by Melinda Colt
Chapter Sixteen
“Tell me you found something useful,” Evan said.
Nóirín spared him a glance. She and another two forensic technicians were thoroughly going over every inch of Jack Dunhill’s car, which had been brought to the Garda Technical Bureau early that morning.
“Patience is not your strong point, is it, Yank?”
“I would have patience if I had time,” Evan muttered. “If I don’t have anything solid by tonight, I’ll have to release Jack Dunhill.”
Nóirín removed her face mask and straightened her back, wincing as she took a few steps away from the car to restore circulation in her legs.
“Well, we found several hairs, both in the back seat and in the front. I sent them to the lab to see if any of them match Jenny Williams’s or Shannon Brody’s DNA. If Jack Dunhill is the killer, Shannon could also have been in his car at some point. There are several fingerprints inside the car, but only Dunhill’s are on the steering wheel. We didn’t find any trace of blood, any weapons, no drugs or illegal substances. Dylan is taking apart the on board computer and checking the logs and such,” she said, indicating a young man with thick-rimmed eyeglasses that worked in the front seat. “The car is a Tesla with a fancy ECU,” she said, using the abbreviation for electronic control units. “But Dylan’s very good at his job. If there’s anything there to find, he’ll find it.”
“Okay, thanks a million. Let me know as soon as you have something new, please. We’re working against the clock on this one.”
He reached out and squeezed Nóirín’s arm, then headed back inside. It was time for round two with Dunhill.
Evan waited in the interview room for a pair of Gardaí to escort Dunhill in. His solicitor had been informed and was on his way, but Jack Dunhill had insisted they start without him.
“I have nothing to hide,” he told Evan once more, sitting at the square table.
Evan studied him. It was hard to maintain his skepticism when the man was so cooperative. But he knew this could be a tactic, so he gave Dunhill the fish-eye.
“How did you spend the night?”
Dunhill squinted through tired eyes. “Have you ever spent the night in jail, detective?”
His excellent nerves prevented Evan from betraying any emotion. He’d spent considerably more than one night in jail, but that wasn’t relevant. He hadn’t murdered anyone.
“I gather it wasn’t a pleasant experience. Don’t worry, you’ll get used to it.”
“I’m not worried because I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Many murderers don’t consider what they do is wrong.”
“I’m not a fecking murderer!” Dunhill shouted, coming halfway out of his chair. “I didn’t kill anyone.”
“We’ll see about that. Why don’t you tell me again about your date with Shannon Brody? Who approached who?”
Two hours later Evan signaled the Gardaí to keep an eye on Dunhill and exited the interview room, leaving the suspect and his solicitor to consult. He had no more relevant facts than he’d had this morning. Jack Dunhill didn’t budge from his story, and even Evan was starting to believe him.
He grabbed a coffee from the vending machine, then stood for a moment, wondering what to do next. Never had he felt so stuck. He thought about calling Chelsea. It was almost noon so she must be awake by now, but on the slim chance she wasn’t, he preferred to let her sleep. She needed the rest.
Coffee in hand, he strolled toward a conference room. No one knew this, but when the place wasn’t being used, Evan liked to withdraw there with his thoughts. He headed there now, grateful when he saw the lights were off. Without turning them on, he left the door open and made his way in the semi-darkness.
The room wasn’t large, but it was spacious enough, sporting two rows of rectangular tables, each with four comfortable, padded chairs. Evan drew one closer and sat, staring at the open door and hoping no one would come in just yet.
It was a habit he had. Wherever he was, wherever he worked, he always found a place to be alone when he needed the break and the silence. Although he had to adapt to the modern workplace, he secretly hated it. He missed the singular office he used to have when working for the FBI, missed having his own space where he could do whatever he needed to be productive. Sometimes he wanted to listen to music, other times he just needed to talk aloud, hear the details of a case, have a debate with himself. If he did that here, he’d be sent to the loony bin. Nowadays he had to work alongside a dozen or more people, in cubicles, without a smidgeon of privacy to listen to his own thoughts. And he had to be productive.
He took a sip of scalding coffee, wincing at the taste. It had too little caffeine and too much sugar, but he needed the kick of both, so he drank the rest of it. It seemed he lived on caffeine these days. Putting the empty Styrofoam cup on the table in front of him, he leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes, trying to order his thoughts.
As much as it pissed him off, all he could do now was wait for the lab results and see if Nóirín came up with any solid evidence against Dunhill. If he was the killer, declaring the car stolen was a stroke of genius. Evan wondered for the umpteenth time how skilled Dylan was. If the computer expert didn’t find anything within the next hour, Evan was going to take a crack at the ECU himself.
If the forensic techs found Jenny’s DNA in the car, that would be irrefutable evidence against Dunhill. But a good cop always had to play Devil’s advocate. What if they didn’t? What if Dunhill was indeed innocent? In Evan’s mind that only meant one thing: he wasn’t Black Dawn. Black Dawn was the killer, and Black Dawn had framed Dunhill, in the same way Black Dawn had framed Patrick O’Leary for Shannon’s murder. There were patterns here, and Evan felt he was being led by the nose by this illusive Black Dawn. His mistake had been not focusing on discovering who that person was, and he hadn’t anticipated a second victim. If it turned out the killer wasn’t Dunhill, he was going to move mountains to find Black Dawn. And once he did, he would make sure the dawn was black forever for that sick fuck.
“I figured you’d be in here.”
His heart bumped against his ribs, and he turned around to see Chelsea silhouetted in the doorway. She reached instinctively toward the light switch, but something stopped her. Hesitantly, she advanced in the dark room.
“Do you want to be alone?” she asked.
“I don’t mind your company,” he said, drawing up a chair and motioning for her to sit next to him. “How did you sleep?”
She sat, holding a steaming cup between her palms.
“Like a rock. Sorry I’m so late, but I slept in, then showered, went through my morning routine… You know, female stuff,” she added, smiling faintly.
He found it odd that she didn’t look at him while she spoke. He couldn’t see her clearly in the dim light coming from behind them, but it looked to him as if she hadn’t worn any makeup. Whatever female routine she was referring to hadn’t helped, because she looked tired and pale.
“It’s okay, you didn’t miss much,” he said. “I’ve interviewed Dunhill again, got nothing new. The Bureau is working on his car. They should have some news for us in a few hours. They found some hair, some prints… We’ll know soon enough if they belong to any of the victims. And a cyber tech is analyzing the onboard computer, checking the logs, redoing the car route from the past forty-eight hours. We just have to wait for a while.”
She nodded, then took a sip from her drink. A scent of vanilla and cherry hinted that she was having hot tea.
“Listen.” He propped his left ankle on his right knee and angled his body toward her. “I’ve been thinking. We may need to consider the possibility that Jack Dunhill might not be our man. That leaves us with—”
“Black Dawn.”
“Yeah. I want you to think really hard about this, Chelsea. Is there anyone that might have a grudge against you, an obsession with you? Anyone you fought with lately? Or a deranged patient that might have some crush on you?”
&nb
sp; She exhaled slowly and stared at the ceiling. “I’ve been thinking about this ever since I woke up. I really can’t think of anyone who would hate me enough to do… this,” she gesticulated widely, as if no explanation was needed.
“Ex-boyfriends, patients, friends, didn’t anyone trigger any alarm bells? It doesn’t necessarily need to be hate, it could also be someone who, in their mind, loves you,” Evan said.
“I don’t know. I honestly can’t think of anyone who would have such strong feelings toward me as to trigger this kind of reaction. I mean, not really…”
Evan’s ears sharpened. There had been the slightest hesitation in her voice, the slightest of pauses in her gesticulating hand.
“What? Tell me, even if it seems irrelevant.”
She sighed, shaking her head as though she couldn’t believe she was saying this. “There was this girl in high school, Aideen O’Banion… She and I were friends for a while, but then we parted ways. I never thought any person in this world would ever hate me, but I guess she comes the closest. But, Evan, that was more than fifteen years ago. Trust me, this is irrelevant. If Aideen wanted to hurt me, she wouldn’t have waited this long to do it.”
“Maybe something triggered it, something that happened recently.” Evan’s skin tingled in that strange, inexplicable way it did when he found a significant piece of information. He was on to something. “When we first talked about this, you did say Black Dawn was a nickname a woman would choose.”
“I guess so, but… It’s just too far-fetched. Even if she were crazy—and I wouldn’t vouch against it—why now? Why me?”
“Let’s take it easy. Tell me about this girl.”
Chelsea took another sip of her tea, then cleared her throat. “Like I said, we were together in high school. I don’t remember how we became friends, but we started hanging out together. She was… unconventional, weird, so I guess I felt as if I’d found a kindred spirit.”
“Weird how?”
“Well… She was a loner, liked to take walks on deserted streets or in the cemetery, listened to odd music and dressed like an old maid. Her family was downright dysfunctional,” she added with a scoffing sound. “Her mother loved to argue, and her father was almost a ghost. I remember she had an older sister. As an only child, I thought how cool that must be, but she and her sister weren’t close at all. There was no love, no affection in her family as far as I could see.”
“So you became friends,” Evan prompted. “What did you do together?”
Chelsea toyed with the cup in her hand, her fingers as busy as her mind. “Things that fifteen-year-old-girls do. Skipped classes, went to internet cafes.” She darted him a glance. “Yes, I am that old, they were in style back then. We used to go there and meet guys online, flirt… We both liked to take long walks.”
“In the cemetery?”
He meant to tease her, but she nodded seriously.
“At first, I thought it was creepy, but then I started to like it. The silence, the peace… I suppose most teenagers go through a phase when they’re interested in death, and I was no exception, especially after my mother’s suicide.” She lowered her eyes.
Evan wanted to reach out and take her hand, offer a comforting gesture, but she resumed speaking before he could touch her.
“Anyway, we didn’t talk much. Unlike most girls, neither of us was chatty. That was one thing I liked about her.”
“So what happened? Why aren’t you still friends?”
Chelsea chewed her bottom lip thoughtfully. “I remember we had a fight… A teacher implied that I had cheated on a test, which I hadn’t. Aideen had sat next to me, and I told the teacher she could vouch for me. To my amazement, Aideen didn’t tell the teacher I hadn’t cheated, although she knew damn well I hadn’t.” Chelsea sounded puzzled up to this day, her eyes filled with recollections. “She just sat there, smiling, and didn’t say a word. I was so stunned and furious I reached out to grab Aideen, to force her to tell the truth. The teacher kept us apart, and then ripped up my paper, convinced that I was lying. That’s when I realized Aideen was mean. The kind of meanness I didn’t want to have in my life. I’ve never spoken to her again, even though after that day she started spreading all sorts of rumors and lies about me. I sensed the best way to deal with her was to ignore her. She even told everyone my mother had killed herself. No one had known until Aideen told them.”
“What a bitch!” Evan’s radar was buzzing louder and louder. This girl fit the profile of the person they were looking for perfectly. There could be a zillion reasons why she hadn’t contacted Chelsea in fifteen years, but she sure as hell sounded like a person of interest.
“Do you know what happened to her?” he asked.
Chelsea shook her head. “Gradually, everyone in our class stopped talking to her. I had been her only friend, and after what happened, no one wanted anything to do with her. Eventually, after a year or so, she moved to another high school. I have no idea what happened to her after that.”
“You haven’t seen or spoken to her since?”
“Nope.”
“That’s odd, isn’t it? I mean, Dublin isn’t that big a city. In all those years people who met at one point are bound to run into each other,” Evan mused.
“I guess so. Maybe she moved to another city, or another country altogether.”
“I’ll find out, count on it.”
Evan stood, then took his empty cup and carried it to a trash can in the corner. Chelsea followed him, discarding her own cup after she sipped the last of her tea. They’d just stepped out into the hall when they spotted Dylan in the hallway.
Evan signaled to him and the young man headed quickly toward them, a stack of papers in his hand.
“Detective Gallagher, I was just looking for you. I have the report for Mr. Dunhill’s car.”
“Let’s get in here,” Evan said, and guided him back toward the conference room they had just vacated.
Chelsea switched on the lights, as Dylan arranged the papers on a table. God bless him! Evan noticed he’d even made a chart.
“So, I reconstructed the route and timeline the car recorded for the last forty-eight hours,” Dylan began, nudging his glasses up his nose with one finger. “Ye have it all here, but I’ll start with what’s most important, which is the night before last, when Jenny Williams was murdered.” He pushed a paper with a graph done in red and blue toward Evan, and started pointing the hours.
“The murder occurred on Saturday night at 11:47, right? Well, the car was in Malahide all day, and was manually driven there from Dublin on Friday morning. Now, this is where it gets interesting. On Saturday night at 6:55, it was set on automatic pilot, driven to Dublin, got here at 10:42, stopped at this address for seventeen minutes, then was set on manual,” Dylan emphasized. “The driver reached Jenny Williams’s address at 11:22, then drove to the club where she was murdered. The car got there at 11:45, the murder occurred at 11:47, then the killer drove away. He stopped a few streets away, here, then set it on auto pilot again and programmed it to drive back to Malahide, to Helen Colman’s parents, where it was back in the parking lot at 12:44.”
Although he had considered the possibility, hearing this made Evan’s gut tighten. On the one hand, he was glad his visceral instinct had been correct and it seemed that Jack Dunhill wasn’t the killer. On the other hand, it meant the real killer was on the loose, and he only had a vague idea as to where to start looking.
“Good job, Dylan.”
“Does this mean we have the killer’s address?” Chelsea said, staring down at the graphic Dylan had made. She placed her index finger on the timeline. “Here, where he stopped for seventeen minutes, could it be where he lives?”
Dylan shook his head. “I’ve already checked, it’s a gas station. I don’t know if he really stopped there or he altered the logs and changed the address. I could try to dig deeper, but I’ll need more time.”
“Do that,” Evan said. “We’ll keep the car for now, so do what
you can to see if the logs have been tampered with. Do you know if Nóirín or the others have any info regarding the DNA tests?”
Dylan shook his head. “No, detective. I came straight here from my office. Keep these, they’re copies I made for you.”
“Thanks. You’ve done an excellent job,” Evan said, slapping his shoulder. “Let me know if and when you have anything else.”
“Sure.”
Once Dylan left, Evan propped his hands on the table and stared down at the papers, then looked across at Chelsea.
“We need to find Black Dawn.”
“Yeah.” Chelsea pressed her fist against her lips, gazing down at the papers. Her thoughts seemed to be far away. “We’re getting a repeat scenario, just like in Shannon’s murder when Patrick was the obvious culprit. The killer tried to frame Jack Dunhill for Jenny’s murder.”
“Our only lead now is the nickname Black Dawn. I need to open my laptop and do a more detailed search, see if I can trace those blog posts. But I wonder why she chose Dunhill. Did Black Dawn know he was your patient?” Evan mused.
“Probably. If he—or she—has been fixated on me, we can presume he or she has been following me for a while.”
Evan glanced at her. He was impressed to see how steady her gaze was, how cool her expression. No one he knew would stay this calm under these circumstances. Straightening, he took a step closer and reached out to pull her into his arms. A number of reasons could account for her reluctance, but after a few tense moments she leaned into him, burying her small hands in his shirt.
“I won’t let anything happen to you,” he whispered into her hair, his hands splayed protectively over her back. “You’ll stay with me until we find this motherfucker.” He cupped her chin between his fingers and tilted her head so he could look into her eyes. “And I swear to you I will find him—or her. I know you don’t think it’s realistic, but this Aideen O’Banion sounds like a valid suspect.”