“Did you send her to the Sisters of the Joyful Heart or did she go on her own?”
“I didn’t send her.”
“Someone else? Was she on FBI business, Yank?”
“The nun who died called her this morning and asked her to come and have a look at a painting that now may or may not be missing. No details.”
“Not a lot to go on.”
Yank watched the dogs and their owners across the river head back inside the shingled house. “For a while after I moved East I thought I’d want to retire up here. Buy a boat. Fish.” The senior FBI agent ran a finger over the thick knot Colin had tied automatically, as if he’d never left the coast for the FBI. “You cured me of ever wanting a boat. Remember that? You damn near killed me that day.”
Colin remembered. Four years ago, Yank had ventured to Maine for the first time to talk to him after he’d volunteered for a tricky, complicated assignment, his first undercover mission.
Yank would be his contact agent. That assignment had led to other ones. For months, Yank had often been the only link Colin had to the world he’d left behind—the only person he spoke to who knew that he was Colin Donovan, a special agent with the FBI, a brother, a son, a man who wasn’t the scum of the earth it was his job to pretend to be.
With the Sharpes just down the road in Heron’s Cove, that first trip to Rock Point ultimately had led Yank to Emma Sharpe. He’d recruited her to the FBI and, now, to HIT, his small, highly specialized Boston-based unit.
“How’d you meet Sharpe?” Colin asked. “You never said. Did you just knock on her door one day and say you needed an art detective?”
“It’s a long story.” Yank dropped his hand from the thick knot. “You walked away from this life. Any regrets?”
“I didn’t walk away. I have a place here.”
“In Rock Point. Not Heron’s Cove.”
Right, Colin thought. Not Heron’s Cove. “Sharpe didn’t tell you about the call from the nun, did she?”
“I thought she was up here picking apples.”
“Apples?”
“You haven’t met her.”
“What was she going to do with the apples?”
“Give some away. Make sauce. A pie.”
“She told you that?”
“It’s what she did last year. Brought everyone a pie, jars of sauce and bags of apples.”
Definitely not a normal agent, Colin thought.
Yank pointed at a seagull swooping down to an unoccupied lobster boat moored in the small harbor. “You know all the different kinds of seagulls?”
“Not all. Some. My mother’s into birding. She can tell you the name of anything that flies through here.”
“Good for her.” Yank sighed. “If I get fired, I can take up bird-watching.”
Colin jumped from his boat onto the dock. He wondered if the honey-haired FBI agent was watching from her kitchen window. He would be. “What happened today isn’t about me. It’s about Emma Sharpe.”
Yank heaved another sigh, shaking his head. “Two Mainers. What was I thinking?”
“You recruited Sharpe. You didn’t recruit me.” Colin tugged on his line, as if he needed to make sure it was secure, in case Agent Sharpe still thought he was a real lobsterman. “What’s on your mind, Yank?”
“Emma’s every bit the asset I thought she’d be. She’s experienced, thorough, an expert in her field, as well as versatile. She has great instincts. Art crime is a multibillion-dollar international enterprise. She has a feel for when it intersects with drug trafficking, gun trafficking, money laundering, kidnapping, fraud, extortion, even terrorism.”
“That’s why she’s on your team,” Colin said.
“The Sharpes are among the best art detectives in the world. Wendell Sharpe, Emma’s grandfather, was a pioneer in this work.” Yank turned from the seagull and glanced up at the Sharpe house before shifting his gaze back to Colin. “If I backed a loose cannon, I need to know.”
“Is that what you think, Matt?”
He didn’t answer at once. Finally he shook his head. “No, I don’t. Emma’s one of the best analytical agents I’ve ever known. She’s innovative, but she’s not one to go off half-cocked.”
“Was today her first time seeing any real action?”
Yank nodded. “Sister Joan was dead and her killer on the run before Emma climbed over the fence and drew her weapon. She didn’t have a chance, but she can handle herself in the field.”
Training helped, Colin thought, but there was nothing like real danger to focus the mind. “Could this nun have been targeted because of Sharpe? Who else knew she was there?”
“I don’t know what happened today, Colin.”
Colin could hear the frustration and fatigue in Yank’s voice. “Are you putting a protective detail on her?”
“She doesn’t want one.”
“So?”
“You could—”
“Dream on, Yank. I’m going kayaking.”
Yank’s dark, gray-streaked hair lifted in a cool breeze, the wind picking up with the rising tide. “A nun was murdered today. She wasn’t just in the wrong place at the wrong time. She’d called an FBI agent four hours before her death.”
Colin again wished he were on his little island, watching the stars come out over the Atlantic. “Sharpe has to feel lousy about having a nun killed under her nose.”
He was aware of Matt Yankowski’s incisive gaze on him. “Why are you here, Colin?”
No way was he explaining his summons from Finian Bracken. “I heard the news—”
“How? You were kayaking.”
“I have a brother with the marine patrol.” It was true, if not the means by which he’d learned about the tragedy at the Sisters of the Joyful Heart. “I decided to check out Agent Sharpe for myself. I knew she was the one who figured out Vladimir Bulgov was also an art collector with a special interest in Picasso.”
With that information, Colin, posing as an arms buyer, had lured a dangerous operator to a Los Angeles art auction, where colleagues in the FBI had placed him under arrest. That was in June. After Bulgov’s arrest, Colin had stopped off in Rock Point and run into Finian Bracken. They’d become instant friends. Just one of
