58

Mickey was on his way back from the call with Timothée when he felt a burning need to go to the cemetery. He didn’t question it. He simply drove.

The cemetery was quiet. He stood in an almost trance-like state at Byrne’s grave.

The day he had lost it out here, when Heather called from France – he had cried for Claire, absolutely, but he hadn’t been able to release her. A part of him refused to give up hope. When he’d packed up her room, a cry of hope rose up and told him that what he was doing was wrong. Now, as he stood at the graveside, he found the hope still there, still digging in its heels. Don’t give up on me.

Byrne lay six feet under, sealed inside wood, preserved in embalming fluid. The grass had been recently cut. Mickey saw wet clippings sticking to the sides of his loafers, and a memory came to him of Claire, the bottom of her feet stained with dirt and covered in fresh grass clippings from their backyard, running through the house and dirtying up the carpet and floor. It amused him, but it had driven Heather, a neat freak, crazy.

He remembered how Claire loved to scoop the cheese off pizza – ‘Daddy, it’s the best part, and I only want to eat the best part’ – and he remembered how she would throw a fit if she wasn’t allowed to pick out her own clothes or decide the number of blueberries she wanted on her pancakes. When he thought of Claire, it was always these moments of toughness that came to him, the small ways she had of trying to control her world, to prove that she was independent and had a mind of her own and God help you if you got in her way. Remembering Claire in this way – this spirited toughness that she used to move through life – maybe that was a distraction too. Maybe he didn’t want to see her as willingly walking off with Byrne, no matter how upset she was.

Why didn’t you kick and scream when Byrne picked you up, Claire? Why didn’t you have one of your patented meltdowns? I would have heard you. Why did you just walk away and leave me?

Byrne’s coffin held not one body but four – Claire’s, and those of the two other missing girls. And it would be that way forever, unless he wanted to hold a separate service for Claire, maybe bury her snow jacket when the police released it, if they ever did.

Only you didn’t bury things. You buried people. You prepared them for their journey into the ground and whatever lay beyond it. You didn’t say goodbye to a snow jacket.

How do I say goodbye when I don’t even know what happened? When was the right time to give up on the people you loved?

The answer came to him later, at home, after half a bottle of bourbon.

High-end bourbons and Irish whiskies always set his head right. They shut off all the noise of the outside world, stripped away the bullshit. They put his mind and soul at ease. They brought him to a calm, inner place where he could hear The Voice.

Mickey believed in God, and, while he would never say out loud that he believed God spoke to him – that was the realm of lunatics and preachers looking to rob people of their hard-earned money – he truly felt that The Voice was a conduit to some higher plane. The Voice was full of wisdom and understanding and acceptance. It spoke the truth. The Voice had helped him to navigate through those awkward and frustrating teenage years when everyone treated him like a zoo animal because he was Sean Flynn’s kid; had helped him through the rough patches in his marriage; and then, when the thing with Claire happened, it had helped hope stay alive. Right now The Voice was telling him that, yes, Claire and his mother were gone, but he shouldn’t give up hope. He could see them. All he had to do was to go upstairs and get the gun.

The thought didn’t sicken or repulse him. After Claire vanished, during those dark moments when he was sure she was dead, he had contemplated suicide. The nine upstairs in the gun safe was equipped with hollow-point rounds. Press the muzzle in the roof of his mouth, squeeze the trigger, and it would be done. A couple of times – well, more than that – he’d put the gun in his mouth or pressed it against his forehead, and The Voice would say, No, don’t do it, Mickey. Not until you have proof that Claire is dead.

And now he had proof. Okay, not hard evidence, but still. She was gone, she wasn’t coming back to him, but he could go to her. You should go to her, The Voice said. It’s time, Mickey. You’ve suffered enough.

It took a moment for Mickey to get to his feet. The room swayed a bit, but that didn’t matter. He didn’t have far to walk.

The doorbell rang. The sound startled him. He glanced at the clock on the microwave: 2.32 a.m. Had to be Jim, he thought.

Don’t answer it.

The doorbell rang again, followed by a fist pounding on the door.

‘Mickey.’

Not Jim; Darby McCormick. What was she doing here? At this hour?

More pounding. ‘Mickey.’

He had to concentrate on walking. His head was swimming and, while he could see his hand reaching out and grabbing the lever for the deadbolt, a part of him felt far away, as though he were watching this from the other end of a long tunnel.

Darby was standing on his front doorstep, all right, and she wasn’t alone. Detective Kennedy was with her.

Darby invited herself in.

‘Come on,’ she said, ‘let’s sit down.’

‘Sit down? For what? What’s going on? And what the hell happened to your face? You get in a fistfight?’

She exchanged a glance with Kennedy and then looked back at Mickey. It was a look Mickey recognized, a reserved one with a hint of disgust, a look that said, Oh, shit, we’ve got a drunk on our hands.

‘I’m allowed to do whatever I want in my own home,’ Mickey said.

‘Absolutely.’ Her tone changed, became more sympathetic and less urgent. ‘Come on, let’s go sit and I’ll tell you what’s going on.’

Mickey made his way to the living-room couch without tripping. Darby hadn’t followed. She was in the kitchen, her hand inside his refrigerator. She came back with a bottle of water, twisted off the cap and handed it to him.

Darby sat on the ottoman, facing him. ‘It’s about Grace Humphrey.’

‘Who?’

‘Byrne’s hospice nurse.’

‘Right. What about her?’ Mickey’s gaze slid away from her to the grave-faced detective, who was leaning against the archway to the living room, his arms crossed over his chest, watching.

‘You’re going to have questions,’ Darby said, and Mickey wondered why she was speaking so slowly. ‘I’ll tell you everything I know so far.’

‘I don’t even know what you’re talking about, why you’re even here.’

‘Remember the day of Byrne’s funeral, those people dressed in white who were picketing, holding up those signs?’

‘Yeah. The Truth Soldiers.’

‘The Soldiers of Truth and Light,’ Darby said. ‘The FBI has had them on their watch list for years. What the Bureau didn’t know – what they’re finding out right now – is that this group has been operating, in one form or another, for the better part of thirty years, they think. What this group does is abduct young children from parents who’ve had abortions. Then they brainwash these kids –’

‘What?’ Mickey looked to Kennedy, who was staring down at his phone. ‘What’s she talking about?’

‘Mickey, look at me.’ She waited until he did. ‘The kids are abducted and brainwashed into thinking their parents are dead,’ Darby said, holding her eyes on his. ‘Then the kids are placed into Christian homes – members of this group who, for one reason or another, can’t have kids of their own. The majority of these families live in Canada. They operate in this Al-Qaeda-like fashion, using encrypted email on private servers. They have members working in abortion clinics all over the country, gathering data on various women who –’

‘Who told you this?’

‘Grace Humphrey. Well, not so much her but her friend, this guy named Gregg Young. Which is a good thing, since Grace can’t talk right now. She’s recovering from surgery.’

‘Surgery from what?’

‘I shot her. We’ll get into that later,’ Darby said. ‘Grace had a laptop with her. She tried to break it but the FBI – they’re involved in this now – they were still able to access the hard drive. What the FBI has been able to uncover so far is a contact list with the names of the people in this group – names, addresses, even phone numbers. You with me so far?’

Mickey nodded. The Voice, though, told him he had blacked out and was dreaming. Claire’s dead, Mickey. I’m sorry, but she’s gone.

‘There was quite a lot of information on Byrne in these emails,’ Darby said. ‘Grace’s group went after Byrne because he represented – and this is a direct quote – “the continuing moral decay of the Catholic Church”. So they took matters into their own hands and pinned the disappearance of your daughter and the other girls on him.’

‘Wait, you’re saying Byrne was innocent?’

‘I’m saying he’s not a paedophile. I’m saying he didn’t abduct your daughter or Elizabeth Levenson or Mary Hamilton. I’m saying –’

‘Those items in Byrne’s bedroom – the pictures and clothing, and those tapes of the girls crying.’

‘Grace planted all of it. She and her pal Young and her group – they’re the ones who had the evidence and took the pictures. This group had … scouts, I guess you could call them, who conducted surveillance on the families and took pictures. This group was extremely organized – I’ve never seen anything like it – and we’ve only scratched the surface. Their goal was to make their victims suffer psychologically – to torture them. Young, by the way, was the one who planted the jacket on the monument. It was pure coincidence Byrne found it that night. But it didn’t matter who found the jacket. When it turned up, you would ID it, and then the police would head straight to Byrne’s and put him under the microscope again.’

Byrne’s voice from the night he had called: I’m going to die in peace. You’re not going to take that away from me. Not you, not the police, not the press. You stay away from me or this time I’ll send you to jail.

Mickey said, ‘Why go through all this when they knew he was dying?’

‘To prolong his suffering,’ Darby said. ‘Byrne admitted to Humphrey he was terrified of dying alone in a prison cell. When it didn’t look like the police were going to arrest him, Humphrey and Young decided to punish him another way: burning him alive. Another thing Byrne was terrified of. Young was the one who threw the Molotov. And he already had someone lined up to pin it on.’

‘Sean.’

Darby nodded. ‘This group bugged Byrne’s house – pinhole microphones and cameras. They were watching and listening to him all the time. Young told us your old man broke into Byrne’s house and set up his own little surveillance system.’ She looked at him with a level gaze and said, ‘That’s how you knew Byrne talked in his sleep.’

‘What?’

‘You told me Byrne talked in his sleep. You found out because Sean told you he’d been inside Byrne’s house – at least that’s what Sean told us a couple of hours ago.’

Mickey sighed. ‘Yeah. Yeah, it’s true, but I didn’t ask him to do that. I didn’t –’

‘Forget it,’ Darby said, but there was no anger in her voice. ‘Young knew your old man was poking around Byrne’s house, so Young set him up. Dropped Sean’s lighter and some cigarette butts at the crime scene, and guess who the police are going to nail to the wall.’

Kennedy spoke up. ‘Young is also the one who attacked Darby in the South End. He thought – the group thought – she was getting too close to finding something out about them, so he paid a visit to Danny Halloran and his boyfriend. Had them shoot up, had Danny call Darby, set her up, make it look like she’d been a victim of some lunatic who’s running around the South End, targeting gay people.’

Mickey looked at Darby. She said, ‘I survived so they decided it was time for Byrne to die. Their plans weren’t working out. They staged Byrne’s death to make it look like a suicide. Grace loaded him up on morphine, and Young did the heavy lifting. Police come in, find the tape with your daughter’s voice on it – and they recorded those tapes, not Byrne. Young told us. They’d recorded those audiotapes years ago – that’s how organized this group is. They were going to plant the tapes, the pictures and your daughter’s snow jacket inside the house after Byrne had died in his sleep. But, given how everything worked out, they had to change their plans. They had the jacket shipped to them, and the tapes. Young printed out the pictures of your daughter and the other girls from a colour photo-printer at his house. We come in, see all the evidence, find the single ligature mark around Byrne’s neck, and it looks like he died during an auto-erotic asphyxiation gone wrong. The extra morphine in his system didn’t raise any red flags because Byrne was dying of cancer.’

Mickey felt a cold sweat break across his skin.

‘When Young fitted the noose around Byrne’s neck,’ Darby said, ‘he told Byrne what they had done to him and then let him hang. It’s all detailed in the emails between him and Humphrey.’

Kennedy cleared his throat. He looked up from his phone and said, ‘Darby, a moment?’

Darby got to her feet. Mickey stared down at his hands, feeling numb – feeling like this couldn’t be happening, even though he knew he was awake. He had heard everything Darby had told him but, at the same time, he hadn’t heard it, because he was drunk and because he couldn’t believe what was happening.

And he thought of Claire. She had to be alive. God wouldn’t bring him this far, this close, only to make her disappear again. God wouldn’t be that cruel twice.

‘Mickey?’

Darby’s voice. He looked up at her. She was smiling. Kennedy was too.

‘We’ve got her,’ Darby said. ‘We’ve found your daughter.’