Nothing but Trouble (26 page)

Sara looked out the windscreen of the car. People hurried along the quay, shops were opening, lorry drivers were queuing up at curbside to make deliveries, buses rolled by. Sunlight dappled the Liffey, the blue sky was tinged with green, and the tourists were in short sleeves, anticipating a warm, clear day.

“Do you have a plan?” Fitzmaurice asked.

Sara let out a small sigh. She’d hoped to get to Spalding by working around Paquette and leaving the smallest possible footprint of her participation in the investigation. “Has there been any fresh communication between Spalding and Paquette?”

Fitzmaurice shook his head. “Not as far as we know.”

Sara bit her lip. If she waited for Spalding to surface or make another misstep, it could be days before he could be brought to ground, and time wasn’t on her side. “Let’s have a talk with her.”

Fitzmaurice turned over the engine and laughed. “That’s a fine plan, Colonel Brannon. One I heartily endorse.”

Sara touched Fitzmaurice’s shoulder. “Wait a minute. Let’s think this through. Where is she now?”

Fitzmaurice glanced at his watch. “On her way to an appointment with a Canadian artist who is about to have a major show at a gallery in the Temple Bar district.”

“Can we have her picked up without arousing her suspicion?”

“A subterfuge of some sort? Is that necessary? We have sufficient cause to question her.”

“Which would surely put her on guard,” Sara countered. “If we approach her as a suspect, she could immediately go on the offensive and either request a solicitor or ask to contact the Canadian embassy.”

Fitzmaurice eyed Sara. “And you wouldn’t want that.” Sara shook her head.

“I could arrange for a detective to approach her about a theft of items from her hotel room.”

“That would work. But I would prefer to meet with her somewhere other than your office.”

“Dublin Castle would do nicely,” Fitzmaurice replied.

“Isn’t it a big tourist attraction?”

“One of the most popular in the city. The former police yard and armory on the castle grounds house Garda offices, including the drug unit. There are several belowground rooms that are equipped for interviews and interrogations.”

Sara laughed. “So we’ll have Paquette thrown into the castle dungeon.”

“Not quite,” Fitzmaurice said with a smile as he pulled out into the crush of morning traffic. “But with a bit of embellishment it will give you an excellent tale to tell once you’re home in the States.”

Sara asked how far it was to the castle, and Fitzmaurice replied that it was no more than a biscuit’s throw away. When they arrived, he gave Sara a few minutes to look around, pointing out an old Norman tower with tall battlements that housed the Garda Museum; the circular gardens, with their serpentine footpaths amid lush grass, resting on the site of the dark pool-dubh linn-that had given the city its name; the Gothic Revival chapel; the state apartments; and the viceroy’s coach house that, from the outside, looked much like a small castle but now served as an exhibition and conference center.

“Originally,” Fitzmaurice said, as he led Sara to a brightly plastered building that bordered the circular garden, “the castle sat along a river. But the old moat was filled in and it’s an underground river now that flows into the Liffey.”

“This is an amazing place,” Sara said as she followed Fitzmaurice inside the Garda Carriage and Traffic Building. They walked down a long hallway, past offices where uniformed officers manned desks, to a suite of rooms that housed the drug unit. There Fitzmaurice introduced Sara to a detective named Colm Byrne and explained that he had need of an interrogation room.

Byrne, who had the look of a young tough who could street-fight with the best of them, gave Sara the once-over from head to toe.

“You’ve come up in the world,” he said to Fitzmaurice with a toothy grin. “Circulating with a much better class of people now, are you?”

Fitzmaurice smiled jovially. “I’m still knocking the north side riffraff’s heads together as need be, Colm, and if you keep drooling on the good colonel’s shoes, I’ll soon be adding your name to my list.”

Byrne threw back his head and laughed. “I want none of that. The interrogation rooms aren’t in use. Take your pick.”

The underground rooms had one-way mirrors that hid small viewing areas where digital video equipment was set up to record interviews and interrogations. The walls were a neutral beige and the rooms were well lit. The only furniture consisted of rectangular office tables and several straight-backed chairs.

“Perfect,” Sara said.

“Soon you’ll have Paquette in hand,” Fitzmaurice said, “which may put you in close reach of Spalding. But who are you really after?”

“Is it that obvious?”

He perched on the end of the table and studied Sara’s face. “Yes. You’ve skirted around Paquette until it has become absolutely necessary to confront her, you’ve relied on me as your intermediary to make it seem as though the investigation has been conducted completely independent of any involvement on your part. Except for being introduced to Colm Byrne, you have avoided all possible contact with Garda personnel other than myself. I’m half convinced that soon you’ll be asking me to delete all references in my reports of your presence in the Republic and your participation in the investigation.”

Sara shook her head. “I have no need to do that, and to ease your mind, I’m not setting you up.”

“Since I am an Irishman and a peeler, and therefore doubly suspicious both by disposition and training, normally I wouldn’t believe you.” Fitzmaurice rose to his feet and smiled. “But I do. However, you’ve severely limited my ability to assist you.”

“The person I want is outside of your reach,” Sara said.

“Fair enough, but when all is over, I expect to be told the truth, in the strictest confidence, of course, with no mention of it to be made in my official reports.”

“Fair enough,” Sara echoed. “How much time do we have before Paquette is picked up?”

“About a half an hour, more or less, I would say.”

“Then let’s go over all the facts and information we have before she gets here.”

Fitzmaurice opened the folder he’d been carrying and sat at the table. “I have a statement from Paquette’s driver you might find interesting, as well as a report from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police that came in overnight, addressed to you, about Paquette’s rather precarious current employment and financial situation.”

Josephine Paquette listened as Hayden LaPorte, the Canadian artist she had just finished interviewing, prattled on, mentioning for the third time that the Canadian ambassador to the Irish Republic would be attending the gallery opening of his one-man show on Friday night.

Bright overhead lights glared against bare walls where paintings were stacked, waiting to be hung. One of them was a large triptych of a band of Inuit, moving camp across the frozen tundra in a snowstorm, a work that captured the harsh beauty of the Artic. The gallery was uncomfortably cold in spite of the warm September day and the bright interior lights, as though a hundred or more Dublin winters had seeped through the stone walls and created a permanent chill that would never go away. The triptych only served to heighten the effect.

LaPorte, a stocky, bearded, nervous, distractible man in his sixties, hadn’t been easy to interview, but Paquette had managed to keep him on track by stroking his ego and directing the conversation back to his work as an artist.

When LaPorte stopped talking, Paquette smiled, closed her notebook, stood, and smoothed her skirt, a Jean Muir creation, silky brown with a slightly flared hem at the knee, which she’d bought on a one-day shopping trip to London. “I’ve taken far too much of your time.”

LaPorte nodded absentmindedly, stared at the empty walls, and sighed. “So much to do.”

After assuring LaPorte that she and the freelance photographer she had hired would see him at his opening, Paquette stepped outside into the warmth of the day. Her waiting car was parked on the narrow cobblestone street, in front of a yellow building where a vendor stood behind a ground-floor window selling coffee to a man with several bundles under his arm.

As she stepped toward the car, a young, pleasant-looking man in a business suit approached her and displayed police credentials.

“Ms. Josephine Paquette?” he asked.

“Yes?” Paquette replied.

The man introduced himself as a Garda