The Mist (19 page)

"We're both on edge," Bob said with some sympathy. "Can Davenport find Abigail?"

"He'll do what he can to help. For her sake, and for Simon's."

"Not for yours," Bob said.

The FBI director kept his gaze steady. "No. I suspect he believes I withheld--personally withheld--information that ended in tragedy for his men."

"What do you believe about him?"

"The same."

"The other Brit?"

"I don't know who he is."

"Cagey answer, John. The fine print reads: you don't know but you have an idea."

"My speculation won't help you."

March abandoned the armor and walked over to a wall of books. Several were collections of Robert Frost poetry. Bob
noticed that the FBI director's suit was expensive and neatly pressed, but the man inside it seemed to shrink into its folds.

"There are days I wish I'd become a poet," March said, turning away from the shelves. "You, Bob?"

"Nope. I like being a cop and asking tough questions. What do you know about Lizzie Rush?"

"We're putting the entire Rush family under FBI protection."

It was an indirect answer, yet filled with meaning. Bob saw it now. "How long has she been an informant for you?"

"I didn't know it was her until today."

"Because you didn't want to know. How long?"

"A year."

Bob gave a low whistle. "Anonymous?"

"She's good, and she didn't want to be found out. She created a story...persuaded me that pursuing her identity would put her at increased risk. Her help was critical but not asked for."

"Regular?"

"Intermittent. I thought she was a professional."

"Just not one of yours."

"I doubt we'd know about her now if she hadn't interceded with Keira and warned you yesterday."

"Abigail checked into Estabrook's Boston connections. She didn't like his threat against you and Simon." And Simon's relationship with her father had thrown her for a loop, even if she was trying to be big about it. Bob wasn't going there. March knew. "Lizzie Rush isn't here."

"I don't know where she went. She called me after she and your daughter--"

"Did you ask her where she was going, what her plan was?" Bob sighed, knowing the answer. "You people give me a headache. I'm going to find your daughter, John. I want to know why that thug
who's now dead up on Beacon Street grabbed her instead of letting her get blown up. If your relationship with the Rush family has anything to do with what's going on, you need to tell me about it."

March ignored him. "Keep me informed."

"Go back to Washington. Stay out of my investigation."

"Get some rest, Bob. Where did you sleep last night?"

"Keira's apartment."

"Have you heard from her?"

"Yeah, sure. A little Irish fairy flew in my window last night and whispered in my ear."

March didn't so much as crack a smile.

Bob pointed a finger at him. "You keep too many secrets."

"Part of the job."

"Not all of them."

Bob kissed Fiona goodbye and left the Whitcomb as Theresa was arriving. She refused even to look at him, but he didn't care. She and the girls--all three daughters--were going back to her house in Lexington and staying there, under police protection, until they all had a better fix on what was going on. The rest didn't matter. Let Theresa blame him.

He helped himself to a handful of smoke-flavored nuts on his way out and went back to the hospital. Alone. No detail. No Yarborough with the suspicious looks.

Scoop still had his morphine clicker, but he seemed more alert.

"Your black-haired woman is named Lizzie Rush," Bob said. "While you were pulling weeds and talking compost, did Abigail mention her?"

Scoop thought a moment. "No."

"Fiona tell you about playing Irish music at the Rush hotel on Charles--the Whitcomb, Morrigan's Bar?"

"Yeah. Never occurred to me it was dangerous."

"No reason it should have. Why didn't I know? I could have gone to hear them play. I'm busy, but I'm not a total jerk. I like to keep track of what my kids are doing. Support them."

Scoop's puffy eyes narrowed. "You okay, Bob?"

"Yeah, sure. I just need to do something about my life. Same old, same old. Nothing to worry about. You just focus on getting better."

But Scoop was tuned in to people, and he said, "Fiona didn't mean to leave you out. She says she normally doesn't like family in the audience."

"Scoop, forget it. It's okay." Bob felt lousy for letting a guy in stitches, on morphine, see him crack, even a little. "Did Abigail say anything to you about Fiona, Morrigan's, the Rushes?"

"Not a word. Does she know, even? Fiona tells me things she doesn't tell you two."

"No kidding. Yeah, she knows."

"Abigail was onto something and not talking."

Bob grunted. "What else is new?"

"I can tell...Bob. Hell. What's going on?" Scoop shifted position, which seemed to be a major effort. "Let me out of here."

"The doctors'll spring you as soon as you can walk without spilling blood all over the floor. Until then--"

But Scoop had already drifted off. Bob sat there, watching him sleep. He was used to bouncing ideas off Scoop and Abigail, and now he didn't have either one of them.

Before he could get too pathetic, he drove to BPD headquarters in Roxbury. He'd pull himself together and work the investigations, see what his detectives had on Abigail, the bombs, the dead guy. The task force was set up in a conference room, with maps, computers, charts, timelines.

Nobody talked to him. He must have had that look.

He got Tom Yarborough over in a corner next to a table of stale coffee. "Don't start on me," Bob said. "Just listen. I need you to work on Norman Estabrook's Boston connections."

"The Rush family?"

Bob sighed. The guy was always a step ahead. "You've already started?"

"Just a toe in the water. I wonder what'd happen if we typed Harlan Rush into the system. He's Lizzie Rush's father. He's a reprobate gambler in Las Vegas--except when he's not."

"Think the feds would storm the building if we get too close to him?"

"Maybe not the FBI."

CIA. Terrific. More Washington types meddling in his investigation. "We'd get a visit by humorless spooks with big nasty handcuffs?"

"Cop or no cop, Lieutenant, I don't want to piss off this guy. Harlan Rush is a player. He's still in the game."

Harlan's daughter, Lizzie, was obviously a chip off the old block. "You've talked to him," Bob said.

Yarborough nodded.

"Good work."

"I'm not sure it gets us any closer to Abigail."

Near Kennebunkport, Maine
8:19 p.m., EDT
August 26

L
izzie took the stairs up to the wraparound deck of her small house built on the rocks near the mouth of the Kennebec River. The tide was going out, pleasure craft and working boats still making their way to the harbor. She let herself into her house--one main room with very little separation of space--and opened up the windows and doors, the evening breeze pouring in through the screens. She walked out to the deck and shut her eyes, listening to the sounds of the boats and the ocean at dusk.

The rambling house her grandfather Rush had built was two hundred yards up the rockbound shore. After an architect friend had walked through it with her, he'd sent her a book of matches in lieu of a plan for renovations. Lizzie loved Maine, but her father avoided it, just as he did Dublin and, to a lesser extent,
Boston. "The water's always too cold," he'd say. But memories haunted him here, too. Nostalgia not just for what had been but what might have been.

Lizzie was ten when she'd first fantasized her father was a spy and fifteen when she knew he was one. He always deflected her questions without giving a direct answer, even as he taught her how to defend herself, how to spot a tail, shake a tail, do a dead drop--how to
think
in such terms.

Only when she went to Ireland herself was Lizzie certain that her mother hadn't tripped on a cobblestone after all, and the circumstances of her death--his inability to stop it--were why her father had taught her how to jab her fingers into a man's throat. "Don't be bound by dogma," he'd say. "Never mind niceties or rules when you're in a fight for your life. Trust your instincts. Do what you have to do to get out alive."

Lizzie opened her eyes, noticing a cormorant swooping low over the calm water. Her grandmother, famous for her frugality, had spent as much time as she could in Maine during her last years. She liked her crumbling house the way it was, liked the memories it conjured up for her.

"Sitting here by myself, the memories are like a warm, fuzzy blanket," she'd told her only granddaughter. But that was a rare display of sentimentality for Edna Whitcomb Rush, and in the next breath, she'd said, "Tear this place down when I'm gone. It's the location I love."

Lizzie had smiled. "It's magical."

"Ah, you have your mother's romantic soul."

"Do you believe she tripped on a cobblestone, Gran?"

It was a question Lizzie had asked before, but her grandmother only answered it then, at the very end of her long, good life. "I'll ask her when I see her in heaven, Lizzie, but no. No, I never
believed your mother simply tripped and fell. But," her grandmother had continued, some of her old starch coming back into her voice, "I do believe that whatever happened to her, justice was rendered. Your father would have seen to that."

"What was she like?"

"She was very much like you, Lizzie."

The sound of a car pulled her out of her thoughts and drew her attention to the gravel driveway down to her left. She walked to the railing and leaned over as a familiar sedan pulled to a stop behind the one she'd borrowed from Martha Prescott.

Jeremiah's car.

Jeremiah who now owed her, Lizzie thought as she watched Will Davenport get out on the driver's side and look at the darkening horizon. She waited, but no one else appeared.

At least he'd come alone.

She remained on the deck, listening to his even footsteps on the stairs. When he came around to her, she put both hands on the back of an old Adirondack chair she'd collected from her grandmother's house farther up the rocks. "You got here even faster than I anticipated."

"Does that surprise you?"

"No. Not even a little." It was true, she realized. "You're more rugged looking up close. I can picture you humping over remote mountains with a heavy pack and a big gun."

He smiled, walking toward her. "I see your imagination and flare for dramatics are at work again."

"Ha. SAS and MI6 equal heavy pack and big gun." She frowned. "Jeremiah told you where to find me? I have blabbermouth cousins."

"Who adore you and whom you adore in return."

"Serves me right for using them to run interference."

But she saw the strain of the past day at the corners of his eyes as he squinted out at the Atlantic, seagulls crying in the distance, out of sight. "Is this your place, or does it belong to your family?"

"It's mine. My great-grandfather Rush was a Maine fisherman. His son did well and married a Whitcomb from Boston, and he came back here and built a big--but not
too
big--house. I own it, too. No one else in the family wanted it after my grandmother died two years ago."

Will turned and leaned against the railing, his back to the ocean, the evening breeze catching the ends of his hair. His eyes were more blue-green now, dark, observant. "Maybe they wanted you to have it."

Lizzie dropped her hands from the chair and stood next to him on the railing, facing the water. "I hadn't thought of it that way. My family--I love them all, Will." She watched a worn lobster boat cruise toward the river harbor. "My parents planned to raise me here. Then my mother died, and my father--well, things changed."

"Things always change."

She glanced sideways at him. "How much do you know about me?"

That slight smile again. "Not nearly enough."

She hadn't expected the spark of sexuality in his eyes, but it was there. And it pleased her even as it unnerved her. "I looked up your family in
Burke's Peerage and Gentry.
"

"You were in London in July," he said.

"Josie's been busy following my trail?"

"Very. I spoke to her on my drive up here."

"I imagine the FBI will want to talk to her."

"I gave them her number."

"Supposedly you were in Scotland fishing when I was in
London. I was careful to stay off any spy radar. I met people at a hotel bar where you and Simon often meet for a drink, and I walked past your sister's wedding dress shop. I never saw her--I wouldn't do that." Lizzie shrugged, stood back from the deck railing. "I was just the hotelier on a London holiday."

"I never knew," Will said.

"That was the idea. I didn't get close enough for you to find out."

"You should have."

Lizzie turned and faced him. "Maybe you should go back to Boston and join forces with Simon and the rest of the FBI, do what you can from there to find Myles Fletcher."

"It's Abigail Browning we need to find. Myles isn't important compared to her safety."

"Will...this place is my refuge. I've never..." She paused, tried to smile. "I've had my cousins over for lobster rolls, but otherwise this is where I come to be alone."

"I get your meaning, Lizzie. I'm invading your space."

"'Invading' is too strong. I had ants once. Now, that was an invasion--"

He touched a finger to the corner of her mouth. "I can see you battling ants." He trailed his fingertip across her lower lip. "Are you all right, Lizzie?" he asked softly.

"Sure. Yes." Her heartbeat quickened, but she tried to ignore its meaning. That she was reacting to this man. That she'd lost all objectivity with him. "I'm not the one lying dead in an alley or recovering from shrapnel wounds or--" But she squeezed her eyes shut at sudden images of where Norman could have Abigail Browning, what he could be doing to her. She tried to block them as she opened her eyes. "I don't want him to hurt her."

Will tucked his fingers under her chin and raised it so that she was meeting his eye. "Whatever happens won't be your doing.
Guilt gets us nowhere." He lowered his mouth to hers and kissed her softly. "I've been thinking about doing that for some time now."

Lizzie smiled. "Long plane ride across the Atlantic."

"I started wondering what it would be like to kiss you when you pretended not to recognize my name at Eddie O'Shea's pub. When I saw you take on Michael Murphy--" Will kissed her again "--I knew it would be only a matter of time."

"Very bold of you."

This time, their kiss took on an urgency, nothing soft or tentative about it. She responded, putting a hand on his arm to steady herself. She was tired and raw emotionally, and all she wanted to do was to feel his arms around her, his mouth on hers.

"Kissing you is everything I imagined it would be," he said.

"I hope what you imagined was good."

He laughed. "Very good, just not sufficient." His eyes sparked as he stood back from her. "I want more than a kiss."

"Will--"

"Also only a matter of time, wouldn't you say, Lizzie?"

She hoped so. Every nerve ending she had wanted it to be so. But she said lightly, "You are very bold, indeed, Lord Davenport."

"A point to remember."

He turned to face the ocean, and Lizzie shook off the aftereffects of their kiss as best she could and reminded herself who was standing next to her. What did she know about this man and why was he really here? "Maybe being attracted to each other is inevitable after all the adrenaline of the past twenty-four hours. Heightened senses and all that."

Will seemed amused. "I was attracted to you before the adrenaline set in."

Now she felt warm. She looked out at the water. Lights were coming on at the inns and houses down toward the river.

"Does Estabrook know about this place?" Will asked, back to business.

"Yes."

"You think he'll come here."

"I think he knows
I'll
come here."

"Lizzie, you can't deal with Norman Estabrook on your own any longer. No one would ask that of you."

"What if I told you he kidnapped Abigail because of me? What would you say then?" She narrowed her gaze on him. "What would you ask me to do?"

He didn't hesitate. "The same. You're not a criminal, nor are you a law enforcement officer."

"Did John March tell you to keep an eye on me?"

His expression darkened slightly. "I don't work for March."

"Did the queen tell you? Your friend the prime minister?" Lizzie didn't wait for an answer. "You're after Myles Fletcher."

"I'm here because I want to help you."

She noticed the air was cool, almost chilly, with nightfall. Maine's too-short summer was coming to an end. "Thank you."

Will said nothing.

"I kayaked out here with Norman last summer. If only..."

"It's too easy to lose ourselves in regrets," Will said. "And not helpful."

"Maybe a drug cartel hired your friend Fletcher to deal with Norman--crash his plane, manipulate him, drag him out and shoot him. Whatever. Maybe yesterday and today weren't Norman's doing. If that's the case, we're clueless about who really does have Abigail." Lizzie watched seagulls perch on the tumble of barnacle-covered rocks below the tideline. She shook off any doubt. "No. It's Norman."

"You've become accustomed to keeping secrets. Not telling
anyone what you know. Not trusting anyone." Will eased his arms around her, locking his eyes with hers. "You're not alone, Lizzie."

She smiled at him before there was no turning back. "Fat chance of that with the feds, BPD and MI6 after me." She gave him a quick kiss. "Come on. I can at least make you dinner," she said, yanking open a screen door, and he followed her into her little house. He seemed as comfortable there as he probably did in London, Scotland, the home of his father, the marquess, or wherever else he happened to be at a given moment.

He walked over to a wall covered with family photographs she'd framed herself. "How did you get involved with Estabrook in the first place?" he asked, his back to her. "His other friends didn't know he had criminal dealings. Why did you?"

"Curiosity," she said, pulling open the refrigerator and frowning at the sparse contents. "For once I was responsible and tossed everything before I left. I don't even have a pint of wild blueberries to offer you."

"When were you here last?"

"A couple weeks ago. I don't need to be in an office every day. I did a little poking around--my trip to London, for example--but I figured I'd keep a low profile until Norman was tried and convicted. Once I realized he was about to make a deal..." She opened a cupboard, sighing as she glanced back at Will. "I have steel-cut oats, a couple of cans of kidney beans and salsa. Cooking's not exactly my long suit."

He pointed to the top photograph on the wall display and glanced back at her. "Your father?"

"Can you recognize a kindred spy soul?" She shut the cupboard and tried another. "Unopened spices and boxes of cornstarch aren't very helpful, now, are they? How do you suppose I ended up with two boxes of cornstarch?"

"One does," Will said with a smile, leaving the photos and taking a seat on a bar stool.

Lizzie shut that cupboard, too. "For a long time I didn't know who was good, bad, possible law enforcement, or if I was completely off base about Norman. But March stayed in touch. That was a clue. I didn't take crazy risks. I met a half dozen of Norman's drug-cartel friends, at least that I'm aware of...sexy, macho guys who like high living and adventures and are very, very violent. They prey on other people's weaknesses for their own pleasure and profit."

"When did you first run into them?"

"At a resort in Costa Rica. I took their pictures and e-mailed them to the FBI."

"To John March, you mean."

"Yes." She looked at Will and felt a rush of relief that she'd made the admission, even if he already knew and didn't need her confirmation. "For personal reasons. But we've never met. I've only seen him from a distance." It was the truth, if also a dodge. "I understand money, but I'm not in Norman's league. I latched onto bits and pieces of what he was up to."

"Did you tip off March in the first place?"

She shook her head, abandoning her efforts to muster together a dinner for two. "I wondered that myself, but no. He was already onto Norman. Simon took the big risks and got the most damning information against him. I did what I could to point whatever investigation might be going on in the right direction."

"Norman trusted both you and Simon," Will said.