The Angel (29 page)

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“No.”

“I didn’t think so. How long before you take him down?”

“Hours. He’s still in Montana. We have him under sur

veillance. He’s not going anywhere.” March paused, then added, “We’re monitoring his calls.”

Simon had assumed as much.

“You’re not calling to tell me Norman Estabrook hates me,” March said. “You’re in the middle of a mess that could explode in both our faces.”

“You heard about Patsy McCarthy.”

“Yes, I did,” March said, a crack of emotion in his voice.

“You remember her, then.”

“Her daughter’s murder was one of the toughest cases I ever worked on, Simon. If I could forget it—well, I’m not sure I would. It’s a reminder of what some people in this world are capable of doing.”

“How’d you find out about the mother’s murder? Who’re you keeping tabs on, me or Abigail? Or have you been keeping tabs on Patsy McCarthy all these years?”

March didn’t give an answer, and Simon gritted his teeth.

“All of the above, probably.”

“Is Abigail—”

“She’s in the thick of things, which is what you’d expect, isn’t it?”

“Then she knows I worked on Deirdre McCarthy’s murder investigation,” March said. “That’s not what’s im

portant now. Finding her mother’s killer is. Simon, you need to walk away from this. It’s not your fight. Go back to London, go fishing in Scotland with your friend Sir Will.”

“Will’s in Ireland.”

“Of course. I should have known. The two of you are too independent for your own good. Dare I ask about Keira Sullivan?”

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It was Simon’s turn to avoid answering.

He heard March’s soft sigh. “You do know how to com

plicate your life. There’s no going back once we move forward with Estabrook, Simon. You have no illusions about that, I hope.”

“My cover’s pretty much blown as it is, and there’s never any going back in life, anyway.”

“I guess there isn’t,” March said with a note of melan

choly that took Simon by surprise. “You’ve been clear-eyed and full-throttle since you were fourteen years old.”

“Maybe so. Director March—John.” Simon kept his eyes on the busy Boston street. “Did the right guy set himself on fire and jump into Boston Harbor thirty years ago?”

“Yes.” There wasn’t a hint of doubt. “Stay in touch,” the FBI director said and hung up.

Simon tossed his phone onto the passenger seat. John March was as professional, honest and decent a man as there was, but he’d also kept his friendship with his dead friend’s son secret from his daughter for twenty years. But Simon knew all about keeping secrets.

He hit the gas pedal, picking up speed.

“I was having the adventure of my life in Ireland while
my best friend, the best person I’ve ever known, was in the
hands of that monster.”

Nineteen-year-old Eileen O’Reilly’s words from Deirdre’s case history had jumped off the page at Simon. Who could blame her for not telling her daughter about Deirdre’s murder? And who could blame Keira, now, for wanting to understand her mother?

Simon gripped the wheel, half wishing Norman Esta

brook would call and threaten to kill him again. It would be a long drive out to the woods of southern New Hampshire.

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He peeked at the speedometer.

Never mind, he thought—he’d get there in less than two hours.

Way less.

Back Bay

Boston, Massachusetts

Noon, EDT

June 24

The lunch crowd was descending on the busy, upscale health club under the Augustines’ showroom on Clarendon Street. Abigail watched men and women with lives very different from her own burst into the locker rooms, jump onto treadmills, each with its own built-in little television, and climb onto weight machines. Several stretched on mats. One older guy crunched abs on an exercise ball. He looked as if he’d crunched about two million abs in his day. All in all, Abigail would have preferred to strap on her iPod and go for a run along the Charles River, pump up her endorphins and just not think about an old woman killed in her home among the angel figurines her murdered daughter had collected—not think about the brilliant, hon

orable, frustratingly secretive man who was her father. She’d tried calling him on her way out to Clarendon Street,

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but she only got his voice mail. She didn’t leave a message. She figured he was avoiding her or talking to Simon—

maybe both.

She didn’t call Owen. He knew about Simon, she realized. Owen was thorough in everything he did, but es

pecially in his work with Fast Rescue.

She expected lies and secrets in her work. They came with the territory—part of her job was to peel them back to get to the truth.

Secrets and lies weren’t supposed to be part of her personal life.

But she was determined not to think about that for a while. Instead, she was standing next to a stack of freshly folded white towels on the health club’s front desk. A lean, tanned man in a black tracksuit emerged from a back room. He was about Bob’s age but in a lot better shape. “Thank you for waiting, Detective Browning,” he said. “We spoke on the phone earlier. I’ve been expecting you. I’m Ron Zytka—I manage the health club. It’s okay to talk here?”

“No problem.”

“Charlotte and Jay Augustine stopped by just before you called. They’re still very shaken up about Charlotte’s brother.” Zytka grabbed a perfectly folded towel from the top of the pile, shook it out and spread it out on the desktop, preparing to refold it. “Understandably.”

“Did you know Victor?”

“Not really.” He carefully folded the towel lengthwise into thirds. “I ran into him with Charlotte a few times, and she introduced us. I could pick him out of a crowd, but that’s it. He wasn’t a member here—not the type.”

Zytka finished folding the towel and set it back on top of the pile. As far as Abigail could see, the towel looked 268

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exactly the same. She’d called him that morning before news of Patsy McCarthy’s murder had reached her. Now she didn’t know what difference the Augustines’ exercise habits made. But she persisted. “I notice you check people in. You must keep a record—”

“We do, and I already checked to see if Charlotte and Jay were in the day Victor drowned, because I figured you’d ask. They weren’t, but the kid who works for them was. I think he’s actually the brother’s employee. The poor man who drowned.”

“Liam Butler was here?”

“That’s right. He could use the club as a guest of the Au

gustines. We offer a limited number of day passes to people in the building. But he was here on his own—he has a sixmonth membership.” Zytka pointed to a line of treadmills in front of a floor-to-ceiling window. “He always uses one of the treadmills over there.”

Given the placement of those particular treadmills, Abigail noticed, Liam could watch people come and go into the building with little concern they would see him.

“You’re sure it was the same day—”

“Yes, Detective,” Zytka said. “It was the day of the drowning. I can show you the log if you want.”

“What time was he here?”

“Liam signed in just before six that evening.” Zytka’s hands shook as he lifted the refolded towel and took the one underneath it.

“Did Liam’s behavior strike you as unusual?” Abigail asked.

Zytka licked his lips and averted his eyes, not because he was hiding something, she thought, but because he was uncomfortable, even afraid—but of what? He was an offi

cious sort. He could simply be worried that one of the

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health club patrons would overhear him and question his discretion as a manager.

But Abigail suspected Zytka’s nervousness had more to do with Victor Sarakis’s death and Liam Butler’s behavior that night. “We can talk in your office if you’d like—”

“I checked the log, Detective Browning,” he said without looking at her as he unfolded the towel. “Liam Butler took out a membership two months ago. I can give you the exact date if you want. Since then, he comes several times a week, sometimes twice in the same day.”

“If he was helping out upstairs—”

“He shows up here on days he doesn’t work. I checked with my staff, and they’ve noticed. My opinion?” Zytka sucked in a breath and plunged ahead. “I think he’s been spying on the Augustines.”

“He couldn’t just be training for a marathon?”

“No. I know the difference.”

Abigail stood back a moment. “Mr. Zytka, did Liam Butler or the Augustines ever discuss angels or devils or evil with you?”

Zytka was so startled, his elbow jerked and struck the tower of towels, toppling several of them. He caught them as they fell and shook his head. “No—no, nothing like that. Detective, what—”

“Listen, thanks for your time,” Abigail said, leaving her card for him on the counter. “If you think of anything else, call me, okay?”

“I will.” He rubbed the back of his lean neck and suddenly seemed less sure of himself. “Listen, I don’t want to get Liam into trouble if he just—you know. If he didn’t do anything. I’m not accusing him…”

Abigail thanked him again for his time, and left. When she got back out to her car, she called Tom Yar

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borough. She’d avoided him when she’d seen Simon. “Can you meet me at Victor Sarakis’s house?”

“What’s going on?”

“Sarakis’s assistant was at a health club down the street from the Public Garden the night he drowned. Liam Butler. He hasn’t told the truth.”

“Give me the address,” Yarborough said. “I’ll get in touch with Cambridge PD and meet you there.”

Near Mount Monadnock

Southern New Hampshire

12:30 p.m., EDT

June 24

Eileen Sullivan belted out the words to one Irish song after another as she stacked wood in front of her cabin. She could hear the Clancy Brothers in her mind, although she couldn’t remember the last time she’d played a CD, listened to a radio. Her voice was terrible—Keira couldn’t sing a note, either. They weren’t the ones in the family with the musical talent.

A cool wind kicked up, and for a moment, Eileen let herself think it was a breeze off Kenmare Bay on her face. She shut her eyes and pictured herself dancing in an ancient stone circle above a quiet, gray harbor on the Beara Penin

sula, and she hugged a log to her chest as if somehow it could bring her there—back to Ireland, back in time. Before Deirdre’s death.

That monster had Deirdre when I danced that night.
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Eileen opened her eyes. She tried to sing again, but the words didn’t come. She’d hoped singing and sweating and praying would finally chase away the demons that had been crawling over her since Keira’s visit. Her distress wasn’t Keira’s fault—none of it was her fault. How could it be, when she didn’t even know about Deirdre?
I should have told Keira about her.
About Deirdre’s awful death, yes, but, even more so, about her life.

“You’ll go to Ireland and have adventures. Oh, Eileen! I
know you’ll have the adventures of your life there.You’ll have
to tell me everything when you get home.”
They’d laughed and planned some of the adventures Eileen would have—seeing the Cliffs of Mohr, kissing the Blarney Stone, finding long-lost cousins. Tracking down the village where Patsy McCarthy’s story of the three brothers and the stone angel was to be Eileen’s biggest adventure.

“You have to go alone. You know you do, Eileen. You’ll
never find the hermit monk’s ruin if you don’t. That’ll be
half the fun of it, going alone will. You can feel it’s the thing
to do, can’t you?”

Deirdre had always had a gift of knowing. Not true prophecy in the way Eileen had been taught its meaning, but simply of knowing—of understanding people, opening herself to see into their hearts. Her intuition in those weeks before Eileen had left for Ireland had been keen, unrelenting.

“If something happens to me while you’re in Ireland,
promise me you won’t regret a thing. Please, Eileen.
Promise me.”

Eileen blinked back tears, remembering how she’d refused that one request on the grounds that such a promise would somehow jinx Deirdre. In the years since her death, Eileen had come to see that Deirdre hadn’t had a premo

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nition about her imminent murder. She hadn’t known she was being stalked. It was just Deirdre being Deirdre—she was a nurse’s aide, and she’d lost her father as a teenager, knew her mother had lost a sister young. Every day was to be treasured.

She also had known Eileen, how hard she could be on herself—how undeserving she often felt. That was
her
nature, and Deirdre, with her uncanny ability to look into people’s hearts, had only wanted her friend to have a good time in Ireland. To trust herself to let go and come home with no regrets.

What had Deirdre seen when she’d looked into her killer’s heart?

“Stuart Fuller.”

Eileen spoke his name aloud to remind herself of his humanity. A supernatural creature hadn’t murdered Deirdre. A man had made the deliberate choice to stalk her, kidnap her, torture, rape and kill her.

Tears spilling down her cheeks, Eileen set the log on her woodpile. She needed to get back to work on the illumi

nated manuscript. She’d decided to shift to another, happier passage and leave aside serpents for the moment. For most of the past week, she’d been preoccupied with finding the perfect one to illustrate the Fall of Adam and Eve.
No wonder I keep thinking about demons.
Eileen brushed her tears with her sleeve. Seeing an ordinary snake curled up on a sunny rock that morning had helped perk her up. It was a part of the natural order of life out on her wooded hillside.