The Whisper (8 page)

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.

Yarborough had been out to Jamaica Plain countless times as Abigail’s partner, but Scoop couldn’t see him planting the bomb. Too ambitious. Too by-the-book. If Yarborough had an axe to grind or was after some extra cash, he’d go all out—he wouldn’t do one small job for a billionaire like Norman Estabrook.

Given the increasingly late hour in Ireland, Scoop texted Josie Goodwin instead of calling: Ask your friends about Percy Carlisle.

He didn’t waste time typing more of an explanation. Josie would have no problem figuring out who Percy Carlisle was. Maybe she already knew.

As Scoop washed up, he got an answer from Ireland: Will do.

Obviously his new British friend wasn’t sleeping, which didn’t bode well for his own night. He returned to the bedroom and finally noticed the Whitcomb had a turndown service. The drapes were pulled, soft music was playing and chocolates were on his pillow.

Definitely better than Yarborough’s sofa bed.

Sophie woke up to not so much as a coffee ground in the cupboards and decided she should have gone to the grocery last night instead of getting herself further under the suspicion of a Boston police officer. Never mind how sexy Scoop was, she thought as she headed through the archway and out to the street. She couldn’t just blame jet lag for her reaction to him—she hadn’t been jet-lagged on the Beara Peninsula.

The wee folk, then. She’d blame them.

She smiled, debating her immediate options. Breakfast on Charles Street and chance she’d run into Scoop?
Hope
she would? The sky had cleared overnight, and it was a bright, pleasant late-September morning, a perfect day to help her kick any lingering jet lag and adjust to being back in Boston.

“Hey, Sophie—Dr. Malone.” Cliff Rafferty got out of a car
just up her quiet, narrow street and shut the door. “I hope I didn’t startle you. Mr. Carlisle—Percy—mentioned your sister has an apartment up here. It wasn’t hard to get the address. You two look a lot alike.” He gave Sophie an easy grin as he tossed a cigarette onto the street and approached her. “I looked her up on the Internet, too.”

Sophie relaxed slightly. She’d slipped into jeans and a dark green long-sleeve top, not bothering with a sweater. “I’m borrowing her place until I figure out what comes next. What can I do for you, Mr. Rafferty?”

He looked up at a windowbox dripping with ivy on the town house behind them, then at her again. “Like being back in Boston?”

“So far, so good. It hasn’t been a full day yet.”

“Feels great being done with school, doesn’t it? All those years of classes, papers, research, and now you finally have those initials after your name.”

He had an engaging manner, but Sophie assumed he’d looked her up for a reason beyond cheerful chitchat. “It does feel great, but there are more classes, papers, and research ahead. If I’m lucky.”

“At least you’ll be paid more as a professor than as a student.” He shoved his hands into the pockets of his lightweight jacket. He had on baggy jeans that were an inch too short and running shoes. “You and Scoop Wisdom last night. That took me by surprise. I gather you didn’t just meet on your flight back to Ireland yesterday.”

“Just about. I ran into him on the Beara Peninsula the day before.”

Rafferty’s gaze was distant now, reminding her that he’d been a police officer. “Scoop’s quite the ladies’ man. He seems taken with you.”

“I wouldn’t know about that,” Sophie said, heat rushing to her cheeks.

“Bet you’ll find out.” Rafferty winked at her unexpectedly, then withdrew a slip of paper from his pocket and handed it to her. “I need to talk to you. Not here. My place. I wrote down the address. Give me an hour.”

Sophie folded up the paper. “I haven’t had breakfast. Why don’t we go for coffee? You can talk to me now.”

“Nah. You come to me.”

“What’s this all about?”

“You’re an expert in Celtic archaeology,” he said. “I have something I want to show you. Get your opinion.”

“Is it Celtic?”

“I don’t know. If I knew…” He didn’t finish, looking awkward now, even defensive. “I was a cop for thirty years. I might not have played things as straight and narrow as Scoop Wisdom would want, but I never hurt anyone.”

“Can I bring someone with me?”

“Yeah, why not? Go find Scoop and ask him if he wants to go with you. See how far you get.” He grinned at her, then raised his thin shoulders in an exaggerated shrug. “Show up or don’t. Your call. Just make it this morning. I’m working this afternoon.”

He walked back to his car, got in and waved as he drove past her on the one-way street. Sophie watched him, trying to make sense of their conversation. Did he want to talk to her about stolen Celtic artifacts? His last assignment as a police officer had been working security at the Augustine showroom after Jay Augustine’s arrest. He’d gone right from there to his job with the Carlisles.

Sophie headed back down the steps and through the gate and the archway into the secluded courtyard, dialing Taryn’s number on her iPhone. Taryn picked up on the second ring, just as Sophie unlocked the apartment door. “Hey, Taryn,” she said, “where’s your car?”

“It’s probably on Anderson or Myrtle, but it could be anywhere. I have a friend who moves it every ten days. Sophie, what’s going on? You sound out of breath.”

“That’s because I’m walking fast.”

“All right.” Taryn didn’t sound reassured. “I’m on my way back to London. If you need me, I’ll be there.”

“Thanks. What color’s your car? I can’t remember.”

“Dark blue. It’s a Mini—”

“That I remember,” Sophie said with a smile, trying to sound less agitated. “All’s well, Taryn. I’ll be in touch.”

Sophie disconnected and grabbed Taryn’s car keys out of a drawer in the kitchen, then ducked back out to the street. She located the Mini in front of a small market on the next block. She still had time before meeting Rafferty and walked down to Cambridge Street—deliberately avoiding Charles Street and the Whitcomb Hotel—and got a coffee and a bagel. She ate the bagel on her way back up Beacon Hill and sipped her coffee as she unlocked the Mini and slid behind the wheel. It started right up.

Luckily she’d already set her coffee in the holder when Scoop Wisdom materialized by the passenger door. She hit a button to automatically roll down the window. “Good morning,” she said. “Are you looking for me?”

“Uh-huh. Where are you off to?”

She didn’t want to tell him, but she didn’t want to lie, either. “Cliff Rafferty asked me to stop by his place.”

Scoop opened the passenger door and got inside. “Talk.”

“I don’t want to be late.”

“Then drive and talk. Or I’ll drive and you can talk.”

“It’s my sister’s car.” Sophie noticed how close he was in the seat next to her. He had on a dark tan windbreaker, khakis and
a chocolate-colored shirt that made his eyes seem deeper, richer. “Do you know where Rafferty lives?”

Scoop shook his head. “No.”

She handed him the address. “I think I can figure out how to get there, but since you’re a police officer—”

“I know the street.”

She smiled. “Thought you might.”

As she drove slowly down to Cambridge Street, Sophie told him about Rafferty’s visit.

“You don’t know what he has in mind,” Scoop said.

“Neither do you. If he’d meant me any harm, he could have run me over going for coffee.”

Scoop frowned at her, then shook his head. “I guess you can’t be a shrinking violet digging up old bones.”

“I generally don’t dig up bones. My field is the Celtic Iron Age with a focus on Irish and British Celtic art.”

“Such as?”

“Not necessarily ‘art’ as we think of it today.”

“No sofa paintings?”

“No sofa paintings.” She made her way to Commonwealth Avenue. Driving on the left had become natural for her in Ireland, but she readjusted quickly. “Think in terms of the art of everyday items—cauldrons, weapons, tools, jewelry.”

“Is there a market for this stuff?”

“For the right collector, definitely, but there are rules for anything that’s found during an excavation. I can’t just pocket an Iron Age gold brooch and put it up on eBay.”

“I read about that gold found in England by a guy with a metal detector.”

“Yes, that’s an amazing discovery. He unearthed a major hoard of early Anglo-Saxon gold and silver buried in a farmer’s field
in Staffordshire. It’ll take years for archaeologists and historians to assess the objects. Most are articles of warfare. A true treasure.”

“Who gets it?”

“Since it’s over three hundred years old, it’s been declared the property of the Crown.”

“It’d be stealing if you tried to sneak artifacts out of Ireland?”

She wasn’t sure he was asking a question, but said, “Undoubtedly, yes.”

Scoop eased back in his seat as she drove past the sprawling campus of Boston University. “What happened to you in Ireland last year, Sophie?”

“You mean—”

“You called the Irish police.”

She tightened her grip on the steering wheel. “What did you do, call the guards yourself over a Guinness last night? Why? What did I do to pop onto your radar?”

“I mentioned your name to friends in Ireland,” he said.

She glanced over at him. “That’s an incomplete answer.”

“I’d get an F if you were grading me?”

“I’d hand your paper back and ask you to finish your answer,” she said.

“That’s because you would be the professor and I would be the student and therefore at your mercy. Right now—”

“It’s the other way around. I’m at your mercy.”

“We’re just two friends talking in a very little car.” He pointed at a throng of students about to cross from a Green Line MBTA stop on the track in the middle of Commonwealth Avenue. “Careful.”

“I won’t run anyone over,” Sophie said, “and last year I got in over my head on an adventure.”

“Treasure hunting?”

She shook her head. “I just told you that I don’t treasure hunt.”

“You didn’t go off with a metal detector yourself?”

“Ireland has the strictest laws in the EU against metal detecting at possible archaeological sites. To answer your question, no, I did not go off with a metal detector.”

She was aware of his dark eyes on her as they came to Allston. He directed her to Cliff Rafferty’s street. She parked in front of a two-family brown-shingled house with a giant oak shading a small front yard, its roots breaking apart the sidewalk.

Scoop unfastened his seat belt. “Do you think Cliff wants to see you because you’re an archaeologist or because you’re friends with Percy Carlisle?”

“‘Friends’ is too strong.”

“Were you two—”

“No,” Sophie said quickly.

They got out of the car. “You and I aren’t finished,” Scoop said, going ahead of her to the front door.

Sophie mounted the steps behind him, checking the address Rafferty had scrawled on the slip of paper. “He’s on the upper floor.” She reached past Scoop’s broad shoulders for the doorbell but noticed the door was slightly ajar. “He’s expecting me. He probably doesn’t want to come down to open up.”

Scoop pushed the door open and called up the stairs. “Cliff? Scoop here with Sophie Malone. We’re on our way up.”

There was no answer. Sophie started up the steps, but Scoop put a hand on her hip and eased past her. She stayed behind him, observing that the injuries he’d sustained in the bomb blast didn’t impede his ability to climb a flight of stairs.

When they came to the second-floor landing, Sophie took a sharp breath and grabbed Scoop by the upper arm, her gaze riveted on the French door. Three realistic-looking replicas of
human skulls had been tacked to the frame, one on each side and one directly in the middle of the lintel.

“Scoop…”

He glanced at her. “Stay close to me.”

She dropped her hand from his arm. “The ancient Celts revered the human head.”

Scoop grimaced. “Yeah. Great.” He tapped open the door and called into the apartment. “Hey, Cliff. I jumped in the car with our Dr. Malone here.”

Again there was no answer.

They entered a narrow living room that ran across the front of the house. A sentimental Irish tune was playing softly in the background. Sophie realized it was coming from the flat-screen television. A DVD was running, displaying familiar scenes of Ireland—the Cliffs of Moher, the Healy Pass, a rainbow over a lush, green Irish pasture.

“Something bad has happened,” Sophie said.

Scoop withdrew his weapon. She hadn’t even noticed the holster under his jacket. He touched her hand. “Just stay close.” He squeezed her fingers. “Real close. Got it?”

She nodded.

Staying in the middle of the room, they stepped onto a worn rug and walked past the coffee table. It was piled with rolls of coated wire, wire cutters, plastic-coated blasting caps and a block of what looked like wrapped clay but Sophie assumed was probably C4 or another type of explosive.

Bomb-making materials.

Just beyond the coffee table, yellow and red glass beads were scattered on the hardwood floor at the edge of the rugs. “Scoop, glass beads are often found in Celtic graves.”

But she didn’t go on. More skulls were arranged on the wood
work of the double-doorway between the living room and the adjoining dining room.

Scoop stopped in the doorway and turned to her, grim, controlled. “Don’t look,” he said.

It was too late. She could see Cliff Rafferty hanging from an exposed beam in the dining room. She recognized his too-short jeans, his scuffed running shoes, his jacket. She didn’t want to look at his face but did. From his coloring, the position of his neck, his twisted features—there was no question he was dead.

The rope had been tied to a heavy-duty eye hook screwed into the beam.

Her breathing shallow, her heart racing, Sophie edged next to Scoop. A small, round dining room table had been pushed against the wall. More glass beads were scattered on the bare floor between the table and the hanging scene.

A cast-iron pot was positioned directly under Rafferty’s feet. He could have used it to stand on—or had been forced to stand on it. Sophie leaned forward and saw the pot was filled with parts of a disassembled gun, each part damaged, as if the weapon had been systematically hammered and destroyed piece by piece. A police badge, also dented and distorted, had been placed on top of the gun parts.

Next to the pot, on the floor, were two halves of a crude torc fashioned out of twisted gold wire, obviously deliberately cut in half.

Sophie made herself exhale slowly through her mouth. “Scoop, these are ritualistic symbols—”

“I see. You can tell me what they mean later.” His dark eyes held hers for an instant. “Don’t touch anything and stay right with me. Got that, sweetheart? Right with me.”

They checked the rest of the apartment—the kitchen, bedroom and bathroom—and headed out to the back porch, a robin
perched on a nearby maple branch. Scoop dialed his BlackBerry. Sophie noticed even his hands weren’t shaking. While he identified himself and gave his report, she watched the robin fly away and contemplated the grisly scene in the apartment behind her.