Chapter Twelve
“What the fuck are you keeping from me?” Albert asked Donovan as he handed him a cup of the hospital machine coffee. “How the fuck did you know she'd be there?”
Donovan looked up at him. “How the fuck did you know where I was?”
“Buddy at the NSA. Insurance database, GPS, blah blah blah. Boring story. My question is more interesting. How did you know?”
Donovan sighed. “Mara Lang. I kept a file on her. She and her brothers went there before Quinn was locked up. There was a picture. It was the day before she died.”
Albert looked at him, then he looked at the operating theatre below them. A surgeon was stitching up Naomh's back. She was sedated. She would be alright, but would have a very nasty scar for the rest of her life. He wanted to ask him what had caused him to think of that, but another question was more obvious. “Why did you keep a file on Mara Lang?”
Donovan sighed. “You know it was my car that hit her?”
Albert nodded. “But that's not all, is it?”
Donovan shook his head. “I was the prosecuting attorney in the smuggling case Quinn Lang was convicted in. Mara Lang came over from Québec for the trial. She wanted to be there for her brothers. But something else happened. Not sure why, but she became obsessed with me.”
“Obsessed with you?”
Donovan nodded. “That's how she ended up under my car. She tried to stop me from driving away from the courthouse. Wanted to talk to me, tried to seduce me. When I turned her away and drove off, she got in front of my car and I drove over her. The cops did not put that bit on record, knowing it would ruin their case against Quinn Lang. Any suggestion of me being involved with his sister, a minor at that, would break their case apart.”
“So that was all hidden from the public eye. But how does that involve Justine? Or Aoibhe?”
“I guess her sister sent her letters and pictures of me. Told her how much she was in love with me. The girls were nearly inseparable. When she died, Aoibhe lost it and she ran away from the boarding school. She wasn't thinking straight. Her brothers would have brought her out to New York if she'd just waited, but she probably tried to make it back here on her own. On her way something happened and she ended up in the water. Then the L'Aigle family pulled her out. She must have banged her head or something, or the trauma of being in the river and the psychological shock combined messed with her memory.
“She did not remember a thing, but it must have kept playing in her subconscious. Not sure what happened after, what set off the murders, but I can guess.”
“Let me guess,” Albert put in. “Quinn recognized the girl on the television and when he got out of jail, he looked her up. Her memory began to return, but meanwhile she's messed up even worse than before because of the constant pressure, brainwashing and in the end, the drugs she was on. She didn’t recognize him at first, but somewhere in her brain she connected him to the death of someone she had loved. She also had the eagle image in her brain, her more recent memories trying to overrule those traumas. That's when she got the tattoo on her back.
“But she could not suppress the old traumas and she decided to deal with the cause of that pain as she saw it at that moment. By killing Quinn Lang. She also remembered who had killed her sister and she remembered hearing how great you were. So she went after you too, but could not kill you because she was convinced she loved you.
“Along the line, she remembered the warehouse and went to check it out. She saw Denny Lang and thought she was seeing Quinn Lang, so she killed him.”
Donovan nodded and rubbed his hands over his face. “It would seem so.” He sighed and sank back in the chair. “Messed up girl was messed up even more by the entertainment industry. Brilliant thing to happen, eh?”
Donovan felt numb when he got home. He had wanted to go and see Naomh Walsh when she woke up, but as he got to her room he saw her husband sitting by her side. He did not know what to do, so he left. He had gotten back in his car and driven home in a zombie state. The house was empty. The butler was still out, and he roamed around the house. He stepped into the living room, but left it immediately. He could not spend time in that room just now. He could not look at the large bloodstain on the white carpet. Instead, he roamed around the house aimlessly.
He went outside, into the gardens. He sat down in the shadow of a tree and closed his eyes. Suddenly he was back there. He was in his car outside the courthouse. He saw the face of Mara Lang again, slammed against his windscreen. He remembered every detail of that day, and then his mind raced on. He saw everything that had happened in the last few weeks. He still felt like vomiting as he recalled the bodies with the eagles drawn on their backs.
A voice stopped his musings. He got up and looked at the surveillance imaging on the street outside his loft. There was a van there. In front of the van was a woman, waving at him. He looked out the front and smiled when he recognized the woman. It was Frankie Saunders.
“Figured you'd need a new carpet,” she said, pointing to the van.
Donovan smiled and used his cell to let the van pass into his private parking bay. She walked in before the van. She kissed him as soon as she could place her lips on his. “It's on me.”
Donovan pulled away from her. “You want to give me more freebies?”
Frankie nodded. “It might shake the image of poor Ms. Graeme from my mind.”
“I don't think I will ever be able to shake that image.”
“Is it true it was Justine Lavoie?”
Donovan nodded. “Don't tell anyone, though. The press is all over it already.”
“You can always persuade me not to tell?”
Donovan smiled. “I can, but I'm not sure I want to.”
Frankie frowned. “How do you mean?”
Donovan looked around. He did not know how to say it, but he had to. “Frankie. A woman I like just ended up seriously hurt, another two went completely berserk and ended up dead. You're engaged, you're one of the most talked about people in this city.”
She nodded, stroked his cheek and walked away. “Call me when you need me again, Storm.”
“I will.” Donovan watched her walk down the narrow street toward the C train. “Thanks for the carpet.”
She turned around and winked. “You're welcome to my carpet.”
Donovan went back in and went to the smoking room. He picked up a cigar from the humidor and lit it. Then he picked up the guitar and began picking at the strings. He just played. Somehow he ended up playing Justine Lavoie's latest hit, but it barely registered that he did. When he finally noticed it, he knew that this was something that would never make it into his file room. There did not need to be a file in that room. Every detail of it would be etched into his mind forever.
Epilogue
Donovan sat in his office. There were emails to answer, there was research to do, there were clients to call, but he could not bring himself to do any of it. He kept thinking about the moment on the hill. He felt the pressure of the trigger against his finger. He felt the shock of his Sig's recoil. He saw little Aoibhe Lang, or Justine Lavoie, slip and fall down. He saw her broken body on the road down below. And he saw the deep cut and the heavily bleeding back of Naomh Walsh.