56 Days by Catherine Ryan Howard

Today

“Mill River,” Karl repeats. “Shit. You think he’s one of them?”

Lee holds up a hand in a stop gesture.

“Roll it back a bit there, Karly boy. We’ve no ID. All I am saying is that the name on that envelope is a match for one of those boys, and their names were never released to the public. They’re legally protected. Still are. And this was back in, what? 2003? Pre-Twitter and Facebook. Before people started violating court orders while sitting on their arses at home thumbing their phones. So apart from friends and family, the school, and probably a few people in the locality, the general public didn’t actually know this name. I only know it because I was on traffic at the funeral. I’m not supposed to know it. I don’t, officially.”

“Who did you call?”

“The senior detective from back then.”

“And he confirmed?”

“Yup.”

“Shit,” Karl says again. “Could it be a coincidence?”

“Course it could. But I wouldn’t say that’s a very common name to find on an Irish twentysomething, would you?”

Karl shakes his head, disbelieving.

“So what do we do with this information?”

“We be very, very careful with it,” Lee says. “The more people we tell, the more chance there is of it getting out. And we’re not just trying to keep it on the QT that it might be him in there, we have to protect the name itself. I don’t want to be responsible for putting that name in the public domain.” She chews her lip as she thinks. “Let’s just sit on it for now. I’ll tell the Super when I have a chance to do it in person.”

“Which one was he? A or B?”

“The name on the envelope,” Lee says pointedly, “is B’s.”

“Where’s A these days? Could he have—”

“He took his own life in detention.”

“How come this dude—” Karl stops, starts again. “How come the name on the envelope isn’t still in there?”

“He got a lighter sentence. Got out when he turned eighteen.”

“I don’t remember hearing anything about that.”

Lee shrugs. “You weren’t supposed to.”

“But that’s a nice apartment,” Karl says, “in a nice place. I mean, what are we talking, two grand a month? And he’s an architect.”

“Please tell me you’re not about to say he doesn’t seem like a killer.”

“But he d—”

“Most people who do bad things do so because a confluence of events has maneuvered them into that position and then pushed them to act, to do something out of character. How many times have we heard, ‘Oh, my Johnnie would never do that, he doesn’t have it in him, you must have the wrong house,’ or, ‘I’ve been best friends with this guy for years, I know he’s not a killer’? Yeah, he didn’t have it in him and he wasn’t a killer—until he did and he was. None of us know what we’re capable of, if the circumstances were right. Or wrong.”

Karl raises an eyebrow. “Are you telling me you think you could murder someone?”

“Well, I’m not planning to—”

“Reassuring.”

“—but I don’t know what’s going to happen to me. Like, imagine: one day you’re outside your house, getting into your car, and—say—your mother is walking around to get into the passenger side.”

“I can’t,” Karl says. “You know Nora would insist on driving.”

“But before she can, a drunk, joyriding teenager plows into her, head-on, right in front of you, pinning her to the side of the car. And then starts laughing about it. Thinks it’s the funniest thing ever, doesn’t care. You can see him, pissing himself laughing, through the windshield. Imagine it. Really. The anger. The rage. The laughing. And you happen to have your sidearm, and there’s no one around and you know you can make it look like you fired on approach to try to prevent what happened from happening. What would you do? I mean, maybe you wouldn’t want to killhim, but wouldn’t you rapid-fire a couple straight into his balls? Wouldn’t you love to see the pain on his face that he’s just caused you? Wouldn’t you want to stop that goddamn laughing?”

Silence.

Then Karl says, “That’s fucking dark, Lee. Jesus Christ.”

“All I’m saying is child murderers can grow up to be architects who live in nice apartments.”

“What did Nora ever do to you?”

“Dividing people into good and evil is just lazy.”

“You really need to get a roommate.”

“Detective Inspector?” The new voice comes from outside the car. When Lee turns toward it, she sees Garda Claire O’Herlihy, one of the uniforms who’s helping with the door-to-doors, standing a few feet away and bent at the waist so she can make eye contact. “Have you got a sec?”

“Sure.” Lee gets out and then Karl does too, walking around the hood to join the women. “What’s up?”

“We’ve got a resident who’d like to talk to you,” Claire says. “Only to you. ‘The guard in charge.’ She might be a bit of a nut, but I don’t get that vibe myself. She claims she has sensitive information about the resident in apartment number one and will only speak to the highest-ranking member on-scene about it. She seems a bit antsy. Nervous. She’s in fourteen.”

Lee exchanges a glance with Karl.

“Have you talked to her already?” she asks Claire.

“She wouldn’t answer any of the set questions. Says she needs to talk to you first.”

Normally in a situation like this Lee would send someone else in to pretend to be the ranking member on-scene—this is, after all, the equivalent of asking to speak to a manager—but considering the name on that envelope . . .

“All right,” she says to Claire. “I’ll go.” Then to Karl, “Get that envelope into evidence for me and check on our Incident Room, will you? Once the pathologist has been and gone, I want to assemble everyone there and see what we have, so let’s be ready to go. And watch out for our friend with the CCTV. And get someone in that bloody KB Studios place who actually knows something on the phone. We have a family to notify and we have no solid information about which family that might be yet.”

Karl nods. “On it.”

“And don’t say anything about—”

“I know, I know.”

Lee indicates then that Claire should lead the way, and together they head back inside the cordon, slipping on masks as they go.

Apartment fourteen is on the opposite side of the complex to the scene—they turn left off the lobby—and one floor up. They step into a lift that has a sign printed in bold type on a sheet of paper warning that only one household can use it at a time.

When the doors open onto the second-floor corridor, Lee is relieved to find she can’t detect any unpleasant smells. She asks Claire to wait by the elevators and then goes to knock on fourteen.

The door opens so fast that the woman who appears in its place must have been standing, waiting, directly on its other side.

She is blond and lean in a way that suggests she knows exactly what her percentage of body fat is and is actively working to make it a smaller number. Late thirties, ish. Wearing loose sweatpants and a well-wornT-shirt with tiny holes in the shoulder seams. Lee catches a glimpse of a thin, white scar just above the T-shirt’s collar before the woman puts a hand there, pulling on the material absently while scanning the hall, right and then left, as if nervous that someone else might overhear them.

“Good morning, I’m Detective Inspector Leah Riordan.” She flashes her ID. “My colleague tells me that you have some information you’d like to share with me.”

“Can you come inside? I don’t really want to talk about it out here.” The woman steps back, opening the door all the way, revealing a hallway that looks identical to its counterpart in apartment one. “It’s just me. We can stand at opposite ends of the living room. And I’ll open the windows.”

Lee hesitates. “Do you have a balcony?”

The woman nods.

“Let’s talk out there, then. We’ll keep our voices low.”

The woman turns and starts down the hall. Lee follows her inside, letting the door swing closed behind her.

She notes that it doesn’t lock—there’s no click from the mechanism sliding into place—which suggests the door in apartment one could have suffered the same fate. It wasn’t necessarily open on purpose. Someone could’ve thought they’d closed it, not realizing it hadn’t actually locked.

This apartment is a mirror image of the scene, with the living room to the right off the hall. As the woman hurries to the other end of it, to the balcony door, Lee does a quick scan of the space.

Everything is the same. Same glossy, clinical kitchen. Same brown leather couch. Even the abstract print on the wall is exactly the same.

What’s weird is that something else is the same, too: the bare, impersonal vibe. Just like the scene, this looks like a show home someone is squatting in for a few days. There’s almost nothing on the kitchen countertops, no personal items, no decoration outside of what came with the place.

This one doesn’t even have the George Clooney coffee machine.

“Do you live here?” Lee asks as she steps outside.

The balcony is bare. It has a nice view of the courtyard and there’s a frosted privacy screen between this and the next balcony over, to the right. A leafy tree almost obscures the view of apartment number one’s terrace, but when Lee bends down a little, she finds clear air. If you were sitting down out here, you’d be able to see it perfectly.

“It’s, ah, like a corporate let.” The blond woman has gone to stand in the farthest corner of the balcony, maximizing the distance between them. “I’m just staying here for a few weeks.”

Lee pulls down her mask. “Where are you normally resident?”

“Well . . .” The woman shifts her weight from one foot to the other. “Dundrum.”

That’s not even half an hour’s drive from here.

“So why are you . . . ?”

“That’s part of what I wanted to talk to you about.”

“All right then.” Lee takes out her notebook, flips it open, clicks the end of her pen. “Why don’t you start with your name?”

“Laura Mannix. Two n’s and an i-x on the end.”

The woman reaches behind into her pocket and pulls out her phone, which has one of those credit-card-sized pouches stuck to its back. She slides a small yellow card out of it and holds it up, stretching so Lee can read what’s on it.

Bitten nails, Lee notes. Chipped red polish.

And then—

NUJ.

The National Union of Journalists.

It’s a press card.

Lee flips her notebook closed.

“All press inquiries need to go through the Press Office,” she says, “as you well know.”

She moves to go.

Fucking chancer.

“No, no, wait,” Laura protests. “Please! It’s not . . . it’s not that.” Her chin trembles; she looks as if she’s about to cry. “I didn’t do anything, okay? I swear. But I think that whatever’s happened in there . . . I think it could be my fault.”