Free Raw Bone by Scott Thornley Page A

Byrne was back. MacNeice put the name on the whiteboard under the Block and Tackle Bar.
    “Ryan, what’s the etymology of
Duguald
? Please tell me it’s Irish.”
    “I’ll check.”
Click click click
pause … 
click
pause. “Irish, sir … means ‘dark stranger.’ ”
    “You’re serious?” MacNeice looked up from his desk as the young man spun around in his chair.
    “Completely. There are different ways to spell it, but that’s what it means. It’s Gaelic.” Ryan spun back to the computer, where he was searching the missing persons files of several forces, looking for a lead to either the body in the bay or the one blown up in the wagon.
    Standing back from the board, MacNeice let his mind wander, flipping the red marker over and around the fingers of his right hand, the way Clint Eastwood would a silver dollar.
    Did the name trace back to the Black Irish and the myth surrounding the fate of the Spanish Armada after its catastrophic defeat at Gravesend? Many of the men who survived that battle and its desperate retreat—the long way around the British Isles through gut-wrenching storms—were shipwrecked off Ireland’s northwest coast. Most were slaughtered on the beaches, stripped of anything useful and rolled back over the cold stones into the sea. Those not put to death were taken into service as soldiers by the Irish warlords. As the story goes, these menmarried or otherwise impregnated the fair and freckled girls of Kerry and Antrim. The product of their coupling was born: fair and freckled, dark and fair, or simply dark. Born with them was the story that Black Irish were the descendants of Spaniards that had washed ashore. The myth refuses to die, but then great myths never do.
    “Black Irish” may also have been an ancient English slur suggesting the treachery of the Irish. If so, it was a classic case of the pot calling the kettle black. Putting the marker back in the tray, MacNeice cautioned himself not to read too much into the name.
    Aziz appeared, espresso in hand, hanging her wet coat over the leading edge of the cubicle.
    MacNeice sat down at his desk again. “Tell me, how are the casualties doing?”
    “Michael says the paramedic will live, but it could be weeks before the doctors will know if he’ll be able to return to work. The damage to his upper arm and shoulder will heal, but a portion of the lung on that side is gone. As for Szabo, the neurosurgeon was able to stop the bleeding and reduce the pressure in his brain. But he’s in an induced coma and no one is giving a prognosis. Both these men have young wives. The cop has two small children, a two-year-old girl and a baby boy. The paramedic has only been married a year.”
    The phone rang. Ryan had taken to wearing a headset and answering the team’s phone without having to leave his keyboard. “Boss, it’s Forensics calling about a boat.”
    MacNeice picked up.
    “It’s Nathan Ho, sir, senior scientist up at the Mount Hope Forensics. Can you tell me what I’m looking for?” Byrne’s aluminum boat had been taken to one of the decommissioned RCAF hangars at Dundurn’s regional airport.
    “DNA—anything female. Hair, pubic hair, clothing, a lost lipstick tube, an eyelash, a fingernail.”
    “What I can already tell you is that this really is a fishing boat. I’ve found dozens of small silvery scales and a fair amount of dried slime.”
    “Is there an anchor?”
    “A twenty-pounder. It appears to be old, what fishermen call a bass river anchor. It’s attached to a coiled half-inch white rope … about thirty feet long.” MacNeice could hear him walking around the boat, his voice booming in the hangar. “There’s another anchor too,” Ho said, “but it’s not so fancy. It’s a makeshift job—an industrial-sized juice can with a heavy-duty galvanized eyelet set in concrete and a similar length of the same rope.”
    MacNeice asked Ho how long it would take to do a thorough sweep, but Ho was reluctant to