Carla Neggers - Harbor Island

She stepped over broken beer bottles next to a fire circle piled with charred logs and came to the white cottage, its sagging porch no more than six inches off the sand. Its front door was ajar, but sand that had blown onto the worn floorboards of the porch appeared to be undisturbed.

“Rachel Bristol? It’s Emma Sharpe.”

A seagull cried behind her, and a breeze stirred in the snarl of bare brush between the white cottage and the ones on either side of it. As she stepped onto the porch, she noticed a red smear and splatters, wet, oozing into the peeling gray paint and cracks of the floorboards to the left of the front door.

Blood.

And pale, slender fingers—a woman’s hand, limp and unmoving, on the edge of the porch.

Emma pulled back her jacket and placed a hand on the butt of her nine-millimeter. As she drew her weapon and moved to her left, she saw a woman sprawled on her back in the grass and sand next to the cottage, her left hand flopped onto the porch floor.

Emma responded instantly, leaping off the side of the porch, squatting next to the woman. There was more blood. A lot of it, seeping into the sand, soaking the woman’s sweater. Emma checked for a pulse but already knew there was nothing anyone could do. The woman was dead.

Rachel Bristol? Or someone else? Someone her caller had wanted Emma to find?

The dead woman had short, spiked, white-blond hair and wore black toothpick jeans, an unzipped black wool jacket and a light blue sweater, the chest area now red with blood. Her black flats and thin black socks were muddy, unsuited to the conditions on the island.

Emma took a closer look at the wound.

Not a knife wound. Not a wound from an unfortunate fall onto a sharp object. It was, without a doubt, a gunshot wound.

Emma quickly stepped behind a clump of scrawny gray birches, but an active shooter who wanted to target her could have done so by now. She dug out her cell phone and dialed 911, identifying herself as an FBI agent. She related the situation as succinctly as possible. The dispatcher offered to stay on the line with her. She declined.

She disconnected and called Colin. “The woman who wanted to meet me. She’s dead, Colin.”

“Where are you?”

“I told you. Bristol Island.” But she realized what he meant. “I took cover. I’m safe. I’ve never seen this woman before. I’m sure I’d remember. If it’s the same woman who called me, her name is Rachel Bristol. At least that’s what she said her name was.”

“We’ll figure that out later. You’re alone out there. No one else is in danger. Right now, your only job is to stay safe. That’s it, Emma. Nothing else.”

That would be the case for anyone in her situation. She knew that. “I’m in a good spot.”

“I’m on my way,” Colin said. “I’ll stay on the phone with you until the police get there.”

She heard the gulls, their cries sharper, louder, as if they sensed the tragedy that had unfolded up by the white cottage. She leaned forward, without exposing herself as a target, and peered down at the dead woman, seeing now that her right arm was flopped at her side with the palm up.

Emma edged a bit closer, noticing something in the woman’s palm.

A small, black stone, polished smooth.

There was some kind of etching that she couldn’t make out—but she didn’t need to. The stone would be inscribed with a simple Celtic cross and a sketch of Saint Declan, an early medieval Irish saint.

The cross was the signature of an international art thief who had first surfaced ten years ago in the tiny village of Declan’s Cross on the south Irish coast.

Her thief, as Yank had put it.

Eight times over the past decade, the thief had laid claim to a recent art heist by sending a small cross-inscribed stone to Wendell Sharpe, Emma’s grandfather. Then last week, that pattern changed. Out of the blue—unrelated to any recent art theft—she and her grandfather had both received cross-inscribed stones in Ireland. So had her brother in Maine, and Matt Yankowski, her boss, in Boston.

“Emma?”

The sound of Colin’s deep, intense voice brought her out of her thoughts. “I’m here.”

“You’re sitting tight, right?”

She heard the urgency in his voice—the fear for her safety—and tried to reassure him. “I am.” She ducked back within the branches of the birches. “I’m the patient one, remember?”

* * *

By the time the Boston homicide detectives finished up with Emma, the rest of the HIT team had gathered at their waterfront offices. She and Colin were in her car, on their way. He’d taken a cab to Bristol Island and flashed his credentials at the police officers securing the scene, and that was that. No one had stopped him. When he and Emma walked back to the marina, he’d had her toss him her keys. She hadn’t argued. She ached from tension, jet lag, her run—from the searing reality that she had come upon a woman who had just been shot to death.

“You didn’t charm the detectives,” Colin said when they were almost to HIT’s building. “I thought you might.”

“I’m not in a charming mood.”

“As in a mood to charm or a mood that charms?”

“Both. Either.”

“I never charm anyone.”

He’d conducted more than a few death investigations during his three years with the Maine marine patrol. She didn’t have that experience. Didn’t want it. But she knew what to do in an active shooter situation, and she’d done it.

“You’re right, though,” she said. “The detectives aren’t happy with me.”

“Can’t blame them. A woman shot as she’s about to meet an FBI agent about an international art thief they didn’t know about. An FBI agent with a unit based in their city they didn’t know about.”

Emma sank into the passenger seat of her small car. “I told them HIT is discreet, not secret. I was being honest, but they took it wrong—said I was being cheeky.”

Colin glanced over at her. “Did they really say cheeky?”

“Maybe they just rolled their eyes.”

The police had cordoned off the small island while they searched for evidence, but there were no additional victims and no signs yet of the shooter, who could have exited the scene by boat, on foot or by car, truck, van or—as one of the detectives had put it—stork. Emma had nothing concrete to offer beyond a description of the call and her reasons for going to the island. She had stuck to the broad brushstrokes of her history with the thief. Details could wait for more information on the dead woman.

She glanced out the passenger window at the harbor, eerily still under the clear sky. “We don’t know if the dead woman is Rachel Bristol or if either one—the dead woman or Rachel Bristol—is the one who called me.”

“Odds are, Emma.”

She nodded, turning back to him. “Yes. Odds are.”

“She had a stone cross on her exactly like the crosses your thief has sent to your grandfather after every theft for the past ten years. Add in the crosses sent to you, Lucas and Yank last week, and I don’t blame the Boston homicide detectives for being pissed that we didn’t bring them up to speed on this thief. I told them to calm down but they have a point.”

“None of the thefts occurred in Boston,” Emma said. “We can’t get tunnel vision. That won’t help.”

“We also have to look at the evidence right in front of us.”

She took a quick breath as she pictured the woman’s face. Her dead eyes. The stone cross in her palm. “I’ve heard of suicidal people manipulating someone to find their body, but that’s not what happened here. This wasn’t a suicide. I didn’t see a weapon, and the police haven’t found one, at least not yet.”

“She wasn’t shot by aliens, either.”