Carla Neggers - The Whisper

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 woodwork 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.

"Backup's on the way," Scoop said as he disconnected.

She stepped back into the kitchen. She was shaking now. She tried to stop but bit her lip, drawing blood. Rafferty's body was just out of view in the dining room. She controlled her emotion and said quietly, "He didn't kill himself."

"Why do you say that?"

She faced Scoop, his expression unchanged, nothing about him suggesting he was affected by the past few minutes--by the terrible death of a fellow police officer. "The pagan Celtic practices reenacted in the dining room and living room suggest ritual sacrifice, not suicide." She crossed her arms on her chest, trying to keep herself from shivering. She wasn't cold. In fact, quite the opposite. It was warm in the apartment. She saw that no windows were open. Had the killer shut them before setting to work? "Before you ask, no, I don't know anything for certain. This isn't an archaeological site. It's..." She didn't finish.

"Sophie, easy--you okay?"

"I didn't expect this."

"Try to remember everything Cliff said to you. Don't try to draw conclusions on your own. Just remember."

She forced herself to remain steady on her feet and focused on Scoop, his jaw set hard, nothing about him even close to relaxed. He was intense but under control. "I assume you saw the bomb-making materials on the coffee table," she said. "What if Rafferty asked me here to confess his involvement with the bomb at your house?"

"Trust me, Sophie. It won't help to speculate."

"Maybe his guilt was weighing on him, and he arranged a suicide that made sense to him." She felt a sting of pain on her mouth and realized she'd bit her lip. "Except I don't believe that, based on what I see and what he told me. He said he wanted my opinion on something."

"Something to do with archaeology or with the Carlisles?"

"I don't know. He wouldn't say. The glass beads, the skulls, the pot filled with smashed parts of a gun--the hanging itself--all could fit into some garbled, twisted notion of pagan Celtic rituals. I'm not talking about modern paganism--"

"It's okay, Sophie. This scene means whatever the person who arranged it wanted it to mean, whether it was Cliff or someone else."

Her gaze rested on toast crumbs on a plate in the stainless steel sink.

Scoop touched her arm. "Don't try to make sense of things right now. You're an archaeologist. You're used to looking at evidence. You know how to be objective. You know you can't just assume a piece of glass you find in the dirt is some ancient artifact. It could be part of a beer bottle some drunk tossed."

"I get your point." She pulled her gaze from the sink. "You're right. I shouldn't let myself be driven by assumptions and get tunnel vision. Do I stay here or--"

She broke off, suddenly overwhelmed by the stifling heat in the apartment, by the proximity of death.

She was gone, running out the back door, down the balcony steps. She didn't breathe until she was out on the street, just as she heard sirens and the first cruiser arrived.

10

Kenmare, Southwest Ireland

Josie paused to admire the view of Kenmare Bay from the front steps of the Malones' Irish holiday house and found herself yearning for a few weeks on her own, with nothing more pressing to think about than whether to spend the afternoon on a long walk in the hills or curled up with a book.

She'd missed Antonia and James Malone and Sophie's twin sister, Taryn.

Not a total waste of a trip, Josie thought, but it was close.

Keira and Lizzie had finally caught up with Colm Dermott in Dublin that morning. He'd told them he'd talked to Sophie recently. They'd discussed the panel she was doing at the folklore conference and a bit about the violence that had touched Keira and Lizzie--even him--over the summer. He hadn't taken Sophie's interest as anything but natural curiosity and her role as an archaeologist.