couldn’t properly mother. Not at fifteen. Not in the confusion of mourning the sister who’d been born with him, and who’d died just minutes later, too small to live.
I set my teeth together and put my forehead against the pillow, shoving away every thought of family ties that came haunting me. Introspection was not my strong suit. I didn’t like to look back, and I wasn’t prepared for the past, in the form of my dead mother, to come calling.
I fell asleep sometime after midnight, still wrapped around the scratchy couch pillow.
There was a place on the other side of sleep that I’d been to, where I’d walked among the dead and spoken with them. The plan—a plan which I didn’t have any intention of mentioning aloud, not even to myself—had been to whoosh through dreamtime, find the dead women and learn who’d killed them, then jaunt off to work like Don Juan triumphant.
Instead I woke up stiff and disoriented the next morning, curled up on the solitary couch cushion, without having had a single moment’s otherworldly experience while I slept. An ache of uselessness welled up behind my eyes. Not only did I not understand what was going on, but the baser part of me didn’t care. Having it all go away would have been far more within my comfort zone.
I had just used the phrase comfort zone with all due seriousness, right inside my own head. I clearly needed to get up, stick my head in a bowl of cold water, and drink a pot of strong coffee. Which I did, except it was a hot shower instead of a cold bowl, and I swear I didn’t drink more than three cups of coffee. Honest.
I called a cab—not Gary; he knew too much about me and I wasn’t up to facing that this morning—and went to work, my nose mashed against the window. I missed Petite. I wanted to be cozy and safe, driving her instead of taking a cab. I had a better relationship with my car than I had with most people.
With any people, a small and somewhat snide voice inside my head said. I told it to go away, paid the cabby, and stumped through the precinct building to find Billy.
Actually, I was looking for his desk, where I figured I could leave a note explaining my humiliating inability to find anything useful, and then run away before I had to confess my failure out loud. I’d come in early just to be sure I could pull that off.
Billy was earlier. He leaned on his elbow, big palm wrinkling the side of his face until his left eye had all but disappeared into the curves of flesh. He looked like he’d been up all night, which was not only possible, but likely. An attack of guilt grabbed me by the throat. I snuck back out of the precinct building and scurried down the street to the doughnut shop to get him a lemon-poppyseed muffin and an oversize mocha. His face actually lit up when I plopped them down on his desk several minutes later, which made me feel slightly less like a loser.
“You’re a goddess.” The side of his face was one big red mark from leaning on his hand too long. He unwrapped the muffin, took a slurp of coffee, and squinted up at me. “You didn’t get anything about the murders, did you.”
“Is it that obvious?” Back to Loserville.
“You look like a kicked puppy. But I’ll forgive you anything for the next five minutes, because you brought me the manna of heaven.”
“Damn.” I looked at the muffin, impressed. “I shoulda gotten me one of those things.”
Billy chuckled and sank back in his chair, its unoiled hinge drawing out a creak that slowly lifted every individual hair from my fingertips to my nape. I wrapped my hands around his coffee cup for a few seconds, trying to chase the chill away. He ate half the muffin in one bite, then nodded at his computer screen, speaking around crumbs. “I’d forgive you anyway. I found some stuff out. Not about our dead girls. They all had ID, by the way. We’re seeing if they’ve got anything in common, but so far they look random. Anyway, the murders.”
Somehow I was able to understand every word he said. I usually couldn’t understand most of what I said when my mouth was full. I twisted around to look at the computer screen. “Interpol?”
“Thought of it this morning. I remembered reading about some kind of ritual murders about thirty years ago—”
“You read them thirty years ago?” Billy wasn’t more than ten years older than I was. He gave me a look that suggested I shut up. I pressed my lips together and widened my eyes, all innocence.
“The murders were about thirty years ago. I read about them a few years ago. Pedant.”
“Because you what, read about ritual murders for fun?”
“Joanie,” Billy said, annoyed. I lifted my hands in apology and tried to keep quiet. Billy glared at me until he was sure I wasn’t going to interrupt again, then continued. “These women all had their intestines stretched out, connecting them with one another.”
I suddenly wished I hadn’t drunk a lot of acidic coffee for breakfast, and looked around for something neutral to eat. There was nothing handy except Billy’s muffin, the second half of which he stuffed in his mouth, clearly suspecting that I was about to raid it. A burp rose up through the soured coffee in my stomach and I clamped my hand over my mouth, tasting coffee-flavored bile. Yuck.
“You’ve got a soft heart, Joanie.” Billy gave me a very tiny smile that did a lot to make me feel better.
“I’m not a homicide detective.”
“Mmm. Yeah. Anyway, so I remembered this morning reading about a murder like that over in Europe. It’s not the kind of thing the authorities like to noise around.”
“No kidding.” My stomach was still bubbling with ook. “So we’ve got a copycat?”
“Either that or somebody’s changed his hunting grounds. Anyway, the only case there was an eyewitness for was, like I said, about thirty years ago. A woman who was presumably supposed to be the last victim—there’s never more than four—fought back and managed to escape. The Garda Síochána—”
“This was in Ireland?” I didn’t mean to interrupt. It just popped out. Billy’s ears moved back with surprise.
“Yeah. What, you had some run-ins with the cops while you were there?”
“No, I just remember my mother talking about the Garda. She didn’t call them the Síochána.” I said the word carefully, SHE-a-CAWN-a. “I had to ask her what it meant.”
“It means police,” Billy said helpfully, then waved off my exasperated raspberry. “Yeah, you know that, right. Anyway, they weren’t able to find the guy, and for a while the woman was under suspicion, but she got off when the marks on the victims’ bodies had obviously been made by somebody a lot bigger than she was. They’re usually strangled into semiconsciousness before the horrible stuff begins.”
“Like being half-strangled isn’t horrible.” It had nothing on having your innards ripped out while you were still alive, and I lifted a hand to stop Billy’s protestation. “I know. So what was her name? Maybe we can talk to her, get some kind of information about this psycho that might help us.”
Billy leaned forward, chair shrieking protest again, to pull up a minimized screen. “That was my thought. She was from Mayo. I’ve got some people there looking to see if they can find her. Her name was—oops, wrong window.” He pulled up another one, scrolling down. “Her name was—”
“Sheila MacNamarra,” I finished, feeling light-headed.
The woman on the computer screen looked more like me than the one I’d known had. There was a ranginess to her that I shared, and our eyes were shaped more alike than I’d realized. I’d never seen a picture of my mother when she was young, and young she was: the photo showed her from the thighs up. She was obviously several months pregnant.
With me.
I closed my eyes, unable to think while looking at the photograph on the computer screen. “You won’t—” I cleared my throat, trying to wash away the break I’d heard in my voice. “You won’t find her. She’s dead.”
“Joanie?” Billy sounded bewildered. “You know this woman?”
“Yeah.” I wished I was wearing my glasses so I could pull them off. Instead my hand wandered around my face like a bird looking for a resting space: my fingers pressed against my mouth, then spread out to cover the lower half of my face before curling in again. I couldn’t stop the little actions, even when I tried. “She’s my mother.”
I wanted the next half hour or so to disappear into a jumble of confusion, but it adamantly refused to. It was all horribly clear, with an overwhelming babble of questions that I caught every syllable of and a host of concerned, confused, angry expressions that wouldn’t let me back up and take stock of the situation. No one had known my mother’s name, not any more than I knew Billy’s mom’s name. Everyone had known I’d gone to Ireland to meet her, and that she’d died, but nobody’d pried beyond that, which I’d been perfectly happy about.
