CHAPTER 2
Raquel screamed, the sound bouncing off concrete wall to come back at her full-force. She dropped to her knees, grabbing Cherise Williams’s body, and Megan swayed as the screams’ echoes bounced around the small bones of her ears. There were a few words in Raquel’s cries—Mama? Mama? Mama, wake up! Mama, no!—but mostly they were heart-wrenching sounds of loss.
Megan, cool with shock, stepped over both the Williamses, knelt on Cherise’s far side, and felt for a pulse. The woman’s skin had lost enough heat to be noticeable, and Megan could find no sign of a heartbeat, or breath. She whispered, “I’m sorry,” and rose to walk to the other side of the room, where windows overlooked O’Connell Street. A group of teenagers were horsing around four floors below, and people in everything from business-wear to sweatpants made their way along the thoroughfare. A child had just dropped their ice cream cone and was rigid with horror, while their distressed father fluttered beside them helplessly. Everything was absolutely normal down there, while up here in Cherise Williams’s hotel room, tragedy had struck. Raquel’s screams had brought hotel staff to the room and babbling sound filled smallish space.
Megan took her phone from inside her uniform’s inner pocket. With hands so cold she had to try several times for the phone’s sensors to recognize her fingers, she called Detective Paul Bourke of An Garda Síochána, the Irish police force. He picked up with a rather cheery, “Megan? What’s the story? You always text unless you’ve found a body.” His self-satisfied chuckle faded into worried silence when she didn’t respond, and when he spoke again all trace of humor had fled from his voice. “Megan?”
“I’m okay.” Megan cleared her throat, trying to sound less like she’d swallowed a frog. “I mean . . . I’m okay. But my client is dead.”
“Jayzu—” Bourke seized the curse back by the skin of his teeth and lowered his volume considerably. “What in hell, Megan?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know! I dropped her off at vital stat—uh, no, sorry, I mean the Central Statistics Office—about three hours ago and got her daughter at the airport and we just got back to the hotel and she’s—” Megan swallowed her own volume as hotel staff noticed her. One, a brisk woman in managerial clothing, strode over and thrust a hand out, obviously expecting Megan to hand over the phone.
“I’m sorry, ma’am, I’m going to have to ask you not to discuss the particulars of occurrences at the hotel with—”
Megan snapped, “I’m talking to the police,” and the woman altered between pale and flushed beneath the dark gold of her skin tones.
“I’m sure that’s not necess—”
“Believe me,” Megan said grimly, “it is.”
Detective Bourke was talking in her other ear, the short breaks in his speech sounding like a man pulling on his suit jacket, his coat, finding his hat, heading out the garda station door. He would be there in ten minutes; Pearse Street garda station was just across the Liffey from the hotel, and most days walking was faster than trying to get a car through Dublin’s congested streets.
The hotel manager still had her hand out, as if expecting Megan to give in like a toddler suddenly too tired to fight anymore. Megan turned toward the window, looking down at the bright, cold January afternoon. The abandoned ice cream wasn’t even melting on the sidewalk, and Megan, seeking them with her gaze, found the defeated father hurrying after the child, whose skip and hop suggested they’d been promised a new ice cream to replace the fallen soldier. Raquel’s sobs had taken on the harsh, throat-grating sounds of worn-down screams. Megan, who might have normally related the Williams story to Bourke with a laugh over a pint, reported what she knew of their visit to Ireland while he crossed the river in the Luas. She could hear the tram’s imperious bing bing! in the background, and its prerecorded, RTÉ-Irish-accent customer service voice telling people what to do, as if nothing untoward had happened anywhere in the city. She thought she kept her voice quiet enough that the hotel manager couldn’t hear what she had to say, much less Raquel Williams.
She watched Bourke exit the Luas just outside the hotel at the O’Connell Street Upper stop. He glanced at oncoming traffic and sprinted across the road ahead of it, narrowly missing stepping in the bereft blob of ice cream. He still had his phone to his ear, hearing the last of the details Megan could share, when he arrived in the Williamses’ hotel room door. She looked at the duration of the call—seven and a half minutes, faster than she’d thought he would get there—and hung up as Bourke’s gaze went from Cherise Williams’s body, down the length of the room to her, and back again. Then, all professionalism, he crouched at Raquel’s side, not quite touching her shoulder to gain her attention. “Forgive me, ma’am. I’m Detective Paul Bourke. Can you tell me what happened here?”
The hotel manager rallied, shooing her employees out ahead of her as she tried to make her way down to the detective without intruding on Raquel’s grief. “Detective, I appreciate your coming so quickly, but it is not . . . unprecedented. . . for a guest to die on the premises, only very unfortunate. We do not require—”
“Mama was fine!” Raquel burst out. “This can’t be natural! She’s just been in for her checkup, right before she came here, the doctor said she’s healthy as a horse. Detective, I want a—I want a—” The passion dumped out of her as quickly as it had come, leaving her in tears again.
Bourke looked up, meeting Megan’s eyes. He looked tired, she thought, ginger hair in disarray and his blue eyes dismayed. As well they might be, when she kept dragging murders, or at least unexpected bodies, into his life. Not, she supposed, that there were often expected bodies in his line of work. Unexpected ones were presumably more common.
“We’ll do whatever is necessary to learn what happened to your mother,” he promised Raquel. “My forensics team is on its way. In the meantime, Ms. Williams, would you step out into the hall with me? I’m afraid I’ve some questions to ask you.”
Raquel stood at his prompting, looking rather small and bewildered beside Bourke’s tall, slender self. The room door, which had been held open by Raquel kneeling in front of it, finally began to swing closed as Bourke guided her out into the hall. Megan made her way forward to catch the door, ostensibly to hold the door so Raquel would be able to enter again, but, more honestly, so she could listen in. A sharp-jawed young man in a suit came bustling up and the hotel manager said, “Doctor,” in relief, ushering him into the room. Megan ended up stepping out to make way, because Cherise Williams’s body sat propped against the bathroom doorframe, which was barely an arm’s length from the room door. So far at least six people, including Megan, had stepped over her.
A glitter in Bourke’s eye said he knew she’d come out after them, though he didn’t actually look at her as she moved an unobtrusive distance down the hall, where, she admitted to herself, unobtrusive meant “just far enough to be polite, but close enough to overhear.” Raquel Williams was in bewildered tears, shaking her auburn head. “Of course Mama doesn’t have any enemies. Not unless you count Peggy Ann Smithers, who always hated her.”
“And why did Ms. Smithers hate your mother?”
“Well, she thought she would have been prom queen if Mama hadn’t stolen her boyfriend, but Daddy says he wasn’t her boyfriend to begin with and that nobody was going to put a crown on that bottle-blond head anyway after the way she treated Cliff Johnson at the rodeo after the car crash—”
Bourke cast a slightly wide-eyed glance at Megan, who sucked her cheeks in and focused hard on a carpet seam as she fought a troubled smile. She could have told half-a-dozen stories like that about her own high school years, and they would have all sounded as fraught and overwrought to a stranger’s ears, even if they’d been the height of importance in her teen life. She imagined Bourke had similar tales of his own, although probably none of his featured a rodeo. He returned his attention to Raquel, noting down her commentary as if it might be relevant to her mother’s death while she said, “But I don’t think Peggy Ann has talked to Mama in fifteen years, and I don’t know why she’d come to Ireland to hurt her.”
“It seems unlikely,” Bourke agreed, “but we’ll look into it. And it could be it was just the excitement of being here that put a strain on her heart, ma’am. An autopsy will hopefully tell us more. But it’s quite a story, the one that brought you here. Who knew about that? About your family’s belief that you’re heirs to an Irish title?”
“Oh, gosh, I guess we told everybody,” Raquel said miserably. “Wouldn’t you? Mama might have put on a few airs, but that was all back home. Why would anything follow her here? She hasn’t even been here long enough to meet anyone!”
Megan thinned her lips on a response to that, thinking of the number of people she knew Cherise Williams had spoken to about her noble connections in the past two days. Dublin was a small town, for a big city, and Megan could imagine word spreading about an American thinking she could lay claim to a British title on Irish soil. She couldn’t push that far enough to imagine it could end in murder, but Mrs. Williams had introduced herself at Leprechaun Limos as Countess Williams. Word would have gotten around.
The doctor exited the Williamses’ hotel room and Raquel surged forward, seizing his hand. “What did you learn? Anything? Oh, God, what happened to my mommy?”
Regret spilled across the young man’s face. “I’m afraid I can’t tell anything from a cursory investigation, ma’am. There are no obvious signs of violence, which initially suggests cardiac arrest, but more information might emerge from a more thorough look. I’m sorry. I wish I could give you an answer now.” He hesitated. “I can offer you a prescription for something to help you sleep for the next few nights, if you want. I imagine these next days will be hard.”
“Oh, God, please, yes.” Raquel seized the prescription paper he offered—Megan wondered if on-call physicians for hotels carried prescription pads as a matter of course—and he, with his apologies, left as Bourke’s forensics team arrived. Megan, glancing at her phone, was surprised to find it had barely been half an hour since they’d found Cherise’s body.
The lead forensics person, a solid woman in her mid-fifties, began speaking with the hotel manager about who had been in and out of the room. Megan, dismayed, realized she could count at least eight—Bourke, herself, Raquel, four members of the hotel staff, and the doctor— which had to contaminate the crime scene, if that’s what it was. At this news, the forensics leader nodded grimly and put her team to work. Megan wondered if she should introduce herself, given this was the third body she’d come across in eight months, but it had been a different forensics team every time. Bourke had only been the lead detective on all the cases because she knew him, and even so she wondered what his superiors had to say about the American who kept finding dead people.
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.”