Darkness, Take My Hand (Kenzie & Gennaro 2)

I said, “Try telling us how ‘this’ started.”

She sat back on the couch and closed her eyes for a moment. Eric placed a hand lightly on her shoulder, and she shook her head, eyes still closed, and he removed it, placed it on his knee and looked at it as if he wasn’t sure how it had gotten there.

“A student came to see me one morning when I was at Bryce. At least she said she was a student.”

“Any reason to think otherwise?” Angie said.

“Not at the time. She had a student ID.” Diandra opened her eyes. “But once I did some checking I found there was no record of her.”

“What was this person’s name?” I said.

“Moira Kenzie.”

I looked at Angie and she raised an eyebrow.

“You see, Mr. Kenzie, when Eric said your name I jumped on it, hoping you’re related to this girl.”

I thought about it. Kenzie isn’t a terribly common name. Even back in Ireland, there’s only a few of us around Dublin and a few more scattered up near Ulster. Given the cruelty and violence that festered in the hearts of my father and his brothers, it wasn’t necessarily a bad thing that the bloodline looked to be close to its end.

“You said this Moira Kenzie was a girl?”

“Yes?”

“So she was young?”

“Nineteen, maybe twenty.”

I shook my head. “Then, no, I don’t know her, Doctor Warren. The only Moira Kenzie I know is a cousin of my late father. She’s in her mid-sixties and she hasn’t left Vancouver in twenty years.”

Diandra nodded, a curt, bitter one, and her pupils seemed to dim. “Well, then…”

“Doctor Warren,” I said, “what happened when you met this Moira Kenzie?”

She pursed her lips and looked at Eric, then up at a heavy ceiling fan above her. She exhaled slowly through her mouth and I knew she’d decided to trust us.

“Moira said she was the girlfriend of a man named Hurlihy.”

“Kevin Hurlihy?” Angie said.

Diandra Warren’s golden skin had paled to eggshell in the last minute. She nodded.

Angie looked at me and again raised her eyebrows.

Eric said, “You know him?”

“Unfortunately,” I said, “we’ve met Kevin.”

Kevin Hurlihy grew up with us. He’s pretty silly-looking—a gangly, tall guy with hips like doorknobs and unruly, brittle hair that looks like he styles it by sticking his head in a toilet bowl and flushing. When he was twelve years old, a cancerous growth was successfully removed from his larynx. The scar tissue from the surgery, however, left him with a cracked, high-pitched mess of a voice that sounds like the perpetual angry whine of a teenage girl. He wears Coke-bottle glasses that make his eyes bulge like a frog’s, and he has the fashion sense of an accordionist in a polka band. He’s Jack Rouse’s right-hand man and Jack Rouse runs the Irish Mafia in this city, and if Kevin looks and sounds comical, he isn’t even close.

“What happened?” Angie said.

Diandra looked up at the ceiling and the skin over her throat trembled. “Moira told me Kevin scared her. She told me he had her followed constantly, forced her to watch him have sex with other women, forced her to watch him have sex with associates, how he beats men who even look at her casually, and how…” She swallowed, and Eric placed a tentative hand on top of her own. “Then she told me how she’d had an affair with a man and Kevin found out and how he…killed the man and buried him in Somerville. She begged me to help her. She…”

“Who contacted you?” I said.

She wiped her left eye, then lit a long white cigarette with the antique lighter. As afraid as she was, her hand only betrayed the slightest tremor. “Kevin,” she said, the word popping out of her mouth like it was sour. “He called me at four in the morning. When the phone rings at four in the morning, do you know how you feel?”

Disoriented, confused, alone, and terrified. Just the way a guy like Kevin Hurlihy wants you to feel.

“He said all these foul things. He said, and I quote, ‘How’s it feel to be living your last week on earth, you useless cunt?’”

Sounded like Kevin. Class all the way.

She inhaled with a hiss.

I said, “When did you receive this call?”

“Three weeks ago.”

“Three weeks?” Angie said.

“Yes. I tried to ignore it. I called the police, but they said there was nothing they could do since I had no proof it was Kevin who called.” She ran a hand through her hair, curled into herself a bit more on the sofa, looked at us.

“When you talked to the police,” I said, “did you mention anything about this body buried in Somerville?”

“No.”

“Good,” Angie said.

“Why have you waited so long before seeking some help?”

She reached over and slid Eric’s gun off the manila envelope. She handed the envelope to Angie, who opened it and pulled out a black-and-white photograph. She looked at it, then handed it to me.

The young man in the photo looked to be about twenty—handsome, with long, sandy brown hair and two days’ beard stubble. He wore jeans with rips in the knees, a T-shirt under an unbuttoned flannel shirt, and a black leather jacket. The college grunge uniform. He had a notebook under his arm and was walking past a brick wall. He seemed unaware his picture was being taken.

“My son, Jason,” Diandra said. “He’s a sophomore at Bryce. That building is the corner of the Bryce Library. The photograph arrived yesterday by regular mail.”

“Any note?”

She shook her head.

Eric said, “Her name and address are typed on the front of that envelope, nothing else.”

“Two days ago,” Diandra said, “when Jason was home for the weekend, I overheard him telling a friend on the phone that he couldn’t shake the feeling someone was stalking him. Stalking. That’s the word he used.” She pointed at the photo with her cigarette and the tremor in her hand was more noticeable. “The next day, that arrived.”

I looked at the photo again. Classic Mafia warning—you may think you know something about us, but we know everything about you.

“I haven’t seen Moira Kenzie since that first day. She isn’t enrolled at Bryce, the phone number she gave me is for a Chinese restaurant, and she’s not listed in any local phone directories. But yet she came to me. And now I have this in my life. And I don’t know why. Christ.” She slapped both palms down into her thighs and closed her eyes. When she opened them, all the courage she’d presumably been sucking out of the thin air for the last three weeks was gone. She looked terrified and suddenly aware of how weak the walls we erect around our lives truly are.