The Angel Page 21
Three silver-framed photographs of a pretty blondhaired girl stood among the angels. One appeared to be at her First Communion. In another, she was teetering on roller-skates at about age twelve.
In the third, she was standing next to a teenage Bob O’Reilly, both dressed to the nines for what had to be a high school prom.
Simon pointed to a prayer card propped up against a multicolored glass angel.
Deirdre Ita McCarthy.
“She must be Patsy’s daughter. Oh, Simon. She was just nineteen when she died. I had no idea. Patsy never said a word.”
“Were these angels and pictures here when you visited her?”
“No—none of them.”
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“We need to find her,” Simon said.
Keira took shallow breaths, her tension mounting as they moved down the hall. When they reached the study, Simon swore and spun around quickly, grabbing her around the waist, stopping her. “Keira, don’t look, sweetheart.”
She clutched his arms. “Simon, what is it?”
“Your friend’s dead.”
“Oh, no…no…” Keira cried out, lunging toward the study, but Simon kept his arms tight around her. She saw blood spattered on the white woodwork. Her eyes filled with tears. “Are you sure—”
“I’m sure. There’s nothing we can do for her, Keira. She’s been dead at least a day.” He kissed the top of her head. “I’m so sorry.”
“Simon, the blood…” She forced herself not to hyper
ventilate. “It wasn’t a heart attack, was it?”
“No.”
“I have to see.”
“Yeah. I know.” He eased his hold on her. “Just stay out here in the hall. It’s best we don’t contaminate the scene, and it’s a tough sight. A lot of blood. We need to call the police.”
Her fingers digging into his arms, Keira peered past him into the study and saw Patsy sprawled on the floor in the middle of a hooked rug, her pastel pink sweater drenched in blood.
“Was it—can you tell—” She gulped in air, pulling herself together as she loosened her grip on Simon. “Can you tell if she suffered? If she was tortured, like the sheep…”
“She wasn’t tortured.”
“There was time for whoever killed the sheep to get back here and…” Keira broke off, unable to finish the thought. “There’s a phone in the kitchen.”
But he was already dialing 911 on his cell phone, his arm 236
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dropping to her waist as they returned to the kitchen. Keira was reeling, her head spinning as he provided a crisp, detailed report to the dispatcher. She remembered the dead man in the Public Garden just a few days ago, pictured the blood and entrails at the ruin and ran out to the back porch, half tripping down the steps to the yard. The priest from the other night in Boston was there, white
faced and motionless. “Father Palermo,” Keira whispered, choking back tears.
She could see he knew something horrible had happened. “Mrs. McCarthy didn’t come to mass this morning. I walked over here to check on her. It’s the second morning in a row she’s missed mass. It’s not—” His voice faltered. “It’s not like her. Miss Sullivan…”
“I’m sorry, Father. I’m afraid Patsy’s dead.”
Keira realized how blunt her words sounded. She didn’t know if she should have told him even that much. She realized the police would want to talk to him, and, in any case, she didn’t want to be the one to describe the scene. He gaped at her, obviously trying to absorb the news.
“What—”
But Fiona appeared on the concrete alley-like walk to Patsy’s backyard. Her blond hair was pulled back neatly, and she had her Irish harp with her, tucked under one arm as she stared, clearly in dread, at Father Palermo and then her older cousin.
“Fiona,” Keira said, “what are you doing here?”
Her eyes—that O’Reilly cornflower blue—widened in obvious fear, and she about-faced and took off back out to the street.
Keira could hear police sirens in the distance as she turned to the priest. “I have to go.”
He nodded, and she charged after her cousin.
South Boston, Massachusetts
9:30 a.m., EDT
June 24
Abigail jumped out of her car just down the street from Patsy McCarthy’s house and raced up the sidewalk, inter
cepting Bob before he could get to the door. She leaped in front of him. “You can’t, Bob,” she said. “You know you can’t go in there—”
His eyes were blue steel. “Get out of my way, Abigail.”
She didn’t budge. He was a senior BPD detective. If he wanted to see the scene, the BPD officers posted outside would let him in. But it wasn’t a good idea. Abigail had been at her desk at BPD Headquarters, doing paperwork to mollify her partner and get her head screwed back on straight, when word spread that a seventy-nine-year-old woman had been knifed to death in South Boston. That kind of outrage always got to everyone. She’d known instantly, in her gut, that it was Keira Sullivan’s storyteller.
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Then came the news that Bob’s niece was the one who’d found the body.
And his eldest daughter was there.
Even her partner was shaken. Tom Yarborough was an ambitious SOB. Twenty-nine, and he thought he should be running the department. But he’d understood when Abigail had abandoned her computer and charged out to the scene. Police vehicles crowded the street. Some of Patsy McCarthy’s neighbors had ventured out in front of their houses in shock.
“Bob,” Abigail said, “you can’t investigate this one. Stay out of it. You’d be telling me the same thing—”
“Where’s my daughter?” His eyes didn’t change, remained hard, flinty. “Where’s Keira?”
“Let me find out, okay? I imagine they’re with the re
sponding officers.”
He looked past her to the simple house. “What the hell was Fiona doing here?”
“I don’t know, Bob,” Abigail said, feeling his anguish despite his rigid self-control. “I just got here myself.”
“I’m going in there, Abigail. Going to try and stop me?”
Abigail sighed, stepping away from him. “No.”
In his position, she’d do the same. She’d done the same eight years ago when she’d flung herself at her dead husband’s body.
She followed him past the patrol officers posted at the door who didn’t, as she’d expected, question his presence. No one would.
They worked their way back to the study, where Patsy McCarthy’s tiny body lay on a blood-soaked rug. “She hooked that rug herself thirty years ago,” Bob said in a near whisper. “Look at it. It’s like new. It’s a scene from Ireland—
a farm, a couple of sheep.”
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239 “Bob…” Abigail had to push back a rush of emotion.
“I’m sorry.”
“Not your fault. You didn’t kill her.”
The grim-faced lead detectives—experienced men Bob and Abigail both knew well—said it looked as if she’d been stabbed twice.
Once for the blood. Once for the kill.
“This was no way for an old woman to die,” Bob said softly. “For anyone.”
He continued down the hall, and Abigail was struck by his easy familiarity with the house. She pictured him running through there as a kid and couldn’t imagine his pain now. But he stopped at the dining room, and Abigail grimaced. More detectives were in the room, carefully documenting the strange scene.
“Damn, Bob,” Abigail whispered, her eyes fixed on one of a trio of pictures in the middle of dozens and dozens of angel figurines on the table. “That’s you. The girl—”
“Patsy didn’t set up this stuff. Her killer did.”
He turned around and stalked back up the hall. Abigail charged after him, her heart racing. Out on the street, Bob stood under
a scraggly maple tree and stuffed a stick of gum into his mouth. “Patsy believed in fairies.” He didn’t look at Abigail as she stood next to him in the thin shade. “She wouldn’t admit it, but she did. Told me she’d hear the cry of a banshee just before someone close to her died. She said the first time she could remember hearing one was when as a little girl in Ireland when her kid sister died of some dread disease.”
“I could do without hearing a banshee,” Abigail said.
“Yeah. Patsy told me that quaint little story when I was nine or ten. Scared the living hell out of me.” Bob chewed 240
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hard on his gum. “She was a simple woman, Abigail. She never asked for much out of life. She never got much, either.”
“We’ll find out what happened. Who did this to her.”
“You know how many unsolved homicides are stacked up on my desk? There are no guarantees. Save the platitudes for someone who doesn’t know any better.” He looked back toward the house, lace curtains in the front windows. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to bite your head off.”
“Forget it.”
“I’m going to find Fiona and Keira.”
“If there’s anything I can do—”
“I’ll let you know.”
Abigail saw his daughter and his niece coming around from the backyard and left Bob to them. She returned to the house and made her way to the kitchen, where she found Simon Cahill chatting with a couple of patrol officers. He struck her as remarkably self-possessed for someone who’d just found an old woman murdered in her own home. Then again, she thought, she’d observed that same control in Owen. She didn’t know if their search-and-rescue work de
veloped such composure, or if they could do that work because they were naturally that way. A little of both, maybe.
“You must be wishing you’d stayed in London,” she said.
“No sense wasting time wishing for something that can’t happen. Bob O’Reilly’s here?”
“Outside with Fiona and Keira.”
Simon waited a half beat, then said, “You and O’Reilly are right up to the line separating personal and profes
sional business.”
“I’m up to it,” she said. “Bob’s crossed it.”
His very green eyes leveled on her. Then he flipped a business-size card at her. “This was under Patsy’s teapot.”
He nodded to the counter behind him. “There.”
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241 Abigail winced when she saw it was one of Bob’s cards.
“I figured I’d give it to you,” Simon said. She regarded him with new insight. It wasn’t everyone who’d notice a business card under a teapot with a dead woman in the next room, much less think to pocket it and give it to her. “Simon,” she said, “do you mind telling me who the hell you are?”
“Stewing about me isn’t going to help find whoever killed Patsy McCarthy.”
He headed out through the back door. Abigail started to follow him and make him talk, but two more detectives came down the hall. She debated giving them Bob’s card. Had he given it to Patsy? Did his daughter have one, and had she given it to her? Keira?
Abigail knew they weren’t her questions to ask or answer. If she’d been one of the detectives walking toward her right now, she’d want the card. Period. No games from a colleague. But she tucked the card into her pocket. “You guys need to talk to Bob,” she told the detectives. “Ask him when he last saw the victim.”
“Abigail—”
“Just do it,” she said and walked past them up the hall. Fiona was still crying, her nose red, her cheeks raw, a tearstained tissue squished in her hand. She’d wiped her eyes, cried some more, wiped her eyes again. “Don’t leave me, Keira,” she said, sniffling as her father approached them. “Dad’s going to—he’s not going to understand.”
“Give him a chance, but don’t worry. I’m not going anywhere.”
Her uncle was stoic, but Keira had learned to read the little signs and could see he was shaken—and furious, she thought. Apoplectic under his outward calm. A woman he’d 242
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known all his life murdered in her own home. His daughter and niece on the scene. He was a cop—an experienced de
tective—and he’d feel as if it was his fault, somehow, that he could have done something, stepped in before some maniac slipped into Patsy’s house and killed her. Keira could identify with such guilt. She couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d set into motion the events that had led to the horror in the house behind her. But her uncle held his emotions in check as he greeted his daughter. “Hey, kid.” His tone was gentle, even kind.
“How’re you doing?”
“Oh, Dad. I feel so bad.”
“I know. It’s an awful thing.”
Fiona nodded, tears welling in her eyes. “I liked her so much. She reminded me of Grandma with her Irish accent.”
“They both were something. Should have seen them when we were kids, the two of them standing out here on the street laughing over little things. The weather, a new recipe. They’d argue, too. Remember how your grandma could argue?”
“She hated to lose,” Fiona said, sniffling as she tried to smile.
“Patsy was the same way. We’ll get you down to Florida, and your grandpa can tell you stories about the two of them. He thought Patsy was a loon, but he liked her.”
Fiona continued to cry, and when Bob touched her shoulder, she fell into his arms and sobbed into his chest. He glared over the top of her head at Keira. “You want to tell me what the hell’s going on? Did you introduce Patsy and Fiona—”
“No, Dad,” Fiona said. “It wasn’t Keira.”
But her cousin sank against Keira’s car, shaking with silent sobs. Keira stuffed her own grief down deep and ex
plained what she knew, what she herself had just learned
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243 from Fiona. “Fiona’s taking Irish music lessons a couple of blocks from here. She started after college let out for the summer. She walked over one day to see where you grew up and ran into Patsy at her church. Patsy reminded her of Gran—she wasn’t hiding anything from you—”
“I didn’t know about the lessons,” Bob said, cutting her off. “I didn’t know about Patsy. In my book, that’s hiding something.”
Fiona stood up straight, her face red from crying.
“Dad—”
“You recognized Patsy when you saw her with Keira the other night in Boston.”
“I never said I didn’t.”
He pointed a finger at her. “Don’t bullshit me, Fi. Not now. I’m sorry she’s dead. I’m sorry you’re upset. But what you have to do right now is make sure you’ve told me every damn thing you know. Everything. Don’t leave out anything, no matter how small or stupid or embarrassing you think it is. Understood?”
Fiona nodded, but instead of her father’s stern words beating her down, they seemed to strengthen her. “I can’t get my head around what was done to her, Dad. It’s—it’s beyond comprehension.”
“Yeah. It is.” He turned to Keira, his gaze unrelenting, like nothing she’d ever seen in him before. “What about you and Simon? When did you get here?”
“Around eight-thirty. I tried calling, I rang the doorbell. When I didn’t get an answer, we went around back—”
“Hell, Keira. The body in the Public Garden, the mess in Ireland—and now this.”
“I don’t like it, either,” Keira said.
Fiona sobbed, lifted her head. “Mrs. McCarthy was the sweetest woman, Dad. How could anyone hurt her?”
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“I don’t know, Fi, but it doesn’t matter if she was sweet or a pain in the neck, she didn’t deserve to die this way.”
“I didn’t see her, Dad. Mrs. McCarthy. Keira stopped me before I—”
“One good thing, anyway. Was it always just the two of you when you visited, Fi? No plumber, electrician, mailman, neighbor?”
dozen times, usually after my lesson, sometimes before—
I’d catch her on her way home from church. That’s what I was hoping to do this morning. She liked to talk, and if I had somewhere else I needed to be…” Fiona’s eyes filled with fresh tears. “That’s awful of me, isn’t it, Dad?”
“No, it’s not awful, Fi. Patsy would understand. She was nineteen once herself.”
Fat tears spilled down Fiona’s cheeks. “I walked over here one day after my lesson to see your old neighborhood. I went past Saint Ita’s—your old church—and some of the church women were setting up for a bazaar in the parish hall. An angel bazaar. They had angel everything—food, decorations, knitted items, music.” Fiona talked at a light
ning speed, as if she needed to get everything out in one breath. “Patsy and some of the other women were display
ing their collections of angel figurines. Patsy’s was the best by far. Have you seen it, Dad? It’s unbelievable.”
“She collected angels for a long time.”
“Father Palermo said some of them might be valuable. I hope… Dad, you don’t think someone was trying to rob her, do you?”
“Too early to say. Did you go to this bazaar?”
Fiona nodded, perking up slightly. “I bought two handmade angel Christmas ornaments for presents, and I had a piece of angel food cake with green frosting.”
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245 Her father gave a half hearted grin. “Gross.”
“It wasn’t that bad. Dad, Patsy had all of Keira’s books—she loved them.” Fiona went pale again. “I can’t believe what’s happened.”
“I know, kid. It’s a tough one.” Bob turned to Keira, his expression showing more of his anguish now and less of his fury. “Were you already in touch with Patsy when Fiona got to know her?”
Keira nodded. “Patsy e-mailed me around the same time, but she never mentioned she knew Fiona.” Keira hesitated, then added, “She never mentioned she had a daughter, either. Bob, the angels, your prom picture—”