“I guess I’d better call in to the office and have someone start running a list of all the cases you handled over the years, and see if anything jumps out. It would have to be someone you pissed off really badly, Sam.”

“Well, that should narrow the field down to a couple hundred people and their families and closest friends,” Sam said dryly. “You can lay an awful lot of track in sixteen years…”

TEN

Sam’s first inclination was to decline the waffles Trula had saved for him, even though he knew it would have been rude. He felt too distracted to eat. But he’d wanted to meet Emme Caldwell and he might as well do it now. So even though he wanted to close the front door behind him and keep on going when he helped Fiona carry her boxes back to her car, he went back into the house.

“So how was your meeting with the FBI agent?” Emme asked after the introductions were made. She’d just tucked Chloe’s shirt into her shorts and sent her outside to play with her kitten. “Did it seem weird, since you used to be the agent meeting with non-Bureau personnel?”

“A little odd, but Fiona and I worked with a lot of the same people and have some mutual friends, so it didn’t seem as strange as I suppose it could have,” he said as he dug into the pile of fluffy waffles, whipped cream, and cherries that Trula prepared for him. “Dear God, Trula, this is one of the best things I ever ate.”

“Well, you’ve been eating a lot of meals at the Conroy Diner,” she replied, “so anything decent is going to taste even better.”

“How do you know where I eat when I don’t eat here?”

She merely smiled, then turned back to what she was doing. Emme laughed out loud.

“Trula knows just about everyone in Conroy. She stops in at the diner once a week ‘for coffee.’” Emme made quotation marks with her fingers. “Which is just her way of keeping her ear to the ground.”

“You have to keep up with what’s happening in your community,” Trula sniffed.

“There’s a local paper for that,” Emme reminded her. “The Conroy Courier comes out once a week. You could get your news from it.”

“I get better info at the diner.”

“Were you able to learn anything helpful from the agent?” Emme turned back to Sam.

“Possibly. She’s going to have some reports copied and shipped here for me to take a look at. We’ll see where it goes.” Sam couldn’t wait to change the subject. “So when do you suppose Mr. Magellan will be back? I’m looking forward to meeting him and working with him.”

“You won’t be working with him for long if you call him Mister to his face. He prefers Robert,” Emme told him. “Even Chloe can’t call him Mr. Magellan.”

“Must be a family thing,” Sam observed. “His cousin, Father Burch, stopped in upstairs this afternoon. He apparently doesn’t like to be called Father.”

“He likes to be called Father,” Trula told him, “he just likes to be Kevin at home. And this is, for all practical purposes, his home. His family. Therefore, first names apply.”

“Does he get involved in all the cases?” Sam asked.

“Only if there’s an area where he can contribute,” Emme said. “Why do you ask? Did he get involved in yours?”

“Actually, he had some good insights to share.” Sam related the priest’s interpretation of the crime scenes.

“Wow.” Emme sat down across the table from Sam. “That’s bizarre. The acts of mercy?”

Trula turned around and leaned against the counter, a puzzled look on her face.

“You say you have three murders?” she asked.

Sam nodded.

“But… weren’t there seven acts of mercy?”

The fork that was headed toward Sam’s mouth stopped in midair and hung suspended there. His appetite suddenly gone, Sam cursed softly under his breath.

Seven acts of mercy. He should have remembered that from his long-ago catechism classes after school with Sister Ignatius.

Seven acts of mercy. Three deaths.

Were there four they had yet to discover, or were there four more victims on the killer’s list?

“Fiona, it’s Sam.” He was disappointed to have to leave voice mail. “Sam DelVecchio. Please give me a call when you get this message.” He repeated his number. “It’s important.”

He disconnected the call and drove through the gates at the front of Robert’s property. He waved at the guard in his little protective house that sat just outside the gate and drove off. It was too early for dinner-Trula’s admonitions aside, the Conroy Diner actually served pretty good food-and Sam was in no mood to return to his hotel. He envied Emme’s residence on the Magellan property. Before he left, she’d given him a tour of the carriage house where she and Chloe would soon be living, and he admitted to experiencing pangs of jealousy. The quarters were spacious and light, with lots of windows and beautiful views of the gardens he’d noticed Trula tending even as she supervised a crew of gardeners.

“I know what you mean,” Emme had said. “We’ve been looking at houses for several weeks now, and this is so much nicer than any place we’ve seen. Easily as nice as our old house back in California, and even bigger. We’re very lucky.” She pointed out the living room window to where her daughter and Trula sat on a lounge near the pool. “The luckiest part is finding Trula. She’s the best thing that’s happened to Chloe and me, probably ever. She’s the grandmother Chloe hasn’t had. She’s the mother…”

She stopped there, and Sam realized she was afraid of revealing too much of herself to a stranger. Well, Sam didn’t fault her for that. He was pretty close-mouthed about most things himself. But he figured that he knew what Emme had been about to say, that Trula was the mother she’d never had, and he wondered about her story. Not that he’d ask-that would be intruding. If she ever wanted to talk about it, she would, if they became friends.

What he did want to talk about was Robert’s search for his son.

“Are they any closer to finding the little boy?” he asked.

Emme shook her head. “Yes and no. They have established that Ian had been in the cabin in the woods we found out about yesterday. The FBI has been called in and in the meantime, the state police crime-scene techs have been all over it. Lots of fingerprints, lots of trace. The case is being treated like a kidnapping now. Maybe you saw that on the news?”

When Sam admitted that he hadn’t had the TV on all weekend, and that he’d forgotten to pick up a newspaper that morning, Emme continued.

“It’s being assumed that whoever took Ian from the car stayed with him in the cabin, and that he’s alive somewhere, that someone is passing him off as their own. The FBI is preparing a computer-generated age-progression photo to show what he probably looks like now. That will be as widely circulated as possible. TV, newspapers, magazines. Robert’s goal is to get that photo in front of the public at every opportunity. He figures that the publicity plus the reward he’s going to offer is going to get someone’s attention.”

“What’s he offering?” Sam was curious.

“One million dollars.”

Sam whistled. “There’s some incentive to keep your eyes open.”

“Here’s hoping. Susanna says now that Robert is pretty sure his son is alive, there will be no living with him until they find him. She said he’s been relentless these past few days. Not that I blame him, of course.” She paused. “Do you have any children, Sam?”

“No. My wife is deceased. We never got around to having kids before she died.” Sam could have added that he and Carly had just started investigating fertility treatments when she was killed, but after the day he’d had, he didn’t feel up to bringing that into the conversation.

“I’m sorry. How long has it been, Sam?”

“Three years.” He hoped she wouldn’t pursue it but knew that she would.

“May I ask, was she ill…?”