Книга - The Whisper

The Whisper
Carla Neggers


Archaeologist Sophie Malone is still haunted a year after she was left for dead inside a remote Irish cave. Now she's convinced that her night of terror is linked to recent violence in Boston. Did the killer under arrest steal the ancient Celtic treasure from the cave that night? Or is another killer out there, ready to strike again?Boston detective "Scoop" Wisdom has recovered from his injuries and is after the bomber who nearly killed him. Tough and stubborn, he's the best at detecting lies…except maybe those of Sophie Malone. When an ex-cop becomes the victim of ritual sacrifice, it's clear nobody's safe, and everyone's a suspect.









Praise for the novels of Carla Neggers


“Carla Neggers and her talents have not been

more in evidence than in her latest…it’s big,

bold and stunningly effective. Evidence of a writer

at the absolute top of her game still climbing higher.”

—Providence Journal on The Whisper

“No one does romantic suspense better.”

—Janet Evanovich

“Readers have come to expect excellence

from Neggers, and she delivers it here…

extremely absorbing.”

—RT Book Reviews on The Mist

“Neggers’s passages are so descriptive that one

almost finds one’s teeth chattering from fear and

anticipation as well as from the cold…the chill from

the emotionless and guiltless killers’ icy hearts is

enough to cause frostbite to our very souls.”

—Bookreporter on Cold Pursuit

“Neggers has few peers when it comes to crafting this

type of story. She combines a brain-teasing mystery

and a steamy, compelling romance into

a breathtaking reading experience.”

—RT Book Reviews on The Angel

“Here is intelligent writing

that remains highly entertaining.”

—Publishers Weekly on Betrayals

“Carla Neggers writes a story so vivid you can

smell the salt air and feel the mist on your skin.”

—Tess Gerritsen




The Whisper

Carla Neggers





www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)


For Leo




Contents


Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Acknowledgments




1


Beara Peninsula, Southwest Ireland—late September

S coop Wisdom opened his daypack, got out his water bottle and took a drink. He sat on a cold, damp rock inside the remains of the isolated Irish stone cottage where the long summer had started with a beautiful woman, a tale of magic and fairies—and a killer obsessed with his own ideas of good and evil.

The autumn equinox had passed. Summer was over. Scoop told himself it was a new beginning, but he had unfinished business. It’d been gnawing at him ever since he’d regained consciousness in his Boston hospital room a month ago, after a bomb blast had almost killed him.

He was healed. It was time to go home and get back to work. Be a cop again.

He set his water bottle back in his pack and zipped up the outer compartment. A solitary ray of sunshine penetrated the tangle of vines above him where once there’d been a thatched roof. He could hear the rush of the stream just outside the ruin.

And water splashing. Scoop shifted position on the rock, listening, but there was no doubt. Someone—or something—was tramping in the stream that wound down from the rocky, barren hills above Kenmare Bay. He hadn’t seen anyone on his walk up from the cottage where he was staying on a quiet country lane.

He stood up. He could hear laughter now.

A woman’s laughter.

Irish fairies, maybe? Out here on the southwest Irish coast, on the rugged Beara Peninsula, he could easily believe fairies were hiding in the greenery that grew thick on the banks of the stream.

He stepped over fallen rocks to the opening that had served as the only entrance to what once had been someone’s home. He could feel a twinge of pain in his hip where shrapnel had cut deep when the bomb went off at the triple-decker he owned with Bob O’Reilly and Abigail Browning, two other Boston detectives. He had taken most of the blistering shards of metal and wood in the meatier parts of his back, shoulders, arms and legs, but one chunk had lodged in the base of his skull, making everyone nervous for a day or so. A millimeter this way or that, and he’d be dead instead of wondering if fairies were about to arrive at his Irish ruin for a visit.

He heard more water splashing and more female laughter.

“I know, I know.” It was a woman, her tone amused, her accent American. “Of course I’d run into a big black dog up here in these particular hills.”

In his two weeks in Ireland, Scoop had heard whispers about a large, fierce black dog occasionally turning up in the pastures above the small fishing and farming village. He’d seen only sheep and cows himself.

He peered into the gray mist. The morning sun was gone, at least for the moment. He’d learned to expect changeable weather. Brushed by the Gulf Stream, the climate of the Southwest was mild and wet, but he’d noticed on his walks that the flowers of summer were fading and the heather on the hills was turning brown.

“Ah.” The woman again, still out of sight around a sharp bend in the stream. “You’re coming with me, are you? I must be very close, then. Lead the way, my new friend.”

The ruin was easy to miss amid the dense trees and undergrowth on the banks of the stream. If he hadn’t known where to look, Scoop would have gone right past it his first time out here.

A woman with wild, dark red hair ducked under the low-hanging branches of a gnarly tree. Ambling next to her in the shallow water was, indeed, a big black dog.

The woman looked straight at Scoop, and even in the gray light, he saw that she had bright blue eyes and freckles—a lot of freckles. She was slim and angular, her hair down to her shoulders, damp and tangled. She continued toward him, the dog staying close to her. She didn’t seem particularly taken aback by finding a man standing in the doorway of the remote ruin. Scoop wouldn’t blame her if she did. Even before the bomb blast, he had looked, according to friends and enemies alike, ferocious with his thick build, shaved head and general take-no-prisoners demeanor.

For sure, no one would mistake him for a leprechaun or a fairy prince.

Her left foot sank into a soft spot and almost ended up in the water. Mud stains came to the top of her wellies. “I saw footprints back there,” she said cheerfully, pointing a slender hand in the direction she’d just come. “Since I’ve never run into a cow or a sheep that wears size-twelve shoes, I figured someone else was out here. A fine day for a walk, isn’t it?”

“It is,” Scoop said.

“I don’t mind the outbreaks of rain.” She tilted her head back, letting the mist collect on her face a moment, then smiled at him. “I don’t do well in the sun.”

Scoop stepped down from the threshold and nodded to the dog, still panting at her side. “Yours?”

“No, but he’s a sweetheart. I suppose he could be aggressive if he or someone he cared about felt threatened.”

A warning? Scoop noticed she wore a rain jacket the same shade of blue as her eyes and held an iPhone in one hand, perhaps keeping it available in case she needed to call for help. It would be easy to think it was still 1900 in this part of Ireland, but that would be a mistake. For one thing, the area had decent cell phone coverage.

“Looks as if you two have bonded.”

“I think we have, indeed.” She slipped the iPhone into a jacket pocket. “You’re the detective who saved that girl’s life when the bomb went off at your house in Boston last month—Wisdom, right? Detective Cyrus Wisdom?”

He was instantly on alert, but he kept his voice even. “Most people call me Scoop. And you would be?”

“Sophie—Sophie Malone. We have friends in common,” she said, easing past him to the ruin. The dog stayed by the stream. “I’m from Boston originally. I’m an archaeologist.”

“What kind of archaeologist?”

She smiled. “The barely employed kind. You’re in Ireland to recuperate? I heard you were hurt pretty badly.”

“I ended up here after attending a friend’s wedding in Scotland a few weeks ago.”

“Abigail Browning’s wedding. She’s the detective who was kidnapped when the bomb went off.”

“I know who she is.”

Sophie Malone seemed unfazed by his response. Abigail was still on her extended honeymoon with Owen Garrison, an international search-and-rescue expert with roots in Boston, Texas and Maine. Will Davenport had offered them his house in the Scottish Highlands for their long-awaited wedding, and they’d accepted, quickly gathering family and friends together in early September. Scoop, just out of the hospital, had had no intention of missing the ceremony.

“Wasn’t it too soon for you to fly given your injuries?” Sophie asked.

“I got through it.”

She studied him, her expression suggesting a focused, intelligent mind. He had on a sweatshirt and jeans, but she’d be able to see one of his uglier scars, a purple gash that started under his right ear and snaked around the back of his head. Finally she said, “It must be hard not to be in Boston with the various ongoing investigations. You have all the bad guys, though, right? They’re either dead or under arrest—”

“I thought you said you were an archaeologist. How do you know all this?”

“I keep up with the news.”

That, Scoop decided, wasn’t the entire truth. He was very good—one of the best in the Boston Police Department—at detecting lies and deception, and if Sophie Malone wasn’t exactly lying, she wasn’t exactly telling the truth, either.

She placed her hand on the rough, gray stone of the ruin. “You know Keira Sullivan, don’t you?”

Keira was the folklorist and artist who had discovered the ruin three months ago, on the night of the summer solstice. She was also Lieutenant Bob O’Reilly’s niece. “I do, yes,” Scoop said. “Is Keira one of the friends we have in common?”

“We’ve never met, actually.” Sophie stepped up onto the crumbling threshold of the ruin. “This place has been abandoned for a long time.”

“According to local villagers, the original occupants either died or emigrated during the Great Famine of the 1840s.”

“That would make sense. This part of Ireland was hit hard by the famine and subsequent mass emigration. That’s how my family ended up in the U.S. The Malone side.” She glanced back at Scoop, a spark in her blue eyes. “Tell me, Detective Wisdom, do you believe fairies were here that night with Keira?”

Scoop didn’t answer. Standing in front of an Irish ruin with a scary black dog and a smart, pretty redhead, he could believe just about anything. He took in his surroundings—the fine mist, the multiple shades of green, the rocks, the rush of the stream. His senses were heightened, as if Irish fairies had put a spell on him.

He had never been so in danger of falling in love at first sight.

He gave himself a mental shake. Was he out of his mind? He grinned at Sophie as she stepped down from the ruin. “You’re not a fairy princess yourself, are you?”

She laughed. “That would be Keira. Artist, folklorist and fairy princess.” Sophie’s expression turned more serious. “She wasn’t reckless coming out here alone, you know.”

“Any more than you are being reckless now?”

“Or you,” she countered, then nodded to the dog, who had flopped in the wet grass. “Besides, I have my new friend here. He doesn’t appear to have any quarrel with you. He joined me when I got to the stream. He must be the same dog who helped Keira the night she was trapped here.”

“You didn’t read that in the papers,” Scoop said.

“I live in Ireland,” she said vaguely. She seemed more tentative now. “The man who was also here that night…the serial killer. Jay Augustine. He won’t ever be in a position to hurt anyone else, will he?”

Scoop didn’t answer at once. Just what was he to make of his visitor? Finally he said, “Augustine’s in jail awaiting trial for first-degree murder. He has a good lawyer and he’s not talking, but he’s not going anywhere. He’ll stay behind bars for the rest of his life.”

Sophie’s gaze settled on an uprooted tree off to one side of the ruin. “That’s where he smeared the sheep’s blood, isn’t it?”

Scoop stiffened. “Okay, Sophie Malone. You know a few too many details. Who are you?”

“Sorry.” She pushed her hands through her damp hair. “Being here makes what happened feel real and immediate. I didn’t expect this intense a reaction. Keira and I both know Colm Dermott, the anthropologist organizing the conference on Irish folklore in April. It’s in two parts, one in Cork and one in Boston.”

“I know Colm. Is he the one who told you about the black dog?”

She nodded. “I ran into him last week in Cork. I’ve just completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the university there. I hadn’t paid much attention to what-all went on out here and in Boston.” She took a breath. “I’m glad Keira wasn’t hurt.”

“So am I.”

Sophie looked up sharply, as if his tone had given away some unexpected, hidden feeling—which for all he knew it had—but she quickly turned back toward the cottage, mist glistening on her rain jacket and deep red hair. “Do you believe Keira really did see the stone angel that night?”

“Doesn’t matter what I believe.”

“You’re very concrete, aren’t you?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “The story she was researching is so charming—three Irish brothers in a never-ending struggle with fairies over a stone angel. The brothers believe it’ll bring them luck. The fairies believe it’s one of their own turned to stone. Every three months, on the night of the solstice or the equinox, the angel appears on the hearth of a remote cottage in the hills above Kenmare Bay.”

“The old woman who told the story to Keira in Boston—”

“Also told it to Jay Augustine, and he killed her,” Sophie said, finishing for him. “Colm says when Keira came out here in search of this place she thought she might encounter a bit of fairy mischief. Maybe she even hoped she would. But a killer? It’s too horrible to think about.”

Scoop stood back, feeling the isolation of the old ruin. Except for the dog and the sheep up in the pastures above the stream, it was just him and the woman in front of him. How did he even know she was an archaeologist? Why should he believe a word she said?

“As many tombs and ruins as I’ve crawled through in my work, I’m not much on small spaces.” She seemed to shrug off thoughts of blood and violence as she tugged her hood over her hair. “You can imagine contentious Irish brothers and trooping fairies out here, can’t you? Keira’s story is very special. I love tales of the wee folk.”

“Believe in fairies, do you?”

“Some days more than others.”

“So, Sophie Malone,” Scoop said, “why are you here?”

“Fairies, a black dog and an ancient stone angel aren’t reason enough?”

“Maybe, but they’re not the whole story.”

“Ah. We archaeologists can be very mysterious. We’re also curious. I wanted to see the ruin for myself. You’re a detective, Scoop. Okay if I call you Scoop?”

“Sure.”

“You can understand curiosity, can’t you?”

He shrugged. “Sometimes.”

Her sudden, infectious smile reached to her eyes. “Ah. I can see you don’t like coincidences. You want to know how we both decided to come here this morning. I didn’t follow you, if that helps. I’ve never been subtle enough to follow people.”

“But you weren’t surprised to find me here,” Scoop said.

“I wasn’t, especially not after seeing those size-twelve footprints in the mud.” She eased in next to the dog. “I’ll be on my way.”

“Are you heading straight back to the village?”

“Maybe.” She patted the dog as he rose next to her. “I’ll have to see where my new friend here leads me. Good to meet you, Detective.” She smiled again. “Scoop. Maybe I’ll see you in Boston sometime.”

Scoop watched her and the big black dog duck back under the gnarly tree. She had a positive, energetic air about her. Nothing suggested she wasn’t an archaeologist. Whoever she was, he’d bet she was the type who wouldn’t let go once she got the bit in her teeth.

What bit did Sophie Malone have in her teeth? What, exactly, had brought her out here?

He slipped back into the ruin, smelling the damp stone and dirt. He reached for his backpack. This time he didn’t notice any pain in his hip. As he slung his pack onto his shoulder, he peered through the gray, dim light at the hearth where Keira claimed to have seen the ancient stone angel as the ruin partially collapsed around her. When she finally climbed out the following morning, the angel was gone. Whatever the case, no one else had ever actually seen it.

Keira would only say she believed the angel was where it was meant to be.

Scoop pictured Sophie walking upstream with the black dog next to her, her red hair flying, her bright blue eyes, her slim hips—her smile.

Yep. Love at first sight.

“Damn,” he muttered, adjusting the pack on his shoulder, feeling only a dull ache where once there’d been fiery pain.

Being in this place was definitely getting to him.

He headed back outside. The mist had subsided, and the sun was angling through the wet trees. He noticed Sophie’s and the dog’s footprints in the mud. She was right about the ongoing investigations in Boston, but she was wrong about one thing. They didn’t have all the bad guys. The major players in the violence of the past three months were dead or under arrest, but there were still unanswered questions. In particular, Scoop wanted to know who had placed a crude explosive device under the gas grill on Abigail’s first-floor back porch.

Even if it was a cop.

Even, he thought, if it was a friend.

He was an internal affairs detective, and two months ago he’d launched a special investigation into the possible involvement of a member of the department with local thugs. His bomber?

Maybe, maybe not, but Scoop didn’t much like the idea that another cop had almost blown him up.

He started back along the stream, Sophie’s and the dog’s footprints disappearing as the ground became drier, grassier. When the stream curved sharply downhill, he emerged from the trees into the open, rock-strewn green pasture high above the bay. A stiff, sudden breeze blew a few lingering raindrops into his face as he continued across the sheep-clipped grass. He came to a barbed-wire fence and climbed over it, jumping down onto the soft, moist ground. On his first hike up here two weeks ago, tackling the fence had caused significant pain, and he’d caught a still-healing wound on a barb, drawing blood. Now he was moving well and seldom felt any pain, and his scars were tougher.

A fat, woolly sheep appeared on the steep hillside above him. Scoop grinned. “Yeah, pal, it’s me again.”

The sheep stayed put. Scoop looked out across Kenmare Bay to the jagged outline of the Macgillicuddy Reeks on the much larger Iveragh Peninsula. He’d driven its famous Ring of Kerry and done a few hikes over there, but he’d spent most of his time in Ireland on the Beara.

He continued across the steep pasture to another fence. He climbed over it onto a dirt track that led straight downhill to the village. As he passed a Beware Of Bull sign tacked to a fence post, a movement caught his eye. He paused, squinting through the gray mist. Across the pasture, he saw a large black dog lope through the middle of an ancient stone circle and disappear into a stand of trees.

It had to be the same dog he’d seen with Sophie Malone.

The mysterious redheaded archaeologist was nowhere in sight, but Scoop knew—he couldn’t explain how but he knew—he’d be seeing her again.

He smiled to himself. Maybe fairies had put a spell on him.




2


Kenmare, Southwest Ireland

S ophie didn’t let down her guard until she reached Kenmare.

She drove straight to the town pier, parked and pried her fingers off the steering wheel. As if the black dog hadn’t been enough to remind her she was out of her element on the Beara, she’d had to run into a suspicious, absolute stud of a Boston detective.

She exhaled, calming herself. Going out to Keira Sullivan’s ruin would have been enough of a heart-pounding experience all by itself, without Scoop Wisdom. He was as tough, straightforward and no-nonsense as she’d expected from the accounts of the violence in Boston over the summer, but he’d looked as if he’d been awaiting the arrival of ghosts or fairies.

He’d gotten her instead.

And what was she?

She hadn’t lied. She was an archaeologist. But she hadn’t told him everything—not by far—and obviously he knew it.

Sophie got out of her little car and paused to watch a rainbow arc across the sky high above the bay. The yellow, orange, red and lavender-blue streaks deepened and brightened, tugging at her emotions. She’d miss Irish rainbows when she was back in Boston.

She shook off her sudden melancholy. She was leaving tomorrow, and her parents and twin sister were arriving in Kenmare later that afternoon for a send-off dinner. In the meantime, getting weepy over Irish rainbows wasn’t on her ever-expanding to-do list.

She squinted out at the boats in the harbor. The Irish name for the village was Neidín, which translated as “little nest,” an apt description for its location at the base of the Cork and Kerry mountains.

“Aha,” she said aloud when she recognized Tim O’Donovan’s rugged commercial fishing boat tied to the pier. The old boat looked as if it would sink before it got halfway out of the harbor, but she knew from experience that it could handle rough seas.

She spotted Tim by a post and waved to him. He was a tall, burly, Irish fisherman with a bushy, sand-colored beard and emerald-green eyes. He glanced in her direction, and even at a distance, she heard him groan. She could hardly blame him, given his unwitting involvement in her own strange experience on the Irish coast a year ago—months before Keira Sullivan’s encounter with a serial killer.

Whispers in the dark. Blood-soaked branches. Celtic artifacts gone missing.

A woman—me, Sophie thought—left for dead in a cold, dank cave.

Suppressing a shudder, she made her way onto the concrete pier. Tim had managed to avoid her for months, but he wouldn’t today. She moved fast, determined to get to him before he could jump into his boat and be off.

When she reached him, she made a stab at being conversational. “Hey, Tim, it’s good to see you.” She pointed up at the fading rainbow. “Did you notice the rainbow just now?”

“If you want me to take you to chase a pot of gold, the answer is no.”

“I’m not chasing anything.”

“You’re always chasing something.” He yanked on a thick rope with his callused hands and didn’t look at her as he spoke in his heavy Kerry accent. “How are you, Sophie?”

“Doing great.” It was close enough to the truth. “I gave up my apartment in Cork and moved into our family house in Kenmare. My parents and sister will be here later today. I’ve been here two weeks. I thought I’d run into you by now.”

“Ah-huh.”

“Have you been seeing to it I didn’t?”

“Just doing my work.”

“I’ve been back and forth to Cork and Dublin a fair amount. My father’s family is originally from Kenmare. I’ve told you that, haven’t I?”

“Along the way, yes.” His tone suggested that playing on their common Irish roots would have no effect on him.

“Taryn’s only staying for a night or two, but my folks will be here for at least a month.”

“You’re going back to Boston,” Tim said.

“Ah, so you have been keeping tabs on me.”

He glanced up at her. “Always.”

She grinned at him. “You could at least try to look disappointed. We’re friends, right?”

He let the thick rope go slack. “You’re a dangerous friend to have, Sophie.”

With the resurgent sunshine, she unzipped her jacket. “Yeah, well, you weren’t the one who spent a frightening night in an Irish cave.”

“Oh, no—no, I was the one who didn’t talk you out of spending a night alone on an island no bigger than my boat. I was the one who left you there.”

“The island is a lot bigger than your boat. Otherwise,” she added, trying to sound lighthearted, “you’d have found me faster than you did.”

“I was lucky to find you at all, never mind before you took your last breath.” He gripped the rope tight again but made no move to untie it and get out of there. Still, he regarded her with open suspicion. “I’m not taking you back there. Don’t ask me to.”

“I’m not asking. That’s not why I’m here. I don’t want to go back.” She fought off another involuntary shudder. “Not yet, anyway. Maybe one day.”

Or maybe not ever, but she wasn’t telling Tim that. Whether she was being stubborn or just had her pride, she didn’t want him to think she was afraid to return to the tiny island off the Iveragh coast where she’d encountered…she wasn’t sure what. She knew she’d almost died there.

“Do you still have nightmares?” he asked, less combative.

“Not as many. Do you?”

He grunted. “I never did have nightmares, but as you say, I wasn’t the one—”

“That’s right, you weren’t, and I’m glad of that.”

“I hear you finished your dissertation.”

She nodded. “It’s been signed, sealed, delivered, defended and approved.”

“So it’s Dr. Malone now, is it?” He seemed more relaxed, although still wary. “What will you be doing in Boston?”

“Mostly looking for a full-time job. I have a few things lined up that’ll help pay the rent in the meantime.”

Tim’s skepticism was almost palpable. “What else?” he asked.

Sophie looked out at the water, dark blue under the clearing early-afternoon sky. Tim O’Donovan was no fool. “Did you know a Boston police detective’s staying out on the Beara?”

“Sophie.” Tim gave a resigned sigh. “You went to see Keira Sullivan’s ruin, didn’t you?”

“It makes sense. I’m an archaeologist. I’ve crawled through literally hundreds of ruins over the past ten years.”

“This isn’t just another ruin. It’s where that Yank serial killer—” He stopped abruptly. “Ah, no. Sophie. Sophie, Sophie. You’re not thinking he was responsible for what happened to you. Don’t tell me that.”

“Okay, I won’t.”

“Sophie.”

“It doesn’t matter what I think. He’s in jail. He can’t hurt me or anyone else.”

“I never should have told you that story,” Tim said quietly.

Sophie understood. Over Guinness and Irish music one evening a year ago, he had transfixed her with a tale he’d heard from a long-dead uncle who had served as a priest in a small village on the Iveragh Peninsula across Kenmare Bay. A coastal monastery, Viking raids, a secret hoard of pagan Celtic artifacts—how could she have resisted? For centuries—at least according to Tim—the story had been closely held by the priests in the village. It was a tangle of fancy, history, mythology and tradition—with, she’d suspected, a large dose of Tim’s Guinness-buzzed Irish blarney.

“I was procrastinating,” she said to him now. “That’s why I started going out there. I was mentally exhausted, and I just wanted to go on a lark.”

“A shopping spree in Dublin wouldn’t have done the trick?”

“I never expected to find anything, or end up in a dark cave with spooky stuff happening around me. It wasn’t a dream, Tim. It wasn’t a hallucination.”

“You were knocked on the head.”

She sighed. She didn’t remember how she’d been rendered unconscious—whether she’d accidentally hit her head scrambling to hide, or whether whoever had been on the island with her had smacked her with a rock. When she’d come to, it was pitch dark, cold and silent in the cave.

Tim unknotted the rope automatically, as he had since he’d been a boy. There were seven O’Donovans. He was the third eldest. “My mother prays for you every night,” he said. “She’s afraid it was black magic at work, or dark fairies—nothing of this world, that’s for certain.”

“Thank your mother for me.”

“I try not to mention your name to her. I should never have told her what happened. She’s the only one who knows—”

“It’s okay, Tim.”

They’d set off a year ago on a warm, clear late-September morning—Sophie remembered how calm the bay was, how excited she was. She’d had her iPhone and everything she needed for less than twenty-four hours on her own. Tim had returned to pick her up the following morning. When she wasn’t at their rendezvous point, he’d set out on foot to look for her. At first he’d assumed she’d got herself sidetracked and was annoyed with her for delaying him. Then he’d found her backpack in a crevice near the cave. She remembered the panic in his voice when she’d heard him calling her, and the relief she’d felt knowing he was there and she would survive her ordeal.

Of course, he’d wanted to kill her himself when she’d crawled out of the cave.

He’d called the guards. By then, there was nothing for them to find. They believed, in spite of Sophie’s academic credentials, that what she claimed to have seen and heard was the product of a concussion, dehydration, adrenaline, a touch of hypothermia and no small amount of imagination. They’d made it clear they thought both she and Tim were nuts. She for going out there, no matter how experienced and well prepared, he for letting her talk him into leaving her alone overnight on the thimble of an island.

“How long are you going to stay mad at me?” Sophie asked Tim now.

“Until I’m explaining myself before St. Peter, should he have me.”

She smiled. “He’ll have you because the devil won’t.”

He grinned back at her, a glint of humor in his green eyes. “True enough. Don’t think I don’t know why you’re here, Sophie Malone. You want to know if anyone’s asked me about you, and the answer is no.”

“You’re sure?”

“Oh, trust me, I’d remember.”

“Keira Sullivan is romantically involved with an FBI agent—Simon Cahill—and her uncle’s a Boston homicide detective.”

“Bob O’Reilly,” Tim said. “Yes, I know.”

Sophie wasn’t surprised. “They’ve both been out here this summer. There’s the Boston detective out on the Beara now. Scoop Wisdom.”

“None of them have looked me up. I fish, Sophie, and I play a little music. I stay away from trouble.”

“I don’t want to cause you any more problems.”

Tim stood up straight and looked out at the sparkling harbor. “I believe you, Sophie. I do. I don’t know how you hit your head, but I believe you found Celtic treasure. I believe you heard whispers, and I believe you saw hawthorn branches dipped in blood.” He turned to her, as serious as she’d ever seen him. “I wish I could tell you who or what it was in that cave with you.”

“I wish you could, too, Tim.”

“They say the woman who hid the treasure died on the island.”

If there ever were such a woman. No historical record existed of her that Sophie had been able to locate. Tim’s story told of a woman fleeing to the island with her pagan treasure to escape Viking raids in the eighth century. Then again, he’d said, maybe it had been English raids in the seventeenth century, or maybe to trade for food for the starving in the famine years.

Hard facts were a little tough to pin down.

Sophie had no intention of arguing Irish tales with an Irishman, especially one who was still irritated with her for putting him through hell. She shivered in a sudden gust of wind, but she knew it wasn’t the cold she was feeling. It was the lingering effects of that night a year ago.

Tim put a big hand on her shoulder. “Let go of what happened to you.” His voice was quiet now. “Get on with your life.”

“I am. Don’t worry about me, okay?”

“Worry about you?” He laughed, hugging her to him. “I want to drown you in the bay. Dragging me to that barren rock. No sign of you when I came after you. There I was with you gone and nothing but the wind, the waves, the crying birds. I get chilled to the bone thinking about it.”

Sophie couldn’t help but smile. Tim was dramatic. She glanced up at the brightening sky, no hint left of the rainbow. “I wonder if it was sheep’s blood on the branches I saw.”

Tim was thoughtful. “It was sheep’s blood at the Beara ruin.”

“Yes, but Jay Augustine left that blood for Keira Sullivan to find, assuming she lived through the night. The blood and branches I saw disappeared. If I’d managed to get a few drops on me, it would have corroborated my story. The guards could have tested it—”

“Don’t, Sophie. What’s done is done.”

She looked down at Tim’s battered boat, bobbing in the rising tide. “We could put all this out of our minds for a while and go sightseeing for seals and puffins.”

Tim obviously knew she wasn’t serious. “You’re playing with fire, Sophie,” he said heavily. “You know you are.”

“The guards must have a report in their files on what happened a year ago, and obviously they know about Keira’s experience on the Beara. They haven’t come to reinterview me. I just keep wondering if I missed something….” She didn’t finish and instead shook off her questions and smiled at Tim. “Stay in touch, okay?”

“Sophie—”

“All will be well.”

“Yes, it will be, please God,” he said, watching her as she headed back down the pier.

“Oh, and Tim,” she called cheerfully, turning back to him, “if you want to get anywhere with my sister, trim your beard and bone up on your Yeats.”

He jumped into his boat, as comfortable at sea as he was on land. “‘Tread softly because you tread on my dreams,’” he recited, crossing his hands over his heart. “‘A pity beyond all telling is hid in the heart of love.’”

Sophie laughed, enjoying the moment. She saw he was laughing now, too, and she felt better as she walked to her car.

After their look around the island produced nothing—not even a drop of blood on the gray rock much less a bit of Celtic gold—the guards had asked her and Tim not to discuss the incident in the cave with anyone else, in order to avoid a rush of treasure hunters. She’d tried to put her experience behind her, even to the point of wondering if she, too, should just blame a concussion, dehydration, fatigue, isolation, overwork and imagination—if not ghosts and fairies, which, she suspected, deep down Tim believed were responsible for her ordeal.

Then last week, she’d pulled her head up from her work and had lunch with Colm Dermott, back in Cork on behalf of the folklore conference, and he’d told her about the violence in Boston over the summer. She’d been vaguely aware that Jay Augustine, a fine art and antiques dealer who had turned out to be a serial killer, had latched onto Keira’s Irish story in June and finally was arrested, after trying to kill Keira and her mother. His violence and fascination with the devil and evil had inspired Norman Estabrook, a corrupt, ruthless billionaire, to act on his own violent impulses, which had led to the bomb blast in late August that had injured Scoop Wisdom and culminated in Estabrook’s death on the coast of Maine.

Sophie couldn’t shake the similarities of Keira’s experience on the Beara to her own on the island. She had to know. Had Jay Augustine followed her a year ago and left her for dead? Had he made off with the artifacts—whatever their origin or authenticity—she’d seen in the cave? Without proper examination, she couldn’t say for sure what they were, but she had a solid recollection of the pieces—a spun-bronze cauldron, gold brooches, torcs and bracelets, glass beads and bangles. She hadn’t imagined them, even if Irish and American authorities had already reviewed her account of her night in the cave and decided it wasn’t worth pursuing further.

She climbed into her car. She was tempted to head to the village and settle in her favorite pub for the rest of the day, but instead she got out her iPhone and dialed her brother Damian, an FBI agent in Washington, D.C.

“Hey, Damian,” she said. “I was just watching an Irish rainbow and thought I’d call. Taryn’s on her way, and Mom and Dad will be here in time for dinner and Irish music. We’ll miss you.”

“I’ll be in Ireland in two weeks.”

“I’ll be in Boston then. I leave tomorrow. It’s not as spur-of-the-moment as it sounds. I’m staying in Taryn’s apartment on Beacon Hill. Doesn’t that sound cozy?”

“What’s going on, Sophie?”

“They teach you that in FBI school—how to turn someone saying ‘cozy’ into something suspicious? Never mind. I was just out on the Beara Peninsula where that serial killer struck. Would you know if he was involved in smuggling and selling stolen artifacts?”

Silence.

Sophie knew she’d struck a nerve but pretended to be oblivious. “Damian? Are you there? Are we still connected?”

“We’re still connected. Any kind of stolen artifacts in mind?”

“Pagan Celtic.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s my area of expertise. Keira Sullivan’s stone angel was Early Medieval Celtic from the sounds of it. I’m just curious if this Augustine character was into Celtic works in general.”

“He was interested in killing people, Sophie.”

She looked out at the pier, tourists gathering for a boat tour of the coast. “I get your point, Damian, but you know what I mean.”

“You’re the archaeologist. I’m the FBI agent. You tell me. Do you know anything about Celtic artifacts showing up on the black market?”

This time, she was the one who didn’t answer.

“Sophie?”

“My battery’s dying. I’ll call you later.”

She disconnected and dropped her phone back in her jacket pocket. As if putting herself on the radar of one law enforcement officer today wasn’t good enough, she’d had to call her FBI agent brother. She started her car and let herself off the hook. Calling Damian made sense. He was assigned to FBI headquarters in Washington. He could find out just about anything.

She wondered if she’d have a better chance if she told him about her experience last year.

“Probably not,” she whispered as she drove back down the quiet street. The Irish authorities already knew about the incident. If she told Damian, he’d look into it, and she didn’t want to send him and the FBI off on some wild-goose chase if she were totally off target.

More to the point, he’d tell their parents, and why get them all worked up over what could be nothing?

She had a few hours before they arrived. Her sister would get there sooner. Sophie decided to forget missing Celtic artifacts and jailed serial killers for the moment and head to the house and cook, clean and do what she could to make her life look as if her family didn’t need to worry about her.




3


Beara Peninsula, Southwest Ireland

A wild hurling match was on the small television in the sole village pub. Scoop sat on a stool at the five-foot polished wood bar. He’d had soup and brown bread, then settled in with a Guinness during an afternoon shower. The peat fire was lit. The bartender’s brown-and-white springer spaniel was asleep on the hearth.

Life could be worse.

“I miss my garden,” he said to Eddie O’Shea, the wiry, energetic barman. In late June, Eddie had helped identify Jay Augustine as the man responsible for the sheep’s blood up at Keira’s ruin.

Eddie busied himself at the sink behind the bar. “Time to go home, is it?”

“Past time, probably. I might have some butternut squash I can save. The firefighters and paramedics trampled the hell out of my tomatoes and cauliflower. Of course,” Scoop added with a grin, “they also saved my sorry life.”

“And you saved Bob’s daughter,” Eddie said. He’d met Bob O’Reilly on Bob’s trip to Ireland earlier in the summer. Bob’d had to see Keira’s ruin, too. “A few tomatoes are a small price, don’t you think?”

“No price at all.” Scoop stared into his Guinness, but he was back in Boston on that hot summer afternoon, minutes before the bomb went off. Fiona O’Reilly, Bob’s nineteen-year-old daughter, had dropped by to see her father. She was a harp player, as smart and as pretty as her cousin Keira and as stubborn as her father. “This wasn’t Fiona’s fight. She was an innocent bystander.”

“Was it your fight?”

“Doesn’t matter. It’s my fight now.” He thought of the special investigation back in Boston. Had his bomber been staring him in the face? Had he missed something? “I want to know who planted that bomb, Eddie. It could have been anyone. The meter-reader, the plumber, the mailman, a cab driver. Pigeons. Who knows?”

Eddie reached for Scoop’s empty glass. “You go after police officers suspected of wrongdoing. Do you suspect it’s a cop you’re after?”

Scoop didn’t respond, and Eddie didn’t push him for an answer. Few of the handful of people in the pub seemed to be paying attention to the game on the television. Most were locals, but Scoop picked out a young couple who undoubtedly had come in on the bicycles he’d seen outside the pub. He could hear the pair chatting in German. They looked happy and carefree, but probably they weren’t. There’d be issues back home—jobs, relatives, health issues. Something.

No one’s life was simple.

Definitely time to go home. Maybe being back in Boston would jog his memory about the minutes, hours and even days before the bomb blast. After three weeks recuperating on the other side of the Atlantic, he hadn’t produced a face, a name, an incident—a shred of a memory that would take him from the shadows of uncertainty to the identity of the person who had assembled the bomb and delivered it to the home of three detectives.

He’d have to face finding temporary housing when he returned to Boston. The triple-decker was badly burned and under repair. Bob O’Reilly was from Southie and knew carpenters, electricians and plumbers and was overseeing the work, but it’d be a while before any of them could move back in.

Scoop eased off the stool, left enough euros to cover the tab and headed back outside. The village was quiet, the sun shining again, glistening on the rain-soaked sidewalk. Brightly painted houses lined both sides of the street. He half expected Sophie Malone to walk up from the harbor.

It was eerie, that certainty that he hadn’t seen the last of her.

He shook off his strange mood and turned onto a narrow lane that ran parallel to the bay, at the foot of the steep hills that formed the spine of the peninsula. A half-dozen brown cows meandered down the middle of the lane toward him. City cop though he was, Scoop had grown up in the country and didn’t mind cows. He stepped close to an ancient stone wall and let them pass. As he continued down the lane, he tried to pay attention to the details around him and not get lost in his own thoughts. He noticed a half-dozen sheep in a pen and heard more sheep baaing up in the hills.

He came to the traditional stone cottage Keira had rented back in June and let him use the past two weeks. She’d come to Ireland to paint, walk, research her old story and delve into her Irish roots, but her summer hadn’t worked out the way she’d meant it to. The cottage was just the sort of place he’d have expected her to stay. Getting blown against his compost bin and almost bleeding to death had helped him realize he could have fallen in love with her, but being here in Ireland had convinced him that he hadn’t—that it wasn’t meant to be.

Keira was meant for Simon Cahill, the bull of an FBI agent who’d come here to search for her when she’d gone missing in the Irish hills.

It’d been a hell of a summer, Scoop thought.

A massive rosebush dominated the otherwise prosaic front yard, its pink blossoms perking up in the sunshine. He noticed the kitchen door was partially open and immediately tensed, although more out of force of habit than any real alarm. He wasn’t expecting company, and his rental car was the only vehicle in the gravel driveway. Most likely he simply hadn’t shut the door properly when he’d left for the ruin that morning.

Wrong on all accounts, he observed as a man with medium brown hair eyed him from the small pine table where Keira had left an array of art supplies. He had several days’ growth of beard and looked exhausted, if also intense and alert. He wore canvas pants and a lightweight leather jacket. “I never could draw worth a bloody damn.” He spoke with a British accent. He leaned back in his chair and held up a sheet of paper with a crude pencil drawing. “What do you think?”

“Is it a sheep?”

“There you go. No. It’s an Irish wolfhound.”

“I was just kidding. I knew it was a dog.” Scoop pulled off his jacket and set his backpack on the floor. “Myles Fletcher, right?”

“Right you are,” Fletcher said matter-of-factly, setting his sketch back on the table. “Did you ever want to be an artist when you were a boy, Detective Wisdom?”

“Nope. Always wanted to be a cop. I bet you always wanted to be a spy.”

The Brit grinned. “Simon Cahill warned me you were no-nonsense.”

“You’re SAS and British SIS. Secret Intelligence Service—MI6. James Bond’s outfit.”

“All right, then.” Fletcher yawned, his gray eyes red-rimmed. Wherever he’d come from, he hadn’t had much sleep. “You’ll want to know why I’m here. I’ll get straight to the point. I have information that a Boston police officer was involved in making and planting the explosive device that gave you those scars.”

Scoop remained on his feet, silent, still.

“This police officer worked with the men who engineered the kidnapping of Abigail Browning. Smart businessman that he was, Norman Estabrook delegated the job. He wanted Abigail. He didn’t care how he got her.”

Scoop leaned against a counter. During Abigail’s three-day ordeal, he had been in the hospital, out of commission. Fletcher’s role in helping her wasn’t common knowledge even in the police department, but Scoop had managed to piece together various tidbits and drag more out of his friends and colleagues in law enforcement. The Brit had latched onto a connection between drug traffickers and a terrorist cell and following their trail had taken him to American billionaire Norman Estabrook. For at least two years, no one, including Fletcher’s own people back in London, knew Fletcher was even alive.

In the meantime, the FBI was on to Estabrook’s association with the drug traffickers and had him under surveillance in the form of Simon Cahill. They arrested the hedge-fund billionaire in June. By late August, he was free again. He disappeared, and Myles Fletcher, still deep undercover, still on the trail of his terrorists, found himself in the middle of the angry, entitled billionaire’s elaborate scheme to exact revenge on the FBI for his downfall. Estabrook’s scheme included setting off a bomb as a diversion to kidnap Abigail, FBI Director John March’s daughter, a Boston homicide detective and Scoop’s friend.

Caught between a rock and a hard place, Fletcher had done what he could to help Abigail. Once she was safe, he took off again.

Now he was sitting in an Irish cottage kitchen drawing pictures of dogs.

What a day, Scoop thought. First Sophie Malone, now Myles Fletcher.

A coincidence? Not a chance. “You wouldn’t be here if the main thrust of your mission wasn’t completed,” Scoop said.

Fletcher shrugged. “I suspect your bad cop is someone you know,” he said. “Someone you wouldn’t think twice to have over for a pint or two.”

“Any names?”

“No. Sorry.” Fletcher stretched out his legs, looking, if possible, even more tired. “I’ve done no research on my own. My focus has been on other matters. This is your fight. You were injured in the blast, and you work in internal affairs. Even if you don’t know this particular officer yourself, you’ll have instincts about those who go bad.”

“Where did you get this information?”

“Here and there,” Fletcher said vaguely as he rose, visibly stiff. “It’s my guess that these thugs, including your bad cop, were involved in other illegal activities in Boston, and that’s how they hooked up with Norman Estabrook.”

Scoop stood up from the counter but said nothing. The Brit was the one doing the talking.

Fletcher picked up a rust-colored pencil from the table. “But you were on to a connection between these thugs and a member of the department before Estabrook snatched Abigail, weren’t you, Detective?”

Scoop thought a moment before he responded. “I had a few whispers. Nothing more.”

“I imagine that’s the truth, as far as it goes. Frustrating, when you know some but not enough…” Fletcher let it go at that. “I expect that you’re very good at your job.”

“So are you. You’re more adept than most at lies and deception.”

“That’s why I’m alive, here, trying my hand at a sketch. Let’s spare each other, then, shall we?” He ran his thumb over the sharp tip of the pencil. “I’m impressed with what Keira can do with colored pencils. I’d always thought they were for children, not working artists.” He set the pencil back on the table and flipped through a stack of sketches Keira had started of various bucolic Irish scenes, pausing at one of a shovel laid across an old, muddy wheelbarrow in a garden. “I wouldn’t mind living inside one of these pictures. A green pasture, a stream, prancing lambs. A beautiful fairy princess. What about you, Detective?”

“I grew up on a farm. I liked it, but I’m not nostalgic about that life. What else can you tell me?”

“There’s a woman. An American archaeologist. She’s been doing scholarly work in Ireland and Great Britain for the past several years.”

“Sophie Malone,” Scoop said.

Fletcher glanced at him, then continued, “You ran into her when she was here in the village earlier today, didn’t you?”

“Yep. I did. Red hair, blue jacket. Had a big black dog with her and talked about the wee folk.” Scoop picked up the pencil Fletcher had used and realized it was nearly the same shade as Sophie’s hair. A deliberate choice on the Brit’s part? “The dog wasn’t hers. Want to tell me what’s going on, Fletcher?”

“I wish I knew. I strongly suspect the men our dead billionaire hired were also involved with Jay Augustine. I don’t know in what capacity.”

Nothing legal, Scoop thought, but he said, “Augustine’s a serial killer. Serial killers tend to be solitary.”

“I’m not talking about his violence. Augustine was also a respected dealer in fine art and antiques.”

“What’s that got to do with Sophie Malone?”

Fletcher grinned suddenly. “I’ve no idea. As I said, I haven’t done any research of my own. I suppose Augustine could have consulted her as an expert in his role as a legitimate dealer.”

“Are you linking her to this bad cop?”

“I’m saying her name came up at the same time as the likelihood that a police officer constructed and planted the bomb that exploded at your house last month.” Fletcher walked over to the front window, determined and focused but also obviously past being dead tired. “I wish I could be more helpful.”

“Funny, you and Sophie Malone turning up here within a few hours of each other.”

“Isn’t it, though?” He nodded out the window. “Here we go. Just what we need.”

For all Scoop knew, the big black dog was back with a troop of fairies.

Instead, FBI Special Agent Simon Cahill and Will Davenport—a British lord and another James Bond type—entered through the kitchen door. Casual, irreverent, black-haired Simon and wealthy, regal, fair-haired Will, both around Scoop’s age, in their mid-thirties, were as different in appearance as they were in temperament and background, but they were close friends.

Right behind them was Josie Goodwin. She had on a sleek belted raincoat, her chin-length brown hair pulled back and her mouth set firmly as she shut the door behind her. She pretended to be Will’s able assistant but was undoubtedly SIS herself. Scoop had met Josie and Will at Abigail’s wedding at Davenport’s country house in the Scottish Highlands. Josie, who was in her late thirties, had muttered over hors d’oeuvres at the reception that if she ever saw Myles Fletcher again, she would smother him with a pillow.

As far as Scoop knew, this was their first meeting since Fletcher had slipped undercover two years ago, leaving everyone he knew—including Josie Goodwin and Will Davenport—to think he was dead.

She entered the kitchen without a word and leaned against a counter. Strongly built and obviously well trained, she looked as if she’d have no problem dispatching even a hard-assed spy like Myles Fletcher.

Fletcher ignored her and directed his attention at the two men. “Simon. Will. It’s good to see you.” Finally he turned to Josie and winked at her. “Hello, love.”

“Bastard,” she said, then beamed a friendly smile at Scoop. “You’re looking well, Detective. Much better than at Abigail’s wedding. Some of your scars seem to be fading already.”

“I feel fine,” Scoop said. “I’m ready to get back to work.”

Simon stood by the kitchen door, near Josie’s position at the counter. “Moneypenny here wouldn’t listen to good advice and stay in London. She had to follow us to Ireland.”

She gave Simon a good-natured roll of her eyes.

Across the tiny cottage, Fletcher was at the front window again. “More company.”

Scoop noticed Simon’s expectant, troubled expression, but Will Davenport was more difficult to read. The kitchen door opened on a gust of wind, and flaxen-haired Keira Sullivan entered the cottage, followed in another half second by black-haired Lizzie Rush. They were both thirty, both coming to terms with the dramatic changes in their lives over the past summer. Lizzie was Will Davenport’s new love, and however she and Keira had gotten to the little Irish village, it hadn’t, obviously, been with either him or Simon. Scoop was trained in reading body language, but it didn’t take an expert to detect the tension between the two pairs of lovers.

With a curt nod at Davenport, Keira swept past Simon and greeted Scoop with a kiss on the cheek. “This place agrees with you,” she said, then, without waiting for an answer, turned to Josie. “Lizzie and I were in Dublin. It took a bit of doing on our part to figure out what was going on. I’m glad you could get here.”

“Wouldn’t have missed it for the world,” Josie said dryly.

Fletcher returned to the table of art supplies. He looked less tired as he smiled at Keira. “Your charming cottage suddenly seems very small, indeed, doesn’t it?”

“I have a feeling not for long,” she said, no curtness to her now. Her breathing was shallow, her cornflower-blue eyes filled with fear and anticipation.

Something was up, Scoop thought, observing his half-dozen visitors.

Fletcher picked up the sketch he’d done and handed it to Keira, her hands trembling visibly as she took it. “Here you go,” he said. “It’s an Irish wolfhound. I think of him as a shape-shifter in the midst of going from man to dog. That explains the quirks in my rendition, don’t you think?”

Josie Goodwin snorted from the kitchen. “So does being a bad artist.”

“It’s wonderful,” Keira said, gracious as always.

Lizzie Rush walked over to the unlit stone fireplace and stood with her back to it. She was the director of concierge services for her family’s fifteen boutique hotels, including in Dublin and Boston. She was small and black-haired, with light green eyes and an alertness about her that supported the rumors Scoop had heard that her father wasn’t just a hotelier but also a spy who had taught his only child his tradecraft.

She was the one who’d called Bob O’Reilly with the split-second warning that a bomb was about to go off on Abigail’s back porch.

Davenport, clad in an open trench coat, kept his focus on Fletcher, who had quietly moved away to the front door. Without raising his voice, Will said, “Simon and I are going with you, Myles.”

Fletcher pulled open the door and left without responding. The door shut with a thud behind him. Unless the departing Brit could shape-shift himself into a bird, Scoop figured Fletcher had a vehicle stashed nearby.

Davenport—well educated, well trained and very experienced—looked over at Lizzie, but he didn’t smile or go to her, didn’t speak, just tapped one finger to his lips and blew her a kiss, then turned and headed out after Fletcher.

“Damn Brits,” Simon muttered, then shrugged at Josie. “Sorry, Moneypenny.”

“I had much the same thought.” She stood up from the counter and inhaled sharply as she nodded toward the front door. “You’re going after them, aren’t you?”

“Yes.” There was no irreverence in Simon’s manner now. He was deadly serious. He walked over to Keira by the table of art supplies and half-finished sketches and touched her long, pale hair. “Keira…”

“You have a job to do. Go do it. Stay safe. Keep your friends safe.” She placed Fletcher’s sketch back on the table and caught Simon’s big hand in hers, no sign she was trembling now. “Come back to me soon.”

Simon kissed her but said nothing more as he went after the two British spies.

Once the door shut behind him, Josie let her arms fall to her sides. “All right, then. They’re off, and now it’s just us girls again.”

Scoop raised his eyebrows.

Her strain was evident even as she smiled at him. “Sorry, Detective.”

“Honestly, Scoop,” Keira said, attempting a laugh, “you look even more ferocious these days. Who’d ever know you adopted two stray cats?”

“The cats know,” he said.

Tears shone in her eyes. “They must miss you.”

“They’re in good hands. Your cousins are taking care of them.” Not Fiona but her two younger sisters, who lived with their mother—Bob O’Reilly’s first wife. Scoop tried to keep his tone light. “Your uncle’s having fits. Now Maddie and Jayne want him to adopt cats.”

“I’m just glad yours survived the fire,” Keira said quietly. “When are you going back to Boston?”

“Tomorrow,” he said, deciding on the spot. First the mysterious archaeologist, now British spies and the FBI. Too much was going on for him to justify even one more day in Ireland. Answers weren’t here, in Keira’s idyllic cottage.

Lizzie sank onto the sofa where, in his first days at the cottage, Scoop had lain on his stomach for hours at a stretch, easing himself off medication and trying to remember anything that could help with the investigations back in Boston. She kicked out her legs and propped her feet up on a small coffee table. Although she was a hotel heiress accustomed to five-star surroundings, she didn’t look out of place in the simple cottage. From what Scoop had seen of them, Lizzie Rush and Lord Davenport—who was accustomed to castles—were at home wherever they happened to find themselves.

“I have a room all set for you at our hotel in Boston anytime you want it,” she told Scoop.

“That’s very kind of you, Lizzie, but another detective’s offered me his sleeper sofa.”

“Who?” Keira asked, skeptical.

“Tom Yarborough.”

She sputtered into incredulous laughter. “You two would kill each other.”

Probably true. Yarborough was a homicide detective—Abigail’s partner—and not an easy person on a good day. He hadn’t had a good day in months.

“My family would love to have you at the Whitcomb,” Lizzie said. “Consider it done, Scoop. I’ll text Jeremiah and let him know.”

Jeremiah Rush was the third eldest of Lizzie’s four male Rush cousins. With her father frequently gone and her mother dead since she was an infant, she had practically grown up with them north of Boston.

“What about you three?” Scoop asked, taking in all three women with one look.

“We’ll keep ourselves busy,” Josie said. She opened up the refrigerator, giving an exaggerated shudder of disgust as she shut it again. “Rutabagas and beer do not a meal make.”

“I’ve been eating mostly at the pub,” Scoop said.

“Yes, well, one would hope.”

He went over to the front window and looked out into the fading daylight. The weeks of healing—of being on medical leave, away from his job—finally were getting to him. He turned back to the women. “When did you all get here?”

“Just now,” Keira said. “Lizzie and I came on our own.”

“Chasing Will and Simon?”

Her cheeks turned a deep shade of pink, but Lizzie was the one who spoke. “Not chasing. Following. They tried to divert us with a few days of shopping in Dublin.”

“Guess they had to give it a shot,” Scoop said with a smile.

“I flew from London,” Josie said. “I hired my own car at the airport.”

“Were you following Will and Simon—or Myles?”

She walked briskly to the table Fletcher had vacated and gazed down at his drawing. “I don’t know what you mean. I’m the trusted assistant of Will Davenport, the second son of a beloved marquess. Whatever else you’re thinking is pure fancy.”

Scoop didn’t argue. What Josie Goodwin knew and how she knew it was a matter he preferred to leave to speculation. He shifted to Keira, staring blankly at a sketch she’d started of the tranquil village harbor.

“Do you know an archaeologist named Sophie Malone?” he asked abruptly.

“I’ve heard of her, yes,” Keira said, perking up. “Absolutely. She’s a very well respected archaeologist. She’s volunteered to chair a panel on the Irish Iron Age at the folklore conference in April. The conference is shaping up to be quite an event. It’s good to have something fun to focus on after this summer.” She abandoned her sketch. “Was Dr. Malone here?”

Scoop nodded. “We ran into each other up at the ruin where you found your stone angel. She mentioned she’d talked to Professor Dermott. She didn’t stay long. I could have scared her off.”

“Not you, Scoop,” Keira said, a welcome spark of humor in her eyes.

Lizzie lowered her feet to the floor and sat up straight, frowning at Keira and Scoop. “Did you say Sophie Malone?”

“What,” Scoop said, “am I the last person to know who she is?”

“She worked at the pub at our Boston hotel when she was in college,” Lizzie said, rising. “We’re about the same age. I was in and out of town a lot at the time, but I remember her. We were both interested in all things Irish.”

“Have you seen her since?”

“Not that I recall. She and her twin sister and their older brother were born here in Ireland. Their parents worked in Cork. I took special note, I suppose, because of my mother, who was Irish.” Her tone softened. Shauna Morrigan Rush had died in Dublin under mysterious circumstances when Lizzie was a baby. “Strange, isn’t it? The ripple effects of life.”

Josie, who hadn’t stirred during the exchange, picked up the electric kettle on the counter and lifted the lid as she shoved it under the faucet. “Sophie Malone’s not another of John March’s informal spies, is she?”

“Not that I know of,” Lizzie said. For the better part of a year, she herself had anonymously provided the FBI director with information on Norman Estabrook, who had been a frequent guest at various Rush hotels.

Josie filled the kettle, then plugged it in and switched it on, her movements brisk, efficient. “You do have tea, don’t you, Detective?”

“On the shelf above you.”

She reached up and got down a tin of loose-leaf tea and set it on the counter, her casualness studied, as if she didn’t dare go where her mind wanted to take her. “Did Myles happen to run into this Sophie Malone?” she asked without looking at Scoop.

“I don’t think so, no.”

She turned to him, her gaze direct and unflinching. “But he mentioned her, didn’t he?”

“He had his reasons for coming here.”

Josie opened the tin of tea. Scoop figured that even someone who wasn’t trained in detecting lies and deception—which surely Josie Goodwin was—would guess he hadn’t told all he knew. She didn’t push him further. Keira and Lizzie eyed him but said nothing.

He retreated to the small bedroom and got his suitcase out of the closet. He had the bones of a plan. He’d head to the airport in Shannon and book the first flight he could get to Boston tomorrow.

He was packed in less than ten minutes. When he returned to the main room, Keira had torn off a fresh sheet of sketch paper and placed it in front of her on the pine table. She was staring at it as if she were trying to envision a pretty, happy scene—as if she’d had enough of violence, mystery and adventure and just wanted to hole up with her paints and colored pencils.

Lizzie Rush was back on the sofa, frowning, the spy in the making.

Josie lifted the lid on an old teapot and peered inside. “The tea’s ready, but I gather you’re not staying.”

“No,” Scoop said.

Her deep blue eyes narrowed slightly as she answered. “Safe travels, then.”

“Jeremiah will be expecting you at the Whitcomb,” Lizzie said.

Keira looked up from her blank page. “Tell my uncle not to worry about me.”

Scoop smiled at her. “That’s like telling the rain to stop falling in Ireland. It’s just not going to happen.”

As he headed out the side door, the three women didn’t interrogate him or try to stop him. He didn’t know whether they could guess what he was doing and approved, or if they just were resigned that he’d made up his mind and there’d be no stopping him.

Unlike Simon Cahill and Will Davenport, he had no one to kiss goodbye.

And no one waiting for his return to Boston.

Except his cats, unless they’d decided they preferred the company of Keira’s young cousins.




4


Kenmare, Southwest Ireland

S ophie walked next to her twin sister, Taryn, enjoying the sounds of traditional Irish music drifting from Kenmare pubs on what had turned into a perfect September evening. One last downpour seemed to have done the trick. Fresh from London, Taryn wore slim jeans with flat-heeled black boots and a black sweater that came down to her knees. Although they were fraternal, not identical twins, Taryn also had red hair, but hers was two tones darker and wavier—and easier to manage, Sophie had decided when they were six, because Taryn always seemed to manage it. A few pins and clips, and she looked gorgeous. She had the lead in a new romantic comedy, but her first break had come performing Shakespeare in Boston. She was as dedicated to her acting career as Sophie had ever been to earning her doctorate, or Damian to becoming a federal agent.

With her afternoon of cleaning, cooking and thinking, Sophie had been in her hiking clothes, still encrusted with mud from her trek on the Beara Peninsula, when Taryn arrived. Taryn, however, had seemed unsurprised and hadn’t asked what her sister had been up to. Sophie had quickly changed into jeans, a sweater and walking shoes. They’d set out on foot from their house to the lively village of bars, restaurants and shops.

Sophie paused at a hole-in-the-wall pub on a narrow side street. “Tim O’Donovan and his friends are playing here tonight,” she said.

Taryn’s expression didn’t change. “How nice.”

“Do you want to go in, or shall we choose another pub?”

“This one’s fine.”

Her sister’s nonchalance was totally feigned, Sophie concluded as they entered the warm, noisy pub. A waiter led them to a table against the old brick wall. She and Taryn had done a Kenmare weekend in the spring, indulging themselves at an incredible bayside hotel spa and listening to traditional Irish music every night. Tim had swept them off for a boat ride—one that didn’t go near the tiny island of Sophie’s misadventure. He’d fallen hard for Taryn, and she for him, except she’d never admit as much, even to Sophie. An Irish fisherman didn’t fit into Taryn’s already complicated life.

Just a touch of spring fever, she’d said, flushed as she’d headed to London.

Tim had grumbled that he should have known better than to swoon over a woman who was an actress, an American and Sophie’s twin. Sophie had met him two years ago when she’d spent part of the winter in Kenmare, working on her dissertation. Right from the start, she and Tim had been more like brother and sister. Not the case, she thought, with him and her twin sister.

Taryn peeled off her teal wool scarf; she’d wound it around her neck, making it look easy, sophisticated and sexy all at the same time. She had an unobstructed view of the small stage where Tim and his friends, who looked as if they’d just come from catching dinner, were setting up, but she carefully pretended not to notice them as she and Sophie each ordered a glass of Guinness.

“I spoke to Damian just before I arrived in Kenmare,” Taryn said.

“I’m sure he wishes he could be here.”

“You’re not a credible liar, Sophie. I’m only slightly better because I’m an actor, but lying doesn’t come easily to either of us. Damian said he talked to you earlier today. He sounded put out with you. Are you mixed up in some top-secret FBI investigation?” Even as Sophie thought she was suppressing any visible reaction, her sister gasped. “Sophie! I was just kidding, but you are mixed up in something.”

“No, I’m not. I asked Damian about what’s gone on in Boston this summer. That’s all. It’s natural I’d be curious.”

Sophie had no intention of getting into her experience in the island cave a year ago. Taryn didn’t know—unless Damian had decided to call the guards himself and had found out about it and told Taryn. Which Sophie doubted. She didn’t like keeping secrets from her family, but they’d only worry if they knew, never mind that she’d promised the guards she wouldn’t tell anyone.

“What did Damian tell you about Boston?”

“Nothing much.”

“Sophie—”

Fortunately, their parents entered the pub and joined them at their table. They’d come straight from Dublin. James and Antonia Malone, Sophie thought with affection, were relishing their early retirement, diving into their love of storytelling, music, drama, art and exploring. Their twin daughters’ red hair came from their mother, although the shade was unreliable since she’d started using a near-orange dye now to cover any gray. She was as tall as Taryn but had Sophie’s sense of adventure. A lifelong New Englander, she’d met their father, the son of Irish immigrants, hiking on the Dingle Peninsula in college.

They’d been home in western Massachusetts during her brush with death last year. There was nothing they could do if she’d told them but worry. She’d returned to her work on her dissertation and tried to put the incident behind her.

Tim looked straight at Taryn and gave her a sexy smile as he put his fiddle to his chin. Then he and his friends launched into a rousing, pulse-pounding rendition of “Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye.” Their music was lively and authentic, the perfect counter to a stress-filled day.

Taryn sipped her Guinness, her attention riveted on the musicians. “They’re really good, aren’t they, Sophie?”

“Fantastic.”

The compliment was sincere, but she hoped Tim wouldn’t decide to join them on his break given their earlier talk on the pier. Of course he did, pulling over a low stool and plopping down. Sophie knew that was the risk she’d taken in choosing this particular pub. She trusted him not to tell her family about the island, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t blab about her excursion to the Beara Peninsula that morning.

“The Malones return to our wee village,” he said, grinning.

He obviously wasn’t going to bring up anything awkward. Sophie tried not to look too relieved. Taryn smiled, but she was unusually quiet, letting her sister and parents carry on the conversation with Tim. Their parents had met him on a visit to Kenmare months before he’d fallen hard for Taryn—before he’d let Sophie talk him into dropping her off on the island.

They talked about music and hiking and weather, and he finally got up for his next set. His gaze settled briefly on Sophie, but it was enough. She got the message. He hated withholding information from her family, and he knew she was up to something.

“I head to Boston tomorrow,” she said, pretending she hadn’t already told him. “I’m staying at Taryn’s apartment there.”

He shifted to Taryn. “What about you? When do you go back to Boston?”

“For good? Not for a while. My play in London runs through October. After that, who knows? I’m waiting for word about a trip to New York. It could come anytime. I’ll just be there for a few days, though.”

“Do you have an audition?” he asked.

She lowered her eyes. “Something like that.”

“I’ve a distant cousin in Boston.” Tim gave Sophie a pointed look. “A firefighter.”

His tone suggested he’d been doing some research of his own on the goings-on in Boston over the summer and the injured police detective staying on the Beara. Given their earlier conversation, Sophie wasn’t surprised or irritated. If she could do it all over again, she’d never have gone out to the island a year ago. She wasn’t even sure she’d have had lunch with Colm Dermott last week and listened to him relate what he knew about Keira Sullivan’s unsettling night alone in the Irish wilds.

When Tim returned to the stage, James Malone eyed his two daughters with open skepticism. “When I was a working stiff in corporate America,” he said, “I learned about subtext. I would say there was an encyclopedia of subtext in that exchange. Either of you want to tell me what just went on?”

Taryn, good actress though she was, floundered, but Sophie grinned at her father and held up her glass of Guinness. “You know these Irish men, Dad.”

“That’s my point,” he muttered.

His wife elbowed him before he could say more and raised her own glass. “And to us poor women who love them.”

Sophie laughed, relishing her time with her family. Her parents were having a ball with their retirement. Let it be that way for a long time, she thought, just as, out of the corner of her eye, she noticed a lone man enter the pub. As a waiter led him to a small table, she was surprised to recognize Percy Carlisle, a wealthy Bostonian she hadn’t seen in a year.

Taryn leaned close to Sophie. “What’s he doing here?”

“I have no idea,” Sophie said half under her breath. She left her drink on the table and quickly stood up, heading to his table. She dropped onto the chair across from him without waiting to be invited. “Hey, Percy. I didn’t know you were in Ireland.”

“I only arrived last night. Helen and I were in London.”

“Is she here with you?”

He shook his head. “She’s gone back to Boston.”

A waiter appeared, and Percy ordered coffee, nothing else. He was in his early forties, dressed in a heavy wool cardigan and wide-wale corduroys that bagged on his lanky frame. He had inherited a family fortune and spent most of his time pursuing his interests in travel, art, music, history and genealogy. Sophie had run into him on occasion when she was a student in Boston and had done research at the Carlisle Museum. They’d gotten along without becoming real friends or, certainly, romantically involved. She hadn’t seen him since she’d moved to Ireland to continue her studies—except briefly late last summer when he’d looked her up while he was visiting friends in Killarney.

“I was in the area and remembered your family has a house here,” Percy said now. “I was on my way there when I saw you and your sister head in here. I was in the car—it took some time to park. I just came from Killarney National Park. For some reason, I’d never been. It’s stunning, isn’t it?”

“Sure is.” Situated among clear lakes and forested hills, the park was as beautiful and inviting a setting as she could imagine. “I hiked the old Killarney road to Kenmare the other day.”

“I wish Helen had been with me. She’d have loved it, but she has business in New York to clear up. She’s giving up her job at the auction house there. It’s a big change, but she’s excited about it. We’re moving into my family’s house in Boston, did you know?”

“I hadn’t heard, no.”

“Helen’s handling the transition. I’ve maintained the house since my father died, but I never thought I’d live there again.” Percy’s dark eyes lit up. “Helen is a ball of energy. I’m lucky to have her in my life.”

“I look forward to meeting her.”

Sophie smiled at his obvious happiness. He and Helen had been married only two months—the first marriage for both. His father—Percy Carlisle Sr.—had been an amateur archaeologist famous for taking off in search of lost treasure. Sophie remembered when he’d invited her into his office in the museum shortly before his death. He’d stood with her at a wall of photographs of his exploits and gone over each one, describing memories, enjoying himself. He’d acknowledged to Sophie that his only son wasn’t nearly as adventurous. “Perhaps it’s just as well,” the old man had said.

She pulled herself out of her thoughts. Her Guinness was making her head spin. Trekking out to the ruin on the Beara and meeting Scoop Wisdom—scarred, suspicious—had launched her back to her own trauma a year ago with an intensity that had left her off balance, on edge.

The waiter delivered Percy’s coffee. He took a small sip, keeping the mug in one hand as he nodded to her parents and sister. “I saw Taryn when she played Ophelia in Boston a few years ago. She’s quite amazing.”

“That she is. She loves her work.”

“Always a plus.” He set his coffee on the scarred table. “Do you love your work, Sophie?”

“I do, yes.”

“I’ve heard you’re involved in the upcoming Boston-Cork conference on Irish folklore. Will that look good on your CV?”

“Sure, and it’ll be interesting as well as fun.”

“But it’s unpaid,” he said. “How are you managing these days?”

“Same as I did throughout graduate school.”

“Tutoring, fellowships, teaching a class here and there?”

“Every job’s a real job.”

“I admire your attitude.” He picked up his mug of coffee. “If there’s ever anything I can do for you, Sophie, you’ve only to ask.”

“Thanks. I appreciate it,” she said. “I’m heading back to Boston tomorrow. I have a few leads on full-time work.”

“Best of luck to you.” Percy watched the musicians chat among themselves for a few moments. “I considered driving down to the village where Keira Sullivan says she found that stone angel.”

His comment caught Sophie by surprise. “Do you know Keira?”

“Only by reputation. Everyone’s still very shaken that Jay Augustine proved to be a killer.” He seemed to wait for Sophie’s reaction. She sat forward, but before she could say anything, he continued, “I wasn’t friends with the Augustines or even close to it. I’d see them socially from time to time at various functions in New York and Boston. Charlotte Augustine’s moved to Hawaii, did you know?”

“No,” Sophie said.

“She’s seeking a divorce. I can’t even imagine what it must have been like for her to discover she was married to a murderer.” Percy stared into his coffee. “The Boston police and the FBI interviewed me in July, not long after Augustine’s arrest. I wanted you to know so that you don’t get the wrong idea. It was routine. I’d done a few perfectly legitimate deals with him. The police talked to everyone who’d done business with him.”

“That makes sense, don’t you think?”

“Of course. I understood completely.” Percy faced her again, his expression cool now, slightly supercilious. “What about you, Sophie? Did you have any dealings with Jay Augustine?”

“No, none.” She tried to lighten her tone. “No money, remember?”

But he continued to look troubled and annoyed. “I’m a very careful, experienced collector, Sophie. Very few pieces available on the market today would interest me. My family…my father…” He broke off, sitting back. “Never mind. You probably know as much about my family’s art collection as I do.”

“I’ve never crawled through your attic—”

“We don’t keep anything of value in the attic. We are familiar with the protocols for storing and preserving works of art.”

Sophie sighed. “It was a joke, Percy.” She noticed with relief that the musicians were about to get started again. “Did you buy from the Augustines or sell to them?”

“Both.”

“What kind of—”

“Nothing that would interest you. Nothing Irish. Nothing Celtic.”

“Percy,” she said, ignoring his sarcasm, “why did you look me up last September?”

He frowned at her. “Last September? What are you talking about?”

She repeated her question.

“Just what I told you at the time,” he said. “I knew you were studying in Ireland and had a house here in Kenmare. I was here playing golf with friends and decided to find you and say hello.”

“No one put you up to it?”

“What? No. Believe it or not, Sophie, I’m perfectly capable of thinking for myself.”

“That’s not what I meant, and I think you know it. Percy, when you were here last year, did you find out that I was exploring—having myself a bit of an adventure between chapters of my dissertation?”

“Following in my father’s footsteps?”

“Making my own.”

“He never liked Ireland. He was far more interested in archaeological sites on the European mainland, in South America, Australia. However, to answer your question—I heard that you were chasing ghost and fairy stories with an Irish fisherman out here somewhere.”

“Did you tell Jay Augustine?”

The color immediately drained from his face at her blunt question. “I didn’t even see Jay Augustine.” Percy stood up, his coffee barely touched. “I have to go. I just wanted to stop in and say hello. Enjoy your visit with your family, Sophie, and good luck finding full-time work. Don’t forget to let me know if I can help.”

“I’m sorry, Percy. I didn’t mean to offend you.”

“We should both forget this killer.”

Sophie thought she heard genuine concern and regret in his voice, but she didn’t know him well enough to be sure. “I’ve seen pictures of him. He looks so normal. I wonder what he’s thinking now, locked up in his Boston jail cell. This has upset you, too, Percy. It would be weird if it didn’t.”

“Of course it’s upset me.”

She noticed Tim glowering at her. He wasn’t aware that Percy Carlisle had looked her up out of the blue a year ago. She glanced at her family. Her father looked as if he were about to make up a reason to come over to Percy’s table.

Tim and his friends started to play again, jumping right into their own mad rendition of “Irish Rover.”

“You should get back to enjoying the evening.” Percy withdrew his wallet and pulled out a few euros. “Stop by the house and meet Helen when you get back to Boston. We’ve hired a retired Boston police officer as our private security guard. I’ll make sure he knows to expect you. I never would have considered such a move, but after this summer…”

“I understand,” Sophie said.

He placed the euros on the table. “I know you do, Sophie. It’s good to see you.”

As he made his way through the crowd, he didn’t seem to hear the music, and he left without a word to anyone. Sophie returned to her family. Her father frowned at her, but she picked up her Guinness and offered a toast, dodging his curiosity as they clapped and tapped their feet to the music. They finished their round of drinks and headed out together, Taryn blushing when Tim shouted out to her and blew them all a kiss. His friends hooted, diving into their next song.

Out on the street, the evening air was cool and clear, perfect for the walk back through the village. Sophie asked her parents about their plans for the next month—anything, she thought, to keep the conversation away from her visit with Percy Carlisle and her impending return to Boston. By the time they crossed the stone bridge above the falls, stars sparkled in the night sky. Sophie lingered, listening to the flow of the water over the rocks, pushing back her analytical side and letting herself feel the presence of her ancestors.

After a few moments, she and her sister and parents continued down the road to their house, situated on a hillside above an old stone wall and painted bright yellow. The interior was open and comfortable, decorated with colorful furnishings and art they’d all collected over the years. Sophie pleaded fatigue and an early start and bolted straight for the bedroom she and Taryn shared. It had twin beds, skylights and a small window with a view of the starlit bay. She undressed quickly and climbed into bed, fighting back tears at the prospect of leaving Ireland tomorrow.

Taryn sat on the edge of the bed across from her. “Sophie, are you okay?”

She pulled her duvet up to her chin. “Just a little distracted.”

“There’s something going on with you. I know there is.” Taryn peeled off her scarf, the moonlight on her face as she studied her sister. “You haven’t been yourself for weeks. Months, really.”

“Taryn…don’t go there. Please.”

She kicked off her shoes. “Whatever’s bothering you has to do with what’s gone on in Boston, doesn’t it? I swear I can feel you being pulled in that direction.”

Sophie rolled onto her back and stared up at the skylight. “That’s because you’ve had too much Guinness.”

“Maybe.” Taryn leaned back onto her elbows and sighed. “Do you ever think about chucking your career and opening an Irish inn?”

“And marrying an Irish fisherman who plays the fiddle?”

They both laughed. “Oh, Sophie. What a couple of romantics we are under our tough-redhead exteriors.” But Taryn’s light tone didn’t last, and she sat up straight. “You’ll be careful in Boston, won’t you?”

For no reason at all, Sophie thought of solid, scarred Scoop Wisdom as he’d watched her at Keira Sullivan’s ruin. Had the violence of the past summer started there, on the night of the summer solstice—or had it started a year ago, on a thimble of an island off the Iveragh Peninsula?

“Sophie?”

“Yes, Taryn,” she whispered. “I’ll be very careful.”




5


Beara Peninsula, Southwest Ireland

N ights on the Beara Peninsula were quiet but also incredibly dark, and Josie Goodwin found herself restless, frustrated and decidedly annoyed with her lot. As much as she liked Keira and Lizzie and enjoyed their company, she hated being left behind, stuck in a cottage in the Irish hills while Will, Simon and Myles were off doing…well, whatever they were doing.

She had few details. She’d learned early that morning that Myles was en route to Ireland and had alerted Will, who in turn had alerted Simon. In the month since Myles had again disappeared after helping to free Abigail Browning, he had continued to avoid communications with anyone in London. For the past two years, he’d sacrificed much to establish his cover as a rogue SAS officer and penetrate a deadly association between drug traffickers and a terrorist cell.

His cover was so deep, so impenetrable, that no one—not even Will Davenport—had known what Myles was up to. Josie and Will had believed Myles had been dragged off in a firefight in Afghanistan and killed—and not heroically at that. Killed by his terrorist friends after he had betrayed his colleagues to them.

But he hadn’t been killed, and he hadn’t betrayed anyone.

Now it was time he had help.

Josie resisted the temptation to pace. What she wanted to do was to return to London. But what could she do there?

Nothing more, she thought bitterly, than she could do right here.

With a heavy sigh, she surveyed the tidy room. Keira had lit a wood fire. Lizzie was washing up in the kitchen. Scoop Wisdom had left little evidence that he’d been here at all, never mind for two weeks. Josie walked over to the front window and looked out at the stars and half moon. She wondered if Myles would have let Norman Estabrook and his thugs kill Abigail before he risked compromising his own mission. He would never have considered such a dire option. He tackled problems head-on and went after the outcome he wanted—in that case, Abigail Browning free and safe, Norman Estabrook and his thugs dead or captured and he, a British agent, with the key information he needed to carry on his mission.

Josie could see Myles giving her one of his crooked, cocky grins. “No worries, love,” he’d say.

She’d never met a man so certain he could achieve whatever he was after.

She raked a hand through her hair. How could she blame Myles for the risks he’d taken—for his courage, his sacrifices?

Because she bloody well could, she thought, forcing herself to smile at her two housemates—Lizzie in the kitchen, Keira heading for the bedroom. “You’d never know Scoop had ever been here, would you?”

“That’s typical Scoop,” Keira said. “You should see his apartment. He had to get rid of everything after the fire, but he likes living a stripped-down life. He doesn’t need much more than a good colander for his garden harvest.”

“I like how you say ‘fire,’” Lizzie interjected. “It was a bomb.”

Despite her blunt comment, Lizzie was an optimist by both nature and conviction and every bit Will Davenport’s match. Josie had begun to doubt if he’d ever find the woman who was. Lizzie Rush not only knew her way around five-star hotels—she had taken on a billionaire and his professional thugs, and she’d held her own with Myles, Will, the FBI and the Boston police.

Lizzie was joining Keira and her young cousins and their detective father for tea on Christmas Eve at the Rush hotel in Dublin. They’d invited Josie. She just might chuck London for a few days and go at that.

Assuming she wasn’t in prison for killing Myles Fletcher in his sleep.

Of course, that would require he avoid getting himself killed on his own first. Will and Simon had gone after him in part because they were convinced—as Josie was—that Myles was on the verge of getting himself killed. It had been a long, difficult, treacherous two years. He had done his share. Would he ever be able to return to a normal life? Would he even want to?

Josie refused to go down that particular road. For a time, she’d thought Myles was, finally, a man who understood her, and she’d thought she understood him—including the challenges of being involved with him.

Of loving him.

She smirked to herself. That had been madness, hadn’t it? Fortunately, she had her son, Adrian. She’d gone outside before dark and called him. He’d had schoolwork to do. He was with his father, an accountant who hadn’t been pleased at all when he’d seen through Josie’s charade of a life. He hadn’t wanted a wife who was an intelligence officer in any capacity, even if it was largely behind a desk. He wanted a normal life. Who could blame him?

Adrian adored Myles and had asked about him frequently in the initial months after his presumed death and betrayal. Josie had been prohibited from saying anything—that Myles was alive, dead, missing. And what had she known? Nothing, as it turned out. Just as well she’d stayed mum. Adrian had finally stopped asking, but only after telling Josie that he knew Myles would be back.

Keira carried an armload of blankets and sheets from the bedroom. “It’ll be like a sleepover. Girls’ night. We can have a pillow fight.”

Lizzie paused at the sink, and she and Josie both gaped at Keira as if she’d lost her mind. Girls’ night? A sleepover? A pillow fight?

“Don’t look so shocked,” Keira said with a laugh, dumping the linens in a heap on the sofa, her pale hair hanging in her face. “I’ve never been one for troops of girlfriends, I admit, but I do like having you both here. Two of us can share the bed and one can sleep on the sofa, or one in the bed, one on the sofa and one on a mat on the floor. It’ll work.”

“Of course it will,” Lizzie said, smiling.

Josie angled Lizzie a sharp look. “If you polish that kettle for one more second, you’ll rub a hole in it. What is it, Lizzie? What’s on your mind?”

Lizzie dropped her cloth and abandoned the kettle. She stared out the dark window above the sink. “I was just thinking about Sophie Malone.” She sighed and faced Josie again. “I’m forgetting something. I know I am, but I can’t think what it is.”

“Something important?” Josie asked.

“I hope not.”

Keira sank onto the sofa next to her heap of linens. “Sophie’s a Celtic archaeologist originally from Boston, and she’s participating in the folklore conference. I can understand that she’d want to see the ruin. She just happened to pick a morning Scoop was there.”

“Yes,” Lizzie said, “but that doesn’t mean that’s all there is to it.”

Josie stood by the fire, welcomed its warmth on her back. “These days, nothing is ever quite as it seems, is it?”

Keira fingered the hem of an inexpensive sheet. “Sophie got to Scoop, don’t you think?”

“Is our Dr. Malone attractive?” Josie asked.

Keira blushed. “It’s not that.”

“Nonsense. It’s always ‘that.’”

Obviously preoccupied, Lizzie walked over to the pine table. “I didn’t know Sophie that well when she worked at our hotel in Boston.” She picked up a charcoal pencil from Keira’s array of art supplies, then immediately set it down again. “I know I’m missing something. I’ll remember, though.”

Of that, Josie had no doubt. Both Lizzie and Keira had faced considerable danger and violence since June and had come out on the other side in good shape.

Josie hadn’t faced anything more dangerous or violent than her email in-box.

“Are you going back to London tomorrow?” Keira asked her.

“I’ve no idea what I’m doing tomorrow,” Josie said, keeping any trace of bitterness out of her tone. “Today didn’t go as I expected. Why should tomorrow?”

Lizzie, obviously as restless as Josie was, pushed aside Myles’s pathetic Irish wolfhound drawing. “We can all drive to Dublin in the morning and have tea and scones at my family’s hotel there,” she said.

“You mean you want to talk to your cousin the doorman,” Keira said. “See if he can help you remember whatever it is about Sophie Malone you think is escaping you.”

Lizzie stood up straight. “We need to know exactly what her interest in your stone angel is.”

“It’s not my stone angel,” Keira said quietly. “It belongs to Irish legend now.”

Josie had noticed Keira struggle with her emotions since Simon’s departure. The upheavals of the past three months had to be finally catching up with her. She’d encountered a brutal killer, fallen in love with an FBI agent and learned of family secrets—the mysterious circumstances of her own conception here on the Beara Peninsula, a terrible murder thirty years ago that had haunted her mother and uncle. Before she’d had a chance to absorb all that, her life was again disrupted when Norman Estabrook decided to exact revenge. He’d trusted Simon, never once thinking he was an undercover FBI agent. As payback for what Estabrook regarded as Simon’s betrayal, he’d sent a killer after Keira. She and Lizzie had stopped him in the ancient stone circle just down the lane.

And now here we are again, Josie thought. Lizzie, hotelier and daughter of a spy. Keira, artist and folklorist. The two women were in love with dangerous men, and not a little dangerous themselves.

And me?

She was the enigmatic British spy, she thought with amusement and just a touch of bitterness. After Myles, she’d given up hope of having a normal relationship with a man.

Any relationship at the rate she’d been going for the past two years.

Now what? Myles was alive and he wasn’t a traitor, but nothing would ever be the same between them. There was no going back to their lives prior to his supposed death and treachery. He’d made his choices.

Lizzie sighed, shaking her head. “Stop kidding yourself, Josie.”

“What?”

“You’re as in love with Myles Fletcher as ever.”

“As ever? I’ve never been in love with him—”

Lizzie and even Keira burst into laughter. Josie suppressed a flicker of impatience. What did these two women know about her life? But she knew her mood had nothing to do with them and everything to do with those few minutes with Myles that afternoon. Being near him again after two years hadn’t been what she’d expected. She could almost feel his mouth on hers, his hands on her—the path to ruin, that sort of thinking.

“All right, then,” she said briskly. “It’s late and I’m hungry. What shall we fix for supper?”

Lizzie raised her eyebrows. “You’re blushing. A stiff-upper-lip MI6 agent—”

“I keep Will Davenport’s calendar,” she said with a mock sniff, “nothing more.”

“Myles will come back to you,” Keira said softly.

Josie snorted. First the bloody bastard had to live through the week. But she smiled and reached for her coat. “Shall we just head to the pub before Eddie O’Shea closes up for the night?”

Keira slipped on a long, thick sweater. “You’re not going to tell us where Myles, Simon and Will have gone, are you, Josie?”

“You’re assuming I know.”

“They’re not fishing in Scotland, that’s for sure,” Lizzie muttered.

She led the way out into the night. She looked as if she could have slept on bare rock in a gale and awakened fresh and ready to go. Josie found herself wanting to tell her new friends more about herself, but she knew she wouldn’t. Let them wonder about the true nature of her work without any confirmation or elaboration from her. That she wanted to chat with them just proved how comfortable she was with these two women.

Quite scary, actually.

Discovering Myles wasn’t dead or a traitor had thrown her off completely. She’d become so accustomed to shutting off any thought of him—any feeling. She couldn’t bear thinking about him. Then all of a sudden…there he was, mixed up with a dangerous American billionaire and chasing terrorists.

He’d never expected to survive this mission. She’d seen that in his gray eyes just a few hours ago.

Couldn’t she have found an easier man to love?

It was almost ten o’clock when they arrived at the pub. Eddie O’Shea was closing up, but he let them in and served them fish soup and warm brown bread that he said his no-account brother Patrick had made. Josie sat with Keira and Lizzie at a table by the peat fire, Eddie’s springer spaniel sleeping soundly on the hearth.

“You look worried,” Lizzie said.

Josie nibbled on one last bite of bread, liberally spread with Irish butter. “I have this terrible sense of foreboding.” She realized what a ridiculous and unhelpful thing that was to say and attempted a smile to cover for herself. “Perhaps it’s just due to an impending bad night on the sofa.”

“Don’t worry about Keira and me, all right? Do what you have to do.” Lizzie leaned back, as at ease in the simple Irish pub as she was in one of her family’s hotels—or Will Davenport’s mansion in the Scottish Highlands. “Keira and I can check with Colm Dermott in Cork on our way to Dublin and ask him about Sophie. We’ll be fine.”

Josie had no doubt about their abilities, but they would also follow a lead if one came to them. They were curious about Scoop Wisdom’s archaeologist. Just because he was a police officer who’d just recovered from serious injuries sustained in a bomb blast and just because Myles had been at Keira’s cottage didn’t mean there was any danger in asking questions about Sophie Malone.

Didn’t mean there wasn’t, either, Josie thought, tempted to order Irish whiskey to go with her soup and bread.

Keira twisted her hands together, as if they’d gone too long already without holding brushes and pencils. “It’s not as if I don’t have time to kill,” she said wistfully. “I haven’t a single image in my head to draw or paint.”

Josie recognized her new friend’s malaise for what it was—painter’s block. Perhaps a trip to Cork and Dublin would be a good distraction. It certainly wasn’t on the face of it unsafe, but as they headed out onto the dark, quiet lane, Josie couldn’t suppress what she could only describe as a chill up her spine.

She blamed Myles Fletcher and wished she’d ordered that whiskey after all.




6


Shannon, Ireland

S coop eased into the security line at Shannon Airport before the long flight back across the Atlantic. He’d stayed in a lousy hotel a few miles from the airport, its saving grace a full Irish breakfast that had helped chase off his bad dreams about scary dogs and mean fairies.

Definitely good to be heading home.

He spotted red hair about ten people ahead of him and immediately thought of Sophie Malone—not a reassuring sign of his state of mind before a seven-hour flight. He took another look, figuring he had to be wrong, but there she was—the redheaded archaeologist he’d met yesterday morning and a British spy had warned him about yesterday afternoon.

She grabbed a bin, turned and waved, smiling as if she’d expected to find him behind her in a line at the airport.

Scoop got through security and caught up with her in the busy duty-free shop. She wore slim black pants and a long dark gray sweater, a contrast to her muddy hiking clothes and bright blue rain jacket of yesterday. Her hair was pulled back but still had a wild look to it. He’d showered, shaved and put on his most comfortable khakis and lightweight sweater.

“We must be on the same flight,” he said.

“Lucky us.” She opened the glass door of a cooler and reached inside. “Water?”

“Yeah, thanks. Did you drive in this morning?”

She nodded. “My folks are staying in Kenmare. I took their rental car back, and they kept my car. They’re taking off for a few days to hike the Kerry Way. Doesn’t that sound idyllic?”

“You mean more idyllic than spending the day on a crowded flight across the Atlantic?”

“You have a wry sense of humor, Scoop,” Sophie said, leading the way to the cash registers with two bottles of water. She’d bought the biggest size. “The head-winds add time to flying west. It’s so much easier flying to Ireland than flying home from Ireland.”

“You seem like an experienced traveler.”

“I guess so. In some ways it feels as if I’m leaving home rather than going home.”

Scoop reached for his wallet, but she shook her head, insisting on paying for both bottles of water herself. As she fished out euros, his cell phone vibrated in the front pocket of his carry-on pack. He stepped out of the line and took the call.

“According to one of Will’s friends in London,” Josie Goodwin said, “Sophie Malone is booked on the same flight to Boston as you are.”

“So she is,” Scoop said.

“Standing right there, is she?”

“Yep. What friend in London?”

“Lord Davenport knows all kinds. I also learned that Dr. Malone met just last week with an octogenarian expert in art theft.”

“Is he another of Davenport’s London friends?”

“Not exactly. Our octogenarian’s name is Wendell Sharpe. He frequently consults with INTERPOL. He and Dr. Malone had tea at the Rush Hotel off St. Stephen’s Green in Dublin. Odd coincidence, don’t you think?”

“Not after yesterday. What did they discuss?”

“I don’t know yet. She’s a legitimate academic. Quite well respected. She recently completed her dissertation and a postdoctoral fellowship here in Ireland. Her field is the Celtic Iron Age, particularly in Ireland and Great Britain. She’s an expert in Celtic visual arts.”

“Does she like sugar in her tea?”

“Lemon,” Josie said.

Scoop had no idea if she were kidding. “Who does she know in Ireland? Who are her friends here?”

“We’re working on that.”

“We?”

Josie sighed. “Keira has painter’s block, and Lizzie’s bored.”

“They aren’t law enforcement,” Scoop said. “Or spies.”

“Neither am I. I work for a British aristocrat. I plan his fishing and golf trips.”

“Where are you three now?”

“Keira and Lizzie are en route to Dublin via Cork. I’m still at Keira’s cottage.”

Collecting reports from her spy friends, no doubt. Scoop noticed Sophie had finished paying for the water and was heading toward him. He had a sudden bad feeling about her—Myles’s visit, what she was holding back. “Stay put,” he told Josie. “Get Lizzie and Keira back there. You can all chase rainbows and drink Guinness.”

“You can be quite annoying, can’t you, Detective Wisdom?”

“What? I wouldn’t mind chasing rainbows and drinking Guinness.”

But Josie Goodwin had hung up.

Sophie joined him and handed him his bottle of water. “Try to drink every drop on the flight,” she said, shoving her own bottle into an outer compartment of her shoulder bag. “It’ll help.”

“Mostly I was passed out on pain meds on my flight from Boston to Scotland.” Except when he and Bob O’Reilly, who was in the seat next to him, had discussed how a bomb had ended up on Abigail’s back porch. Scoop slid his phone back in his carry-on. “Guess who that call was about?”

“No idea.”

Her body language indicated she knew exactly who. He tucked the huge water bottle into his pack. “It was about a certain Sophie Malone, Ph.D.”

“Who would be calling about me?”

“A friend here in Ireland.” Not a lie, technically, although he’d only met Josie Goodwin three weeks ago at Abigail’s wedding. “I’m cautious these days.”

“So you’re checking me out?” She paused, narrowing those bright blue eyes on him. Her freckles didn’t stand out as much in the artificial airport light. After a couple of beats, she nodded thoughtfully. “All right. That makes sense. You’re a detective who just went through an awful experience. I’m from Boston, I’m an archaeologist and I interrupted your visit to the ruin where a serial killer terrorized a friend of yours.”

“Plus you’re hiding something.”

“Aren’t we all?” She seemed unperturbed by his skepticism as she hoisted her bag back onto a slender shoulder, strands of red hair dropping into her face. “Where are you sitting?”

“Row 40.”

“I’m way up front. Just as well, don’t you think?” She smiled at him. “I have a feeling if I were any closer, I’d be a distraction.”

Looking at her, all Scoop could think was that he had to get out of Ireland and back to his home turf. He let his gaze linger on her longer than was necessary, or wise, but she didn’t seem to notice. It had to be the fairies. He was attracted to cops, prosecutors, the occasional crime-lab technician. Not red-headed experts on the Iron Age.

“This friend who called,” she said. “Is it Keira Sullivan?”

“Doesn’t matter, does it?”

“Keira and I are going to be working together on the Boston-Cork conference, and Colm Dermott and I are colleagues. If you’ve planted ideas in their heads about my hiding something, I probably should know.”

“Hell of a small world, isn’t it? I didn’t plant ideas in anyone’s heads. I’m not here to screw things up for you. You seem like the type who needs to stay busy.”

“I suppose I am. I suspect you are, too.”

He grinned at her. “See? Something in common.” They passed a rack of Irish souvenirs on their way out of the duty-free shop. “You didn’t show up at that ruin yesterday just out of professional curiosity.”

“And you know this how?”

“Instinct.”

Her eyes sparked with challenge. “Ah.”

He set his pack on an empty chair and didn’t let her doubt faze him. “You have some kind of personal stake in what happened there. You volunteered for the conference. Why? Something to do with Jay Augustine? Did you do business with our jailed serial killer?”

“You’ve been away from your job a long time. I’m sure it’ll be good to get back to work and have real cases to focus on.”

“I have real cases now.”

She didn’t falter for even half a second. “Even better. It’ll be good to get back to them full-time.” She headed for the ladies’ room and tossed him another smile as she pushed open the door. “See you at customs.”

He sat down, but Sophie wandered off when she came out of the ladies’ room and managed to avoid him until they boarded the plane. He had an aisle seat. She did, too. She wasn’t way up front. She was seven rows ahead of him. Either she couldn’t add, or lying was her way of telling him not to bug her on the flight.

He didn’t bug her, but he kept an eye on her while he read a book and drank the water she’d bought him. It was a long, skin-crawling seven hours across the Atlantic. He had smart, pretty Sophie Malone a few rows in front of him, a four-year-old kicking his seat behind him and, directly across the aisle, two old women who talked for all but about six seconds of the flight. Sitting still had never been his long suit, and almost getting blown up in his own backyard hadn’t helped his patience.

His conversations with Myles Fletcher and Josie Goodwin hadn’t helped, either. Was Sophie on to something—deliberately or inadvertently—that would interest British intelligence? A professional, or even a personal, interest in Keira’s ruin was one thing. Keeping secrets was another.

When the plane landed, Sophie jumped up and squeezed past a young couple with a toddler. If Scoop tried the same maneuver, he’d knock someone over, but she was slim, agile and much faster than anyone would expect just looking at her. She also had a big, friendly smile. Scoop was faster than he looked, but that was it. He wasn’t slim or agile, and he certainly didn’t have a big, friendly smile.

He wondered if being back on American soil would help him lose that fairy-spell, love-at-first-sight feeling. So far, not so good.

He caught up with her again at baggage claim. “Share a cab?” he asked as she lifted a backpack off the belt.

She hooked its strap onto one shoulder. “Oh—no, thanks.” She motioned vaguely toward the exit. “Someone’s picking me up.”

Scoop didn’t even have to be good at detecting lies to see through that one. Not that she was trying hard to hide that she wasn’t telling the truth.

He could have taken the subway, too, but he went ahead and grabbed a cab.

He’d be seeing Sophie Malone again. It wasn’t a question of if. It was a question of when and under what circumstances.



Scoop had the cab drop him off in Jamaica Plain. He stood in front of the triple-decker he owned with Bob O’Reilly and Abigail Browning. It was a freestanding, solid house, one of thousands of triple-deckers built in the early 1900s for immigrant workers. It had character. Abigail and Owen were due back soon from their honeymoon. Bob was working. He and some of the guys from the department had boarded up the windows with fresh plywood and strung yellow caution tape across the front porch.

Scoop had never figured his second-floor apartment would be the last place he owned, but he’d had no immediate plans to move. He, Bob and Abigail all hated that three police detectives had brought violence to their own neighborhood. Their street was semi-gentrified, with mature trees and well-kept gardens. There were young families with kids on bicycles, teenagers playing street hockey, professionals, old people.

Scoop unlocked the side gate, left his carry-on and duffel bag on the walk and headed to the postage-stamp of a backyard. The bomb had set off a fire on Abigail’s first-floor back porch that burned straight through to her dining room. His porch, directly above hers, had also burned. The firefighters had gotten there fast and stopped the fire from spreading, but with the extensive smoke and water damage, the entire three-story house had to be gutted. Bob was in charge of figuring out what came next. It’d be a while before they could move back in.

Abigail planned to sell her place and move with Owen into a loft in the renovated waterfront building where the new headquarters of Fast Rescue, Owen’s international search-and-rescue outfit, were being relocated from Austin. Bob had mentioned maybe he could take the top two floors and Scoop could move to Abigail’s place. Sounded good to Scoop, but it’d involve redesigning and probably more money.

He squinted up at his boarded-up apartment. He’d done his mourning for any stuff he’d miss. Photographs, mostly, but his family had copies of a lot of them—nieces, nephews, birthday parties, holidays.

The air still tasted and smelled of charred wood and metal. He walked over to the edge of his vegetable garden. He’d been weeding when Fiona O’Reilly had arrived that day and offered to help him pick tomatoes.

That was what they’d been doing when the bomb went off. Picking tomatoes.

“Hell,” he breathed, remembering.

The bomb had to have already been in place under Abigail’s grill when they’d all gotten up that morning.

It was constructed with C4. Nasty stuff.

He, Bob, Abigail, Owen and Fiona had made lists of people they’d seen at the house in the days before the bomb. Everyone. Cops included.

Maybe especially cops, Scoop thought, sighing at the weeds that had taken over his garden. He could still see where firefighters and paramedics had trampled his neat rows in the rush to save his life and keep the fire from spreading to neighboring homes. He’d trampled a few gardens in his years as a police officer. He noticed a couple of ripe tomatoes and squatted down, pulling back the vines, but the tomatoes had sat in the dirt too long. The bottoms were rotted.

“What the hell,” he said, “they’ll make good compost.”

He yanked up a few weeds, aware of the scars on his back, his shoulders, his arms. He’d grabbed Fiona, protecting her as best he could from the shards of metal and wood as he’d leaped with her for cover—the compost bin Bob and Abigail had moaned and groaned about when Scoop had been building it.

He got to his feet and looked up at the sky, as gray and drizzly as any he’d seen in Scotland and Ireland. He had no regrets about being back home.

He had a lot of work to do.

He headed back out to the gate, picked up his stuff and unlocked his car, sinking into the driver’s seat. He’d have no problem readjusting to driving on the right. He glanced at himself in the rearview mirror. He looked as if he’d flown on the wing of the plane instead of in an aisle seat. He needed a good night’s sleep.

Where? Should he take Lizzie Rush up on her offer to put him up at her family’s five-star Boston hotel—the one where Sophie Malone used to work?

“Might as well,” he said aloud, and started the car.




7


Boston, Massachusetts

S ophie’s iPhone jingled, signaling an incoming text message. She’d texted Damian when she’d landed in Boston. She checked her screen as she emerged from her subway stop onto Boston Common. Her brother’s response was about what she’d expected: Nothing new. Go dig in the dirt.

She smiled. The Malones were known for not mincing words, Damian especially.

After the long flight, she welcomed the walk up to Beacon Hill. The narrow, familiar streets and black-shuttered town houses helped her to shake off the odd feeling that she was out of her element, on strange and unpredictable ground. She’d gone to college in Boston. She had friends there. It wasn’t as if she’d just landed in a foreign country or a city where she didn’t know anyone.

She descended steep, uneven stone steps to a black iron gate between two town houses. Since giving up her apartment in Cork, she’d felt uprooted, but unlike Scoop Wisdom and his detective friends, her homelessness was by choice and finances.





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