2
The evening Claire Flynn vanished, Darby had been the first person from the crime lab to arrive at Roby Park, although no one ever called it that. Townies had called it ‘The Hill’, and, back when she was growing up, it had been nothing more than a long, wide stretch of grass, at the top of which was Dell’s, the only place in town where two bucks bought you a large Coke and a burger served on a paper plate stacked high with fries or onion rings, your choice. Dell’s was still there, along with D & L Liquors, but by then the Hill had fancy jungle gyms, a new baseball diamond with standsand, its real attraction, a floodlight set up high on a telephone pole that lit up every inch of the Hill, allowing everyone to go sledding any time they wanted.
Belham PD had responded quickly to the report of Claire’s disappearance and pulled out all the stops – blocking off every road and searching every car; an Amber Alert over the radio and through emails and the department’s social-media platforms. Darby had interviewed Claire’s father, Mickey Flynn, inside D & L Liquors while the storm raged outside. She had assisted in the search that night, and again the next morning and in the days that followed, hoping to discover additional evidence beyond the finding of the girl’s sled and Claire’s broken glasses, which her father had noticed that night and pocketed.
There had been a single eyewitness to the abduction: Daniel Halloran, a nine-year-old, also from Belham. His father was a patrolman. The next morning Peter Halloran had asked his son if he had seen a young girl in a pink snowsuit up on the Hill, and when Danny had said yes, his father took him down to the station, where the lead detective, Tom Atkinson, interviewed him at great length.
‘Dead,’ Kennedy said, folding his hands on his stomach.
‘She has to be. It’s been eleven years since she vanished.’
‘To the day. Today’s her anniversary.’
Darby caught something in his tone and said, ‘You know something I don’t? Something new?’
Kennedy shook his head. ‘I’ve told you everything I know, which isn’t much,’ he said. ‘And you know the case better than I do, since you worked it.’
‘It was my first case.’
‘And you arrived well before any of the other forensic people did.’
She nodded. ‘I happened to be in Belham that night.’
‘Right.’ Kennedy nodded sombrely. ‘Your mother.’
Darby had spent a lot of time in Belham the year Claire disappeared, because her mother had been diagnosed with melanoma – the invasive type. The tumour had been removed, as well as several infected lymph nodes, but the cancer had already spread into the body, placing Sheila McCormick in the worst possible category: Stage IV. Metastatic melanoma, one of the deadliest and most difficult cancers to treat, didn’t offer much in the way of hope, although the surgeon had tried to reassure them both that there were some promising clinical trials, and he had several patients who had extended their lives with immunotherapy.
‘What’s your opinion on how the case was handled?’ Kennedy asked.
‘You mean initially?’
‘Yeah, start there.’
‘Belham PD had the whole park blocked off, as far as I could tell. It was half past seven when I arrived, already pitch black, and, again, it was snowing, so visibility was poor – why are you grinning?’
‘You sound like you’re on the witness stand, McCormick. Relax. You’re not under cross-examination.’
‘There wasn’t an actual crime scene. Claire Flynn had been missing for a little over an hour by that point. Detective Atkinson was at the scene when I arrived, and he had called Boston PD, asked them to send forensics along, just in case.’
‘Because you’ve got to pull out the stops when a six-year-old goes missing.’
Darby caught the subtext in his tone: you’ve got to put on the best show for the cameras. Seeing a forensic van and team members on camera played well on the news, especially in an age when everyone got their knowledge from watching reruns of CSI and Law & Order. Perception mattered just as much, if not more so, than reality.
‘Atkinson was the lead detective,’ Darby said. ‘He had the father, Mickey Flynn, already sequestered inside the liquor store when I arrived. Mickey was pretty despondent.’
‘And shitfaced, from what I was told. Could barely stand.’
Darby nodded. ‘He’d let his daughter climb the Hill with his nine-year-old god-daughter, Ericka Kelly, so they could go sledding. Mickey and Ericka’s father, Big Jim Kelly, were at the bottom. Ericka came down alone, told them about how she’d got into it with a bunch of kids at the top –’
‘Thomas MacDonald and his crew.’
‘MacDonald pushed Ericka down the Hill on her inflatable tube. She arrived alone. Mickey went up to get his daughter. He found her sled and the broken glasses, but he didn’t find her.’
Kennedy studied her for a beat, his eyes searching hers – for what, exactly, Darby didn’t know.
‘I processed the glasses myself, at the lab,’ Darby said. ‘We recovered multiple partial fingerprints.’
‘One of which belonged to the infamous Father Richard Byrne.’
Darby knew him – everyone in town did. He had been a priest at St Stephen’s, where Claire Flynn went to school and to church.
Kennedy said, ‘He had daily contact with her and every other single kid there. Several witnesses at the school said Claire’s glasses were always falling off, especially when she was outside, playing. Kids and teachers would pick them up for her – Byrne included.’
‘That’s the same argument his defence attorney used.’
‘The fingerprint evidence was never going to be enough to convict him. We all knew that. We didn’t have a single witness who could put Byrne there that night.’
‘Didn’t have any witnesses who could validate his story about being at the rectory that night either,’ Kennedy added.
‘As for the one witness we did have, the Halloran kid, he was helping Claire look for her glasses when a man stepped up next to them. He didn’t get a good look at the guy’s face, and the guy never spoke to him.’
‘Could’ve doesn’t get you a conviction.’
‘No shit.’ Kennedy breathed deeply as he craned his head and looked up at the ceiling. His puffed his cheeks and blew out a long, frustrated sigh.
‘Chris,’ Darby said.
His eyes slid back to her.
‘You’ve been on the job, what, four, five months?’
‘About that,’ he replied.
‘You’ve got stacks of cold cases in here. Why Claire Flynn?’
‘Because I don’t like paedophiles,’ he said. ‘And I especially don’t like how the Catholic Church, under the leadership of that arrogant prick, Cardinal Law, may he not rest in peace, knew full well that Byrne and those other priests were paedophiles. What did he do? He shuffled them around for something like fifteen years, put the reputation of the Church ahead of stopping child rape.’
Kennedy was right. Boston’s Cardinal Bernard Law had, for nearly two decades, shuffled known paedophile priests to other parishes all over the Commonwealth of Massachusetts rather than reporting their crimes. It went on until 2002, when the Boston Globe broke the story, which went global. It seemed Law wasn’t the only one who’d put the needs of the Church above the needs of humanity: hundreds of similar stories kept popping up not just in the US but also all over the world. The Catholic Archdiocese of Boston had sold many of its properties to help defray the staggering legal costs and the nearly $100 million settlement for the victims of sexual abuse.
‘The state didn’t have a mandatory reporting law,’ Darby said. ‘Cardinal Law wasn’t under any legal obligation to come forward with any sexual-abuse claims.’
‘Doesn’t make it right.’
‘Didn’t say it did.’
Kennedy waved his hands, as if surrendering. ‘But we’re not talking about that sick bastard Law. We’re talking about our sick bastard. Byrne abducted two girls before Claire Flynn.’
‘There’s no evidence that supports he –’
‘First church Byrne was sent to out of seminary was down in New Bedford,’ Kennedy said. He was leaning forward in his seat now, elbows resting on his thighs, his eyes heated with anger, or frustration, or maybe a combination of the two. ‘He was an English teacher at St Bartholomew, taught first and second grades. Was there for something like fifteen years.’
‘Eighteen.’
‘Right, eighteen. Sorry, senior moment. Now, we don’t know too much about what happened back then. Totally different time period – nobody would believe a priest was capable of molesting kids and, because the victims were underage, their parents didn’t want to go to the police, have it get around town. What we do know is that Byrne took a special interest in his female students, asked certain ones to stay after class, to come visit him alone in his office for talks that often involved their sitting on his lap. And now we know the Church, behind the scenes, came in and intimidated the hell out of the families, bought their silence. Cardinal Law didn’t put a stop to it, even after Byrne’s last year there, when Mary Hamilton vanished without a trace during a snowstorm.’
Darby had read the case file: how the Hamilton girl, who was roughly the same age as Claire Flynn, had been abducted while playing in a friend’s backyard. The friend’s mother, who had been out with the girl, supervising, had gone into the house to fetch her cigarettes. When she came out, Mary Hamilton was gone: her daughter told her that a man had come out of the bushes and grabbed Mary. She was never seen again.
The friend told the police that the man who had grabbed Mary Hamilton wore a priest’s collar. She hadn’t seen the abductor’s face.
‘A few months after that,’ Kennedy said, ‘the Catholic Church sends Byrne for a little R & R at that private spa resort they’ve got in upstate Connecticut for treating priests who like molesting kids. Our man spends not even a month there and the Church decides that’s enough, he’s rehabilitated, and Law sends him to another church – this one up north, in Nashua, New Hampshire. Year goes by, everything’s hunky-dory, and what happens next? Ten-year-old Elizabeth Levenson disappears, again during a snowstorm. Mother called the school: Byrne had offered to give the Levenson girl a ride home, and did. He admitted to that.’
‘The Nashua police found no evidence or eyewitnesses tying him to that crime – he wasn’t even a suspect at the time. Same deal in New Bedford.’
‘Then the Church ships him here and we know what happens next. This isn’t a series of coincidences – it’s a goddamn pattern.’
‘Any particular reason you’re so laser-locked on Byrne?’
‘You don’t think he’s our guy?’
‘I was wondering why you’re so heated up about him all of a sudden.’
‘It’s got to be Byrne. Who else could it be? And please don’t tell me Mickey Flynn’s old man. I don’t buy for one minute that Sean Flynn was behind his granddaughter’s disappearance.’
‘He made Mickey’s mother vanish into thin air.’
‘A theory that was never proven,’ Kennedy said. ‘I’m not saying it’s a bad one. After all, what sort of mother would abandon her kid, leave him to be raised by an animal like Sean?’
‘It happens more than you think. Anyway, we took a good, hard look at Sean. Guy was a contract killer for the Irish mob – and the only one that I know of who never got arrested. We couldn’t find a motive, let alone evidence, that suggested he was behind Claire’s disappearance. After that, we worked on the theory that Claire might’ve been snatched as retaliation or payback by one or more of his business associates, or, say, a family member of one of his long list of victims. Sean made a lot of enemies over the years.’
‘But nothing ever came of it, right?’
Darby nodded. ‘The Irish and Italian mobs were long gone by then, and what few guys were left were either in jail or wearing diapers and using walkers. Boston PD did a lot of the legwork on that. They had a hard-on for putting Sean behind bars. Probably still do.’
‘You think Sean might have played a role in it?’
‘How about you cut to the part where you tell me the real reason I’m here?’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘We could have discussed all of this over the phone. You wanted me to come here in person. Why?’
Kennedy sat back in his seat. As he crossed his legs, his eyes cut sideways to the glass partition. When they landed back on hers, something in his face had changed, but she couldn’t tell exactly what it was.
‘Byrne is back in Belham, living in his mother’s house,’ Kennedy said. ‘He inherited it after she died – probably of shame and embarrassment.’
‘I heard he was back.’
‘From who?’
‘The Boston Globe Magazine article published last week. I read it online yesterday. He’s been back here for, what, almost two years now.’
‘So you know Byrne is dying?’
Darby nodded. ‘We talking months or weeks?’
‘Days, from what I’ve been told. Since he moved back here, every morning without fail he attends the six o’clock mass at St Stephen’s. He doesn’t get together with any of the priests, and he doesn’t have any visitors except for his hospice nurse, a woman named Grace Humphrey.’
‘You have people on him?’
‘Just concerned people in the community who like to report to us.’ The way Kennedy said it suggested he had cops watching Byrne on an unofficial basis, so it wouldn’t ever come back to bite him in the ass. ‘Byrne stopped going to mass about two weeks ago. He’s holed up in his house – final days, I’m guessing. Although I’m told he does occasionally still walk the trails behind his house.’
‘Some of those trails lead to the Hill.’
‘They most certainly do.’
‘You try using cadaver dogs? I didn’t see that mentioned anywhere in the file.’
‘Tried the dogs once, but nothing ever came of it. Byrne used to be tight with this other priest from St Stephen’s, Father Keith Cullen. He’s going to give Byrne the sacrament of reconciliation.’
‘Father Cullen told you this?’
‘No. That would violate all sorts of, you know, clerical ethics. Byrne told me.’
Darby looked at him in disbelief. ‘Byrne told you.’
Kennedy was nodding. ‘He called me up out of the blue, said he wants to talk.’
‘What did he say?’
‘That’s the thing,’ Kennedy said. ‘He doesn’t want to talk to me. The only person he wants to talk to, it seems, is you.’