"Right," I said. To my coffee. To the kitchen. To no one in particular and all three of them at once. "What are we working on today?"
"Evidence review," Cormac said. "All four of us. After breakfast." He set his coffee down. "One more thing. Your DNA contact. The one who ran your samples."
Something in his voice straightened me up. "What about him?"
"He hasn't answered since yesterday morning. Two scheduled check-ins missed." Flat. No alarm in it, which from Cormac was its own kind of alarm. "Could be nothing. He's careful, you said. Discreet. Men like that go to ground for their own reasons all the time." A beat. "Or someone's tidying up the people who touched your investigation."
The warm kitchen went a few degrees colder.
I thought about a man in Chicago who ran samples for me for money and never asked the wrong questions. Who I'd trusted about as much as I trusted anyone, which wasn't much, but was something.
"Find out which," I said.
"Already on it," Cormac said.
Tiernan had stopped moving at the stove. Ronan had gone still over his coffee. The fragile new thing that had been in the room a minute ago was still there. It just had company now.
They'd known where I was for a while. And now, maybe, someone else was reaching down the same threads that led to me, one quiet hand at a time.
"Right," I said, and put my cup down. "Then we don't waste the day."
18
SIENNA
I asked Ronan if I could take the car.
He said yes without asking where I was going, which I hadn't expected, and which cost him something I caught in the set of his jaw. The effort of a man who wanted to ask and chose not to. He handed me the keys, said be back by four, and that was all.
I drove into Dunraven alone.
I'd been at the estate nine days. Nine days of evidence files and recordings and the four of us around the kitchen table, the slow strange work of building something in a place I'd never expected to build anything. Days of the sea outside the window, Tiernan filling the quiet the way he did, Cormac's silences, and Ronan watching me when he thought I wasn't watching back.
I needed an hour that wasn't any of that. I needed to see the town.
I parked at the edge of the harbor where I'd always parked as a child. Where my father used to park on Saturday mornings when he took me to the market, in the brief window of my childhood simple enough for casual Saturday mornings, before security arrangements made them impossible. The harbor was the same. The fishing boats were the same. The smell of salt anddiesel and something frying was the same, the way smells stay the same when they're specific enough to live in your memory.
The frying was chips, and the chips put Uncle Eamon on the harbor wall in my head for half a second, his arm around me, before I folded him up and put him away. Some grief you carry around all day. His I could only take in seconds.
I got out and walked.
The town was quiet on a Thursday morning in October. A few people crossed the market square with the purposeful unhurry of people who lived somewhere and had nowhere to be that they weren't already going. A woman with a pram. Two men outside the pub who'd stood there since anyone remembered, talking with the body language of a conversation thirty years old. A teenager on a bicycle who gave the car I'd arrived in more attention than he gave me.
I walked down the main street with my hands in my pockets and my collar up against the wind, taking it all in.
The butcher was still there. Different sign, same building, same spot. I'd been sent to that butcher on Saturdays with a list in my mother's handwriting I took extremely seriously, because I was that kind of child. The pharmacy next door was new. The old pharmacist had retired. I knew that from the background work I'd done over the years, the kind you do when you run a surveillance operation dressed up as a whiskey business. The hardware shop had expanded. The bookshop had not, which pleased me in a way I couldn't account for.
I stopped outside the bookshop.
It was small and cramped and had the smell good bookshops have, paper and dust and something that might have been ambition. Too many books and not enough shelf space, a shop that had long since made peace with the fact. A handwritten sign in the window advertised a local history section. I went in.
The woman behind the counter was old enough to have been here my whole life. Small, sharp-eyed, with the specific attention people who spend their lives around books develop. The ability to sort a person quickly and accurately without making a thing of it. She clocked me when I came in. I nodded and moved into the stacks.
The local history section was in the back, where they always are in shops like this. Respected but not prominent, for the people who know to check rather than the ones passing through. I ran a finger along the spines. Dunraven: A Coastal History. The Families of West Clare. Irish Crime and the Modern Era. A thin self-published volume called simply The Cliff Road.
I pulled out The Families of West Clare and turned to the index.
Madigan. Pages 47, 89, 134.
