Keeper's Reach. Carla Neggers
After a quiet winter fitting himself into HIT, Colin had been summoned to FBI headquarters in Washington in late January. He’d returned several times the past month, so far managing to fly back to Boston for weekends.
Wedding or no wedding, he had a job to do.
And so do I, Emma thought, reading Oliver’s text again. Wealthy, solitary and very smart, he might be a man haunted by his past, but he was firmly anchored in the present. It helped, no doubt, that he didn’t fear arrest, by the FBI, Scotland Yard or any of the law enforcement agencies in the other countries where he had helped himself to valuable art over the past decade.
Oliver York was, in a word, untouchable.
* * *
When she reached her tiny apartment, Emma heaped her coat, hat and gloves on a chair and kicked off her boots. She sat on her couch in the living room and dialed up Oliver York on her laptop on her coffee table.
“Sorry I’m late,” she said.
Oliver peered at her from across the Atlantic. A thick, dark blond curl flopped onto his forehead as he leaned closer to his screen. “What happened to your hair, Emma?”
“Hat head.” She had no intention of telling him about trying on wedding dresses.
“It’s cold in Boston?”
“Yes. Where are you?”
“My London flat.”
It was a room she didn’t recognize from her one visit last November to his sprawling Mayfair apartment overlooking St. James’s Park. Colin and Yank had accompanied her. Oliver had met them in the library, where his parents had been murdered almost thirty years ago. Now he sat in a tall-backed red-leather chair in front of a draped window and a painting of porpoises in Ardmore Bay on the south Irish coast. Emma knew the painting, an early work by well-known Irish artist Aoife O’Byrne.
“A video chat is more intimate than a phone call, at least. How are you, Emma? It is all right if I call you Emma, isn’t it? It’s more informal than Special Agent Sharpe, but this is an official chat, I assume?”
“I’m an FBI agent. You’re a thief. Yes, it’s an official chat. But Emma is fine.”
He pointed at her. “You’re testier than when I saw you here in November.”
That was when she had figured out that Oliver Fairbairn, a tweedy British mythologist caught in the middle of a murder investigation in Boston, was also Oliver York, a cheeky, wealthy British aristocrat with a tragic past. That Oliver Fairbairn and Oliver York were one and the same wasn’t widely known. He preferred to keep the two identities separate, and Emma had no reason to announce it to the world. In fact, the opposite.
“Tell me about this FBI agent you believe is following you.”
He gave an audible sigh. “Testy. Definitely testy.”
She tried to resist a smile.
“I have reliable radar for FBI agents, and it went off like crazy when I spotted this man. He was in the park outside my apartment. I had just returned from an art gallery. I wouldn’t be surprised if he followed me.”
“Was this today?”
“Around noon, yes.”
“Is the gallery the one holding the show for Aoife O’Byrne?”
“Mmm.”
The Irish O’Byrne family was one of Oliver’s victims—his first, ten years ago. He had made off with two Jack Butler Yeats landscape paintings of western Ireland, a fifteenth-century silver wall cross depicting Saint Declan and an unsigned landscape of a local scene, probably by a young Aoife O’Byrne herself. Her Yeats phase, Oliver called it. The porpoises had come after that, as well as a few crosses of her own, but she was known now for her moody seascapes.
At least Oliver had bought the porpoise painting instead of stealing it.
“What’s the name of this agent you ran into in the park?” Emma asked.
Oliver looked surprised. “I only saw him. I didn’t speak with him.”
“How do you know he’s an FBI agent if you didn’t speak with him?”
“The suit. The look. He’s one of yours. I’ve no doubt.”
“Did you take his picture?”
He sniffed. “Of course not. I’m a mild-mannered mythologist, not Scotland Yard or MI6. This man is tall, lean, medium coloring, perhaps early forties—but that describes a lot of your colleagues, doesn’t it? Not you, of course.”
“Of course.”
Oliver sat back, amusement lighting up his face. He was good-looking and surprisingly affable for a man so solitary, so haunted by his past. “I’m many things, Emma, but paranoid isn’t one of them. I’m convinced this man is one of yours. Consider yourself alerted.”
“Fair enough. Anything else?”
“I’ve sent you a package. Martin has, actually.”
On her November trip to London, Emma had also met Martin Hambly, Oliver’s longtime personal assistant. It was unclear to her whether Martin was aware of his boss’s alter ego as an art thief. “What’s in the package, Oliver?”
“A present for you. A surprise. You’ll love it. I packed it myself when I was at the farm over the weekend. I returned to London on Monday. Then today...” He grimaced. “Today, I saw the FBI outside my apartment.”
“Where did you send the package?”
“I addressed it to you at Father Bracken’s rectory in Rock Point. I thought that would be simpler, but, as luck would have it, our Irish priest friend is here in London.”
Emma frowned at that bit of news. “I thought he was in Ireland visiting his family.”
“He joined his brother on a business trip on behalf of Bracken Distillers. I ran into Finian at the gallery. He, Declan and I are all about to have a drink together. Declan has to return to Ireland tomorrow, but I plan to invite Father Bracken to the family farm in the Cotswolds.”
“I wish you wouldn’t do that, Oliver.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’re a thief and Father Bracken is a friend of mine.”
“That’s plain enough.” Oliver paused. “How is your family, Emma? Everyone’s well?”
“Doing fine, thank you.”
“Did your grandfather come home to Heron’s Cove for Christmas?”
“You know he didn’t. You two rang in the New Year together at Claridge’s.”
“Ah, so Wendell did tell you. I wasn’t sure he would. He told me he’d expected to fly home to Maine for Christmas, but he didn’t feel comfortable going so far with your parents here in London. The experimental procedure to help relieve your father’s chronic back pain went well, but it’s taken some time to recover.”
Emma made no comment. She wasn’t discussing her family with Oliver York.
“Chronic pain takes a toll,” he added.
“Yes, it does,” Emma said. Although there was a psychological component to her father’s physical pain given its impact on his life, it was different from the chronic psychological pain Oliver York endured. She was convinced he’d turned to planning and executing solitary, daring art heists to provide relief. It must have worked, at least temporarily, since he’d been at it for a decade. Of course, catching him sooner would have put a stop to it.
“I gather you and my grandfather are on a first-name basis now,” she said.
“I haven’t seen him since New Year’s. He came out to the farm for a couple of days,