Kilmoon: A County Clare Mystery (11 page)

Liam Donellan’s journal

Timing is everything, my boy, and the timing back in 1975 was abysmal. My poor Julia, she of the diabolical allure, carefree laugh, and sincere—and ultimately futile—attempts at objectivity. She didn’t know what surrounded us until it was too late.

First, that pompous ass, Andrew McCallum. I never told Julia that he’d ordered me to match them together the night she pushed him at me for the sake of her article. Just like that, he’d decided on her. I denied his request—if for no other reason than because requests go against my festival rules—and assumed that would be the end of his impertinence. Little did I know that he was a man who loved nothing so much as winning the deal, out-strategizing the opponent, cutting out the middleman. He was money-making scum who chose the woman to best fit his lifestyle. No doubt she ended up an asset inside his gilded cage, God rest her.

Andrew and I were chemically repulsed at first sight, much like you and Lonnie. We’d have avoided each other with the territorial instinct of the great cats if not for Julia.

And there’s more. As these things go, there usually is.

• 22 •

Later that evening, still smarting from the day’s revelations, Kevin stared at the bowl fighting to emerge from a prime piece of imported manzanita root burl. It spun on the lathe at a decelerating rate while he sucked on a finger. He’d been too distracted to take care with the chisel, and now the bowl’s profile was irretrievably lopsided.

Sisters, two of them. The fact of them gnawed at him.

He loosened the screws that anchored the wood to the horizontally rotating faceplate and lobbed the block toward the rejects pile in the corner of the studio. It ricocheted off the closest set of shelves, causing Liam’s plaster cast to fall. As automatic as a football goalie, Kevin leapt sideways and caught the ragged memento in midair before crashing to the floor.

He lay there still catching his breath when a footstep landed on the outside stoop. He turned over, expecting—no one, in reality, and certainly not Danny looking as wan as John the Baptist before the beheading.

“Sweeping the floor with your clothes?” he said.

Kevin held up the plaster cast. Danny had once asked him what it meant to him, this sad-sack souvenir that was nothing but a soiled tube of plaster in the shape of a skinny wrist. Answer: home.

“How goes the investigation?” Kevin said as Danny pulled him up.

“Tsk, against the rules to ask, but since you’re asking”—he flashed his mocking grin of old—“I’ll answer. Shittier than a backed-up bowel.”

“Your men find anyone who saw me when I left the party? I was probably out back pissing with the other drunks. Better than waiting for the loo anyhow.”

“There’s nothing but alcoholic fuzziness so far. It will take weeks to talk to everyone who was at the party. It’s bloody chaos. Walked through the village to check the crime scene, and I’ve never been more popular. And the tourists are photographing themselves in front of the café. Love, lust, and murder, what more could the skivers want?”

“Wish I could help you, truly.”

“You’re in luck. I’m meant to fetch you in for questioning, with your permission of course. Clarkson wants to watch the interview live.”

“Now?”

“Riding us all hard.”

Kevin twisted his torso back and forth with a back-cracking groan. “We’ll have to drop Liam off at the pub first. He’s on dinner break just now.”

They trudged to Liam’s house. Liam sat innocently enough at the dining table with its neat piles of mail. His matchmaking ledger sat before him. He’d already ticked off a few names with colored tabs. Under his elbow, a legal pad displayed other notes.

“I don’t like the looks of you two,” he said.

“Clarkson wants Kevin in so he can tell the O’Briens we’re making progress,” Danny said.

“Surely you have a better suspect by now,” Liam said.

“Merrit Chase for reasons I’m not saying.”

Liam’s expression turned inward. After an unusual delay, he responded with, “Ah, I see,” and went back to scanning his ledger.

Kevin almost laughed at Liam’s disinterested act. If Kevin could lay a wager, he’d have thought Kate the sister with the killer instinct. But then, what did he know? Merrit was the poster child for still waters and deep reservoirs and all that bollocks.

“No treating Merrit with the family-friendly touch then,” Kevin said to Danny but with an eye on Liam, who frowned.

Danny waved his recorder toward Liam. “I need another round with you before we take off. Kev, take note so you don’t fall all over your sorry self with Clarkson.”

Kevin collapsed onto a dining chair. They ought to be laughing over stupid tourist antics and eating Kevin’s specialty eggs with pork and parsley. Instead, Danny turned on the recorder, introduced the interview with Liam, and pulled a photo from his pocket. The image showed a wood-handled knife stained with blood. Kevin opened his mouth then closed it at a glare from Liam. Danny passed on his own silent warning.
Shut
up and pay attention.

“Mr. Donellan,” Danny said for the benefit of the recording, “do you recognize this object?”

“I wondered where that had got to,” Liam said. “I rather like that old knife. I bought it from a Galway man years ago. Fine work, isn’t it?”

“This is the murder weapon.”

“I assumed that, my dear boy. I used it to cut gift ribbon as you well know, and before you ask, yes, dozens of people saw me. Ask Sean and Brendan and Martin and Seamus and Raymond—the Harkin brothers. They gave me a blow-up doll, the tossers.”

“So you or your son brought this knife to the party—”

“No surprise there. Kevin grabbed it off my desk before we left. Alan never gives up his bar knives. The man’s so stingy he wouldn’t give you steam off his piss.”

Danny rubbed a smile off his face. “Let’s return to the provenance of this knife. It’s well known that your son works wood. In fact, I wondered myself when I saw it at the scene. Was this hilt designed by your son, Kevin Donellan?”

“No, as I said, that’s my knife, from Galway.”

Relief passed over Danny’s features, nevertheless, he continued with, “Some might say the woodwork bares a remarkable resemblance to your son’s work before he began wood turning.”

“Kevin used this old thing as a model, that’s all. Mimicry, you know, that’s how artists get started. In fact, I’ll wager he designed dozens of such hilts in an effort to perfect his technique, then either tossed or gave them away.”

“When did you notice this knife go missing at the party?”

“When indeed?” Liam frowned, thinking. “It was after eleven thirty by the time I unwrapped the last gift. After that, I don’t know. The crowd was obliterated by then. No one was paying me any mind.”

“So your son could have picked up the knife without your knowledge.”

“By Christ,
anyone
could have picked it up without my knowledge. That’s hardly a significant point against my son.”

***

“End interview.” Danny clicked off the recorder. A headache throbbed behind his eyeballs. “I’m walking a tightrope here, gents. I was supposed to bring O’Neil with me tonight for protocol’s sake, and that’s just the beginning of it.”

Kevin fidgeted, then rose to pace around the dining table.

“Whatever else you do,” Danny continued, “keep your temper with Clarkson. You hear me, Kev?”

“Oh, that’s rich. Let’s see you
keep your temper
—oh never mind—I need a drink.”

Kevin disappeared into the kitchen. Oaths and slamming cabinet doors followed.

Liam closed the ledger and picked up his velvet coat. “At least he’ll know how to answer your questions about the knife when you get him to the station. Bless you for that, good Danny. It does look similar to some he’s made in the past, but it’s my knife, and I’ll swear to it again if I have to.”

Danny stroked the leather cover that protected Liam’s matchmaking lists. The giant book looked like a hand-me-down from Merlin the Magician, and it hadn’t changed since Danny’s childhood. The same cracked leather in dark green, the same binding that Liam unfastened as required, the same specialty paper stock with shredded edges and a vellum hue. Liam made it all seem so simple.

“He’ll be all right,” Liam said. “We’ll see to it, won’t we now?”

“Remember the tightrope.”

They sank into silence, listening to Kevin stomp around the kitchen. Finally, he returned with flushed cheeks. Liam handed him a roll of breath mints from his pocket.

After dropping off Liam, Danny drove Kevin to the Garda station through a twilight that softened rock walls and turned silage bundles into silhouettes. From the backseat, Kevin’s irate grumblings lifted into actual words. “It’s no coincidence, you know. Lonnie’s death. My sisters arrive at the same time but separately, and he dies not long afterwards. And Merrit Chase, your suspect. She’s one sister.”

Danny braked in surprise. “As in Liam’s biological daughter?”

“Thought you’d like that.” Kevin waved fingers through the air. “The wondrous symmetry of it all, like a macabre dance. We’re pawns to the jig Merrit and some cow named Kate—the other daughter—are ringing around the lot of us.”

“Merrit mentioned a Kate, but I haven’t had a chance to follow up on her yet.”

“There you go—things aren’t what they seem. This Kate, she’s a gem, believe me, and her gaze about shriveled me up to nothing.” Kevin’s voice whispered like a loss of faith. “There’s no mistaking her resemblance to Liam.”

A few minutes later Danny pulled into the Garda station parking area. The building stood on the noncoastal about a half mile from the plaza and with nothing to mark it as Garda except a small blue sign. The men sat while the engine ticked and dusky clouds lined up along the horizon. The wind was up, a sign of summer’s passing.

Danny called O’Neil, who appeared a minute later from the pub around the corner from the Garda station. “You owe me one,” O’Neil said with a good-natured grin. “Shall I do the honors?”

O’Neil positioned himself behind Kevin and propelled him forward by the elbow. Danny followed. Once inside, they passed through a door that unlocked with a code and dropped them into a realm of messy desks, stale coffee, ringing telephones, and on-duty guards. Cl
arkson loitered within the incident room, where whiteboards filled the walls and that morning’s leftover pastries dried out on the conference table. He waved Danny to a stop and ordered O’Neil to escort Kevin to an interview room.

“How goes the investigation?” Clarkson said.

“Steady on all fronts.”

Clarkson tapped a pen against the conference table. “Two days with exactly no progress in other words. Worse yet, today I learned from the O’Briens that you and our suspect are best mates in the pints.”

“Which is not hampering the investigation.”

“Is that so?” He waved a stapled sheaf of papers in Danny’s face. “You mind explaining this then?”

He read aloud from Danny’s original interview with Kevin.

KD: I bet they did—took a sorry interest in seeing us together, I’m sure. Last year, the relationship not even laid to rest, and she showed up at the party with Lonnie. Oh, and Lonnie made sure to swagger her around the room, acting as if he actually cared for her—

DA: You didn’t grease this tin.

KD: (clanking) . . . anyway, last night Emma only wanted to be sure I was right in the head again, such as that goes.

Clarkson let the memo of interview fall onto the table. “Sounds to me like you warned your best mate not to implicate himself. And we’ll not go into the efficacy of interviewing a suspect without another officer present much less while—what?—baking?”

“This was the best way to get him interviewed. He was on the verge of refusing to be interviewed at all. And, sir, you know as well as I do that there aren’t enough officers to go around on this one.”

“I’ll grant you the last, but you’re stretching. What do you have so far?”

“The blanket with blood plus an asthma inhaler, which points to Merrit Chase as a suspect. Plus, I’m after learning that—”

“Right. Merrit Chase, the tourist who knits, befriends drunks, loses her inhalers, and checks her email. Motive?”

“Nothing on that.”

“Whereas your best mate with the assault record hated Lonnie. What have you got on Kevin’s whereabouts when he wasn’t lobbing it back with you?”

“Nothing yet,” Danny said. “My men are on it.”

“Seems to me your relaxed attitude is interfering with the investigation.”

Danny’s rising blood pressure added its thump to his throbbing head. “You’ve got my reports about Ivan Ivanov and Merrit Chase. Plus, a new name cropped up today. A woman named Kate Meehan. I’m following up on all of them. Seems to me the O’Briens are running this case, and I’m the only person willing to consider suspects besides Kevin.”

“That’s your objective take, is it?”

“Yes. Sir.”

“Time to interview Donellan,” Clarkson said.

Danny turned to accompany Clarkson to the interview room, but Clarkson shook his head. “I’ll see to him. Go home. Tomorrow first thing, drive to Ennis to see what came back on Lonnie’s computer. Dublin bastards sent everything there instead of here.”

So now Danny was an errand runner. “Fast turnaround,” he said.

“Called in a favor.” Clarkson paused. “After that task, you’re off the case.”

“I’m sorry?”

“You heard me. Off the case. You’re too close to Kevin Donellan. And here I thought it would be your family problems that would sink you.”

Clarkson departed, muttering about the techs in Dublin who best not have screwed up the chain of evidence.

“Damn the man,” Danny hissed under his breath.

He was still standing in the middle of the room when O’Neil returned with a large stack of papers. “Clarkson’s got Pickney manning the video equipment.”

O’Neil settled down at the end of the conference table and started sorting through his pile. “This is for shit. We have to consider the whole damned village. Lonnie wasn’t exactly Mr. Popular.”

“Have you spoken to Emma Foley yet?” Danny said. “We need to confirm what Kevin said about their conversation at the beginning of the party.”

“Not yet. Poor Emma though, speaking of people with issues. I asked her out a few months back, I don’t mind saying, and she was having none of it. Still moons over Kevin.” O’Neil slid a fax toward Danny. “Something for you. Internet Café’s bank statement.”

Danny squinted down at columns that represented Internet Café’s cash flow. He perked up. This day had a positive end, after all. A way to proceed, a concrete inquiry based on numbers, lovely digits that didn’t lie, confuse, or derail. “We haven’t seen this report yet.”

“We haven’t?”

“No. And if Clarkson asks after it, tell him you’ll follow up with the bank.”

O’Neil, bless him for a few brain cells, caught on quick. “So much paperwork to track, it’s no wonder a few items fall through the cracks.”

“Good man.”

Danny sat back, thinking. He hadn’t forgotten Merrit’s Tweedle Dee to Ivan’s Tweedle Dum. In fact, he now wondered if their bumbling yet collusive behavior at Internet Café linked them to Lonnie’s interesting financials.

“Tomorrow I’ve got an errand to run thanks to Clarkson, and then we’re going to hunt down Ivan.”