Chris was stumped. There was no way this guy in the wheelchair could be their killer.
Even overlooking his disability, Simon Darcy was a slight, feeble-looking 60-odd-year-old man. There was no chance he could have carried out the heavy lifting required at the murder scenes.
Upon further questioning, Darcy informed them that he’d been quadriplegic since the late nineties, following a car accident. His disability was largely the catalyst for the breakup of his marriage to Amanda’s mother.
While the man was talking, Chris noticed something. He’d actually been aware of it all the time he’d been here, but was initially so distracted by Simon Darcy’s condition that his mind hadn’t been able to process it.
Present in the house was an incredibly potent ammonia smell, the kind of smell that Reilly had tried to describe to them throughout the investigation as similar to skunk spray. Clearly there was something else going on here, something they weren’t getting. Simon Darcy might not be directly involved in the killings, but the police were on the right track. However, the ammonia smell may well have been some side effect of Darcy’s condition ...
But Chris didn’t believe in coincidences, and there were already way too many to ignore. Darcy’s connection to Webb, the spicy cooking sauce, and now the smell ...
‘Do you live alone, Simon?’ he asked suddenly.
‘No, my sonlives with me,’ the older man replied easily. He sighed. ‘Actually, I thought it might have been him you were looking for at first.’
The hairs on the back of Chris’s neck stood up.
A son. Someone who would have also been deeply affected by the rape, and who quite possibly didn’t share his father’s noble ideas about justice and punishment.
He recalled the details from the Harrington case file. An older brother had indeed been listed under family, but because they’d discovered the Harringtons had subsequently emigrated ...
Evidently the brother had decided to swap surfboards and koalas for magpies and maggots. Chris’s mind raced and his pulse quickened. He looked at Kennedy ‘Where is your son now?’
‘Out with friends, I believe. Whatever it is, can’t it be dealt with during work hours?’
Kennedy looked baffled. ‘Work hours?’
‘Well, yes. I presume you wanted to ask him something about the morgue.’
Now Chris was confused. The morgue?
Simon shook his head. ‘I’m sorry – my mistake again. I just assumed you both knew Luke, and this was work-related. He works as a volunteer assistant at the city morgue. Goodness knows why. I can’t imagine a more macabre position, but of course he’s always been interested in the darker side of ...’ Then, at the same time that Chris made the connection, Simon did too. The older man stared at Chris, a world of pain in his eyes. ‘Oh, no ... no ...’ he cried out. ‘The drawings ... I had no idea.’
Chris was by now holding his breath. He let it out slowly. ‘What drawings, Simon?’ he asked carefully. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘You said something before – about those appalling murders ...’ he said, addressing Kennedy now. ‘About a man ... hanging from a tree with his ...’ He shook his head, and Chris recalled that the more horrific details of Jennings’ death had been purposely concealed from the media. ‘I thought it was a rendering of Dante, such a vivid, expressive scene ...’
‘Simon,’ Chris said, gently touching the man on the shoulder, ‘show us the drawings.’
‘Luke? The son’s name is Luke? How deliciously perfect!’ Reuben was agog with exhilaration when, following an update from Chris, Reilly phoned the profiler to pass on the details of their most recent find.
She frowned. ‘How so?’
‘Well, all along I had envisioned our killer as Minos, when of course he was acting in the name of the devil himself! Lucifer,’ he added quickly, when at Reilly’s end there remained a baffled silence. ‘A rare blunder on my part, but it happens occasionally, if truth be told,’ he added with typical modesty. ‘But given his familiarity with Dante, I’m guessing our Lucifer must have been keenly aware of not only the connotations of his namesake, but his responsibilities too. In the Inferno, Minos ordains the punishments, but it’s the devil who carries them out.’
Luke ... Lucifer ...
The quiet college kid from the morgue, capable of so much destruction? It seemed incomprehensible. Yet at the same time it fit.
From his position at the morgue, Luke Darcy would have had access to the case files and the evidence reports, and was keeping himself abreast of the investigation every step of the way.
Then another thought struck her. Luke’s made-up goth face the last time she’d him ... and that unidentified white dust mark on Crowe’s shoulder on the DVD ...
Reilly knew that poor Karen Thompson would be devastated to learn that this amiable kid she’d entrusted with the city’s dead had deceived her in such a way.
Judging by the drawings that Luke’s poor devastated father had shown the detectives a sketchpad of perfectly rendered illustrations of all five Dantesque murder scenes it was clear that the younger Darcy was also quite the artist, which fit in perfectly with the pencil and rubber traces.
Not only that, but the proximity of the takeaway restaurant (and Simon’s reluctant confirmation that his son was a regular customer) tallied with the cooking sauce, and Chris was adamant that in the Darcy house, he too had picked up that same so far unidentified ammonia-type smell.
Now all they needed to do was find out where Luke was, and if he was indeed holding Ricky Webb, the man he held ultimately responsible for his sister’s death.
Reilly was certain that the key to this was the equine slant to the remaining evidence – the horse feed and the alkaline soil that Lucy had identified as being from the Kildare area.
Reuben was on his way to the GFU building to help with the search, while Chris and Kennedy planned to remain temporarily at the Darcy house until Luke returned from his supposed ‘night out with friends’.
They were also keen to continue questioning Simon about his knowledge (or lack of it) of his son’s recent pursuits, and to determine whether the older man could shed any light on the rural location in which Luke had been holding his victims. If they could identify this, they might just be able to save Ricky Webb.
‘Check the Land Registry, see if either is registered as owning property other than this one,’ Chris suggested. ‘Simon says he doesn’t, but I’m not taking anything for granted.’
‘I’m on it.’ Reilly told him.
She’d just hung up the phone when she heard Gary’s footsteps in the hallway outside. He hurried into her office, laptop in his hand.
‘I just got your message. What do you need?’
Reilly was already tapping on her own keyboard. ‘Property search,’ she replied briskly. ‘We need to know if Simon Darcy owns any property around the Kildare area.’
Gary slid his laptop from its case. ‘Like a stables, or stud farm maybe?’ He stretched his fingers and cracked his knuckles. ‘This is my kind of search.’
Reilly looked over as his fingers flicked nimbly across the keyboard. Always good to have a techie on the team.
Some twenty minutes later, Reuben breezed into the office, full of excitement.
‘Pray tell, my beloved, what news?’
Gary, temporarily distracted from this search, gave the profiler a curious glance, and despite the fraught circumstances Reilly couldn’t resist a smile.
‘We’re trying to figure out where Darcy’s keeping his victims,’ she told him. ‘Chances are it’s where he’s got Webb right now.’
‘Ah, my favorite part of the story,’ Reuben intoned in a singsong voice. ‘Now that the true culprit has been unmasked, we must swoop in, find our villian and save the day. Only then will order be restored.’
‘This isn’t a TV show, Reuben,’ Reilly scolded. ‘Someone’s life is at stake here.’
‘Agreed, but I must admit I’m rather in agreement with the object of your attraction on this one. The life at stake could hardly be considered a treasured one.’
Reilly couldn’t believe what she was hearing.
‘Then why are we doing this, Reuben? Why the hell do we do this job at all? Why not just allow every sicko to get away with whatever random form of justice he fancies?’
‘Calm down, I jest.’
‘Do you, though?’ she asked. ‘Do you really care about what happens to
Ricky Webb? Or have you already made up your mind that he’s not worth saving?’
If they the authorities, the ones who were supposed to uphold order and justice could be prejudiced, then surely they were no better than viligantes themselves, deciding at will who merited protection or who didn’t?
‘My dearest Reilly, that is precisely the reason I’m here. To assist and illuminate you on your quest to save our man,’ Reuben replied in his typical mocking tone, though for once there was a modicum of seriousness in there too. ‘And truth be told, I have an idea—’
‘I think I’ve got something.’ They both turned to look at Gary, who was still tapping away on his computer. ‘It’s a bit of a long shot, but ...’
‘What is it?’ she demanded.
He looked at her. ‘I know you said to search for property ownership under the Darcy name, but then I had a thought. The son, Luke, he and his sister lived with their mother and stepdad at the time of the attack, yes? Then he emigrated to Australia with them after the sister died—’
‘But subsequently returned to ye oul sold,’ Reuben finished.
‘Yes. And went to live with his real father, Simon, who lives in a small terraced house in Ringsend.’
‘I’m not following.’
‘So who’s to say the stepfather doesn’t still own property here?’ Gary continued, excitement in his tone. ‘The Harringtons are reasonably well off, and while they were able to sell their Dublin house before they emigrated—’
‘They might still be trying to offload another place down the country,’ Reilly finished, sitting down and scooting her chair closer to Gary’s.
‘Yep. There is indeed a property still registered to one David Harrington formerly of Sandymount, Dublin – in Clane, County Kildare. A quick MyHome search confirms it’s currently on the market ...’ He spun his laptop round so Reilly could see the screen, and grinned triumphantly. ‘And here’s what it looks like.’
Her breath caught. It was a two-acre farmstead, a house and an old stone barn located on the property. For sale and abandoned, yet Luke Darcy would have easy access to the place, probably had his own set of keys, and with the property market in the doldrums, could likely go about his business completely undisturbed.
‘Gary, you’re an absolute genius!’ Reilly exclaimed, and in her excitement she reached forward and kissed him on the lips.
The lab tech’s face colored with surprise, and he smiled.
‘Hmm ...’ Reuben raised an eyebrow as he surveyed the exchange. ‘Clearly, I’m in entirely the wrong field.’