fifty-one

Danny shook hands with DS Sheehy, who was on loan from the neighboring Killaloe District, and his DO, Detective O’Donnell. “Glad to have you. You’re up to date?”

“Well enough, anyhow.” Sheehy glanced around the cramped Detective Unit office. “No incident room?”

Danny pointed to a table shoved into the corner of the room with a whiteboard hanging over it. “That’s it.”

Budget constraints. None of them had to say it.

A blank line bisected the whiteboard, with one side labeled Joseph Macy (EJ) and the other Annie Belden. A mass of paperwork littered the tabletop. Memoranda of interviews, reports, questions, potential leads—all of it in disarray.

“I suppose I’m your ‘incident room’ coordinator,” Sheehy said.

“That would be grand.” Danny gestured toward O’Neil and his other DO, Detective Pinkney, who sat at their desks. “We could use the help.”

As incident room coordinator, Sheehy would function as the office man, weeding through paperwork, assigning follow-up tasks, and ensuring that no leads fell through the cracks. They had him and O’Donnell in Lisfenora for a week. Danny planned to make full use of them to organize their arses.

“First off.” Sheehy handed a folder to Danny. “Just in.”

Danny flipped it open, grimaced, and handed it off to O’Neil. Benjy’s report on Annie Belden’s cause of death. Danny hadn’t attended the autopsy because he’d run to the Ennis hospital to ensure that Ellen was settled. The doctors at the Limerick hospital had deemed her well enough to be transferred to the local facility once again. No one had bothered to call him until after she’d arrived in Ennis.

“Eileen Browne, her therapist, predicted an insulin overdose,” Danny said, “and she was correct. She also thought suicide, which might have stuck if we’d found her medications in the house.”

“Conspicuous in their absence.” Sheehy wrote insulin overdose on the whiteboard.

“Odd that,” O’Neil said. “If you’re trying to get away with murder, why pilfer the one item that could lead to a suicide verdict?”

Once again, Danny pondered the nonsensical aspects of the crime scene: Annie’s face covered with due respect in sharp contrast with the dead flowers. “What do we know about the bouquet?”

“Nothing yet,” Pinkney said.

Sheehy grumbled under his breath, then said, “O’Donnell, you’ve got flower research.”

“Our first priority for the Belden case,” Danny said, “is to find a man named Cedric Gibson.”

Sheehy raised his chin at O’Neil, and O’Neil nodded. “Yes, sir.”

Sheehy wrote the task assignment on the whiteboard. Danny breathed a sigh of relief. They might make progress now that they had enough men for proper division of labor.

“There’s another man, Nathan Tate, who’d recently taken up with Annie. I’m circling around him. He needs a light touch because he’s none too stable.”

Sheehy wrote Danny’s name next to Nathan’s on the whiteboard. He pointed to the paper piles amassed on the incident room table. “Will I find memoranda from her neighbors in that mess?”

O’Neil spoke up. “Yes, all there. Somewhere.” He leaned back in his chair with his hands clasped behind his head. “The last sighting we have of Annie is late Thursday afternoon, when the neighbor across the lane saw her setting out the rubbish for the bin men. Pinkney and I got an earful from her. Annie’s security lights are bright enough to read by, according to the neighbor. She nattered on about having to buy black-out curtains for her bedroom, on and on and on, until I got out of her that on the night in question, the lights triggered at 12:30, 1:43—not 1:45, mind, but 1:43—2:18, 2:37, and 5:18. More than usual, according to her.”

“The neighbor wrote it down?” Sheehy said.

“Indeed. Quite the long list of offenses she had against Annie Belden.”

Sheehy added Irate neighbors? to the whiteboard list.

“Cats, badgers, possums, or foxes could account for that,” O’Donnell said.

“Any joy tracking the missing mobile?” Sheehy said. “What about family?”

“Joyless thus far,” O’Neil said. “Her brother who lives in Spain arrived to see to her affairs. Next of kin scattered for both EJ and Annie, and either alibied or living too far away to be interesting.”

Sheehy tapped his marker on EJ’s side of the whiteboard. “I found the report about the turf cutter that killed Joseph Macy. When did the tool go missing?”

“There’s when it went missing and when Alan Bressard, the owner, noticed that it went missing,” Danny said. “He said the pile of antiques sat on the floor for a week. He noticed the sleán missing when he went to hang it back up, about three days after EJ’s death.”

“The sleán didn’t jig its way out of the pub on its own,” Sheehy said.

“Alan’s dog lies back there.” Danny had thought about this, about how he’d pinch a turf cutter other than by breaking into the place. “It’s toward the back of the pub near the corridor that leads to the toilets, kitchen, and back door. Anyone could have stooped to pet Bijou and tucked the cutter into a coat, then strolled out the back door.”

“Awkward,” Sheehy said.

Danny nodded. Bloody awkward.

Sheehy tilted his head back to peer through his glasses at yet another piece of paper. “Nathan Tate again. The murder weapon was found with his painting supplies at—Fox Cottage, is it? And he warms a stool same as EJ did at the Plough and Trough. I’d say he needs to be brought in for a more formal chat.”

“Not yet,” Danny said. “Trust me on this one. If we push him too hard, he’ll shatter.”

“Useless as tits on a nun he’d be then,” O’Neil said. “I second that.”

Sheehy looked mournful as he gazed at the whiteboard. “In other words, we’ve got feck all.”

“About the size of it,” Danny said. “Except for Cedric Gibson.”

“We’ve assumed the cases are unrelated,” Sheehy said, “but for the sake of argument, suppose we were to find a connection between Annie and EJ, something that led to both of their deaths—”

“Nathan was friendly with both of them,” O’Neil said.

“Just so.” In Sheehy’s precise printing, Nathan’s name straddled the divide between the cases.

Danny sensed Sheehy’s wheels chugging toward the obvious answer, the easy answer: Nathan Tate. Not that Nathan didn’t intrigue Danny, but there was something to understand about Nathan that still eluded him.

“We need to look into who else knew both Annie and EJ,” Danny said. “It could be that Cedric Gibson has a connection to EJ that we don’t know about yet.”

Sheehy pointed at Pinkney. “Gibson’s connection to Joseph Macy, anyone’s connection to both Annie and Joseph.”

Danny grabbed coffee and settled in for the rest of the afternoon of paperwork and phone calls. His mind kept returning to Nathan. He knew a fact about Nathan that he hadn’t reported yet: the horrific scar on his side, a scar that devoted Zoe had surely tried to heal with the cure. Danny ignored the voice that taunted him about his growing interest in Zoe as a wannabe healer.