Conor frowned at the detective.
‘What I mean is,’ Hunter explained, ‘Mr. Daniels was a plumber. Did this friend of his look like he was a plumber as well? Or a builder, or something like that? Could they have been on a job together before coming in for a drink at the end of their work day?’
‘Umm…’ Conor paused, yet again. ‘There’s no way I can be sure. We’re talking a month ago here, but I don’t think that either of them was dressed in their work clothes, to be fair.’
‘Do you think that you’d be able to describe what Mr. Daniels’s drinking partner looked like?’ Garcia asked.
The bartender took no time in shaking his head. ‘Nah, I barely looked at the fella. Like I said, I only really remember it because Shaun never comes in with a mate and he never takes a table. Always sits at the bar.’
‘Do you remember if they seemed to be arguing at all?’ Garcia asked.
‘I can’t really say, but if they were, it wasn’t anything serious or loud.’
‘I take it that they left together?’ Hunter, this time.
‘Can’t say for sure again, but probably. I don’t remember serving the fella on his own, or seeing him here by himself.’
Garcia quickly peeked at Hunter in a peculiar way. The look was almost code forI think that we’re done here.
Hunter reached into his pocket for a card and handed it to Conor. ‘If you remember anything else, or if, by any chance, you happen to see the person that was sitting with Mr. Daniels that night in here again, or anywhere else for that matter, please, contact me straight away. No matter the time. That person isprobably the last person to have seen Mr. Daniels before he disappeared… probably the last person to have seen him alive too. We need to find him.’
‘Aye, no bother,’ the bartender said, taking the card. ‘If I see him again I’ll get in touch.’
As Hunter and Garcia turned to leave, Conor halted them.
‘There was this one night, like. He said something… odd.’
Both detectives exchanged a quick glance before returning to the bar.
‘I’m not quite sure exactly when this happened,’ the bartender began. ‘But I’m pretty certain that it wasn’t too long before the last time I saw Shaun in here. It was also one of the nights that he got pretty ossified, like.’
‘He got what like?’ Garcia asked.
‘Umm… quite drunk,’ Conor replied before continuing. ‘So that night we got chatting here at the bar. It was a slow weeknight. No games on TV or nothing.’ He threw his thumb over his shoulder to indicate the TVs high on the wall behind him. ‘So I’m guessing it was probably a Monday or a Tuesday.’ He shrugged. ‘Anyway, we’re chatting about something or other and somehow the conversation turned to “feck-ups”.’
Garcia’s eyes narrowed. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Ya know, life feck-ups – I should’ve done better with my life, but I fecked up and everything went arseways. Ya know what I mean, right?’
‘Yeah, sure,’ Hunter replied. ‘So what happened?’
‘Well…’ Conor pressed his lips together and subtly shook his head. ‘I think that it was Shaun who mentioned something about being a feck-up and that his whole life was a feck-up. So I said something back like – we’ve all fecked up in life one time or another, ya know… we just gotta carry on… that’s what’s important. I fecked up plenty in mine, I told him.’
‘OK…?’ Garcia nodded him along.
‘I remember that when I said that,’ Conor explained, ‘Shaun looked at me with this terribly sad look in his eyes, finished his pint, downed a shot of whiskey, and just before he walked off he said – and these were his words – “Not in the way I have, Conor. Not in the way I have.”?’
Twelve
Hunter sat quietly at his desk, eyes closed, mind plowing through the little they had so far, trying hard to understand what sequence of events could’ve led to Shaun Daniels being tortured for days before being murdered, but there were too many missing pieces… too many unanswered questions for any sort of workable image to materialize.
Back at O’Hearn’s Bar and Grill, Hunter had asked the bartender if he’d ever asked Shaun what he’d really meant when he mentioned that he had fucked up in life. Conor said that he never did. From experience, he said, he knew that comments like Shaun’s were better left alone. The more you prodded, the more it stunk.
Hunter couldn’t really argue with that logic. Conor wasn’t exactly Shaun Daniels’s best friend, or his analyst. He was just a bartender in Shaun’s local bar. There was no reason for him to go snooping around in Shaun’s personal life.
Right then, a ‘ping’ came from the computer on Hunter’s desk, announcing the arrival of a new email. His eyes blinked open and his attention moved to his screen. The email was from Dr. Slater and it contained some of the forensics results from the analysis her team had conducted on Shaun’s car. The report wasn’t very long. The team had managed to retrieve several full and a few partial fingerprints from the external and internal door handleson all four doors, the steering wheel, the dashboard and the car’s trunk lid. They had also recovered a few strands of hair from the driver and passenger seats.
No luck.
