Harbor Island. Carla Neggers
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decade, the thief had laid claim to a recent art heist by sending a small cross-inscribed stone to Wendell Sharpe, Emma’s grandfather. Then last week, that pattern changed. Out of the blue—unrelated to any recent art theft—she and her grandfather had both received cross-inscribed stones in Ireland. So had her brother in Maine, and Matt Yankowski, her boss, in Boston.
“Emma?”
The sound of Colin’s deep, intense voice brought her out of her thoughts. “I’m here.”
“You’re sitting tight, right?”
She heard the urgency in his voice—the fear for her safety—and tried to reassure him. “I am.” She ducked back within the branches of the birches. “I’m the patient one, remember?”
* * *
By the time the Boston homicide detectives finished up with Emma, the rest of the HIT team had gathered at their waterfront offices. She and Colin were in her car, on their way. He’d taken a cab to Bristol Island and flashed his credentials at the police officers securing the scene, and that was that. No one had stopped him. When he and Emma walked back to the marina, he’d had her toss him her keys. She hadn’t argued. She ached from tension, jet lag, her run—from the searing reality that she had come upon a woman who had just been shot to death.
“You didn’t charm the detectives,” Colin said when they were almost to HIT’s building. “I thought you might.”
“I’m not in a charming mood.”
“As in a mood to charm or a mood that charms?”
“Both. Either.”
“I never charm anyone.”
He’d conducted more than a few death investigations during his three years with the Maine marine patrol. She didn’t have that experience. Didn’t want it. But she knew what to do in an active shooter situation, and she’d done it.
“You’re right, though,” she said. “The detectives aren’t happy with me.”
“Can’t blame them. A woman shot as she’s about to meet an FBI agent about an international art thief they didn’t know about. An FBI agent with a unit based in their city they didn’t know about.”
Emma sank into the passenger seat of her small car. “I told them HIT is discreet, not secret. I was being honest, but they took it wrong—said I was being cheeky.”
Colin glanced over at her. “Did they really say cheeky?”
“Maybe they just rolled their eyes.”
The police had cordoned off the small island while they searched for evidence, but there were no additional victims and no signs yet of the shooter, who could have exited the scene by boat, on foot or by car, truck, van or—as one of the detectives had put it—stork. Emma had nothing concrete to offer beyond a description of the call and her reasons for going to the island. She had stuck to the broad brushstrokes of her history with the thief. Details could wait for more information on the dead woman.
She glanced out the passenger window at the harbor, eerily still under the clear sky. “We don’t know if the dead woman is Rachel Bristol or if either one—the dead woman or Rachel Bristol—is the one who called me.”
“Odds are, Emma.”
She nodded, turning back to him. “Yes. Odds are.”
“She had a stone cross on her exactly like the crosses your thief has sent to your grandfather after every theft for the past ten years. Add in the crosses sent to you, Lucas and Yank last week, and I don’t blame the Boston homicide detectives for being pissed that we didn’t bring them up to speed on this thief. I told them to calm down but they have a point.”
“None of the thefts occurred in Boston,” Emma said. “We can’t get tunnel vision. That won’t help.”
“We also have to look at the evidence right in front of us.”
She took a quick breath as she pictured the woman’s face. Her dead eyes. The stone cross in her palm. “I’ve heard of suicidal people manipulating someone to find their body, but that’s not what happened here. This wasn’t a suicide. I didn’t see a weapon, and the police haven’t found one, at least not yet.”
“She wasn’t shot by aliens, either.”
Emma ignored his muttered comment. “The police said the area is sometimes used for illicit target practice. I suppose this could have been an accidental shooting. I didn’t hear gunfire. Planes were landing and taking off at Logan but I didn’t notice any close overhead. I was focused on the island and what I was doing, though, not on the sky.”
The police were in the process of interviewing everyone at the marina. People at a busy harbor marina presumably were accustomed to frequent comings and goings. Even at a quiet time of year, they wouldn’t necessarily pay attention to someone wandering off onto an island trail. As far as Emma knew, no one had paid attention to her when she’d arrived.
Colin slowed, downshifting as they came to their building. “Emma, did you tell the police everything?”
“What do you mean by everything?” His eyes held her for a fraction of a second, but it was enough. “Colin, are you mad at me?”
She saw him tighten his grip on the wheel. “We can talk later.”
She sat up straight. “You are mad.”
“It’s your nature to hold back, Emma. You don’t want to do that now, with this killer at large.”
“I’m not holding back. I’m doing my job.”
“If I’d been with you when this woman called, would you have told me?”
“I did tell you. I texted you.”
“That was one hell of a cryptic message you sent,” he said.
“You don’t think I should have gone out there alone.”
“To a deserted island to meet a stranger who called you about a thief who could be escalating to violence? Damn right I don’t think you should have gone out there alone.”
Emma didn’t answer immediately. She appreciated his intensity and his honesty, if not his conclusion. But he thought she kept secrets. He thought she had layers that he would never be able to peel back to her core. Love and sex were one thing. Knowing her was another. She got that and attributed it to their different natures—his hot to her cool—and not to anything fundamentally wrong with their relationship, or with her.
Finally, she said, “I made a judgment call.”
“So you did.”
“What about you? The note you left on the kitchen counter wasn’t exactly packed with details. You went off on your own.” She gave him a cool look. “You weren’t at Starbucks, were you?”
“I didn’t find a dead body.”
Not one to back down, her Colin. “I was careful. I was aware of my surroundings. If the shooter had wanted me dead—”
“Then you’d be dead right now, and I’d be explaining to the homicide detectives that I didn’t know what the hell you were up to out on that island.”
“I wouldn’t have thought twice if it’d been you going to meet a CI.”
“For good reason.”
“Because you have field experience that I don’t. Okay. Fair enough. That doesn’t mean I didn’t know what I was doing.”
Colin sighed through clenched teeth. “I’m not saying you didn’t know what you were doing. I’m saying you shouldn’t have gone alone.” He turned onto the gated entrance at their building. “And if you want to see mad, wait until you talk to Yank.”
“Does he know?”
“Not