I said, “Try telling us how ‘this’ started.”

She sat back on the couch and closed her eyes for a moment. Eric placed a hand lightly on her shoulder, and she shook her head, eyes still closed, and he removed it, placed it on his knee and looked at it as if he wasn’t sure how it had gotten there.

“A student came to see me one morning when I was at Bryce. At least she said she was a student.”

“Any reason to think otherwise?” Angie said.

“Not at the time. She had a student ID.” Diandra opened her eyes. “But once I did some checking I found there was no record of her.”

“What was this person’s name?” I said.

“Moira Kenzie.”

I looked at Angie and she raised an eyebrow.

“You see, Mr. Kenzie, when Eric said your name I jumped on it, hoping you’re related to this girl.”

I thought about it. Kenzie isn’t a terribly common name. Even back in Ireland, there’s only a few of us around Dublin and a few more scattered up near Ulster. Given the cruelty and violence that festered in the hearts of my father and his brothers, it wasn’t necessarily a bad thing that the bloodline looked to be close to its end.

“You said this Moira Kenzie was a girl?”

“Yes?”

“So she was young?”

“Nineteen, maybe twenty.”

I shook my head. “Then, no, I don’t know her, Doctor Warren. The only Moira Kenzie I know is a cousin of my late father. She’s in her mid-sixties and she hasn’t left Vancouver in twenty years.”

Diandra nodded, a curt, bitter one, and her pupils seemed to dim. “Well, then…”

“Doctor Warren,” I said, “what happened when you met this Moira Kenzie?”

She pursed her lips and looked at Eric, then up at a heavy ceiling fan above her. She exhaled slowly through her mouth and I knew she’d decided to trust us.

“Moira said she was the girlfriend of a man named Hurlihy.”

“Kevin Hurlihy?” Angie said.

Diandra Warren’s golden skin had paled to eggshell in the last minute. She nodded.

Angie looked at me and again raised her eyebrows.

Eric said, “You know him?”

“Unfortunately,” I said, “we’ve met Kevin.”

Kevin Hurlihy grew up with us. He’s pretty silly-looking—a gangly, tall guy with hips like doorknobs and unruly, brittle hair that looks like he styles it by sticking his head in a toilet bowl and flushing. When he was twelve years old, a cancerous growth was successfully removed from his larynx. The scar tissue from the surgery, however, left him with a cracked, high-pitched mess of a voice that sounds like the perpetual angry whine of a teenage girl. He wears Coke-bottle glasses that make his eyes bulge like a frog’s, and he has the fashion sense of an accordionist in a polka band. He’s Jack Rouse’s right-hand man and Jack Rouse runs the Irish Mafia in this city, and if Kevin looks and sounds comical, he isn’t even close.