Faithful Place (Dublin Murder Squad, #3)(92)
He said, “It’s occurred to me.”
“Of course it has. If it hadn’t, you’d be an idiot. Has it occurred to anyone else on your team?”
“Not that they’ve mentioned.”
“And they won’t. They’ve all thought about it, because they’re not idiots either, but they’re keeping their mouths shut because they’re terrified of getting on Scorchie’s bad side.” I leaned in across the table, close enough that he had to look up. “That leaves you, Detective Moran. You and me. If the guy who killed Rose Daly is still out there, no one’s going after him except the two of us. Are you starting to see just why our little game is ethically OK ?”
After a moment Stephen said, “I guess.”
“It’s ethically just peachy all over, because your primary responsibility here isn’t to Detective Kennedy—or to me, come to that. It’s to Rose Daly and Kevin Mackey. We’re all they’ve got. So quit faffing about like a virgin clutching her knickers, and tell me what you think of Detective Kennedy’s theory.”
Stephen said, simply, “I’m not mad about it.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t mind the holes—no known motive, not sure how Kevin found out about the elopement, all that stuff. You’d expect gaps like that, after this long. What’s bothering me is the print results.”
I had been wondering if he would spot that. “What about them?”
He licked mayo off his thumb and held it up. “First off, the unknowns on the outside of the suitcase. They could be nothing, but if this were my investigation, I’d want to identify them before I closed the case out.”
I was pretty sure who had left those unknowns, but I didn’t feel like sharing. I said, “So would I. Anything else?”
“Yeah. The other thing is, right”—a finger went up—“why no prints on the first page of the note? Wiping the second page makes sense: if anyone starts getting suspicious and reports Rose missing, Kevin doesn’t want the cops finding his prints on her good-bye letter. But the first page? He takes it out from wherever he’s been keeping it all this time, he’s planning to use it as a suicide note and a confession, right, but he wipes it clean and uses gloves to stick it in his pocket? In case what, someone connects it to him?”
“And what does Detective Kennedy have to say about that?”
“He says minor anomaly, no biggie, every case has them. Kevin wipes both pages that first night, hides the first one away, when he takes it back out he doesn’t leave prints—people don’t always. Which is true enough, except . . . We’re talking about someone who’s about to kill himself. Someone who’s basically confessing to murder. I don’t care how cool you are, you’re going to be sweating like a motherf—like mad. And when you sweat, you leave prints.” Stephen shook his head. “That page should have prints,” he said, “end of story,” and he went back to demolishing his sandwich.
I said, “Just for fun, let’s try something. Let’s assume for a moment that my old friend Detective Kennedy is off base for once, and Kevin Mackey didn’t kill Rose Daly. Then what’ve we got?”
Stephen watched me. He asked, “Are we assuming Kevin was murdered too?”
“You tell me.”
“If he didn’t wipe off that note and put it in his own pocket, someone else did it for him. I’m going with murder.”
I felt that sudden, treacherous flood of affection rush through me again. I almost got the kid in a headlock and tousled his hair. “Works for me,” I said. “And what do we know about the murderer?”
“We’re thinking it’s the one person?”
“I sincerely hope so. My neighborhood may be a little on the freaky side, but I’m hoping to God it’s not freaky enough to have two separate killers doing their thing on the one road.”
Somewhere in the last sixty seconds, since he started having opinions, Stephen had got a lot less scared of me. He was leaning forward, elbows on the table, so focused he had forgotten all about the rest of his sandwich. There was a new, hard flash in his eyes, harder than I would have expected from such a sweet little blushing newbie. “Then, going by Cooper, it’s probably a man. Aged between, say, late thirties and fifty—so he’d have been between his midteens and thirty when Rose died—and pretty fit, then and now. This took a guy with some muscle on him.”
I said, “Rose did. Kevin didn’t. If you’d found a way to get him leaning out that window—and he wasn’t the suspicious type—one little shove would have been all it took. No muscle needed.”
“So, if our man was between fifteen and fifty when he got hold of Rose, that puts him anywhere between late thirties and seventy now.”
“Unfortunately. Anything else we can say about him that might narrow it down?”
Stephen said, “He grew up somewhere very near Faithful Place. He knows Number Sixteen inside out: when he realized Rose was dead, he must have been big-time shocked, but he still remembered those slabs of concrete in the basement. And from what everyone’s telling us, the people who know Number Sixteen are people who lived on or near Faithful Place when they were teenagers. He might not live there any more—there’s dozens of ways he could’ve found out about Rose’s body showing up—but he did.”