It was a room she didn’t recognize from her one visit last November to his sprawling Mayfair apartment overlooking St. James’s Park. Colin and Yank had accompanied her. Oliver had met them in the library, where his parents had been murdered almost thirty years ago. Now he sat in a tall-backed red-leather chair in front of a draped window and a painting of porpoises in Ardmore Bay on the south Irish coast. Emma knew the painting, an early work by well-known Irish artist Aoife O’Byrne.
“A video chat is more intimate than a phone call, at least. How are you, Emma? It is all right if I call you Emma, isn’t it? It’s more informal than Special Agent Sharpe, but this is an official chat, I assume?”
“I’m an FBI agent. You’re a thief. Yes, it’s an official chat. But Emma is fine.”
He pointed at her. “You’re testier than when I saw you here in November.”
That was when she had figured out that Oliver Fairbairn, a tweedy British mythologist caught in the middle of a murder investigation in Boston, was also Oliver York, a cheeky, wealthy British aristocrat with a tragic past. That Oliver Fairbairn and Oliver York were one and the same wasn’t widely known. He preferred to keep the two identities separate, and Emma had no reason to announce it to the world. In fact, the opposite.
“Tell me about this FBI agent you believe is following you.”
He gave an audible sigh. “Testy. Definitely testy.”
She tried to resist a smile.
“I have reliable radar for FBI agents, and it went off like crazy when I spotted this man. He was in the park outside my apartment. I had just returned from an art gallery. I wouldn’t be surprised if he followed me.”
“Was this today?”
“Around noon, yes.”
“Is the gallery the one holding the show for Aoife O’Byrne?”
“Mmm.”
The Irish O’Byrne family was one of Oliver’s victims—his first, ten years ago. He had made off with two Jack Butler Yeats landscape paintings of western Ireland, a fifteenth-century silver wall cross depicting Saint Declan and an unsigned landscape of a local scene, probably by a young Aoife O’Byrne herself. Her Yeats phase, Oliver called it. The porpoises had come after that, as well as a few crosses of her own, but she was known now for her moody seascapes.
At least Oliver had bought the porpoise painting instead of stealing it.
“What’s the name of this agent you ran into in the park?” Emma asked.
Oliver looked surprised. “I only saw him. I didn’t speak with him.”
“How do you know he’s an FBI agent if you didn’t speak with him?”
“The suit. The look. He’s one of yours. I’ve no doubt.”
“Did you take his picture?”
He sniffed. “Of course not. I’m a mild-mannered mythologist, not Scotland Yard or MI6. This man is tall, lean, medium coloring, perhaps early forties—but that describes a lot of your colleagues, doesn’t it? Not you, of course.”
“Of course.”
Oliver sat back, amusement lighting up his face. He was good-looking and surprisingly affable for a man so solitary, so haunted by his past. “I’m many things, Emma, but paranoid isn’t one of them. I’m convinced this man is one of yours. Consider yourself alerted.”
“Fair enough. Anything else?”
“I’ve sent you a package. Martin has, actually.”
On her November trip to London, Emma had also met Martin Hambly, Oliver’s longtime personal assistant. It was unclear to her whether Martin was aware of his boss’s alter ego as an art thief. “What’s in the package, Oliver?”
“A present for you. A surprise. You’ll love it. I packed it myself when I was at the farm over the weekend. I returned to London on Monday. Then today…” He grimaced. “Today, I saw the FBI outside my apartment.”
“Where did you send the package?”
“I addressed it to you at Father Bracken’s rectory in Rock Point. I thought that would be simpler, but, as luck would have it, our Irish priest friend is here in London.”
Emma frowned at that bit of news. “I thought he was in Ireland visiting his family.”
“He joined his brother on a business trip on behalf of Bracken Distillers. I ran into Finian at the gallery. He, Declan and I are all about to have a drink together. Declan has to return to Ireland tomorrow, but I plan to invite Father Bracken to the family farm in the Cotswolds.”
“I wish you wouldn’t do that, Oliver.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’re a thief and Father Bracken is a friend of mine.”
Dead Man Running
by Theresa Ragan
Chapter One
San Quentin State Prison
Jason Caldwell sat across from his defense lawyer, Mike Gabaldon, in a twelve by fourteen square foot room. There were no windows, and the table was bolted to the floor in case his temper got the best of him. Metal cuffs circled his wrists and a heavy chain weighed them down almost to the floor, where two more metal cuffs trapped his ankles.
He’d already been locked up for three years. Most prisoners stayed clear of him once they heard about the hack job he’d done on his business partner. It also helped that he lifted weights for a few hours every day.
The truth was…he was innocent. But of course no one believed him, since someone out there in the real world had a done one heck of a job framing him.