Adrian McKinty: Hidden River

Or maybe she looked out the window. She’d be surprised. A blizzard. She couldn’t have been expecting that in June.

Monday, June 5, 1995, two-thirty Mountain Time…

At precisely the same moment, it was raining in Belfast, and the man who would eventually find Victoria’s killer was not yet up.

Me.

I was half awake in a boat I’d broken into at Carrickfergus Marina, a girl with me whom I’d met in Dolan’s the night before.

I was twenty-four, underweight, bearded, pale and sickly, with black curly hair that badly needed a cut. The girl: pretty, redheaded, skinny, and (unknown to me) only seventeen, at Carrickfergus Grammar School, a prefect, a member of the choir and scripture union but rebelling and well on her way to dropping out, failing her A levels, moving to Dublin and becoming a singer/model/prostitute/junkie. Breaking and entering and plying her with stolen gin would do nothing to alter the course of this trajectory.

And yet it was not such an illogical leap that, two weeks later, I’d be on my way west to the United States to investigate a murder that confused the local police. No, it wasn’t so strange because in fact I’d been a detective for the Royal Ulster Constabulary — Northern Ireland’s police force. A copper for six years, a detective for three of those and a DC/DS for my last six months on the force. Those last six months the key to my current geographical, moral, physical, and spiritual condition.

Detective Constable/Drug Squad.

The girl rolled over sleepily in the bunk, went back to sleep. I stroked my beard and lit the remains of her joint. I never smoked pot, never, it made you stupid. My drug of choice…

But that’s another story. Well, part of this one, but we’ll get to that.

Still raining. Cold. Pissing down.

The boat stank. Why a boat? I couldn’t go home — my father, retired from teaching math, always bloody there. And her house was out of the question. The marina had an emergency turnstile locked with a Yale standard. Easy. You break in and you find a boat that looks expensive. The bunks were narrow, though, and there was no way to get warm unless you turned on the power on the dock but that would set off a light in the marina office. Suffer for your sin.

I had things to do but the rain had hypnotized me into apathy. I slid out of the bunk and went along the passage to the head. For it to work properly, you had to turn a cistern on, piss, pump it out, and turn it off again. A lot of effort. I went down there in my boxers, T-shirt, jacket. Trailing a duvet. Shivering. Smoking. A notice on the wall: “Trust in God and keep your bowels clean — Cromwell.” I regarded it for some time. Was it supposed to be funny? My brain felt addled.

I looked out through the thick glass. Pissing was right. The sort of gray, heavy downpour chief constables pray for during riot season. Not that I cared about it, not anymore. Nope, all over, done with. I was no longer part of the solution but had migrated to become part of the problem. I smiled.

I tugged the blanket around me. I smoked and rested my head against the bog wall. Something troubled me still. Something I didn’t want to forget. I searched my memory and then the jacket pocket, but neither place revealed its mystery.

Sleep on it, I told myself.

I got up and walked to the chart table. I found the gin bottle and a square of Cadbury’s chocolate from the night before. I threw the square in my mouth. Stale. I reached down again, found some fags, and lit one. Climbed in the bunk next to the girl.

Filthy habit, smoking in bed, for God’s sake. I took a few puffs, coughed for half a minute, and added the cigarette to what I hoped was an ashtray lying down there.

I pulled the covers up over my head and kicked away a hot water bottle, icy and rubbery as a dead seal pup. I folded the duvet tighter. All now quiet — only the easing rain on the window ledge and a drip, drip, drip coming from off the mainmast and down the hatch. The girl woke, whimpered. I slept….

And as the sky above eastern Ulster started to clear, on another continent, in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains and a thousand miles into the Great Plains, a wide, suffocating blanket of snow had closed down the railways, the highways, and every other road to all but the hardiest of souls. Cops, night shift workers, emergency personnel, stranded drivers, or the horde of high-altitude insomniacs staring through their windows.

And, of course, Victoria Patawasti’s murderer.

Few vehicles moving, fewer people around, everywhere an eerie quiet.

Denver smothered in low clouds reflecting back the street and building lights, turning them sickly orange and neon red. Snow falling slantwise and hard but then diminishing as the pressure systems rotated around themselves in enormous anticlockwise ellipses. And in those moments of relative tranquillity, from high apartment windows came the peculiar sight of the snow falling upward, bobbing on heat thermals and heading into some icy purgatory in those awful clouds.

A truly impressive storm system that stretched from Canada all the way down into the Sangre de Cristos. Great swirls of low pressure that bounced off the Rockies and sucked up moisture from as far away as Puget Sound and the Gulf of California. The overnight man on the Weather Channel was dizzy with excitement. After a winter of drought, this was the biggest snowfall of the year. In fact, this was the biggest June storm since 1924, snow in six states, sixteen inches in Aspen, power outages in Utah, fourteen airports closed, all the east-west highways, America effectively cut in two, families trapped in cars, trucks overturned, El Niño, La Niña, Global Warming, Instability, the End Times, the Second Coming….

Not that it bothered Victoria’s killer.

No, you didn’t care, did you?

You had already murdered Alan Houghton up on Lookout Mountain.

And now it was three in the morning. Perfect. They say that that’s when the body is at its weakest. The storm had come out of the blue. But it wouldn’t matter. It would erase your footprints like a shaken Etch-A-Sketch. You probably liked the darkness, the low clouds, the fresh snow. The deciduous trees like scarecrows, the pine and spruce drenched in white. Trails on the path from people walking their dogs. Here and there a glimpse of the mountains. How long did you stand outside Victoria’s apartment building?

You must have come in by the fire exit next to the garage. The only entrance that did not have a security camera. What would you have done if some old lady had spotted you down there?

You’re going in late? Don’t I know you? You’re the —

You wouldn’t hesitate. Jump down, rush her, kick the dog, take out the knife, slit her throat, knee drop on the dog, break its neck. That’s the sort of thing you didn’t want. Messy. Ugly. A whole night’s adventures and you wouldn’t even be in the building yet. And besides, you’d had quite the night already.

Absolutely no turning back now. Alan Houghton already dead. His body probably dumped in a quarry or under the extension of Interstate 70. What an effort that must have been for you, lifting his dead weight into the plastic sheeting in the trunk, driving through the snow, finding the trench you’d picked out yesterday. Necessary.

As was this.

Houghton had no proof of Charles’s involvement in the murder but once the smear got out there it wouldn’t go away. The bleeding had to stop. It had literally been millions of dollars over decades. If Charles was going to go anywhere, Houghton had to be silenced. And now with the first step taken, the job had to be finished. Oh, the surprise on his face. I’m sure he’d been expecting an envelope stuffed with benjamins….

The fire exit. You took out a magnet and greased it over the pass sensor. The light went green, the lock clicked. Easy as pie.