Page 85 of 56 Days
“Collecting more information. Approaching him, maybe. Eventually.”
“Didyou?”
Laura looks away. “No. But I did speak to his girlfriend.”
For a moment, Lee thinks she’s misheard. She looks to Karl, who says, “Hisgirlfriend?”
“Yes. His girlfriend. Her name’s Ciara.”
Laura can’t keep the triumph off her face; she’s clearly enjoying telling them something they didn’t already know.
“Did she come here with him from London?” Karl asks.
“Don’t know. Her accent was Irish, though. Cork, I thought.”
“And what was the highlights reel from that conversation?”
“Conversations, plural. There were two.”
“Did you tell her who you were?”
“Hardly. There wouldn’t have been a second conversation if I had.”
“What about a last name?”
“Didn’t get it.”
“Did she know about his past?”
A beat passes.
“I don’t know,” Laura says then. “I thought if she didn’t know, I should warn her. But I kept it vague. I told her I knew he’d done something bad and that his last name wasn’t really Kennedy. And she said...” Another shrug. “Well, not much.”
Karl is getting a little red in the face.
“Right,” he says. “So. To recap: you, a complete stranger, walk up to this woman and say, hey, I know your boyfriend’s done some bad shit and his last name isn’t really what he says it is, andherreaction was ‘not much’?”
“I figured she was protecting him.”
Lee considers this, lets it percolate. Either this mystery girl was in a relationship with a convicted murderer and was protecting him from Laura or...
Lois Lane here had the wrong Oliver.
Karl asks Laura when she last saw this woman.
“Probably... three weeks ago?”
“Were they living together?”
“Could’ve been.”
“So,” Lee says, “you never actually spoke to him, but presumably this Ciara woman relayed your conversations...”
“I sent him a note. I dropped it in his letterbox. Explaining that I didn’t want toexposehim necessarily—”
Karl snorts.
“—but I did want to talk to him. Hear his side of things. I never heard back.” She folds her arms, lifts her chin. “Look, I wasn’t wrong. Iknowit was him. And I didn’t do anything wrong here. I wasn’t harassing them—”
