Mystery and intrigue abound as an unlikely pair of FBI agents team up to solve this nail-biting murder from New York Times bestselling author Carla Neggers.
Emma Sharpe is summoned to a Maine convent, partly for her FBI art crimes work, partly because of her past with the Order. At issue is a mysterious painting of Irish lore and Viking legends. But when the nun who contacted her is murdered, it seems legend is becoming deadly reality.
Colin Donovan is one of the FBI’s most valuable deep-cover agents. Back home in Maine after his latest mission, a contact clues him into an intrigue of murder, international art heists and long-held secrets that is too tempting to resist. As danger spirals ever closer, Colin is certain of only one thing—Emma Sharpe is at the center of it all.
Previously published
Saint’s Gate
Carla Neggers
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
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
CHAPTER 1
EMMA SHARPE STEELED HERSELF AGAINST THE sights and sounds of her past and kept up with the nervous woman rushing ahead of her in the dense southern Maine fog. They came to a tall iron fence, a folk-art granite statue of Saint Francis of Assisi glistening with drizzle among purple coneflowers and cheerful golden daylilies by the gate.
The little bird perched on Saint Francis’s shoulder still had a couple of missing tail feathers.
Sister Joan Mary Fabriani stopped at the gate. On the other side was the “tower,” the private work space where the Sisters of the Joyful Heart performed their restoration and conservation work. In violation of convent protocol, Sister Joan had escorted Emma onto the convent grounds without having her first stop at the motherhouse to register as a visitor.
And a visitor she was, in boot-cut jeans, a brown leather jacket, Frye boots and a Smith & Wesson 442 strapped to her left calf.
“The gate’s locked,” Sister Joan said, turning to Emma. “I have to get the key.”
“I’ll go with you.”
“No. Wait here, please.” The older woman, who’d spent the past thirty years as a member of her order, frowned slightly at the gate, which crossed the meandering stone walk two hundred yards from the main gate at the convent’s entrance. “I thought I left it unlocked. It doesn’t matter. I’ll only be a few minutes.”
“You’re preoccupied, Sister,” Emma said. “I should go with you.”
“The shortest route to the tower is through an area restricted to members of our community here.”
“The meditation garden. I remember.”
“Yes. Of course you do.”
“No one will be there at this hour. The sisters are busy with their daily work.”
“I’m in no danger, Emma.” Sister Joan smiled, her doe-brown eyes and wide, round face helping to soften her sometimes too-frank demeanor. “It’s all right if I call you Emma, isn’t it? Or should I call you Agent Sharpe?”
Emma noted an almost imperceptible bite in Sister Joan’s voice. “Emma’s fine.”
With a broad hand, Sister Joan brushed a mosquito off the wide, stretchy black headband holding back her graying dark hair. Instead of the traditional nun’s habit, the Sisters of the Joyful Heart wore plainclothes; in Sister Joan’s case a dark gray hand-knitted sweater and calf-length skirt, black tights and sturdy black leather walking shoes. The simple silver profession cross hanging from her neck and the gold band on her left ring finger were the only external indications that she was a Roman Catholic nun.
She looked pained. “I’ve already broken enough rules by having you here without telling anyone.”
Sister Joan hadn’t given any details when she’d called Emma in Boston early that morning and asked her to make the two-hour drive north to the convent, located on a small peninsula on a beautiful, quiet stretch of rockbound Maine coast.
“At least give me an idea of what you want to talk to me about,” Emma said.
Sister Joan hesitated. “I’d like to get your opinion on a painting.”
As if there could be any other reason. “Do you suspect it’s stolen?”
“Let me get the key and show you. It’ll be easier than trying to explain.” Sister Joan stepped off the walk onto the lush, wet grass, still very green late in the season, and looked back at Emma. “I want to thank you for not bringing a weapon onto the grounds.”
Emma made no comment about the .38 tucked under the hem of her jeans. She’d left her nine-millimeter Sig Sauer locked in its case in her car outside the convent’s main gate but had never considered going completely unarmed.
Without waiting for a response, Sister Joan followed the fence into a half dozen mature evergreens. The evergreens would open into a beautiful garden Mother Superior Sarah Jane Linden, the foundress of the Sisters of the Joyful Heart, had started herself more than sixty years ago in a clearing on a rocky ledge above a horseshoe-shaped cove. The sisters had added to it over the years—Emma herself had planted a pear tree—but the design remained essentially the one Mother Linden, who’d died almost twenty years ago, had envisioned.
As she lost sight of Sister Joan in the fog and trees, Emma stayed close to the tall gate. Even the breeze drifting through the evergreens and the taste of the salt in the damp air called up the longings of the woman she’d been—the possibilities of the woman she’d never become.
She pushed them aside and concentrated on the present. The morning fog, rain and wind would have attracted passing boats into the protected cove, one of the well-known “hurricane holes” on the Maine coast.
Watching guys on the boats when she was supposed to be in deep reflection and contemplation had been an early clue she wasn’t cut out to be a nun.
Sister Joan, honest and straightforward to a fault, had always known. “You’re an
