CHAPTER NINE
Megan ran for the Luas, the Dublin tram system that would get her nearest to the Shelbourne, and got to the hotel in under half an hour. She jogged upstairs and Simon’s room door opened before she even had a chance to knock. She came in quietly, bottom lip between her teeth as she saw Liz’s father, Peter, with his head huddled in his wife’s lap to muffle his sobs. Mrs. Dempsey, stroking her husband’s temple with a mechanical gesture, looked decades older than she had a day earlier.
Simon Darr, slim to begin with, had lost weight since Megan had last seen him. His cheekbones were gaunt, his eyes hollowed, and his thin hands leaped with nervous energy one moment and fell listless the next. He gestured at his computer. Megan squeezed his shoulder, then, making sure to mute the speakers and turn the screen away from the devastated family, sat down to watch a few seconds of the video. There were hundreds of comments beneath it, many of them angry and even more of them confused. A few were agonizingly sympathetic, guessing that Liz had left more vlogs unexpectedly prepped.
“She hadn’t, though,” Meg murmured, mostly to herself.
Simon sat heavily beside her, shoulders slumped and face in his hands, as if his head simply weighed too much to hold up anymore. “I didn’t think so,” he said, muffled. “You checked. I didn’t remember how, but I knew you’d checked. Someone else posted it. How could someone else have posted it? It was on this computer, Megan. I found the folder with the rest of her prepped vlogs, but no one has been in here to use the computer except me. Us,” he said with a short, whole-body lean toward Liz’s parents.
“Did anyone else have access to her files? Through cloud sharing, maybe? Did she lose her phone?” Megan checked the location the latest vlog had been uploaded from, macabrely wondering if it would claim to have been posted from the morgue. An IP address came up, the same as the last post, and she picked up the phone to call the front desk. “Yes, hello, I’m wondering if you can tell me what the hotel’s IP address is? No, not just the Wi-Fi network name, but the—yes, thank you.” She waited while they transferred her to the business centre, where a young-sounding man read off a four-part number that identified the hotel’s permanent internet location. It matched the last several posts on Liz’s blog, including the two vlogs and the posts both Simon and Megan herself had made. She thanked the youth and fell back in her chair as she hung up, frowning at the screen.
Simon remained silent while she did all that, only answering her questions once she’d hung up. “She never lost her phone, and as far as I know, no one had cloud access—could she have been hacked?” His voice broke, but Megan thought he sounded relieved rather than distressed. “That would explain—”
“It would, but these were all posted from here. A hacker could have come here to post them, or spoofed it, but why? It—”
“I don’t even know what you’re saying,” Mrs. Dempsey broke in shrilly. Her husband sat up, pulling her into his arms now, but she continued in the too-sharp voice. “Why would someone hack Dana’s blog? What’s spoofing? Why do you know this? I thought you drove cars, not—” Her imagination failed her and she fell silent.
“I got online before it was cool, much less normal.” Megan thought, but didn’t say, how very hipster of me. “Long enough ago that learning some of the backbone information about how the internet works was just kind of something you did in order to use it. I’m hopelessly out of date now, but I still know just enough to look where not everybody would think to. Spoofing is making the internet think you’re posting from one place when you’re really somewhere else. Kind of like in the movies, where you see somebody trying to trace a phone call that’s been routed all around the world to hide the caller’s location.”
Mrs. Dempsey nodded tightly and turned her face against her husband’s shoulder, clearly understanding well enough and not caring for any more in-depth explanation. Just as well; Megan didn’t think she could have provided one.
“So probably someone hacked her and spoofed this?” Simon asked. “But why? I didn’t think Liz had any enemies.”
“How many restaurants closed down because of her reviews?” Megan asked.
Mrs. Dempsey cried, “That’s not fair!” as Simon flinched.
“Some. I didn’t keep track. Nobody closes on the weight of one bad review, though, Megan. There has to be something more already wrong. There’s no such thing as bad publicity.”
“That’s not what the owner of Canan’s says,” Megan told him with a sigh. “The point is, Mrs. Darr probably did have some enemies. But I don’t know what value an enemy would get in posting vlogs after her death. It’s not a restaurant review. It’s not even a market review, like the last one. She’s just hiking.”
“We were hunting for stone circles,” Simon whispered. “Down on the Ring of Kerry. She just wanted to share it with everyone. That’s what her vlogs were, personal stuff, things she was excited about, not reviews. She left that to text. Easier to compile into a book.” He tried for a thin smile and almost succeeded. Megan returned it sadly, then took a deep breath.
“You’re sure no one else had access to the computer?”
“I was the only one in my room at ten thirty.” Simon gave a short, hard laugh. “Of course, I don’t have an alibi because my wife, who would have provided one, is dead.”
Mrs. Dempsey gave a terrible choking sound that turned into harsh sobs. Simon paled, his anger evaporating as he spun toward his in-laws. Mr. Dempsey’s unforgiving gaze met Simon’s and held for a long moment until a sudden weariness swept him and he bent his head over his wife’s. Simon sagged, drained.
Megan’s skin prickled from the raw breaking of emotion around her. She moved her hands stiffly, wishing she knew what to do with them—or herself—then made herself hold still. After what felt like forever, Simon, much more dully, said to her, “And you were with me when the first one went live. You’re my alibi.”
Megan blinked, then let out a breath of faint surprise. “I am, aren’t I? It’s something.” More than something maybe. If Liz had been having an affair with Cíara O’Donnell, Cíara might have had access—for no reason that Meg could think of—to post from Liz’s computer. But Megan had been with Simon when the first vlog went live after Liz’s death, and Cíara certainly hadn’t been there then. She had no idea what all that proved, if anything, except that Simon probably hadn’t posted the vlogs himself. There were new comments rolling up on the vlog, accusing him of pulling a publicity stunt, but he didn’t look or sound to Megan like a man engaged in that kind of behaviour. “You should probably tell Detective Bourke about this.”
“What? Why?” Mr. Dempsey looked up from comforting his wife. “What could this possibly have to do with her death? It’s a computer glitch. Some kind of horrible error.”
“Well, I don’t know, but that’s his job, isn’t it? Figuring out if it’s related? It’s kind of too weird to be totally unrelated, right?”
“I think there’s plenty of police activity around Dana’s death already,” Mr. Dempsey said shortly. “I don’t think we should complicate it any more. It really can’t be any more complex than food poisoning, and I’ll be glad when that horrible restaurant is shut down.”
Megan bit her lip hard, stopping herself from defending Canan’s. “Well, maybe I’ll look into it,” she said instead. “At least so we can figure out who’s posting those things and get it to stop. I wonder if there’s a setting to block new posts.”
She went back into the blogging software, searching for something of that nature as Mrs. Dempsey said, “Yes. Yes, please. You obviously understand this internet thing—” a gross overstatement, in Megan’s opinion, but she didn’t argue—”and I want this to stop. Our poor girl, being dragged around like this after her death. All of us being taunted this way. It’s like being haunted by a ghost.”
Megan, almost guiltily, thought now her ghost wheels her barrow through streets broad and narrow, and bit the inside of her cheek to keep from breathing the lyrics aloud. It took a few seconds to promise, “I’ll try to stop the posts. I don’t see anything to just, like, archive the whole thing and set it, so it can’t have any more updates, but I’ll keep looking.”
“You have to do more than keep looking,” Mrs. Dempsey pleaded. “You have to figure out what’s happening. This can’t be related to her death, so I don’t want the police involved any more than they must be. I just want someone I trust to figure out what’s going on.”
How she had gone from car-driving stranger to someone the Dempseys trusted—it should have been an impossible leap, but really, Megan recognized that she must seem like a lifeline to the Dempseys, and maybe to Simon Darr as well. They were all Americans, but the mourning family were strangers in a strange land, one that Megan had been navigating for a while now. She understood how they’d latched on and could neither blame them nor, she knew, turn her back on them. If she had been Liz, she would have wanted someone there to help take care of her family in the worst moments of their lives. Maybe if she were a little wiser, or a little colder of heart, it would be against her better judgement to say, “I’ll do everything I can to figure out what’s happened, Mrs. Dempsey,” but she didn’t have it in her to turn her back on Liz’s bereaved parents.
Grateful tears seeped from the older woman’s eyes. “Thank you, Megan. Thank you.”
Megan nodded, but in spite of the woman’s gratitude, she steeled herself for the likely backlash of what she had to say next. “If I’m going to figure out what’s happened—what’s really happened here—I need to ask some questions you might not like. Maybe—” She glanced at Liz’s parents. “Maybe one at a time or, at least, Simon alone.”
Colour made dark streaks along Mrs. Dempsey’s cheekbones and her nostrils flared, but just as swiftly, she seemed to accept the wisdom of Megan’s suggestion. She stood without speaking, took her husband’s hand, and led him from the room.
As soon as they left, Simon collapsed, though he’d never sat up straight since Megan’s arrival. “Detective Bourke asked me everything anybody could ever need to know.”
“I’m sure he did, but I wasn’t there for that.” Megan sighed. “Do you want me to do this? Poke into Liz’s death and whatever’s going on with these vlogs?”
“Ellen does. I . . .” Simon lifted his face, gaze going to the ceiling. His throat, stretched long, showed the Adam’s apple prominently, and when he swallowed, it looked painful. “I can’t imagine what the vlogs might have to do with her death. Galway, Kerry . . . nothing happened there. We talked to fans at the market, but we didn’t even see anyone while we were out hiking. I want them to stop.” He lowered his head again, eyes fixed on the carpet’s diamond fleur-de-lis patterns. “If you have to look into her death to figure out how to make them stop, I guess that’s okay with me. If you want to, I mean.” He finally met Megan’s eyes. “I realize we’ve been asking a lot of you. This isn’t your problem.”
“No, but I feel—” Megan made a small, useless motion with her hands. “I feel responsible, in a way. Like you were in my squad and . . . even if I didn’t slip up myself, something went wrong, and I want to know what. I want to—” She pulled a lopsided smile. “I want to be able to prevent it from happening again. I know that doesn’t exactly make sense.”
“It does. Sometimes a patient comes in too late to do anything for them, and you know it’s not your fault, that there’s nothing you could have done, but you look for the answers anyway. As if next time, when someone comes in too late, that extra little bit of knowledge might somehow be enough to save them. You said you were a combat medic?” At Megan’s nod, Simon nodded, too. “Then you know what I mean.”
“I do. Okay, then, look. Here’s the first horrible question: Were you two okay? I mean, your marriage was ... ?”
“We were happy,” Simon replied quietly. “We’d had some rough patches. Who doesn’t? But we were doing well.”
“Do you know a Cíara O’Donnell?”
Simon’s entire face shaped itself into a question. “Detective Bourke asked that, too. I have no idea who she is. Why? Who is she?”
“Apparently Liz knew her. Did Liz go off on her own a lot?”
Simon spread his hands. “Define ‘a lot.’ We weren’t joined at the hip. I guess there are people who can live that way, but we always had our own hobbies. And we noticed a long time ago that when we were traveling, if we did everything together, we didn’t have anything new or interesting to talk about and we got kind of sick of each other. So we’d do some of what we were both interested in and some things independently. I went for interviews while she went for hikes, or I’d go to a movie she didn’t want to see while she found a knitting group. That kind of thing. And I left her alone while she wrote, obviously. We weren’t a single unit, but we’d talk about what we did at the end of the day. She never mentioned a Cíara.”
“What does that mean to you?”
For a moment, Simon didn’t look like he even understood the question. Then he blew air between his lips, almost dismissing it. “That she didn’t know her very well, or she wasn’t very important to her. I don’t know. I suppose it could mean the opposite, that this girl was very important to her, but . . .” He shook his head. “As far as I know, Liz didn’t have any romantic interest in other women. I mean, she said once that she’d have run off with Josephine Baker given the chance, but that’s like me saying I’d have run off with David Bowie. Anybody would run off with Bowie or Baker.”
Megan smiled. “And nobody would blame them for it. All right, look, um. How were you . . . financially? I mean . . .” She’d never had any particular inclination to be a cop. Asking Simon a load of invasive questions quenched any thought at all she might ever had had along those lines. “I mean, with her death, I suppose you’re the beneficiary of any life insurance?”
Simon Darr looked so appalled Megan thought he might actually vomit. “I am, yes. I . . . Jesus. I didn’t need money, if that’s what you’re asking. We have—we had—Jesus. A prenup. Liz didn’t want one. She—I insisted. My parents—” Simon exhaled deeply, his colour deepening. “My parents had a terrible marriage and a disastrous divorce. Liz hated the idea of a prenup, but I’d seen what my parents went through—my mom especially—and I wanted to be sure neither of us would be in that condition if we eventually split up. She said it was because I was going to be a doctor; I’d have made all the money and I’d want to keep it.” His laugh sounded like tears. “What a surprise for her, when her foodie career took off and she ended up being the real provider, while I had hundreds of thousands in student debt. It turned out I was protecting her from me, if it had come to that. It didn’t. It hadn’t. We were happy,” he said, sounding lost.
Megan reached out to put her hand on his knee. “Okay. I’m sorry. Look, I don’t . . . I don’t think I even know what else I should ask right now. I’ll try to find out what’s going on with the vlogs and I’ll see if I can find Cíara O’Donnell and figure out what she has to do with any of this.”
“I can’t believe it hasn’t even been two whole days yet,” Simon said tiredly. “I feel like it’s been forever and no time at all and neither makes any sense. I feel like all the answers should be figured out already, and instead, nothing is.”
“I know. I’ll do what I can to change that.”
Simon nodded. “Thank you, Megan.”
Megan, quietly, said, “You’re welcome,” and slipped out the door.
* * *
Ellen Dempsey met Megan in the hall, standing in front of the Dempseys’ room door like she’d never gone in. “Peter is resting,” she said as soon as Megan emerged from Simon’s room. “I just wanted to say thank you, Megan. This has all been so awful.”
“No, it’s okay.” Megan leaned on the doorframe beside Liz’s mother and folded her arms. “Can I ask you a couple of questions, while we’re talking?” Mrs. Dempsey nodded unhappily, and Megan wondered which prying query to try first. She started with, “Did Liz ever date any girls, in college or high school?” and earned a genuinely astonished look in return.
“Not that I know of, and I think she would have told her mini-me.” Tears filled Mrs. Dempsey’s eyes again and she wiped them away without trying to stop their fall. “Why?”
“She apparently had a young female friend Simon didn’t know, so I was trying to figure out what kind of relationship they might have had. Okay. I know you might not know this, but . . . were she and Simon financially stable?”
A deep sigh shuddered from Ellen’s chest. “Their first few years were terribly hard. Simon’s student debt was almost insurmountable and Liz wasn’t making any real money as a blogger yet. But Simon had a few windfalls and they got on their feet, and then Liz’s career took off. I think they were doing quite well.”
“What kind of windfalls? New jobs or something? Doctors get paid a lot.”
“They do, but not compared to their student loans, not for the first several years. And the interest fees are usury.” Anger flashed in Mrs. Dempsey’s eyes, momentarily drowning the grief, but it returned as swiftly as it had gone. “He said real estate investments; money from his mother, I think. We helped where we could, too, of course. Liz didn’t have too many student loans between her scholarships and what we were able to give her, though, and Simon never wanted us to be paying off his loans, he said. So they relied on their own incomes and his investments. They were even able to buy a house recently, which isn’t common for people their ages anymore, I understand.”
“It’s lucky,” Megan agreed. “I don’t know if I’ll ever own one. Thank you, Mrs. Dempsey. If I think of any other questions, I’ll drop by to ask them, okay?”
Mrs. Dempsey nodded and let herself back into her room. Megan waited until the door clicked shut and then, motivated, marched off to find Cíara O’Donnell.