The Whisper

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.”