cigarettes and tapped out one. 'See you when they hand out your commendation for bravery. Enjoy the limelight while you can.' He stuck the cigarette in his mouth and nodded to Sophie. 'Dr. Malone.'
He went back up the walk. Sophie shivered again. 'It's colder out than I expected. I can feel fall in the air.'
Scoop resisted an impulse to slip an arm around her. 'You must be about dead on your feet.'
'You, too,' she said, almost smiling.
'We're still on Irish time. I'll walk you back to your place.'
'As far as the Whitcomb is fine.'
'You're not very trusting, are you?'
She laughed, tucking her hands into her sweater pockets. 'I got on the same plane with you, didn't I?' She glanced back at the Carlisle house, the front door shut, lights shining in the tall windows. 'A bit different from Keira's Irish ruin, isn't it?'
Scoop shrugged. 'Right now I'll settle for a bed and a blanket.'
'Me, too,' she said, then caught herself. 'I mean--'
'It's okay. You're jet-lagged.'
'Very jet-lagged,' she said, almost falling against him as she started down the street.
Scoop walked alongside her to Charles Street. The rain stopped, but the wind picked up. She looked cold and tired, but she had the presence of mind not to go back into the hotel with him and instead continued on to her sister's apartment on her own.
A good thing, Scoop thought when he headed downstairs for a drink and a sandwich and found Bob O'Reilly at the bar.
'When I was in Ireland and couldn't sleep,' Scoop said as he eased onto a high stool next to Bob, 'I'd sit up with a book and listen to the sheep and cows in the hills. In another twenty years, maybe I'll retire there.'
'In another twenty years,' Bob said, 'you'll be running the department.'
'Nah. I'm no good at the politics.'
Bob O'Reilly was a big, burly fifty-year-old divorced father of three daughters. The son of a cop, he'd wanted to be a homicide detective even before a young woman two doors down from where he grew up in South Boston was kidnapped, sexually abused and murdered. That was thirty years ago. He still carried a picture of Deirdre McCarthy in his wallet.
Deirdre's mother had told Keira the story about the three Irish brothers, the fairies and the stone angel that had taken her to the Beara Peninsula. But Patsy McCarthy had also told the story to Jay Augustine, believing he was a respected dealer interested in her collection of angel figurines--and he'd killed her. Keira and Simon had found her body.
Bob drank some of his beer. His curly red hair was a tone lighter and brighter than Sophie Malone's and touched with gray. Not good, Scoop told himself, that he was thinking about the shade of Sophie's hair.
He ordered a club sandwich and, following Sophie's lead, added a Guinness to go with it. 'Lizzie Rush booked me a room here,' he said. 'She insisted.'
'I'm in Keira's place up the street,' Bob said. 'I took the lace out of the windows, but it still feels like I'm a creep or something, sleeping in my niece's apartment.'
Scoop's beer arrived. 'Do you know Cliff Rafferty's working security for a rich couple in Back Bay?'
'Yeah,' Bob said, 'I do.'
'The Carlisles. Know them?'
'Old-money Boston. I think it's just the son left now. He did some business with Augustine. The wife--I forget her name...'
'Helen,' Scoop supplied.
Bob lifted his glass. 'Yeah. Helen. She worked at an auction house in New York before she married Percy. There are no missing Carlisles or auction house workers or anyone else to tie Augustine to them.'
'As a killer,' Scoop said.
'As opposed to what?'
'What if he was involved in pushing stolen art?'
Bob set his glass down and sighed. 'Don't complicate my life more than it already is, Scoop, all right?'
'Cliff Rafferty's been out to our place.'
Bob didn't respond right away. Finally he pushed aside his glass as if Scoop had just ruined his evening. 'Hell, Scoop, what are you doing? You'll make yourself crazy. You'll make
'Estabrook was caught up in Jay Augustine's obsession with evil. There could be a stronger connection between those two than we realize.'
Bob's eyes--the same shade of blue as those of his three daughters and niece--narrowed on Scoop. 'What's going on? What do you have?'
Scoop drank more of his Guinness, remembering evenings alone on the Beara Peninsula when he'd force himself not to speculate, not to lose himself in the possible scenarios and suspects. He and Bob weren't on the investigation. They couldn't be. They were personally involved.
Victims.
He hated that word.
'Nothing,' he said finally. 'Grasping at thin air. You ever run into an archaeologist named Sophie Malone? She used to work here.'
Bob sighed. 'Archaeologist, Scoop? What the hell?'
'We met in Ireland yesterday and ended up on the same plane back to Boston today. Just one of those things.'
'Yeah. Imagine. That's the short version?'
Scoop nodded and looked at the sandwich placed in front of him. He'd lost his appetite.
'You need sleep,' Bob said. 'Jet lag makes me feel like I have dryer lint in my head. Keira had me try some scheme she read about on the Internet. Basically you don't eat for about twelve hours on the day you travel. You just drink a lot of water.'
'Did it work?'
'I don't know. I didn't make it past four hours. Did you run into Keira in Ireland?'
It was a blatant ploy for more information, not that Scoop blamed him. 'I saw her and Simon yesterday before I headed to the airport.' He decided not to mention the Brits. 'They're good.'
'The fairy prince and princess,' Bob said, only half joking.
'I could believe in fairies after going out to Keira's ruin.'
'Cathartic being there, wasn't it?'
'Yeah.' He almost could hear the dog splashing in the stream, Sophie's laughter. 'Yeah, it was.'
Bob scratched one side of his mouth, looking the experienced homicide detective he was. 'I'm not an enemy, Scoop. What else happened in Ireland?'
'It rained a lot my last week there.'
Bob stood up. 'Go to bed.'
'Your beer's on me.'
'Yeah. Good. We'll talk tomorrow.'
He thumped up the stairs. Morrigan's had emptied out. Scoop ate a few bites of his sandwich and drank more of his Guinness. It was true that anyone could have planted the bomb. The triple-decker had no alarm system. There wasn't much of a lock on the gate. There was often no one at home, although he, Bob and Abigail had unpredictable schedules--which could be a deterrent to some stranger walking out back with a pipe-bomb stuck under his shirt or hidden in a backpack.
Another cop could have found out their schedules.
Scoop gave up on his sandwich and took his beer upstairs with him. His room was on the third floor, small, understated, with upscale towels and bath products and a fussy little table that he could use as a desk. He didn't care. The water was hot and the bed had clean sheets. The rest didn't matter.
No question it beat Tom Yarborough's sofa bed.
