Saint's Gate Page 4

  “The police?”

  “They’re not saying at this point. It’s not my investigation. It’s okay if I jump to conclusions. They can’t.” She swallowed past a stubborn tightness in her throat. “I shouldn’t have let Sister Joan get the gate key on her own.”

  “If you hadn’t, you could be dead now, too.”

  “I was armed, Lucas. We’d have a dead would-be killer instead of a dead nun.”

  He eyed her with a dispassion that she’d come to respect—and that also reminded her of their grandfather. “You had no reason to think Sister Joan would be attacked.”

  “I knew she was on edge. I knew she hadn’t asked me to come see her for old times’ sake. She didn’t want me to go through the meditation garden. It’s as if she had to remind me that I no longer belonged there.” Emma paused, not sure she could explain. Her brother had never understood why she’d entered the convent in the first place. No surprise. She wasn’t entirely sure that she understood anymore herself. “Another agent in my position might not have cared.”

  “About violating the privacy of a convent for no good reason? You think so?”

  “What would you have done?”

  “Whatever Sister Joan asked me to do.” He gave Emma an irreverent smile. “Nuns scare me.”

  She couldn’t resist a small laugh. Nothing scared her brother. “Thanks, Lucas.”

  “Sure. You can stay here if you want. Fair warning, though. I think the place is haunted, and it has bats.”

  “Your kind of house.”

  He grinned. “That it is.” He cuffed her on the shoulder. “Hang in there, okay, kid? And if that SOB Yankowski decides to fire you, you know you always have a place back with the family biz. You can always sweep floors, file—”

  “Bastard,” Emma said with a laugh, and headed back to her car.

  Ten minutes later, Emma drove down a busy, attractive waterfront street of inns, marinas and graceful older homes, and stopped in front of the small, gray-shingled house that served as the unexpected main offices of Sharpe Fine Art Recovery. Her grandfather, Wendell Sharpe, had worked out of the front rooms and lived in back until fifteen years ago, when, in his late sixties, he’d decided to open up an office in his native Dublin.

  Lucas had been tempted to move the offices to Boston, but Heron’s Cove was part of the Sharpe mystique. He’d finally opted to modernize and had worked up plans with a local architect to gut the place down to the studs. The process had started a month ago with relocating the offices temporarily to their parents’ house in the village. Since they were spending a year in England, the timing was perfect.

  Emma had promised to come up one weekend and help clear out the attic and the living quarters.

  It wouldn’t be this weekend, she thought as she walked around to the back of the house.

  Matt Yankowski was standing on the grass at the edge of the retaining wall above the docks at the mouth of the Heron River. Two hundred yards to his left, past a parking lot and an inn, a deep channel led into the Atlantic. Next door on the right was a marina.

  Yank gave Emma a sideways glance as she eased next to him. He was a tall, fit, good-looking man with silver streaks in his dark hair and an unrelenting toughness in his dark eyes. “I thought you came up here to pick apples.”

  “I did.”

  “The Sisters of the Joyful Heart have apple trees?”

  “Yes,” she said, “but I had a local orchard in mind.”

  A sailboat drifted past them, a scruffy white dog sitting in the stern. Yank said nothing. He was the senior agent in charge of a small, specialized team that investigated and responded to high-impact incidents involving criminals with virtually unlimited resources. HIT, for short. Four years ago, he’d personally recruited Emma to join the FBI. She’d left the Sisters of the Joyful Heart and worked with her grandfather in Dublin for a year before she finally called Yank and said she wanted to give the FBI a shot. Six months ago, he’d summoned her to his unit.

  His days as a field agent were legendary. If he’d been at the convent that morning, Emma had no doubt Sister Joan would still be alive.

  “When do you leave for Dublin?” he asked.

  She didn’t let his seeming non sequitur throw her. Several weeks ago she’d arranged to spend a few days with her grandfather as he packed up his work and turned over the Dublin office to one of his Irish protégés. “Sunday night.”

  “Good. I’ll carry your suitcase and drive you to the airport.”

  A battered warhorse of a lobster boat passed them. Emma noticed the faded script on the stern: Julianne. She didn’t recognize the boat or the man at the wheel. He was big and broad shouldered with medium brown hair and a couple days’ growth of beard. A worker. She half expected him to catch her staring at him but he didn’t even glance in her direction. She imagined his life and then imagined herself with a different life, but she’d had different lives. A nun. A Sharpe art detective. Now an FBI agent.

  Yank scowled at her. “What are you doing, lusting after lobstermen?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “There are worse distractions. Finding a dead nun would be among them.”

  Emma knew better than to let him get to her. He’d straddled the supervisory and operational worlds for years but had always been more comfortable in the field. He looked out of place on the Heron’s Cove waterfront in his wrinkle-free charcoal-gray suit, striped tie and polished shoes. She doubted her lobsterman would mark him as an FBI agent, or even armed, but Matt Yankowski was both.

  He was also frustrated, concerned and angry. Not everyone would notice. Emma did; she could see it in his rigid stance, the tightness at the corners of his mouth, the pinched look to his eyes.

  Sister Joan’s inexplicable murder and her own actions that morning had gotten to Yank.

  It hadn’t been a good day.

  “Let’s go up to the porch,” he said. “We can pretend we’re normal.”

  Emma nodded and followed him onto the back porch of her grandfather’s house. Yank glanced at an old metal wind chime that clinked pleasantly in the breeze. She wondered if he already knew it was one of Mother Linden’s early folk-art efforts, a gift to the Sharpes before she’d founded the Sisters of the Joyful Heart.

  He ignored the wicker chairs set in front of a small table and instead stayed on his feet. He pointed at Emma’s right thigh, where she’d torn a hole in her jeans. “Hurt?”

  “No.”

  “There’s blood.”

  “It’s a scrape, Yank. That’s all.”

  “You got it jumping the fence?”

  “Climbing the fence. It’s six feet tall. I’d have to be Wonder Woman to jump it.”

  “Why was the gate locked?”

  “I don’t know.” Emma, too, remained on her feet. “Sister Joan thought it would be unlocked. It’s standard to lock the gate when there’s a retreat at the convent. It deters visitors from wandering into the tower. That’s a work area. No one’s admitted without permission.”

  “There wasn’t a retreat at the convent,” Yank said.

  “And none coming in for the weekend. Technically, I had permission to be there because Sister Joan escorted me, but she didn’t tell her Mother Superior. That’s a violation of the rules.”

  “Her violation. Not yours.”

  Emma didn’t argue. Another sailboat maneuvered past them toward the marina. It was sleek, expensive. She couldn’t see a soul on board. Nightfall was coming earlier, the arrival of autumn already reducing the number of pleasure boats.

  Her lobsterman had tied off his boat and seemed in no hurry as he rearranged traps stacked in the stern.

  Yank stood next to her at the balustrade. “Why didn’t you go with Sister Joan to get the key?”

  “She asked me not to. I respected her wishes. She had to go through a secluded meditation garden to get to the tower.”

  “Ex-nuns aren’t allowed in this meditation garden?”

  “No,” Emma said.

  “It’s an either-or thi
ng? Either you’re a nun or you’re not a nun? Ex doesn’t count?”

  She kept her focus on the water, mirrorlike under the darkening sky, with the wind dying down. “It doesn’t matter. I waited by the gate.” Her voice was steady but she heard the anguish in it and expected Yank did, too. “I wasn’t in the tower when Sister Joan was attacked. I couldn’t help her. I didn’t get there in time even to get a description of her killer.”

  “Damn.” Yank shook his head at her. “You were useless, huh?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “There’s a good chance this killer locked the gate, either hoping to buy time to steal any valuables before one of the sisters came by or already calculating that Sister Joan would have to go through the meditation garden to get the key.”

  Emma could hear the gentle lapping of the rising tide on the rocky beach and the dock posts. “If the killer knew about the garden, then the attack wasn’t just a random act. He or she could have had the convent under surveillance for some time.”

  “Or could live there,” Yank said.

  “We can speculate until sunrise and not get anywhere.”

  “Maybe you and Sister Joan would both be dead if you’d gone with her.” Yank paused, eyeing Emma. “Maybe more nuns would have been killed or injured if you hadn’t done exactly what you did.”

  Emma banked down a rush of emotion that she didn’t want Yank to see, or perhaps even to acknowledge herself. She hadn’t just lived at the Sisters of the Joyful Heart’s convent for three years. She’d dedicated herself to their community, their mission, their charism. She’d believed she would live out her life at their isolated convent and be buried in its simple cemetery.

  All in the past, but the past had roared back to her the moment she’d heard Sister Joan’s voice on her cell phone that morning. “Emma. I need your help.”

  “The investigation’s in Maine CID’s hands now,” she said.

  Yank shook his head. “Not totally. Not when one of my people is involved.” He sat on a wicker chair and put his feet up on the table, next to a white mum in a clay pot. “I thought you were gutting this place.”

  “We are—Lucas is. I’m only peripherally involved.”

  “How come there are wicker chairs and mums on the porch?”

  “We haven’t finished clearing out the living quarters yet. Might as well keep a place to sit out here as long as we can.” Emma wasn’t fooled by the casual conversation. Yank always had a purpose. “We can have nice days for weeks yet.”

  “I’m driving back to Boston tonight. Took me over two hours to get up here with traffic. It should be easier going back.” He settled into the chair. “Tell me about Sister Joan.”

  Emma sat on the balustrade, her back to the water. “In some ways I knew her the least of any of the sisters I served with. I consider them all friends, but I’ve moved on to another life.”

  “The FBI,” Yank said, as if she needed reminding.

  “Her given name was the same. She never changed it. She was born Joan Mary Fabriani. She was fifty-three. She grew up in Rhode Island but went to college in Maine and was drawn to the Sisters of the Joyful Heart. She became an expert in art conservation.”

  “Religious art?”

  “Any kind but most of her work came from religious institutions.”

  “What about you two?”

  “Sister Joan was never convinced I had a true calling to a religious life. She didn’t question my sincerity, but during my period of discernment—” Emma stopped herself, realizing her words sounded foreign to her. She couldn’t imagine how they sounded to Yank. “I learned a lot from her. She was open and honest in her dealings with me.”

  “Joyful?”

  Emma sighed. “Yank.”

  He grinned at her, dropping his feet to the floor. “Sorry. Couldn’t resist. I could see you drifting back to those days.” He rose and pointed again at the tear in her jeans. “Clean up. You don’t want that to get infected.”

  “It’s not going to get infected. It’s nothing. I didn’t even realize it happened until one of the detectives pointed it out.” She jumped down from the balustrade. “Anything else?”

  “Trying to get rid of me, Agent Sharpe?”

  “I just need some time to myself.”

  Yank didn’t respond. Emma didn’t have a clue what he was thinking. He was a hard man. A total pro. He hadn’t changed since she’d first met him almost four years ago, at the same Saint Francis of Assisi statue where she’d waited for Sister Joan to return with the gate key. Yank had been on an art theft case, tracing a connection to drug trafficking. Emma had helped. Two days later, he’d handed her his card and told her to call him when she’d had enough of being a nun.

  “I make my final vows soon,” she’d told him.

  He’d raised his eyebrows. “Bet not.”

  A year later, she’d entered the FBI academy. Yank had never doubted—at least not to her face—that she could get through the eighteen weeks of training.

  Now here they were, on her porch on a chilly early autumn evening, a member of her former order dead—because of her? Was her work as an FBI agent somehow responsible for what had occurred today?

  Yank walked over to the back corner of the porch, where a wooden easel was set up next to a small, painted chest loaded with art supplies. He frowned at the canvas clipped to the easel. “What’s that?”

  “The docks,” Emma said. “It’s a work in progress.”

  He glanced over his shoulder at her. “Your doing? You paint?”

  She nodded without explaining.

  He leaned forward and squinted again at the oil painting. “Is that a seagull?”

  “Actually, it’s a boat.”

  “Oh. Good thing you’re an art detective. You’d have a hell of a time trying to make a living as a painter.” He straightened and turned back to her, his dark gaze as penetrating and unrelenting as she’d ever seen. “So did you lie to me, Agent Sharpe?”

  “No.”

  “Which came first, deciding to come up here to pick apples or Sister Joan’s call?”

  “Sister Joan’s call, but I didn’t lie.” Emma tried not to sound defensive. “There was no need to tell you about Sister Joan.”

  “She didn’t sound nervous?”

  “A little, but I don’t think she was really afraid until I arrived at the convent and saw her.”

  “Then not telling me about her was a sin of omission, not a sin of commission.”

  “It wasn’t a sin at all.”

  Yank was silent a moment. “Did you assume this painting she wanted you to assess was a personal or a professional matter?”

  For the first time, Emma felt the sting of her scrape and the ache of her muscles in her legs and lower back. Her head was pounding. She looked out past the channel toward the Atlantic, the sky and ocean a purplish gray, the air clear, as if the fog earlier in the day had never existed.

  Finally she said, “We didn’t get that far. Sister Joan promised to explain once we were in the tower.”

  “What about this Sister Cecilia?”

  “She’s a novice. She’ll be professing her final vows soon. She’s an art teacher. She’s also working on a biography of Mother Linden.”

  Yank scrutinized her a moment. “Do you have a headache?”

  His question took her by surprise. “How do you know?”

  He gave her a slight smile. “Your eyes. They’re headache eyes.”

  “I landed hard when I jumped down from the fence, but it’s been a long, sad, miserable day.” She forced herself to rally. “I’ll be fine in the morning.”

  “Sure you will.” He walked over to the porch steps, the boats down on the docks shifting in the rising tide. “Have I ever told you I hate boats?”

  Emma smiled unexpectedly. “You have.”

  “I grew up in the mountains—what’d I know about boats? Then some jackass I know took me out on this dented, rusting, leaking junkyard of a boat in a gale that would have had Ahab w
etting his pants.”

  “Doesn’t sound like much fun.”

  He pretended to shudder. “It was hell. I almost jumped overboard. Hated every damn second.”

  “Did you get seasick, or were you just afraid you’d capsize?”

  “I toughed it out. I don’t know why the hell we didn’t capsize.”

  “Was this jackass a friend of yours?”

  “Yeah. He grew up fishing. I think he was born on a boat. Bastard.”

  Emma bit back another smile. “Have you been on a boat since?”

  “Navy ships. That’s it. I like terra firma.”

  She frowned at her canvas, her headache easing now that she’d laughed a little. Her boat did look a little like a seagull. “Would you like a drink or something to eat before you leave?”

  “No, but you should eat. You have food?”

  “Some, and there are restaurants within walking distance.”

  “Be careful if you have any booze. It’s easy to overdo after something like today.”

  “I haven’t been to Maine in a few weeks. The last time I was here I painted, read, walked, ate lobster. I use this place as a refuge these days.” Emma picked up a paintbrush and ran her fingers over the soft natural bristles. “My past is going to come out, Yank.”

  “Yeah. Probably.”

  “It’s not a secret but I don’t automatically tell people.”

  “You were a nun, Emma. You weren’t a serial killer.”

  “You recruited a lot of tigers to your unit. Finding out about my past will change my relationship with them. It’ll draw attention to me, which could affect our work. We’re supposed to keep a low profile.”

  “Let me worry about that.”

  “If I’d stayed at the convent—”

  “Don’t go there. It won’t help you or anyone else. It won’t help find this killer.” Yank looked back at her, his gaze half a notch softer than pure granite. “Maybe it’s not a good idea for you to be here alone. What if our killer was targeting you, and Sister Joan gummed up the works?”

  “I stood alone by that gate for fifteen minutes if anyone wanted to attack me.”

  “I can put a protective detail on you.”

  “No, never. That’d do me in for sure.” Emma returned the paintbrush to a drawer in the chest. “Besides, I wasn’t a target today.”