Saint's Gate

by Carla Neggers

  “Are you sure about that?” Yank’s expression was difficult to read in the fading light. “Don’t beat yourself up. Sister Joan would have had you escort her to this tower if she’d thought she was in danger. Whatever she was worried about, it wasn’t getting attacked in her own convent.”

  “It took me too long to get over that fence.”

  “You’re an art detective and analyst. You’re not supposed to be kick-ass.” There wasn’t even a hint of criticism in his tone. “You did what any of us kick-ass types would have done, except I’d have bitched and moaned climbing over that fence. Did it have spikes?”

  Emma managed a smile. “No spikes.”

  She followed Yank down the porch steps to the yard. He stood a moment in the light breeze. “What do you do, sit out here with your morning coffee and watch the boats?”

  “Sometimes.”

  He glanced at her. “What’s on your mind, Agent Sharpe?”

  She didn’t meet his eye, picturing instead the gentle, terrified novice in the fog earlier that day. “Sister Cecilia knows something that she’s not saying.”

  “The CID guys think she’s just scared.”

  Emma shook her head. “It’s more than that.”

  “Can you get it out of her?”

  She didn’t answer right away. “Maybe. I can try.”

  “Does she know you used to be a nun?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Right.” Yank buttoned his suit coat against the cold evening air. “That nun business was a whim. You’d have figured it out. I just figured it out before you did and helped you see the light.”

  A whim.

  Emma noticed her lobsterman was still on his boat, cleaning traps, puttering. She understood the appeal of hanging out on the docks. She could sit on the porch for hours, painting, reading, watching the tide, the people, the boats.

  “You have your work cut out for you the next few days,” Yank said. “You might not pick a lot of apples.”

  “I’ll talk to Sister Cecilia in the morning. Are you going straight back to Boston?”

  He nodded toward the water. “After I take a stroll on the docks and look at the boats.”

  6

  COLIN USED A WIRE BRUSH TO SCRAPE EMBEDDED gunk off a lobster trap, figuring he had another fifteen seconds before Matt Yankowski wandered onto the dock. Yank was up on the retaining wall now, acting as if he’d just spotted an interesting bird.

  Emma Sharpe had gone inside and turned on lights in the back windows. She was something of a surprise. Honey-colored hair, leather jacket and boots.

  Not bad.

  Heron’s Cove was quintessential coastal southern Maine with its mix of historic houses, oceanfront mansions, shops and restaurants. It had two short stretches of sandy beach, marshes, rock-strewn coastline and the tidal Heron River.

  No Hurley’s, though, and no Donovans.

  Yank walked onto the wooden dock, tentatively, as if it might suddenly collapse and cast him into shark-infested waters. He’d faced down violent criminals and fanatical terrorists, but he didn’t like much that had to do with boats.

  Colin shook his wire brush off in the water. Nothing on it hadn’t come from the river and ocean in the first place. “Agent Sharpe must be trouble for you to trek up here and pay her a personal visit.”

  “I thought you were dead,” Yank said.

  “No, you didn’t. You know you’d have heard.”

  The unrelenting gaze fastened on Colin. “You don’t change, Donovan. When did you get to Maine?”

  “Sunday. One day of yard work. Five days kayaking. A week up north in the wilderness. That was the plan. Today was my fourth day kayaking, so the plan didn’t work out.”

  “You’re alone?”

  “I’m alone.” Colin flipped over the trap and started to remove the gunk encrusted on the bottom. “Emma Sharpe thinks I’m a lobsterman?”

  “For now.”

  “She doesn’t have my name from the Bulgov case?”

  “I didn’t tell her,” Yank said. “She knows she provided key information to an undercover agent to help in the arrest of Vladimir Bulgov, a Russian arms trafficker operating on U.S. soil. That’s all.”

  “Any connection between Vlad and what happened today?”

  “You tell me.” Yank shifted his gaze to the opposite bank of the tidal river, where a couple were throwing a ball for two chocolate Labs in front of a sprawling cedar-shingled house. “You dropped off the radar, Colin. You’ve been working without a net for the past three months.”

  “I had no choice. You know that. You let it happen. You wanted our Russian and you got him. You’re about results, Yank. You’re not about people.”

  “Who knows you’re in Maine?”

  “The director. My family and friends in Rock Point. Now you.”

  “You knew this was the Sharpe place,” Yank said.

  “That’s right. Makes sense. I’m from the area and the Sharpes are world-renowned art detectives.”

  “But you’ve never met Emma.”

  “I just saw her for the first time chatting with you. She’s better looking than I expected.”

  Yank wasn’t distracted. “What about her brother, parents, grandfather?”

  Colin shook his head. “I didn’t investigate art crimes when I was with the state marine patrol.”

  “Art crime is in the Sharpe DNA.” The senior FBI agent frowned at Colin. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Cleaning lobster traps.”

  “Think the lobsters care?”

  “An FBI agent who just found a dead nun is watching us, Yank. I’m trying to look natural.”

  Yank grimaced. “Do I want to know what’s stuck on those crates?”

  “Probably not.”

  “The CID guys say Emma was cool today. She made sure the rest of the nuns were safe, she provided details to the detectives—”

  “Who’re you trying to convince? She’s an FBI agent. She damn well should be able to handle herself in a tough situation. You’re not protective of her, are you?”

  Yank stepped back sharply, as if Colin had gut-punched him. “Hell, no. Whatever you’re thinking, you can stop right now. Emma’s a fully qualified agent. I’m no more or less protective of her than I am of any other agent.”

  Colin shrugged. “Okay.”

  “She doesn’t rattle easily.”

  Using the end of his brush, Colin hacked at a thick wedge of what he thought might be dried bait. He didn’t tell Yank. “She isn’t acting as if she’s worried she might be next for a blow to the back of the head.”

  “Emma doesn’t worry.” Yank spoke in a matter-of-fact tone. “That’s what I’m saying. It can make her hard to read.”

  “She’s not a normal agent, is she?”

  “We need to wrap this up. She’s watching. I don’t want her to march down here and then have to explain you.”

  “I’m not your problem. Agent Sharpe is.” Colin abandoned his scraping and tossed the brush into the toolbox, latched it shut. “She screws up, it’s your career. This new team of yours goes up in smoke.”

  “She couldn’t have saved that nun today,” Yank said, a note of regret mixed with his usual pragmatism. “Maybe you could have, but that’s because you’re not normal, either. Emma’s not normal in a different way.”

  “Did you send her to the Sisters of the Joyful Heart or did she go on her own?”

  “I didn’t send her.”

  “Someone else? Was she on FBI business, Yank?”

  “The nun who died called her this morning and asked her to come and have a look at a painting that now may or may not be missing. No details.”

  “Not a lot to go on.”

  Yank watched the dogs and their owners across the river head back inside the shingled house. “For a while after I moved East I thought I’d want to retire up here. Buy a boat. Fish.” The senior FBI agent ran a finger over the thick knot Colin had tied automatically, as if he’d never left the coas
t for the FBI. “You cured me of ever wanting a boat. Remember that? You damn near killed me that day.”

  Colin remembered. Four years ago, Yank had ventured to Maine for the first time to talk to him after he’d volunteered for a tricky, complicated assignment, his first undercover mission.

  Yank would be his contact agent. That assignment had led to other ones. For months, Yank had often been the only link Colin had to the world he’d left behind—the only person he spoke to who knew that he was Colin Donovan, a special agent with the FBI, a brother, a son, a man who wasn’t the scum of the earth it was his job to pretend to be.

  With the Sharpes just down the road in Heron’s Cove, that first trip to Rock Point ultimately had led Yank to Emma Sharpe. He’d recruited her to the FBI and, now, to HIT, his small, highly specialized Boston-based unit.

  “How’d you meet Sharpe?” Colin asked. “You never said. Did you just knock on her door one day and say you needed an art detective?”

  “It’s a long story.” Yank dropped his hand from the thick knot. “You walked away from this life. Any regrets?”

  “I didn’t walk away. I have a place here.”

  “In Rock Point. Not Heron’s Cove.”

  Right, Colin thought. Not Heron’s Cove. “Sharpe didn’t tell you about the call from the nun, did she?”

  “I thought she was up here picking apples.”

  “Apples?”

  “You haven’t met her.”

  “What was she going to do with the apples?”

  “Give some away. Make sauce. A pie.”

  “She told you that?”

  “It’s what she did last year. Brought everyone a pie, jars of sauce and bags of apples.”

  Definitely not a normal agent, Colin thought.

  Yank pointed at a seagull swooping down to an unoccupied lobster boat moored in the small harbor. “You know all the different kinds of seagulls?”

  “Not all. Some. My mother’s into birding. She can tell you the name of anything that flies through here.”

  “Good for her.” Yank sighed. “If I get fired, I can take up bird-watching.”

  Colin jumped from his boat onto the dock. He wondered if the honey-haired FBI agent was watching from her kitchen window. He would be. “What happened today isn’t about me. It’s about Emma Sharpe.”

  Yank heaved another sigh, shaking his head. “Two Mainers. What was I thinking?”

  “You recruited Sharpe. You didn’t recruit me.” Colin tugged on his line, as if he needed to make sure it was secure, in case Agent Sharpe still thought he was a real lobsterman. “What’s on your mind, Yank?”

  “Emma’s every bit the asset I thought she’d be. She’s experienced, thorough, an expert in her field, as well as versatile. She has great instincts. Art crime is a multibillion-dollar international enterprise. She has a feel for when it intersects with drug trafficking, gun trafficking, money laundering, kidnapping, fraud, extortion, even terrorism.”

  “That’s why she’s on your team,” Colin said.

  “The Sharpes are among the best art detectives in the world. Wendell Sharpe, Emma’s grandfather, was a pioneer in this work.” Yank turned from the seagull and glanced up at the Sharpe house before shifting his gaze back to Colin. “If I backed a loose cannon, I need to know.”

  “Is that what you think, Matt?”

  He didn’t answer at once. Finally he shook his head. “No, I don’t. Emma’s one of the best analytical agents I’ve ever known. She’s innovative, but she’s not one to go off half-cocked.”

  “Was today her first time seeing any real action?”

  Yank nodded. “Sister Joan was dead and her killer on the run before Emma climbed over the fence and drew her weapon. She didn’t have a chance, but she can handle herself in the field.”

  Training helped, Colin thought, but there was nothing like real danger to focus the mind. “Could this nun have been targeted because of Sharpe? Who else knew she was there?”

  “I don’t know what happened today, Colin.”

  Colin could hear the frustration and fatigue in Yank’s voice. “Are you putting a protective detail on her?”

  “She doesn’t want one.”

  “So?”

  “You could—”

  “Dream on, Yank. I’m going kayaking.”

  Yank’s dark, gray-streaked hair lifted in a cool breeze, the wind picking up with the rising tide. “A nun was murdered today. She wasn’t just in the wrong place at the wrong time. She’d called an FBI agent four hours before her death.”

  Colin again wished he were on his little island, watching the stars come out over the Atlantic. “Sharpe has to feel lousy about having a nun killed under her nose.”

  He was aware of Matt Yankowski’s incisive gaze on him. “Why are you here, Colin?”

  No way was he explaining his summons from Finian Bracken. “I heard the news—”

  “How? You were kayaking.”

  “I have a brother with the marine patrol.” It was true, if not the means by which he’d learned about the tragedy at the Sisters of the Joyful Heart. “I decided to check out Agent Sharpe for myself. I knew she was the one who figured out Vladimir Bulgov was also an art collector with a special interest in Picasso.”

  With that information, Colin, posing as an arms buyer, had lured a dangerous operator to a Los Angeles art auction, where colleagues in the FBI had placed him under arrest. That was in June. After Bulgov’s arrest, Colin had stopped off in Rock Point and run into Finian Bracken. They’d become instant friends. Just one of those things: an Irish priest far from home and a burned-out undercover agent who was back home and wasn’t sure he’d ever belong there again.

  Then he’d returned to his underworld and made sure the right people thought he was dead.

  Yank pivoted and started down the dock, stopping abruptly and looking back at Colin. “I don’t like one thing about what happened up here today.” He paused, sucked in a breath. “You know Maine. Do what you can.”

  “Is that an order?”

  “Yeah, sure. Let’s call it an order. As if that would make any difference with you. Damn, Colin. I thought you were dead half the summer.”

  “If you thought I was dead, why didn’t you try to come to my funeral?”

  “No body. I figured there’d be a memorial service.”

  He could be kidding and Colin would never know. Yank had a labyrinthine mind, and he led a tough, tight unit that went after some of the most elusive criminals in the world. Now one of his handpicked people was mixed up in the death of a nun and whatever else had gone on at the isolated Maine convent of the Sisters of the Joyful Heart.

  “Why did Emma Sharpe join the FBI?” Colin asked. “Sharpe Fine Art Recovery is a successful private business. Did she have a falling out with her family? Did she just want the chance to arrest people herself? The green light to carry a gun?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  Complicated? That wasn’t the answer Colin had expected.

  “I have to go,” Yank said. “I’m not used to the ocean air the way you Mainers are. You’ll keep an eye on her?”

  “I’ll do what I can,” Colin said, “but Emma Sharpe is your problem, not mine.”

  Yank either didn’t hear him or pretended not to. Colin watched the senior agent—his friend, despite their differences—walk off the wooden dock as if they were just a couple of strangers who’d run into each other over boats and seagulls.

  Would that were true, Colin thought as he stretched his lower back, feeling the effects of his days of kayaking. He jumped back into his borrowed boat. More lights were on in the Sharpe house. Was Agent Emma expecting company? Huddled over her own bottle of Bracken whiskey?

  Too many questions with no answers.

  He had only to head home, grab his kayak and disappear. He was better at disappearing than most. Yank could get someone else to find out what was going on with Special Agent Sharpe.

  Colin glanced again at the Sharpe house, unchange
d in the past thirty seconds. He was uneasy, on edge. He understood, at least on a gut level, why Matt Yankowski had taken the bait and come down to the water to talk to him. No doubt every instinct his friend had was telling him exactly what Colin’s instincts were telling him.

  Emma Sharpe. The break-in at the convent. The dead nun.

  All wrong.

  He noticed a Maine marine patrol boat easing through the channel into the harbor and spotted his youngest brother, Kevin, at the wheel.

  A year after Colin headed to Quantico, Kevin had joined the marine patrol.

  Perfect, Colin thought.

  He’d get his baby brother to tell him about the goings-on at the Sisters of the Joyful Heart.

  7

  A UNIFORMED STATE TROOPER LET EMMA THROUGH the convent’s main gate on what had already turned into a clear, brisk, beautiful fall morning. She walked alone to the motherhouse, a stone mansion built in 1898, with leaded-glass windows, porches, dormers and more drafts than a haunted house. As a child, on a visit there with her grandfather, Emma had convinced herself it was haunted.

  She entered through the front door. The sisters again were singing in the chapel down the hall. They would need time to mourn the violent, unexplained death of one of their own, a fifty-three-year-old woman who’d committed her life to her religious vocation.

  Emma went into a simple sitting room overlooking a flower garden and the Atlantic Ocean. The horseshoe-shaped cove and the meditation garden were on the opposite side of the small peninsula. The trooper had told her that CID had released the tower as a crime scene and completed their initial interviews, searches and evidence gathering but would be back later this morning.

  Too restless to sit on the dove-gray sofa or chairs, Emma stood on the edge of the soft hand-hooked rug and studied a wall of photographs. She noticed several of Mother Linden in her later years. She’d been a stout, cheerful woman, a talented artist, a formidable scholar and a dedicated religious sister. As a much younger woman, she’d encouraged Wendell Sharpe, then a security guard at a Portland art museum, to pursue his interest in art theft and recovery.