated.”
My palms press down the victim’s suit, lift the lapels, squeeze the lining. Nothing. No ID, no wallet. But there’s a familiarity to the victim’s face that I can’t quite place.
“Was there anyone else on the prom? When you came down here?” Baz asks.
I stand. “No one. What do you make of his appearance?”
He lets out a whistle of air. “Dressed well? The guy’s suit looks newly pressed almost. A bit wet, obviously. But barely a stain on it. I guess Alan Shine was dressed well too. In a way.”
The victim’s mouth is sunken inwards, lips trapped against teeth. Sealed shut. Unable to speak. KILLER. One word. An entire sentence, an accusation at his feet. Straightening, I move back to take in the position of the body, my eyes on the man’s bloated face.
“The victim could represent the killer himself?” He points at the word KILLER in the sand.
Although I’ve known killers who’ve chosen victims because they saw something in their victims they despised about themselves, knowing that this body is related to the Shine murders throws that theory away. The Shines were different from this lone figure. I let my gaze linger on the man’s thick dark hair, the long sweep of his nose and think what it is that’s made this man deserve the title KILLER. He’s got a type of clichéd good looks. Even with the bloat, I can see an adequate jawline and I have a sudden memory that I know him. I see him, a teen standing in a photo for his Gaelic football team.
“I think I know who he is. He played Gaelic football with my brother when they were kids. Teenagers. He played for the team above Justin.” It doesn’t take much to recall his name. “Sheridan. Conor Sheridan.”
“Fuck.” Baz looks at me as if testing whether he should be concerned. “I’m sorry?”
“I recognize him but I didn’t know him. Not really,” I reply. I take out my phone, flick on the torchlight, scan the ground again, then up the wall behind the man, toward the promenade to street level.
I move up the beach; the smell of Sheridan’s corpse lessens and I allow myself a few good breaths. I let my eyes follow the prom all the way down to the beach. It would’ve been a struggle to haul the body down here.
Nearby, a SOCO is photographing something in the sand.
“Any sign yet of how he got down here?” I ask.
She stands, glances at the image on the screen of her camera. “Detective, hi. No, nothing.” She plucks a clamshell from the ground. “Thought maybe the edge of a bootprint but no, a shell upturned, flipped by the tide.” She straightens. “He could have come down the slipway? The sea’s out.”
Turning, I follow her gaze to the slipway, a short pier-like structure where the yacht club launch their boats. The victim is heavy, not overweight heavy, but dead-weight heavy. There should be drag marks at least or the scattering of sand. But there are no grooves to and from the access points to the beach, no footprints, guilty and hurried, pressed into the ground, apart from our own.
I make my way back to Baz, my eyes over the sea. The tide is, in fact, not climbing back up the beach as I’d originally thought.
“When’s the next tide in?” I ask him.
“Is it on the way out? Four hours, maybe.”
“Our perp lays out their victim, labels him as a killer, then doesn’t worry that we might not get to him before an incoming wave wipes out half his handiwork, wipes out what he wrote in the sand?”
“So he knows about tides.”
I swallow and face the dark beach. I know that when the tide comes in on Clontarf, hundreds of years of man-made seawalls and reclaimed coastline guide the water first into a shallow canal that slowly widens. It’s deceptive. The area we’re standing on is one of the last places the sea engulfs. Turning, I scan the scene. Again, the killer has taken time over this. He’s done his homework, planned all the details of his crime, this wondrous achievement, for it to look a certain way.
The techs move around us, setting up a tent, metal poles hammered into the ground. A uniform walks between them, a roll of tape spinning out in her hands, closing off the beach. A yellow-gray light is bleeding out over the horizon, an early sunrise making promises an Irish summer should never make.
The van arrives; the techs carry down the stretcher. “We’re ready to go now,” one of them says.
“Okay.” I walk to Baz. “Will you oversee the removal of the victim to Whitehall? I’ll be there in under an hour. I need to collect my things from my folks’.”
“Sure,” he says.
“Try to get the body off before the dog walkers get their slippers on. We want to keep the media back for as long as possible, and we don’t need any Snapchats with a body bag in the background.”
“Door-to-door?”
“As soon as you can rouse people. We’ll need a formal ID. I think his parents, if they’re still alive, are in Clontarf somewhere.”
“Wife?”
I shrug. “Possibly. He’s been gone a few days at least. Someone must’ve missed him.”
A small twist of distaste on Baz’s face. Always more victims than the dead when it comes to murder.
* * *
—
THE SQUAD CAR leaves me at my parents’ house. I let myself in through the back. The kitchen is warm with peaceful silence. The tick of the clock over the sink, soothing. Quiet clunks, the hand moving over the seconds, casting off time like it’s nothing. I stand against the sink, look over at the kitchen table. Justin, Conor Sheridan head-to-head in a drinking game. Our parents out for the evening. Me looking on, shy glances from the sofa by the far wall, wanting desperately to join in and reveling every time Conor threw me a smile, a wink. Tingling starts up in my fingers and I release my grip on the drainboard, shake my hands out.
There’s a creak on the stairs, second from the top. A callback to early school mornings, Mam padding down to the kitchen ahead of us waking to get breakfast on the go. She appears in the doorway, her eyes blinking, her hair in mad tufts over her forehead.
“Frankie. What are ye doing up?” She looks at the clock. “Jesus, sure it’s practically the middle of the night still.” She frowns, takes a few steps toward me, worry deepening the lines at her mouth. “Is everything all right?”
“I’ve got to work, Ma.” I nod at the window to the gradually lightening sky. “I just came back to get my things.”
“Okay, love, if you’ve got to go, you’ve got to go.” She doesn’t prod for details, relief that it’s work and nothing else that has me up in the small hours. That whatever tragedy has fallen in the middle of the night, i
t has fallen on someone else.
Upstairs, I pull the sheets over the bed, tuck them in tight at the corners. Position the pillows, the cushions the way that Mam likes. In less than a few minutes the room looks like I’ve never stepped foot in it.
Downstairs, I give a kiss to Mam’s cheek, apologize once more, then I’m out the door and back in the squad car. I dial the office, let them know I’m coming in.
Helen is quick to the phone. “Chief. Baz filled me in. Same killer. Clontarf again.”
“It doesn’t like to be left out of the action. We have a tentative ID, Conor Sheridan. His parents lived in Clontarf. You’ll need to send someone out there. There could be a wife, a family. Can you get the address for me?”
I can hear a rustle of paper, her scribbling down the victim’s name. “Sure, Chief.”
CHAPTER 12
THE UNIFORM TAKES the North Strand Road back to Dublin. The streets are quiet as a graveyard; the odd bus moves sleepily out in front of us, pulling up at empty stops where the driver can have a crafty fag before continuing on his lone voyage. We turn into the underground car park at the Bureau. I get out and stop sharp when I see Clancy getting out of his car.
“Jack.”
He gives me a nod. “Well, Frankie. You’re like the pied piper of murders. Baz said the corpse stank like a rancid old fish.”
“Yeah, this one’s been a keeper for a while.”
“Like Alan Shine.”
“Undoubtedly the same killer.”
“McDonagh?”
“We have his fingerprints in the Shine house but he says he was intimate with Geraldine Shine. The trainers we seized from him did not match the print from the Shine house. So we released him yesterday afternoon. Plainclothes say he’s not moved from his home since.” We enter the lift, select the fourth floor. “If we can get a time of death quickly on Conor Sheridan then it will give us a window to work with at least.”
We step onto the floor. There are five occupied desks in the room, gray faces under the sharp fluorescence. Helen looks up when she sees us enter.
“The parents are on their way to Whitehall, Chief,” she says over the partition. “We’ll get statements from them but the visiting officer says so far they seem as clueless as we are as to why their son would’ve been murdered. I have the wife’s address, or ex-wife. Jane Sheridan now Brennan: Bay Road. Number 29.”
I drop my coat, bag inside the door and hold out my hand.
“The victim, Mr. Sheridan,” she continues, “lived in the south of the city. I’ve noted his address also”—she flicks over her notebook—“in Tallaght. Subsidized flat, one housemate, long-standing, a Mr. James Lynch.”
“Lynch?” I ask, not quite believing I’ve heard her right.
“Yes, Chief.”
I let out a long sigh of relief. There’s such a sweet feeling of victory when a name crops up twice in an investigation, makes you more aware of the ground beneath your feet, drives away that feeling that your legs are pedaling the air before you drop into nothing. Robbie McDonagh, in an attempt to save his own ass, has given us a foothold.
Clancy turns to me. “He on the roster too?”
“McDonagh mentioned a Jimmy Lynch during interview. Said he was a friend and that he was at his place when the Shine murders happened.”
Clancy nods toward the information on Conor Sheridan in my hand. “When did Sheridan’s marriage go tits up?”
“Five years ago,” Helen replies. “Nothing untoward on the papers filed, no reports of domestic violence and Conor was on top of his child support.”
My stomach tightens at the mention of kids. “Alimony?”
“Not any longer. Jane Sheridan has since remarried.”
I feel a familiar mix of frustration and excitement, not uncommon in the early hours of a murder investigation when time is tight and there are too many doors to knock on and no one can say which will lead to the all-you-can-eat buffet of evidence. I think through the hours ahead, whether I can spare Helen from the floor so that she and Ryan can take the ex-wife. But Jane Sheridan’s personal connection to our most recent victim is too much for me to give up. It could be that she’s able to give us a sense of the relationship between Conor and his flatmate, something we could use during Lynch’s interrogation.
I turn to Clancy. “Best send some eyes to Sheridan’s flat, keep tabs on Lynch until I can get out there. I’ll talk to the ex first then see what Lynch can tell us. Helen, how about the husband?”
“A David Brennan. We’re still looking into him. For the moment all we got is that he works at the port. A crane driver.”
Clancy nods. “When you go out to that flat, I want you to take Baz with you.”
“I’m fine on my own.”
“Until we know what kind of fuckers we’re dealing with, we stay with our partners.” His voice shakes with barely restrained force.
“Briefing in two minutes,” I say to Helen.
I walk Clancy to the coffee machine. My stomach is clenching with hunger; acid works its way up my throat. I pour a coffee, take a couple of cellophane-wrapped biscuits from a basket at the side of the machine.
“Well, Hegarty will have to cool her heels now,” Clancy remarks. “Our resources are stretched enough with this.” He jabs a button on the machine, curses when it spits out creamy latte. “You got to the scene prompt.”
“I was in the area, at my folks’. Spent the evening running over the Hennessy case with Tanya before bed.”
He shakes a packet of sugar loose, rips the top, and dumps it into his coffee, then reaches for another. “She sucked in by Hennessy’s tall tales?”
“She’s raised a few worrying flags. Possible cross-contamination of the scene. A question of the validity of Cara Hennessy’s testimony.”
“Validity? Cara Hennessy was an absolute trouper during an event that would have broken many an older person.”
I narrow my gaze on his face. “You’re remembering a lot nowadays.”
He dumps the second sugar into the coffee. White, plastic stick stirring at speed. “Not because I want to, I’ll fucking tell you that.”
I think of Owens’s message. “What about Hennessy’s confession?”
His selective memory returns with a shrug. “Never heard or seen it.”
“It must’ve lit a fire, right? Made him seem guilty at first.”
He stops stirring his coffee, faces me. “His guilt made him seem guilty.”
I take up my coffee, give up playing tic-tac-toe with Clancy. I move toward the case board and wait for the room to settle. Clancy stands near the back. I don’t meet his eyes.
“A body was found at approximately two A.M. on the beach at Clontarf. Time of death is still to be decided but we’re looking in the last week. The victim, a male in his forties, believed to be Conor Sheridan, Tallaght, formally of Clontarf. There are major tie-ins with the Shine case. The victim’s body was in the early stages of decomposition. The word KILLER was etched into the sand at his feet. The body is undergoing autopsy at Whitehall under Dr. Abigail James. Steve, anything on who called it in?”
Steve is folded into a chair at the front, red head bent over his notebook. Pale, narrow face still on his notes. “Nothing. The voice was disguised, I think.”
“What about our victim? What else do we know about him? Have we got his last movements? Or those that led up to his disappearance?”
“Helen’s been looking at the vic’s background, his work, I think laboring, mostly,” he replies. “Scaffolding, steel-fixing since his divorce.”
“Girlfriend?”
“Nothing yet. I guess his housemate would have a good idea.”
“So Jimmy Lynch’s name came up when we interviewed Robbie McDonagh. It could be a coincidence but you all know how I feel about those. Also, Robbie McDonagh, by his own admission, was sleeping or had
slept with Geraldine Shine. So we have a very loose link, suspect wise, between our victims. It may be a couple of degrees wide but it’s there. When sorting through door-to-door and the evidence, keep it in mind. We need to build on it.”
Clancy smacks his hands, rubs his palms together. “Right. Let’s get on the chase, lads. This fella looks like he’ll have the juice for more of the same, and we don’t want to find ourselves with a queue of messed-up corpses to deal with.”
I nod. “Paul?”
Paul looks up from the side of the office, his rounded chin rolling over his collar. “Yes, Chief?”
“Make the usual statement for media, please. We’ve yet to make a formal ID.” Then I look out at the room. “Where are we with the Shine case? Helen? Phones?”
Helen makes a show of examining her notes before she speaks. “Yes, we have something. I’ve chased down both of the Shines’ phone locations with Cell Site. Alan Shine’s hit a mast near his home on the fourteenth of August.”
There are fourteen masts in the two-mile radius around the Shine home. It would be fair game for his phone to hit any of them during a normal day.
Helen continues, the volume of her voice raising slightly. “But I’ve just got Geraldine’s phone details in,” she says slowly. “It hit masts as far out as Howth Head even after she’d been murdered. The last feedback coming at 7:01 P.M. Site 2195 near Cliff Walk in Howth.”
Twelve kilometers from our crime scene. Twenty minutes of driving. I smile. The phone is no doubt in the Irish Sea now. Lost. But it’s done the job. Given us another small glimpse at the killer’s movements in the wake of this murder. He deposits the blouse in Ger Shine’s house then drives out to Cliff Walk to dispose of the phone. That would bring us up to approximately seven thirty P.M. We have traffic cams on that route. And where we’ve traffic cams, we have license plate recognition.
“Ryan.”
“Yes, Chief?”
“How’s ANPR going?”
“Nothing really sticking out, I’m afraid.”
“Get on the traffic cams out to Cliff Walk and Howth Head. Cross-reference the findings with those vehicles passing by and parking near the church on the Sunday.”
The Killer in Me Page 14