Page 9 of The Trap by Catherine
At the end of the hall, he turned back to her. “Where were you? We’ve been calling.”
Lucy had found her phone in the bottom of her bag, accidentally on silent. There were so many notifications on the screen that she’d put it back there without checking any of them and just concentrated on getting home.
“I was at the cafe,” she said.
“You were at the cafe,” Chris echoed, in a tone that would’ve also worked if she’d just told him she’d come from the moon. He seemed to notice her appearance for the first time. “Did you sleep there too?”
“You really want to do this now?”
“Luce, you promised—”
She pushed past him and opened the door. Denise, their Family Liaison Officer, was already in the kitchen, standing by the table.
She was tall and lithe, like a ballet dancer, and always wore her hair pulled back into a smooth, tight chignon, which made Lucy wonder if she’d actually been a ballerina at some point. She was a detective so she wasn’t uniformed, but seemed to stick to her own unofficial version: dark jeans, starchy white shirt, dark-blue blazer that fitted perfectly except for the little bulk on her right hip. She seemed like a woman who ought to be effortlessly running a corporation from the top floor of a glass tower somewhere, wearing a blinking Bluetooth earpiece and sipping a dainty espresso, not standing at Lucy’s scratched kitchen table with sagging packing boxes piled up behind her, preparing to say—
“I don’t have any news on Nicki. I’m sorry.”
Some version of this was always the first thing out of Denise’s mouth. Not because she didn’t have a heart, but because she did have one.
“But,” she continued, “Idoneed to talk to you about something.”
She suggested they all sit down.
The kitchen smelled of coffee—the pot on the drip machine by the sink was full and steaming—but Denise had a glass of water in front of her, which she took a small, quick sip from now.
Lucy was convinced the water was some sort of FLO strategy, a tip they gave them in training. Even when something horrible had happened to your family, the societal norms of Irish hospitality were hardwired into the brain, so you felt obligated to serve all visitorssomething?: a cup of coffee, a plate of fanned-out digestive biscuits, an off-brand chocolate bar. But no matter what you offered Denise, she’d say, “A glass of tap water would be great, thank you.” It was a stroke of genius. Accepting something meant the strain of incessant offering could be brought to a swift and decisive stop, and the thing being water only required the traumatized to find a clean glass and a tap.
There was a bundle of what must have been this morning’s post sitting in the middle of the table. All the usual suspects: past-due bills, cards from the crazies, letters that beganDespite numerous attempts to contact you...The item on top was a thick business envelope with something red stamped above its window and a barcode sticker showing it had been sent by registered post.
That was a first, and it couldn’t be good.
Lucy swept the lot off the table and on to the seat of one of the empty chairs, feeling two sets of eyes on her as she did it.
A beat passed.
“Perhaps you’ve seen or read something already this morning,” Denise started. “But I wanted to come here to make sure you’ve got the facts. The stories in the media... They’re all just speculation at this point. And they will be for the foreseeable, so I’d avoid them if you can. Trust me as your source of information.”
“What stories?” Chris asked.
Lucy leaned forward. “Is it Roland Kearns? Has he been arrested?”
The ex-husband of the first woman to have gone missing, Tana Meehan, had never officially been declared a suspect in her disappearance or any of the others, but he’d also been the only person across all three cases brought in for questioning, and several women had gone to the media to share pictures of skin he’d split open with his fists.
“Luce,” Chris said reproachfully.
“No,” Denise said. “It’s not about Roland.” She paused. “Does the name Lena Paczkowski mean anything to you?”
They both shook their heads.
“Lena was reported missing by her parents two weeks ago,” Denise explained. “She’d been out in Maynooth on a Saturday night, socializing in a pub with friends. Her boyfriend was expecting her to walk to his house afterward, about fifteen minutes away, but she never arrived. He presumed she’d changed her mind and gone off with friends, but the following day, on his walk into work, he found her phone lying on a grassy verge not far from his door.”
Under the table, Lucy felt Chris’s hand reach for hers.
Each of the three missing women’s phones had been found close to their last known locations. The last positive sighting of the first woman, Tana, had been at a bus stop in the middle of Kildare town; her phone had been handed in to a coffee shop on Market Square by a woman who’d found it lying in a gutter. Nicki’s had been in a city-center laneway, its screen smashed to smithereens, around the corner from the pub that CCTV had captured her leaving, alone. The third and last woman, Jennifer Gold, had been abducted as she walked her dog along a road near her home. Her phone had been found in a hedgerow.
“Lena wasn’t linked at first to the others,” Denise went on. “The consensus was that she’d left of her own volition. She was arguing with her parents about wanting to move out of the family home and into student accommodation. They felt that this was a private matter, and turning it into headline news would only make it difficult for her to return. I’m sure I’ve said this to you before, but when it comes to missing person cases, we very much have to follow the family’s lead.”
“OK,” Chris said with a twinge of impatience.
