by Catie Murphy
Bourke had gotten everything he could out of Raquel, whose grief had mounted toward hysteria again. The details of what needed doing—not least, calling her family back home to break the terrible news—were starting to come to her. With one breath she would be making calm decisions, and with the next, clawing the wall in helpless despair. Megan approached and asked, quietly, if Raquel would like her to go get that prescription filled, and the mourning woman thrust the paper at her without hesitation. Bourke caught her eye and walked her to the lifts, although left on her own Megan would have taken the stairs. “What’s your take on the whole story?”
“I really don’t know. Raquel’s wrong about how many people here might know about the earldom connection, because Mrs. Williams was telling everyone who would listen and plenty of people who wouldn’t. I can’t imagine why anybody would kill her over it, though. It’s not like it’s a hundred years ago and Ireland’s fresh with scars from its separation from Britain. There are probably a few people who still feel strongly about old titles, but I don’t think there are many of them hanging around the Leprechaun Limos offices or anything.” Megan took a deep breath. “Look, there’s something else I should probably mention. It’s probably not a big deal, because the hotel lobby and airport cameras, and my vehicle’s GPS tracker provide an alibi, but—”
Bourke’s peachy-gold colouration drained to an unhealthy pallor that made faint freckles stand out across his cheeks. “But what?”
Megan sighed. “I had a key to Cherise Williams’s room.”
CHAPTER 3
Paul Bourke sagged less like a stringless marionette and more, Megan thought, like a balloon losing its air. His clothes—a slim-cut dark blue suit and his ubiquitous tan trench—which normally fit perfectly, suddenly looked too big for him as his shoulders caved and his head dropped. “Jesus, Megan.”
“I know.” She made a fluttering motion with one hand. “Mrs. Williams gave it to me, so I could let Raquel right in to the room, and she wouldn’t take no for an answer. Honestly, between the airport and the car and everything I don’t think there’s five minutes of unaccounted time over the past few hours, but I . . . well, I thought I should mention it.”
“My superiors are going to have a field day.”
Megan grimaced. “I’d just been wondering if they had any . . . opinions about me.”
Bourke, still slumped, gave her a grim look from under his eyebrows. “Absolute fecking loads. The captain wants to take away your commercial license.”
“But I haven’t done anything!” Megan felt like an eight-year-old, stating the truth so emphatically it sounded like a lie.
“I know. They know. But all these deaths in half a year, Megan—”
She muttered, “Eight months,” defensively.
This time Bourke’s glance was dangerously warning, before he rallied and pulled himself straight and tall again. The elevator doors dinged and slid open. A crisp-looking woman in her thirties exited, forcing Megan and Bourke to both step back and make way for her. Neither of them entered the lift, and after a moment the doors slid shut again. “Eight months or half a year, you’re a civilian and you’re not meant to be wandering in and out of situations where suspicious deaths occur.”
“Oh really. I thought it was de rigueur. All the best limo drivers are doing it.”
“Megan.”
She lifted a hand in apology. “Yeah. Sorry. You don’t need snide on top of the rest of this. Maybe Mrs. Williams did just die of a heart attack.”
“Even if she did, you being on scene to find the body . . .” Bourke sighed from the bottom of his soul and pressed the lift button again. The doors opened immediately and this time he gestured for Megan to precede him into it. She did, leaning against the handrail on the back wall and catching infinite glimpses of herself and Bourke in the sidewalls’ mirrors. “Tell me what else you know.”
“I told you everything on the phone. Our schedule—Orla will kill me if I tell you our schedule. Client confidentiality.”
“Orla Keegan may be little and fierce and have the whole lot of you who work for her cowed, but she’ll hand over the keys to the kingdom if the guards tell her to.”
Megan, offended, said, “I’m not afraid of Orla,” and Bourke snorted.
“Sure and you’re only keen to not rock the boat where she’s concerned.”
“She’s my boss, Paul, and at this point I don’t know that I could get another job driving in Dublin if I lost this one.”
“Not if my chief had anything to say about it,” Bourke admitted. The lift rebounded gently as it reached the ground floor and opened its doors to release them into a corner of the Gresham’s melodramatically spacious lobby. Chandelier light bounced off hard, polished white floors with darker stone inset in labyrinthian lines. Megan could imagine walking them meditatively, as long as she didn’t look up at the field of large, blown-glass flowers that hung from the ceiling near the reception desk, and as long as she wasn’t interrupted by the surprisingly (by Irish standards) helpful floor staff. Megan’s soft-soled black driving shoes were silent on the marble floors, but Paul’s hard-soled leather Oxfords clicked like a pair of high heels as they headed for the doors.
“I’ll claim you used police pressure if Orla goes on a tear,” Megan warned. “Anyway, the itinerary includes driving up to Leitrim for a couple of days so they can see what they imagine are their old stomping grounds, and spending as much time nagging St. Michan’s or the CSO as necessary to get the DNA samples they want. Or that was the itinerary, anyway. I don’t know what’ll happen now.”
“They can’t really imagine someone’s going to let them drill a hole in an old finger bone for a DNA sample, can they?” Paul trotted down the shallow hotel steps outdoors ahead of Megan, glancing back at her as she caught up.
“I dunno. Um, where’s the nearest pharmacy?” Most of the afternoon sunlight had faded, leaving O’Connell Street blue and gold with twilight and streetlamps. A green pharmacy cross glowed from a building down the street toward the river, and she headed that way. “I read up on it and it said the last Earl of Leitrim spent thousands of dollars trying to find his missing brother. Thousands back then would have been tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands, in today’s money, so even if there’s not anything left of the title now, it was worth a lot to somebody once upon a time. Someone might be willing to see whether it’s true, at the very least. Everybody likes a good lost-heir story. Look at Anastasia.”
“Anastasia was over a century ago, Megan.”
Megan shrugged her eyebrows. “So was the missing heir to Leitrim. Are you supposed to have followed me out of the hotel, or did you just forget what you were doing?”
Bourke laughed, glancing back toward the hotel as they went into the pharmacy. “I probably shouldn’t have, now that you mention it. There’s staff to question and security tapes to review. Grand, now it’s me you’re getting in trouble, Megan.”
“I’d hate to be the only one your superiors are mad at.”
A few minutes later, the pharmacist asked Megan if the medication was for her. Megan said, “It is,” and nodded along at the woman’s instructions for taking it, then paid and left again, Bourke in tow.
“You just lied to a pharmacist in front of a police detective, Ms. Malone.”
Megan blew a raspberry. “I tried to get migraine medicine for a friend once and told the truth and they wouldn’t sell it to me, so I’m not doing that again. Besides, you’ve got bigger fish to fry than me.” They reached the hotel again within a couple of minutes, Bourke jogging up to hold the door for her in a very gentlemanly fashion. “I’m going to bring this up to Raquel and call Orla, because God forbid she hear this on Six One.” She said the last couple of words carefully, trying not to sound like an American, because her instinct was still to call it “the six o’clock news,” which just wasn’t how the Irish referred to their evening newscast.
“I’d tell you to stay out of trouble, but it wouldn’t take.”
Bourke split off and went to reception, where the hotel manager had a small group of employees huddled around her. Megan thought they were all the staff who had been in and out of the room, and suspected the manager was doing her best to teach them the hotel’s party line on the topic of Cherise Williams’s death. She veered toward the stairs, preferring them over the lift, and took most of the four flights two steps at a time. Her thighs ached by the time she reached the fourth floor, but at least it had gotten her blood moving.
Raquel Williams sat alone on one of the beds, her back to the windows, in her mother’s hotel room. The door had been left open, but Megan tapped on it anyway; a warning, at least, that she meant to come in. Raquel barely lifted her head. She held her phone in both hands, on her lap, and her rounded shoulders spoke of defeat. Megan put the pharmacy bag on the desk and went to sit silently beside the bereaved woman.
“I have two sisters,” Raquel said after a while. She sounded drugged already, her voice heavy and slow. “I don’t know how to tell them. I don’t even know what to tell them. They’re going to want to know how, why, and I don’t have an answer. But I can’t wait, either. What do I do?” When Megan didn’t answer, she lifted her gaze to stare at the opposite wall and said, “No, you don’t have to say it. I know. I call them. I tell them.” She turned her head, not quite enough to meet Megan’s eyes. “I’d like to be alone, please, but could you wait for me? In the hall?”
“Sure.” Megan rose and left the room, closing the door behind her and just as grateful to not have to witness Raquel sharing terrible news with her sisters. She had her own version of it to share already, and, with a sigh, rang her boss, who picked up with an acerbic, “Whaddaya? Traffic keep you from getting the Williams girl?”
“No, I got her, but when we got back to the hotel room, Mrs. Williams was dead.”
Orla Keegan’s silence went on so long Megan pulled the phone away from her ear to make sure the connection was still active. “Orla?”
“You’re fired and I want you out of the apartment by the weekend.”
“Orla!”
“No, I won’t hear it. You’ve got a curse on you and I won’t have it in my business, not a minute longer.”
“Orla!”
“Bring the car back. I’ll have your last paycheck waiting for you when you get here.” Orla hung up and Megan flinched as if she’d had a receiver slammed down in her ear. Her hands had gone cold again, at odds with her heart’s beat, so ferocious she felt dizzy. She backed up to the wall opposite Raquel’s room and leaned against it, afraid she’d fall otherwise, and waited for anger to start burning the shock away.
Incredulity rose instead, a laughing disbelief that clutched her chest. Orla couldn’t possibly mean it, except she obviously could. Megan turned her phone over and fumbled a search query on whether Orla was allowed to just fire her like that under Irish employment law. The internet suggested she couldn’t, and that Megan could sue if she wanted to. Orla was too savvy a businesswoman to risk that, so Megan reckoned something could be done. But part of her mind ran through contingency plans—where she could live, whether she could live on her military retirement, whether a competing driving service would hire her, or whether she could get a taxi of her own—while the rest of her focused on making a phone call with shaking hands.
Her friend Brian picked up with the same cheery, “Hi, Megan, what’s the story?” that Bourke had used earlier. He’d acquired the phrase, though: Brian, like Megan, was an American immigrant. His day job, running a small publishing business, allowed him to dog-sit her puppies more often than Megan thought she should ask, and as a sort of masochistic hobby, he’d developed a well-honed outrage about Irish tenancy agreements after nearly twenty years in the country. Concern filtered into his voice when she didn’t speak for a moment. “Megan? Are you okay?”
“What . . . ah.” Megan’s voice cracked and she swallowed, trying again. “Uh . . . how much notice does a landlord have to give you before they throw you out, if you’ve lived someplace for about two and a half years?”
“Fifty-six days, why? Oh, crap, did Orla finally lose her shit over the dogs?”
“Oh, God, I hadn’t even thought of them, but I bet they’ll be her excuse.” Megan had rescued newborn puppies and their mother months earlier, and somehow, although more than half a year had passed, she still had all three of them. “No, she fired me and told me to move out because another client just died.”
“What? I mean, what a cow, but—what?”
“She thinks I’m cursed. She might be right. I shouldn’t be telling you, but yeah, my client today—I don’t know. A heart attack, maybe. I hope.”
“Well, she can’t fire you for that. You’re not the one killing people.” Measured anger filled Brian’s voice. “Are you okay?”
“That,” Megan said grimly, “is logic talking, and if Orla thinks I’m cursed, we’re not trucking with logic. I don’t know. I was okay a few minutes ago, but I called Detective Bourke when we found the body and he almost had an aneurysm on the phone.” Across the hall, Raquel’s door handle jostled. Megan groaned. “I think I have to go. My client—her daughter—asked me to stay.”
“Okay, look.” Brian spoke rapidly. “She can’t kick you out without almost two months’ notice, and even then only for failing to fulfill the terms of the tenancy or if she’s going to sell or a family member is going to use it and we know none of that is true. You come over after work tonight. We’ll get this sorted. It’s going to be fine.”
Megan took a deep breath. “Thank you. I think I just needed to hear somebody say that. I was starting to melt down.”
“That’s what friends are for. I’ll get the paperwork you need to prove your point, just in case she decides to push it.”
“You’re a star, Brian. Okay. I’ve got to go.” Raquel’s door opened as Megan hung up, the younger woman looking smaller and more fragile than she’d been a few hours earlier.
“My sisters are flying over tonight,” she whispered. “Could you get them at the airport in the morning? I’ll text you their flight information.”
Megan smiled as best she could. “Leprechaun Limos will be there to help you. Is there anything else I can do?”
Raquel shook her head. “I think I’m going to take one of those sleeping pills and try to rest. I can’t do anything else tonight and my head is full of fog.” All her Texan bluster had disappeared; Megan, off-kilter herself, empathized.
“If I may make a suggestion?” At Raquel’s nod, Megan said, “Order a bowl of soup before you sleep. It’s going to be hard enough without being hungry, even if you’re not consciously hungry.”
“Oh.” Raquel looked around, gaze vague. “I was hungry before—before. Maybe I sh—do you know where they’ve taken her?” Her voice broke. “They told me when they took her away, but I forgot. A hospital.”
“The Mater is closest. Your sisters will want to see her?”
“I don’t know.” Raquel’s facade of calm was breaking. Megan stepped forward, offering a hand.
“I’ll ask the detective if he knows, and text you the details so you’ll know, and the service will drive you and your sisters wherever you need to go tomorrow.”
Raquel squeezed Megan’s hand with cold fingers. “Thank you. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
“I’m glad to help.” Megan let her go and took the stairs down to the lobby again. Bourke was in an alcove, talking to one of the staff members, and Megan caught his eye as she passed by. She tipped her head toward another set of chairs and he gave a minute nod in return, so she sat down to wait, thumbing through web pages about unlawful termination and looking for apartments to rent. Not that anyone would rent to her if she didn’t have a job, but she would burn that bridge when she got to it.
“What’s the story?” Bourke appeared and sat across from her, his long legs splayed with an undignified lack of professionalism.
“Raquel wanted to know where they’d taken Mrs. Williams’s body, in
case her sisters want to see her when they fly in tomorrow. She thought they’d said it was a hospital, and the Mater’s closest, but I told her I’d check and see if you knew for sure.” Megan sounded mechanical even to her own ears, and from the curious upward sweep of Bourke’s pale eyebrows, to his too.
“Yeah, the Mater. Are you all right?”
“Orla fired me and told me to find a new place to live. I knew I was stupid to rent from my employer.”
Bourke’s jaw went long with surprise. “She never!”
“Oh, but she did. Said she’d have my last paycheck waiting for me when I got back with the car.”
Distress and anger turned Bourke’s light eyes a darker blue. “That check had better have two weeks’ severance attached to it. What the hell is she thinking?”
“That I’m cursed.”
For the space of a heartbeat Megan saw Bourke genuinely consider the possibility before shaking it off. “I see her point, but, I don’t know. Maybe you could get an exorcism.”
Megan stared at him a moment. “I wonder if that would work. I mean, if it would satisfy her.” She shook herself, then sighed. “Yeah. I spent eight years as a medic in the army and I came across fewer random dead people than I have in this job. I see her point too.”
“I assume you came across considerably more not-random dead people, though.”
“We tried pretty hard to make sure they didn’t actually die, but yeah.” Megan sighed. “Look, I’d better get the car back and see whether there really is a final paycheck waiting for me or if she was just blowing off steam. Boy, I’m going to be good fun tonight.”
Despite the circumstances, Bourke’s eyebrows rose with interest. “Got a date?”
“No, although I should probably call Jelena and tell her I might need to crash on her couch while I find a new place to live.”