“Did you recognize any of them?”
Trey thinks back. “Nah. Don’t think so.”
“Fair enough,” Nealon says easily, but Cal hears the unspoken for now: if Nealon comes up with a suspect, he’ll be back. “Did you hear any of what they were saying?”
Trey shrugs. “Small bits, only. Like one fella said, ‘Over that way,’ and another one said, ‘Jesus, take it easy.’ And someone said, ‘Come on ta fuck’—sorry for cursing.”
“I’ve heard worse,” Nealon says, with a grin. “Anything else?”
“The odd word, just. Nothing that made sense. They were moving around, like, so that made it harder to hear.”
“Did you recognize any of the voices?” Nealon asks. “Take your time, now, and think back.”
Trey thinks, or else gives a good impression of it, frowning into her mug. “Nah,” she says in the end. “Sorry. It was all men, but. Like, not my age. Grown men.”
“What about the accents? Could you tell were they Irish, were they local, anything at all?”
“Irish,” Trey says, without a pause. “From round here.” Cal’s head goes up at the note in her voice, clean and final as an arrow slicing straight to the heart of the target, and he knows.
Nealon says, “Round here like what? This county, this townland, the West?”
“Ardnakelty. Even just over the other side of the mountain, or across the river, they talk different. These were from round here.”
“You’re certain, now, yeah?”
“Definite.”
The whole story is bullshit. Cal understands at last that Trey has never been her father’s minion in this; she’s playing a lone game, and has been all along. When the opportunity came her way, she aimed Ardnakelty down a phantom path after imaginary gold. Now that things have shifted, she’s aiming Nealon, meticulously as a sniper, at the men who killed her brother.
She gave Cal her word never to do anything about Brendan, but all this is just distant enough from Brendan that she can convince herself it doesn’t count. She saw clearly that she would never get a chance like this again, so she took it. Cal’s heart is a heavy relentless force in his chest, making it hard to breathe. When he worried that Trey’s childhood had left cracks in her, he had it wrong. Those aren’t cracks; those are fault lines.
Nealon’s expression hasn’t changed. “How long would you say you were out there?”
Trey considers this. “Coupla minutes, maybe. Then the car engine started up, and I went back in the house. Didn’t want them seeing me if they came our way.”
“Did they?”
“Don’t think so. By the time they drove off I was in my room, it’s at the back; I wouldn’ta seen their lights go past. But the car sounded like it was going the other way. I wouldn’t swear, but. Sound echoes funny, up there.”
“True enough,” Nealon agrees. “What’d you do after that?”
“Went back to bed. It was nothing to do with us, whatever they were at. And everything had gone quiet anyway.”
“But when you woke up early, you went to have a look.”
“Yeah. Couldn’t get back to sleep; too hot, and my sister, that I share the room with, she was snoring. And I wanted to see what they’d been at.”
Cal knows now why Trey brought her find to him instead of to Johnny. There was nothing sentimental about it; she didn’t trust him more in a pinch, or turn to him from the shock. She wanted the chance to tell this story. Johnny would have tossed Rushborough down that ravine and made damn sure Trey had seen nothing, heard nothing, and never got near a detective. Cal is better behaved.
“And that’s when you found him,” Nealon says.
“My dog found him first.” Trey points at Banjo, sprawled with Rip in the shadiest corner by the fireplace, his side rising as he pants in the heat. “The big fella there. He was up ahead, and he howled. Then I got there and saw.”
“It’s a shock,” Nealon says, just sympathetically enough and not too sympathetically. The guy is good. “Did you get up close to him?”
“Yeah. Up next to him. Went to see who it was, what was the story.”
“Did you touch him? Move him? Check was he dead?”
Trey shakes her head. “Didn’t need to. You could tell by him.”
“You were there about twenty minutes, you said,” Nealon reminds her, without any particular emphasis. His little blue eyes are mild and interested. “What were you doing all that time?”
“Just kneeling down there. I felt sick. Hadta stay put for a bit.”
Trey’s answering readily this time, now she’s had a chance to plan, but Cal knows better. He’s seen Trey taken apart by an animal’s suffering, but never by a dead creature. Whatever she was doing by Rushborough’s body, she wasn’t waiting for her stomach to settle. The thought of her screwing around with evidence makes him flinch.
“Sure, that’s only natural,” Nealon says soothingly. “It takes all of us like that, the first few times. I know one Garda that’s been on the job twenty years, great big lump of a fella, the size of Mr. Hooper here, and he’d still get the head-staggers when he sees a dead body. Did you get sick, in the end?”
“Nah. I was grand in a bit.”
“Did you not want to get away from your man?”
“Yeah. Thought if I stood up I might puke, but, or get dizzy. So I stayed put. Kept my eyes shut.”
“Did you touch the man at all?”
He asked that already, but if Trey notices, she doesn’t show it. “Nah. Fuc— Sorry. No way.”
“I don’t blame you. I wouldn’t fancy touching him myself.” Nealon gives Trey another smile. She manages a half-smile back. “So you took a little break to get your head together, and once you were all right, you came straight here.”
“Yeah.”
Nealon takes another cookie and mulls that over. “That fella Rushborough,” he says, “he was only, what is it, a few minutes from your own gate. Why didn’t you go tell your mammy and daddy?”
“He usedta be a detective,” Trey says, nodding at Cal. “I reckoned he’d know what to do, better’n they would.”
It only takes Nealon a fraction of a second to come back from that and change the surprise to a big grin. “Jaysus,” he says. “They say it takes one to know one, but I hadn’t a notion. A colleague, hah?”
“Chicago PD,” Cal says. His heart is still slamming, but he keeps his voice easy. “Back in the day. I’m retired.”
Nealon laughs. “My God, what are the odds? You come halfway across the world to get away from the job, and you trip over a murder case.” He glances over his shoulder at the uniform, who has stopped scribbling and is looking up at them open-mouthed, unsure what to make of this development. “We got lucky today, hah? A detective for a witness; Jaysus, you couldn’t ask for better.”
“I’m no detective here,” Cal says. He can’t tell whether there was a fine needle under the words—he’s still waiting to find out how long you have to live in Ireland before you can reliably identify when people are giving you shit—but he’s seen enough turf wars to make this much clear straightaway. “And I never worked Homicide anyway. About all’s I know is to secure the scene and wait for the experts to get there, so that’s what I did.”
“And I appreciate it, man,” Nealon says heartily. “Go on, give us the rundown: what’d you do?” He leans back in his chair to leave Cal the floor, and gets to work on his cookie.
“When I got to the scene I recognized the man as Cillian Rushborough, I’ve met him a couple of times. I gloved up”—Cal pulls the gloves out of his pocket and lays them on the table—“and I confirmed that he was dead. His cheek was cold. His jaw and his elbow were in rigor, but his fingers still moved, so did his knee. I didn’t touch him anywhere else. I backed off and called you guys.”