The Death of an Irish Sinner (21 page)

BUT M
C
GARR DID
not proceed directly to Dunlavin. Instead, he drove due south to Killiney and Delia Manahan’s house.

There he lowered the visor with his Garda shield pinned to the other side. He found the front door—which faced the Irish Sea and had been kicked in by Ward the night before—slightly ajar. McGarr stepped in and began his search in the basement, where Ward had reported Delia Manahan kept her outdoor gear.

Finding the camping equipment hung neatly in organized rows from the wooden floor joists so it wouldn’t mildew, he began searching through the rucksacks and backpacks, the zippered pouches and compartments. But he did not find what he was after until he remembered that Noreen kept their water bottles—the several with the pop-up nipples that she
took with her when shooting or riding, or on a hot day she brought out to him in the garden—in the kitchen.

Which is where he found what he was looking for—not one white plastic water bottle stenciled with the logo “G. Bass, Outfitters” but five. Why five?

In passing up the stairs, he had also noted, that all the climbing ropes lining the stairwell had been looped, then tied rather professionally with noosed knots.

The photos that he came upon in Manahan’s bedroom—again because of Ward’s earlier reconnaissance—showed Manahan, Geraldine Breen, and a girl who, McGarr suspected, was Manahan’s daughter.

They were standing near a large wooden sign that said “San Juan Wilderness Area.” In back of them were red pines and aspen trees, and, in the far distance, towering gray stone cliffs imposed on a crystalline blue sky dotted with puffs of cumulus cloud. The Rockies, McGarr assumed, where at elevations of ten thousand feet and greater, hydration was essential.

Each of them was toting a rucksack with water bottles similar to the G. Bass model in pouches to either side. Total of six. McGarr tucked the photo in his jacket.

Back on the ground floor, he located the room that Ward had dubbed the “television room.” In a wall case behind glass were the “fowling pieces.” Not finding the key in either of the two drawers below, McGarr broke the glass.

The gun with the smallest bore was a 21-gauge Czech-made shotgun with a carved stock and a hunting scene engraved on its German silver receiver.

Again he searched the drawers below. The only box of 21-gauge shells that he could find had two loads missing. The thin shells had yellow plastic jackets.

Placing the five water bottles in a carton, he left for Dunlavin.

As usual, Father Fred Duggan met McGarr at the front door of Barbastro. “Isn’t it rather late for a visit? I would have thought you would be with Noreen and Fitz. By the by, how are they?”

“How’d you hear about that?”

Duggan’s head went back, and his blue eyes studied McGarr’s face. “Wasn’t it all over town with the helicopter and all? Some of your neighbors rushed over and found the house wide open. The local Guards, of course, knew the story.”

One call from you—a recently bereaved priest—and they told all.

Duggan’s eyes fell to the carton McGarr was carrying. “Whom do you wish to see?”

God, McGarr thought, for Whom he had two questions named Noreen and Fitz.

“Delia Manahan here?”

“Up in her room. By that I mean, up in the room she usually occupies when she’s here. But I don’t think she wishes to be disturbed, since she’s at her prayers.”

McGarr pushed by Duggan and mounted the main staircase two steps at a time.

There was light under Delia Manahan’s door, but it took at least a minute of rapping to get her there.

“I hope this is important,” he heard her say before she opened the door a few inches to look out.

Thrusting his weight into the carton, he shoved open the door, knocking her back into the room.

“What’s this?” she demanded. “I’m at my prayers. Get out! Get out!”

Spinning around, McGarr saw Duggan in the open door, and he kicked it shut. Before grabbing the woman by the back of the neck and shoving her toward the room’s only easy chair, into which she fell face first.

Ripping open the carton, he dumped the five G. Bass, Outfitters white-and-black plastic water bottles over her. “Don’t say a word, not a word,” McGarr hissed into her ear, before spinning her around and stuffing her down into the chair.

To calm himself, he then walked toward the window that looked out at the garden where Mary-Jo Stanton had been found. And he checked his mobile phone to make sure Nuala had not phoned him and he had not heard the ring during his…ruckus.

He began speaking to the dark window, knowing that if he looked at her again—the shaved eyebrows, the severe, ascetic,
religious
image that she had honed—he might not be able to control himself.

“I don’t know when you got the letter from Parmalee. Rather, the anonymous letter that you sometime later figured out was from Parmalee. But it enraged you. As well it might.

“For ten years, a cunning, duplicitous enormity had been worked on you. After murdering your blackmailing husband, the father of your two children, who you did not know was a blackmailer, Gerry Breen had ingratiated herself with you. Helped you with the wake, the funeral, the house and kids.

“You became fast friends who, it turned out, had something in common—an abiding religiosity that Breen stoked, given her extreme commitment to Opus Dei. Which seemed like the answer to you as well. So after completing your studies—financed in part, I should imagine, by them—you came aboard. God—or at least, a life dedicated to God—seemed like the answer.

“And your relationship with Breen also became deeper. You traveled, hiked, camped, and perhaps even”—McGarr could hardly bring himself to say it—

“
shot
together. Skeet, perhaps big game—I don’t know how or when those heads appeared on the walls in that room in your house—and maybe even at targets, given Breen’s special office with Opus Dei, that of enforcer/protector. Security. It was what she had been doing at Barbastro all those years—keeping guard over Mary-Jo Stanton, whom Opus Dei did not know what to do with. But you didn’t know about that. As yet.

“No. All you knew was that Gerry Breen and you were the closest of personal friends, and you also shared beliefs and interests. I don’t know what else you might have shared, and I don’t care. But when the letter arrived, you decided to get back—at Breen and at Opus Dei.

“How better than to get rid of Mary-Jo Stanton, to whom Gerry seemed more completely devoted even than she was to you, and who appeared to be a personage within the Opus Dei fold. I’m not sure you understood why—that she was the fleshly daughter of Opus Dei founder José Maria Escrivá—and I’m not sure it would have mattered or increased your rage.

“In any case, you decided to employ an intermediary to exact revenge. You had already placed Frank Mudd—your former lover—here at Barbastro as gardener, and you knew it wouldn’t take much to recruit him. What you didn’t know was that Parmalee had already turned Mudd into his own mole and informant, threatening to expose him to his erstwhile co-criminals in the States, on whom Mudd had informed.

“He had Mudd place bugs in every bedroom and public room of this house, and, most likely unknown to Mudd, he also placed a bug in Mudd’s cottage.”

In the reflection off the glass, McGarr saw Manahan raise her head.

“Monitoring and recording the voices from a flat over the chemist shop down in the village, Parmalee heard every little squeak and sigh that you two made in the bedroom, to say nothing of your proposal to Mudd.

“But the strategy that you chose wasn’t sufficiently pointed to suit Parmalee—digitalis being a bit too anonymous for the ex-Jesuit who blamed Opus Dei and Duggan for removing him from Mary-Jo, whom he claimed to have been bedding, and for ending their collaboration in the writing of books. Duggan might call in a country doctor, who would declare the elderly Stanton’s a death from natural causes. So Parmalee developed his own plan.

“Prepping the water bottle with digitalis—the sixth of your six with the G. Bass, Outfitters logo stenciled on the front”—McGarr flicked a hand at the five around her chair—“you either gave it to Stanton yourself before she went out, or you had Mudd place it by her as the two were gardening in the hot sun. Mudd’s
job was to retrieve it after the old woman drank from the bottle and expired.

“You could not have known that Mudd and Parmalee—or perhaps just Parmalee himself, given the label in the jacket that was placed over the surveillance camera—waited, most probably in the garden haggard, for the digitalis to begin to take effect, then obscured the lens and wrapped a barbed
cilicio
around Mary-Jo’s neck, tightening down the clamp enough to draw blood but not enough to cause death. The point being to inculpate those who either used or had access to such a device, namely, Opus Dei, whose founder, Escrivá, had been known to use one himself.

“Which brings us to Mudd, who—you believed—was the only person who knew how you…worked Mary-Jo’s death. Not the most intelligent man and an episodic drunk with a criminal record, he could be leaned on and made to tell the truth. So he had to be taken care of in a way that would make it look as if he killed himself as penance or in remorse for having killed Mary-Jo.

“Getting him drunk was the easy part, stringing him up something else, given his size. But for a climber like you, tying a secure blood hitch to the beam in the feed room and then attaching a come-along to the noose were skills that you’d practiced before. And the come-along with its crank handle could make it possible for somebody to hang himself, even while drunk.

“You then scoured the place, removing the brassiere that had been hanging in the toilet”—again McGarr watched Manahan react. Shifting her feet, she turned
her head toward the door, as if thinking of fleeing. “And all other traces of your presence.

“You probably even went to Father Fred and owned up to Mudd not being your brother as you had originally told him and Mary-Jo when you pleaded they take Mudd on as gardener.” McGarr was winging it here, merely supposing she had done so. “And now you had your doubts about him. Maybe Duggan should reexamine the tape of Mary-Jo gardening right before her death.

“Duggan bought the suggestion, reviewed the tape, then came to me, making no mention of your admission about Mudd’s not being your brother. If Mudd and Mudd alone were believed responsible for Mary-Jo’s death, with no Opusian complicit in any way, then Opus Dei would remain guiltless for her murder. Just something done by a crazed drunk. End of story. The crime wrapped up neatly even before it hit the press.

“But you couldn’t have that, even though it was in your interest as far as suspicion of murder was concerned. Although you had removed Mary-Jo from Gerry Breen, Opus Dei and Breen herself would remain unscathed. In fact, both would be massively rewarded by her demise. The biography of Escrivá would either go unpublished or be expurgated by some Opus Dei scribe, and Opus Dei would end up with the bulk of Mary-Jo’s fortune. Even Breen would suddenly find herself a wealthy woman.

“But you had the manuscript of the biography, didn’t you? It was you in Mary-Jo’s quarters when I climbed up there to investigate. And, as with the
cili
cio
, in cutting the painting off the wall your intent was to put the police on the trail of an Opusian zealot.

“But the manuscript was something else, wasn’t it? It was dynamite. Placed in the proper hands, it would blow the myth of Opus Dei’s beatified founder sky-high. Linked to the other allegations about the order, it might do much to knock them from the preferential position they enjoy in Rome.

“And the proper hands were Parmalee’s, which is how he obtained the manuscript, shortly after the murder. I don’t know if by then you had connected the letter you had received with Parmalee. But who else could it be? Who seemed to know as much about Opus Dei and some of the priests themselves?

“What you did know, however, was that I’d surely be questioning Parmalee about the manuscript. That I’d want to see the letter from Mary-Jo that he wrote about in the paper and, when he couldn’t come up with that, that he’d need to throw me and my staff some sort of bone.

“So you sent him the same sort of revelatory letter that he’d sent you, telling him where Gerry Breen was.

“Endgame? It must have seemed that way to you at the time. Breen would be hunted down and arrested, Parmalee would publish the manuscript, and Opus Dei would have to go on the defensive. And Breen might even be charged with Stanton’s and Mudd’s deaths, when and if it came out what role she had played in the order over the years.

“Little could you have known how capable your erstwhile friend and co-Opusian is.” McGarr turned
from the window and regarded Manahan directly. “Which is something you should heed.”

As though steeling herself, she had folded her arms across her substantial chest, and her gray eyes were bright. “I’m afraid I don’t understand. Why
heed
?”

“Because she’s not a woman given to half measures, and she’s no longer under our control.”

“I’ve less reason to fear Gerry than I have to be concerned with any of the…bullshit that you just uttered. May I speak candidly as a solicitor?”

McGarr waited.

“You don’t have a scrap of evidence, otherwise you wouldn’t be here trying to get me to—could it be
confess
? My opinion? You’re delusional. Shouldn’t you be somewhere else? Out actually looking for Gerry or back at the cop shop massaging paper. Or even better, from a human perspective—at the hospital with your wife and her father. But maybe not even they need you in your present state of mind.”

Suddenly McGarr found himself hunched over the woman, their faces inches apart. “I don’t know how you
worked
that, but there are two ways I can
work
you. One is the usual way, the legal way. But that’s far too easy and good for the likes of you.

“What you need is pain. Not the pain of losing a husband who was a blackmailer and thief. No. And not the pain of having been misled even for a decade by a group of conniving clerics. Not that either.