The Liar's Girl

by Catherine Ryan Howard

  “I thought he might just have one of the units in there.”

  The man frowned. “Units?”

  I looked toward number 23. “It isn’t divided up?”

  “No,” the man said. “Not that I know of.” He turned to go back inside. “Let me get you that number. Hang on a second.”

  Malone and I exchanged a glance. He shook his head, just once, to indicate that we shouldn’t talk. Moments later, the man returned with a mobile phone number scribbled on a piece of paper.

  “Here you go.” He passed it to me. His fingers brushed mine as I took it from him. His hand was warm.

  “Thanks so much for this,” I said, taking a step back. “We really appreciate it.”

  “What’s your name?” the man asked me.

  I was thrown by this and hesitated, and then I realized how suspicious that was and since it was the first girl’s name that wasn’t my own, inappropriate as it may be, I blurted out, “Amy.”

  I could feel Malone tense up beside me.

  “Amy,” the man repeated slowly. “I’d never have guessed. You don’t look like an Amy.”

  “Don’t I?” I smiled tightly. “What does an Amy look like?”

  “Is he around here much?” Malone said. “We don’t see him round our place very often.”

  The man frowned. “What do you mean? He’s here all the time.” He pointed next door, at number 23. “He lives there.”

  alison, now

  It made perfect sense, when you thought about it. A rental property he never actually rented out. He wasn’t the landlord there, but the resident. Living there and also showing it to accommodation-seeking students as if he wasn’t, as if no one was. Malone had turned a paler shade at the thought that the guy—the killer?—was inside that house at this very moment, potentially seeing him and I outside, and I had, in turn, felt a hot stone of guilt settle in my stomach for not obeying Malone’s instructions to just stay in the bloody car.

  But then No. 24 said No. 23 was likely to be at work. He didn’t know what his neighbor did for a living, but he seemed to work weekdays and wore a suit.

  We thanked him and hurried back to car.

  “I shouldn’t have used Amy,” I said. “It was just the first name that popped into my head.”

  All Malone would say is, “Let’s just get out of here.”

  Once back in the driver’s seat, he tapped his phone’s screen and put it to his ear. He started the engine, threw the car in gear. “Em, it’s me. Listen …”

  While he filled her in, my thoughts strayed to Will. I wondered what he was doing right now. I imagined going to see him again, telling him that we’d found the Canal Killer. The real one.

  But had we?

  A wave of nausea came over me. I turned toward the window and closed my eyes, waiting for it to pass. The ground felt unsteady, everything did, like plates were shifting fast beneath my feet and everything on them—my whole life—was threatening to move and change.

  This guy could just be a copycat. But why copy a killer who’d been caught? And why now, after all this time? Why not just go and do your own evil thing?

  Unless Will and him were working together. But how would that work? They started as a tag-team, now this guy was going solo. Why? And again, why now? What had he been doing all the years in between?

  And was Daniel really just wrong place, wrong time, or was he involved in the murders in some way? If he was, how did he and No. 23 fit together? And how did they tie in with Will?

  I groaned inwardly. There were no answers, only more questions.

  I was literally sick of asking them.

  “Okay, yeah,” Malone was saying. “I will … I will … All right. Bye.” He ended the call and twisted the steering wheel, pulling the car out of its parking space. He drove the rest of the way around the U-shape of Doolyn Gardens and turned into the city-bound traffic on the main road.

  “What’s happening?” I asked.

  “They have Daniel O’Dowd in custody. Shaw is looking for me. He and I are going to do the interview.” With one hand he tapped his phone again, put it to his ear. Waited through what sounded like a voice message. “Sarge, it’s me. Cusack passed on your message. I’ll be at the station within the hour and I’m on this number in the meantime.” He tapped the screen; the phone locked with a click.

  “What did Cusack say about number twenty-three?’

  “She’s checking property records. She also thinks I’m actively trying to lose my job.”

  Malone’s phone rang. He glanced at the screen.

  “It’s Shaw,” he said to me. Into the phone, “Malone.”

  I could hear Shaw’s voice but not the individual words. At first Malone was nodding and saying, “Yeah,” periodically. Then, “I have Alison Smith with me. Did Cusack tell you …? Yeah … Yeah, I know. That’s what I thought too … Okay … Okay, yeah. Right. Will do.” He ended the call, turned to me. “He’s going to call me when the warrant comes in.”

  “So what now?”

  “We wait. Maybe Em will come up with something on number twenty-three before the interview with Daniel starts.” He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. “What about you? I could drive you out to Bray?”

  I thought of Malone’s balcony, the peaceful view from it.

  “Could I just wait at yours? It’s closer, and it doesn’t have my mother in it.”

  I was relieved to see him grin at this.

  “I like your mother,” he said. “But sure.”

  “Sorry about back there.”

  “It’s okay,” Malone said after a beat. “No harm done.”

  We drove back to his place each lost in our private silence.

  Just as we arrived, Shaw called again to tell Malone to come in for three; it was just past noon by then. We’d picked up fast food drive-thru for lunch and sat in front of Malone’s TV with it, staring vacantly at the screen. Neither of us could have recalled any detail of what we were watching, not even if our lives depended on it.

  At some point, I fell asleep.

  I dreamed of us all. Will and I. Liz. Heather. Daniel. We were all in the water and something was pulling on our ankles, dragging us down. The water ran up my nose and down my throat and reached into my lungs and squeezed and I couldn’t breathe—I can’t breathe—and someone was screaming—

  I opened my eyes.

  Malone was shaking me and, after a moment of sheer terror when I didn’t know where I was or whose arms were around me, I realized that they weren’t constricting me but supporting me, and we were sitting so close, and I could only look at him, not quite at his face but down at his chest, and a heat bloomed between us, and his arms closed around me, pulling me in, and it felt like melting, like disappearing, or everything else disappearing, and I breathed in deep, pulling him in, and he pulled me closer—

  And then his phone rang, breaking the spell, and reality came rushing back like a slap.

  I was so mortified, I couldn’t think. Every blood cell in my body was making a beeline for my face.

  Meanwhile, Malone just answered his phone, like a normal person.

  It was Cusack. I was sitting close enough to hear every word.

  “Bad news, bad news,” she said.

  “Oh, great.” Malone rubbed at his eyes. He looked like he might have dozed off too. “Go on.”

  “The property at twenty-three Doolyn Gardens is registered to a Mr. and Mrs. Thomas and Margaret O’Rourke with an address in Ennis. They actually own number twenty-four as well. Landlords. Landlords currently not answering their phone. I can only go back fifteen years before I have to go looking for physical records, but it’s been in their name all that time. So whoever lives there isn’t an owner-occupier, but he could be related to Mr. and Mrs. O’Rourke, I suppose. Or he could just rent off them. I ran the address through PULSE bu
t nothing came up. The utility bills would tell us more, but I’d need a warrant for them. And trust me when I say nothing is happening here that isn’t related to Daniel O’Dowd right now, so you’re shit out of luck on that front.”

  “Great.” Malone shook his head. “What’s the other bad news?”

  “The telephone number his neighbor gave you is a dud. It belongs to a researcher on a radio show in Limerick city. The radio station pays for the phone and were happy to email me a scan of their most recent bill. It all checks out.”

  Malone looked at me.

  I whispered, “Double-check?”

  The note was in Malone’s pocket. He unfolded it now and called out the number again. Cusack had taken it down correctly.

  I held out my hand and he passed the note to me. The digits were clear. This wasn’t a handwriting error. The guy must have given his neighbor the wrong phone number on purpose.

  “Okay,” Malone said. “Well, thanks for all that, Em.”

  “I’m not done with the bad news.”

  He sighed. “Go on.”

  “The address wasn’t in PULSE,” she said, “but I did find it somewhere else. Shaw was getting me to cross-reference all the names that came into us during the original investigation with the ones we’ve been getting in now, in response to the CCTV appeal. He sent me an Excel spreadsheet prepared by one of the analysts. And get this: the address was on that. Someone put together this waitlist/property search connection back in 2007 and compiled a list of properties each of the girls had viewed. But it stopped there. I think they got Will Hurley then and the property connection wasn’t explored any further.”

  Malone looked at me and I looked away.

  If this was the same guy, they had him back in 2007—or were about to get him, until I corrected my statement and pulled them off the trail.

  I felt sick.

  I put a hand to my mouth, worried that I would be.

  Then I felt Malone’s hand on my other hand. I let him turn it over, lock his fingers into mine, squeeze it once, tight.

  I dared look at him.

  His face was full of sympathy. He’d tell me it wasn’t my fault, I knew, but that’s exactly whose fault all this was.

  “What’ll I do with all this?” I heard Cusack’s tinny voice say.

  “I’m going to bring it to Shaw,” Malone said. “When I come in. See what he has to say. I mean, we have to interview Daniel either way. Even if he’s not the guy, he’s spent hours surveying the canal. He’s bound to have something useful for us. Any update on Amy Boylan?”

  “Nothing yet, no. Shouldn’t you be on your way in already? It’s nearly half-two.”

  Malone raised his eyebrows at me.

  I mouthed go.

  He squeezed my hand again and told Cusack he was on his way.

  alison, then

  Lauren’s death felt both strange and personal.

  On the one hand, we’d known her. Not very well, but we had. We felt grief, not really the I miss her kind, but the this is so tragic kind. We were all sad, but poor Claire was bereft. She and Lauren had grown close over the term.

  But on the other hand, she’d been murdered.

  That was the bit we couldn’t process, the thing we couldn’t understand. That felt outside of us, other, made up, even. How could someone we know have been murdered? That kind of thing only happened on TV.

  For days we just wandered around aimlessly, listlessly, asking each other that question. Everything else stopped. Classes passed in a blur. I didn’t go to half of them. We didn’t go out. Liz, Will, and I hung out in either my or Liz’s apartment, or sometimes in the subdued student bar, and traded information we’d gleaned from the news or from another student or from a friend of a friend whose uncle was a guard. The college arranged buses for anyone wanting to attend Lauren’s funeral in Galway City. We went. There were free counseling sessions at the student center for anyone who had been affected by Lauren’s death. We didn’t go to those.

  The Gardaí had interviewed Claire, but no one else we knew. The rest of us hadn’t been back in St. John’s yet. Lauren had only returned the morning of her murder, coming back a few days early because she’d been able to get a lift off a friend of hers who was driving to Dublin.

  Information was scant, but it seemed like she’d been walking home alone, alongside the canal, and someone had pushed her in.

  Over the course of the next two weeks, Lauren went from the top-of-the-hour headline to halfway through the news, to an update about the investigation, maybe, in the Sunday papers. The noise levels in the student bar gradually returned to normal, with boisterous laughter and loud music filling the space again. We started going out again, hitting the clubs on Harcourt Street, crossing the Luas tracks to go back toward the canal, to come back home.

  Lauren stayed in the past and her death took on an implausibility. After a while we wondered: Had she ever really been here at all?

  Then they found Rachel Folen.

  She’d been missing for two days. I’d never met her, didn’t recognize her when I saw her face on the front page. Even though she’d lived in Halls, it was a big complex, and she’d studied a science subject that was taught on the far side of campus to where all my classes were.

  The Gardaí quickly downplayed any connection between her and Lauren, but we all thought that was just not to start a panic. We all thought, Someone is out there doing this.

  And we were right. Less than two weeks later, the body of Caroline Brady was pulled out of the canal.

  That made three. Three in three months.

  All hell broke loose then.

  * * * * *

  “I don’t believe this,” I said. “Look how busy this place is.”

  We were in the 1-A, the biggest lecture theater on campus. It could hold upwards of five hundred students but right now, there wasn’t a seat to be had. After I pointed this out, Liz, Will, and I shuffled along behind the top row of chairs, weaving around the throng already gathered there, and sat down in the last remaining space on the far steps. There was no noise in the hall other than student voices but that alone was a soundtrack playing at a deafening level. The melody suggested fear, but pulsing underneath—although no one would ever admit it—was a beat of excitement.

  Meetings like these were being held across campus. Information meetings, they were calling them, innocuously, but we all knew what they were about. I even knew the running order. A briefing from a couple of Gardaí on personal safety. An assurance from them that they’d flooded the campus with officers in plain clothes. A plea not to panic. An appeal for information. A presentation from the Student Union’s welfare officer on a new service the SU was providing: free shuttle buses from Stephen’s Green at midnight every night.

  Finally, the college president would get up on stage and deliver the bad news: they were instigating a curfew. If you lived in Halls, you had to back in them by 1:00 a.m. Nothing would be said about what might happen if you weren’t, but of course one thing in particular was implied: you could die.

  The meeting would end with some information about a candlelight vigil that was going to be held on Front Lawn and a reminder that if we needed to talk to somebody, there were resources available to us.

  I wasn’t scared. I was sad for the girls and their families, yes, but I wasn’t scared. They had all been walking home alone, by the canal, in the early hours of the morning, and I wasn’t going to do that. I assumed they all had some kind of connection to whatever psycho was doing this; I was sure I didn’t have any. I knew some girls who had cut or dyed their hair because all the girls who’d died had lots of it and were blonde, but if they thought that was how the killer was picking his victims, he had about two-thirds of the student female body to choose from.

  If there was a threat, if there was going to be more, then it felt distant to me. Separate.
r />   But Liz was starting to freak out.

  I’d thought it was melodrama at first. She wouldn’t have been the first person on campus to relish being so close to the action. She wouldn’t even have been the thousandth. She’d taken to sleeping in my bed when I stayed at Will’s, because she didn’t trust her weird roommate to keep their front door locked. If I didn’t stay with Will, Liz slept on our couch.

  She was sitting next to me now, perched on the edge of a carpeted step, knees drawn up to her chin and arms wrapped tightly around her legs. Will was on my other side; I was leaning against him. The meeting unfolded exactly as I’d heard it would. Afterward the two uniformed Gardaí remained onstage with the president, talking, and a number of students headed toward them instead of the lecture theater’s doors.

  We’d stood up and started toward the doors when Liz gripped my arm.

  “I think I should go up there,” she said, nodding at the stage. “I think maybe I should talk to them.”

  “To who?” I asked. “The Gardaí?”

  “Yeah.”

  “About what?”

  Liz’s hand was still on my arm, squeezing. “I think I might know something.”

  This was the first I was hearing of this.

  Will had moved in behind her. He rolled his eyes at me.

  “There’s this guy,” Liz went on. “I keep seeing him everywhere. I think he’s following me. Maybe. You’ve met him, actually. He was in Essence a while back. We were talking to him. I think he was even in a picture with us? And he was at the Traffic Light Ball. The red-haired guy. Didn’t he say his name was Dave or something? Derek maybe? It was something with D.”

  I didn’t remember his name. I could barely picture him. There was another memory of that night that was so vivid, I didn’t have room left for storing anything else.

  “Liz,” I said, “hang on a second. You can’t just go around accusing people of things like—”

  “I’m not accusing him of anything,” she hissed. “I just think he’s weird. And they said all information, even if we think it’s trivial. Even if we think it’s not related. They want everything we have.”