“A few. Not a crowd, like; maybe four or five.”
“Did you recognize any of them?”
Trey thinks back. “Nah. Don’t think so.”
“Fair enough,” Nealon says easily, but Cal hears the unspoken
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?”
