The Angel

by Carla Neggers

  Another reason, she thought, to head to Boston. Simon took a breath. “Hell, Keira.”

  She didn’t know whether she made the first move or he did, but suddenly she was in his arms. His mouth found hers, and she let go of all her tension and threw her arms around his neck, deepening their kiss. She loved the taste of him, the feel of his hard body against hers, the warmth of him in the cold, damp wind.

  He lifted her off her feet. The hem of her shirt rode up, and he spread his hands on the bare skin of her lower back, sending a jolt of pure desire straight through her. She pressed herself into him, was sure she heard him give a moan of a yearning as wild and uncontrolled as her own. A gust of wind blew down from the hills, and more sprinkles fell, the combination of the cold air and water with the heat of their kiss setting every nerve in her body on fire. Sensations coursed through her. She’d never re­

  sponded to anyone the way she did Simon. She wanted to

  THE ANGEL

  169 run her hands through his hair, taste every part of him, feel him inside her. And it wasn’t just adrenaline, or being out on an Irish hill—she’d had a strong reaction to him the moment she’d spotted him in Boston.

  “I’d love to go back to the cottage,” she said between kisses. “A storm’s brewing. We could forget all this mess…”

  But even as she spoke, he was lowering her back onto the cool, damp ground, and she steadied herself and caught her breath as she adjusted her shirt and looked out across the barren landscape.

  Just as well they’d stopped when they did, Keira thought, because now she could see two men walking toward the ruin.

  “The guards have arrived,” Simon said with a hint of amusement.

  “In the nick of time, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Hardly.” And, as if to make his point, he gave her a fast, fierce kiss. “We’ll pick up where we left off another time. We’re not finished.”

  Keira didn’t respond, just ran toward the two Irish police officers and waved to them, hoping they’d have answers. Perhaps they’d tell her they’d just arrested someone who’d been out killing sheep and terrorizing tourists. But she knew that was unlikely, because the answers weren’t in Ireland.

  They were in Boston.

 
  Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts

  10:00 a.m., EDT

  June 23

  Using a screwdriver she’d borrowed from Bob O’Reilly, Abigail opened a gallon can of blue paint she’d put on news­

  paper in her bedroom. A grainy black-and-white picture of Victor Sarakis stared up at her, as if to remind her that the investigation into his death was not yet finished. She tried to focus on the paint. “Do you like the color?”

  she asked Owen, who watched her from the doorway.

  “It’s a nice shade.”

  He didn’t give a damn about paint. She knew he didn’t, but she still had to ask. She wanted him to like it, to have some role—however small—in its selection. He’d arrived back in Boston last night from Austin. Her gaze drifted to the double bed—anything larger wouldn’t fit in the tiny room. She hadn’t bothered to make it. The sheets were tangled from their lovemaking.

  “If you want a different color,” she said, “now’s the time to speak up.”

  THE ANGEL

  171

  “Blue’s good. I can help—”

  “It’s so small in here, we’d just bump into each other and get paint all over everything.” She lifted off the lid, set it on Victor’s face and put down the screwdriver, picking up the wood stirrer that came with the paint. “I’m not kicking you out.”

  “I know you’re not.”

  Did he? She wasn’t sure anymore. “I’m preoccupied with a case.” She dipped the stick into the paint and smiled, or tried to. “I’ve got the devil on my mind.”

  She’d been reading Charlotte Augustine’s book on the history of the devil last night when Owen had arrived. “It’s your day off,” he said. “You could sit in a lounge chair, drink wine and read Jane Austen.”

  “Sounds tempting.” There were a thousand things she could do besides paint the bedroom.

  “Simon’s on his way back here with Keira,” Owen said.

  “Bob told me when I went out for the paper. He’s been beside himself. I guess I don’t blame him. It’s weird, Keira coming on the body in the Public Garden and now this mess in Ireland.” Abigail shoved the stick into the paint. “I don’t like coincidences.”

  “Is there any reason to think the two are connected?”

  “No.”

  When she didn’t go on, Owen drew himself up straight from the door frame. “There are a couple of things I need to do at the foundation. Nothing important. Fiona O’Reilly and her friends are coming back to practice. If you want to, stop by later.” He smiled. “We can dance an Irish jig.”

  Abigail felt a little of the tension go out of her. “Do you know how?”

  “No, but maybe Bob could teach us.”

  “That I’d like to see.”

  172

  CARLA NEGGERS

  She stirred the paint. It was such a great color. She’d picked it out while Owen was out of town. He could afford decorators, but she couldn’t, not on a detective’s salary. And she didn’t want to. She’d had visions of redecorating the bedroom together, but it wasn’t working out that way. Without looking at him, she continued. “Bob’s annoyed with me. I sat outside last night reading a history of Satan while I waited for you. The man who drowned the other night was obsessed with devil imagery.”

  “Bob thinks you’re wasting your time?”

  “I’m bucking him and everyone else I work with. We’re all under pressure to improve our percentage of solved cases, and this one—it’s not even a case at this point, really. The pre­

  liminary work’s done. I should wait for the full autopsy report. It could be a couple more weeks.”

  “You think you should wait, or everyone else thinks you should?”

  “Both.” She lifted the stirring stick out of the paint and scraped the excess off on the edge of the can. “Something’s not right about this man’s death, Owen.”

  “In other words, as the lead detective, you don’t believe waiting for the autopsy report is in the best interests of your investigation.”

  “That’s a better way to put it than to tell me I’m just being difficult.” She looked up at him from her paint can.

  “I love you, Owen. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Never a doubt. Abigail—”

  She jumped in before he could finish. “The color will darken when it dries.”

  “It’ll be perfect. But you’re not going to paint today, are you?”

  She rolled back onto her heels, not responding right away. One of the many things she loved about him was his

  THE ANGEL

  173 insight—she didn’t have to constantly explain herself. “I haven’t decided. I admit I’m preoccupied. I can’t shake this Sarakis thing. I keep thinking I’m missing something, and someone’s going to end up hurt if I don’t figure out what.”

  “Do what you have to do today, Abigail.”

  “We’re grilling tonight. Keira and Simon will be here by then, won’t they?”

  Owen nodded. “I’m picking them up at the airport.”

  “I don’t like this, Owen. I’m glad to know the Irish police are investigating. What if some nut followed Keira to Ireland and tried to kill her? It could all be a bizarre mix of accident, coincidence and her imagination. But I’d want to know more if I were an Irish detective.”

  “You want to know more as a Boston detective.”

  She sighed. “I guess I do. Can’t help it.”

  “Simon’s on the case. He’s got contacts even I don’t know about.” Owen stepped into the room and kissed her softly.

  “You know you could paint this room chartreuse for all I care, don’t you? I’m not looking at the walls when I’m in here.”

  She laughed. “I should
call that bluff and exchange my pretty blue for a really ugly chartreuse and see how you like it.”

  He left, and thirty seconds later, Abigail did exactly as he predicted and gave up on painting. She placed the top back on the can, tapped it down tight and got to her feet, part of her wishing he’d kicked over the paint can and swept her off to the beach for the day. They could be in southern Maine in less than two hours, depending on traffic. Getting out of her way, going off to Beacon Hill, had nothing to do with painting the bedroom or her preoccu­

  pation with the drowning in the Public Garden. Owen was simply giving her room to figure out what was going on with her.

  174

  CARLA NEGGERS

  And wasn’t that part of why she’d fallen in love with him? She headed through her small, IKEA-decorated kitchen out to the backyard. Hers was the first-floor and the smallest of the three apartments in the Jamaica Plain tripledecker she’d bought with Bob and Scoop Wisdom, an internal affairs detective. Abigail had heard Scoop leave early for work and thought Bob had gone off, too, but she found him out back drinking coffee and cleaning the grill.

  “I just saw Owen,” Bob said. “Why aren’t you with him?”

  “I’m painting the bedroom.”

  “No, you’re not. You’re messing with that accidental drowning.”

  She knew he’d said “accidental” deliberately to get under her skin. “You know damn well it hasn’t been deter­

  mined—”

  “Officially it hasn’t.” He dug his grill scraper into a baked-on hunk of black gunk. “I don’t know what’s going on with you and Owen, but you two need to talk before someone besides me notices it’s affecting your work.”

  “Nothing’s going on with Owen and me, and my work’s fine. Since when are you the relationship expert, anyway?”

  He ignored her, flipping the black glob onto a paper towel. He wore shorts, a Red Sox T-shirt and sports sandals—not an outfit he’d wear to work. “Take it from someone whose had two marriages go sour on him. It’s worse when you’re lying in bed alone again, and you know you should have just let it out, talked. Maybe it would have helped save things, maybe it wouldn’t have, but you’d know you’d done everything you could.”

  Abigail didn’t want to talk to him about relationships.

  “You’re not going in today?”

  “Nope. Abigail, you need to listen to me.” He pointed his grill-cleaning brush at her. “You were on your own for

  THE ANGEL

  175 seven years. You spent those years focused on becoming a detective and finding your husband’s killer.”

  “I lived my life, Bob,” she said quietly, knowing he wasn’t going to quit until she said something.

  “Yeah, but your life revolved around finding Chris’s killer. Everything else came second. You know it did. You got your answers last summer, but you didn’t have a chance to absorb them before you and Owen fell like bags of rocks for each other.” Bob attacked the grill again.

  “I don’t think you know if you want to stay a detective.”

  “That’s insane. What else would I do?”

  “Wrong question. Ask yourself if being a detective matters to you today as much as it did last summer before you got that tip that sent you to Maine.”

  To Mount Desert Island, she thought, where her husband had been born and raised. Where he’d died on his honey­

  moon, on the rocky coastline between his childhood home and Owen’s summer home. Chris’s killer had lain in wait for him, shot him, left him to die. Owen found his dead friend the next morning. Now, eight years later, Abigail had what people called—awkwardly, inadequately—closure.

  “I’m not asking myself anything,” she told Bob.

  “Then you’ve been hanging around me too long. This job doesn’t make it easy to talk. We get used to just not going there. To bottling it up.” He managed a grudging grin. “Only, I’m not that deep. Nothing to bottle up.”

  “Owen and I are fine,” Abigail said, feeling her prick­

  liness return. “I’m almost finished with the book Charlotte Augustine loaned me. You know, Lucifer is a fallen angel.”

  Bob glared at her. “So?”

  “Keira went to Ireland to investigate an old story about a stone angel twenty-four hours after finding Victor Sarakis—”

  176

  CARLA NEGGERS

  “You want to jerk my chain, fine,” Bob said, dropping his wire brush onto the grill. “But you just remember. I’m a senior detective who can kick your ass from here to Bunker Hill if you don’t straighten out.”

  Abigail didn’t back down. “My gut tells me there’s a connection between Victor Sarakis’s death and what happened to Keira in Ireland. Your gut would, too, if you weren’t emotionally involved.”

  She knew questioning his judgment and instincts—

  telling him outright that he was, in fact, emotionally involved in her case—would set him off, and it did. He glared at her, his entire face turning red. “I’m getting you pulled off this investigation.”

  “Just try it. See what I do.”

  He turned purple, swore under his breath and thundered up the outside stairs to his third-floor apartment. Abigail exhaled, feeling lousy. Bob was her friend, and he’d had a rough couple of days. She had no business baiting him that way.

  She debated following him upstairs to apologize, but rejected the idea. They’d just end up in a bigger fight. Neither one of them could get along with anyone these days.

  She went back inside, grabbed her car keys and headed out. Jay and Charlotte Augustine’s Back Bay showroom was located above an upscale health club with lots of sweating, intense, skinny people on treadmills, stair-climbers, ellip­

  tical machines, exercise balls. The treadmills had their own televisions, and most of the machines were placed in front of tall windows that overlooked the street. Abigail used the BPD gym. It wasn’t bad, but it was perfunctory. She took a claustrophobic little elevator up to the ren­

  THE ANGEL

  177 ovated brick building’s third floor. It let her out into a re­

  ception area that consisted of an oak rolltop desk, an un­

  occupied ergonomic swivel chair and a library table that held a telephone, computer and crates of manila files. Behind the desk was a floor-to-ceiling partition and a locked door that, presumably, led to the main room. The door opened, and Liam Butler, Victor Sarakis’s graduate student assistant, poked his head out. “Hey, Detec­

  tive,” he said. “I thought I heard the elevator. What’s up?”

  “I wanted to stop by and thank Mrs. Augustine for a book she gave me.”

  “I know the one—I suggested it. Fascinating, isn’t it? Believe it or not, there are entire college courses on the devil. Victor could have taught one—he was that knowl­

  edgeable on the subject.”

  “What about you?”

  “I’m not that wild about it, to be honest. I had night­

  mares when I first started working for him, but I got over my resistance after a while. Victor understood. He said it was natural to be reluctant to confront evil, even on an intellectual basis. Part of the deal, really.”

  “A defense mechanism,” Abigail said casually, then nodded to the open door. “Mind if I have a look in there?”

  “If I said no, you’d need a warrant, right?”

  “If you said no, I’d leave.”

  “Gee, don’t tempt me. But it’d be provocative, wouldn’t it? If I just told you to get lost?”

  She didn’t answer. She’d need more time with Liam Butler, she decided, to have a better sense of him. The outfit he had on looked like the same one he’d worn the other day, but she couldn’t tell for sure. His hair was greasier—she doubted he’d showered. She didn’t know if that was the norm for him or if the sudden death of his 178

  CARLA NEGGERS

  landlord, friend and employer had yanked him out of his routines. He seemed as easygoing as he had been a
t their first encounter with Jay Augustine in Victor’s devil room. Abigail knew from personal as well as professional ex­

  perience that not everyone handled loss in the same way. From what she’d seen so far, Liam’s behavior—even tweaking her over a search warrant—wasn’t entirely out of the ordinary.

  “I have a key, in case you’re wondering,” he said. “I check on the place when Jay and Charlotte are out of town—once or twice a week, at most.”

  “They don’t have employees?”

  “Sometimes they hire a tempt to sit at the front desk, but that’s only if paying customers are coming by and they need the extra help. They don’t keep regular hours. Most of the people who come here have appointments.”

  “Do the Augustines know you’re here now?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. I haven’t seen them. I guess we’re all still trying to get our heads around what’s happened.” He held open the door and motioned with one arm. “Care to have a look around? I was only joking around about the warrant. No one’s got anything to hide, Detective.”

  Abigail entered a room that looked as if it took up all or most of the third floor of the narrow building. Larger items—furniture, statues, trunks—were arranged on the floor in what looked to be an orderly fashion. She peeked at deep shelves filled with colorful pottery vases, small statues of animals and naked warriors, an ornately carved box and an ancient-looking bronze falcon.

  “Jay and Charlotte keep good records,” Liam said. “They know everything in here, right down to the mice turds.”

  Abigail smiled at his infectious humor. “Do they have a specialty?”

  THE ANGEL

  179

  “They have to be pragmatic, but they’d deal exclusively in Classical and early Medieval works if they could.”