“We’re putting the entire Rush family under FBI protection.”

It was an indirect answer, yet filled with meaning. Bob saw it now. “How long has she been an informant for you?”

“I didn’t know it was her until today.”

“Because you didn’t want to know. How long?”

“A year.”

Bob gave a low whistle. “Anonymous?”

“She’s good, and she didn’t want to be found out. She created a story…persuaded me that pursuing her identity would put her at increased risk. Her help was critical but not asked for.”

“Regular?”

“Intermittent. I thought she was a professional.”

“Just not one of yours.”

“I doubt we’d know about her now if she hadn’t interceded with Keira and warned you yesterday.”

“Abigail checked into Estabrook’s Boston connections. She didn’t like his threat against you and Simon.” And Simon’s relationship with her father had thrown her for a loop, even if she was trying to be big about it. Bob wasn’t going there. March knew. “Lizzie Rush isn’t here.”

“I don’t know where she went. She called me after she and your daughter-”

“Did you ask her where she was going, what her plan was?” Bob sighed, knowing the answer. “You people give me a headache. I’m going to find your daughter, John. I want to know why that thug who’s now dead up on Beacon Street grabbed her instead of letting her get blown up. If your relationship with the Rush family has anything to do with what’s going on, you need to tell me about it.”

March ignored him. “Keep me informed.”

“Go back to Washington. Stay out of my investigation.”

“Get some rest, Bob. Where did you sleep last night?”

“Keira’s apartment.”

“Have you heard from her?”

“Yeah, sure. A little Irish fairy flew in my window last night and whispered in my ear.”

March didn’t so much as crack a smile.

Bob pointed a finger at him. “You keep too many secrets.”

“Part of the job.”

“Not all of them.”

Bob kissed Fiona goodbye and left the Whitcomb as Theresa was arriving. She refused even to look at him, but he didn’t care. She and the girls-all three daughters-were going back to her house in Lexington and staying there, under police protection, until they all had a better fix on what was going on. The rest didn’t matter. Let Theresa blame him.

He helped himself to a handful of smoke-flavored nuts on his way out and went back to the hospital. Alone. No detail. No Yarborough with the suspicious looks.

Scoop still had his morphine clicker, but he seemed more alert.

“Your black-haired woman is named Lizzie Rush,” Bob said. “While you were pulling weeds and talking compost, did Abigail mention her?”

Scoop thought a moment. “No.”

“Fiona tell you about playing Irish music at the Rush hotel on Charles-the Whitcomb, Morrigan’s Bar?”

“Yeah. Never occurred to me it was dangerous.”

“No reason it should have. Why didn’t I know? I could have gone to hear them play. I’m busy, but I’m not a total jerk. I like to keep track of what my kids are doing. Support them.”

Scoop’s puffy eyes narrowed. “You okay, Bob?”

“Yeah, sure. I just need to do something about my life. Same old, same old. Nothing to worry about. You just focus on getting better.”

But Scoop was tuned in to people, and he said, “Fiona didn’t mean to leave you out. She says she normally doesn’t like family in the audience.”

“Scoop, forget it. It’s okay.” Bob felt lousy for letting a guy in stitches, on morphine, see him crack, even a little. “Did Abigail say anything to you about Fiona, Morrigan’s, the Rushes?”

“Not a word. Does she know, even? Fiona tells me things she doesn’t tell you two.”

“No kidding. Yeah, she knows.”

“Abigail was onto something and not talking.”

Bob grunted. “What else is new?”

“I can tell…Bob. Hell. What’s going on?” Scoop shifted position, which seemed to be a major effort. “Let me out of here.”

“The doctors’ll spring you as soon as you can walk without spilling blood all over the floor. Until then-”

But Scoop had already drifted off. Bob sat there, watching him sleep. He was used to bouncing ideas off Scoop and Abigail, and now he didn’t have either one of them.

Before he could get too pathetic, he drove to BPD headquarters in Roxbury. He’d pull himself together and work the investigations, see what his detectives had on Abigail, the bombs, the dead guy. The task force was set up in a conference room, with maps, computers, charts, timelines.

Nobody talked to him. He must have had that look.

He got Tom Yarborough over in a corner next to a table of stale coffee. “Don’t start on me,” Bob said. “Just listen. I need you to work on Norman Estabrook’s Boston connections.”

“The Rush family?”

Bob sighed. The guy was always a step ahead. “You’ve already started?”

“Just a toe in the water. I wonder what’d happen if we typed Harlan Rush into the system. He’s Lizzie Rush’s father. He’s a reprobate gambler in Las Vegas-except when he’s not.”

“Think the feds would storm the building if we get too close to him?”

“Maybe not the FBI.”

CIA. Terrific. More Washington types meddling in his investigation. “We’d get a visit by humorless spooks with big nasty handcuffs?”

“Cop or no cop, Lieutenant, I don’t want to piss off this guy. Harlan Rush is a player. He’s still in the game.”

Harlan’s daughter, Lizzie, was obviously a chip off the old block. “You’ve talked to him,” Bob said.

Yarborough nodded.

“Good work.”

“I’m not sure it gets us any closer to Abigail.”

Chapter 23

Near Kennebunkport, Maine

8:19 p.m., EDT

August 26

Lizzie took the stairs up to the wraparound deck of her small house built on the rocks near the mouth of the Kennebec River. The tide was going out, pleasure craft and working boats still making their way to the harbor. She let herself into her house-one main room with very little separation of space-and opened up the windows and doors, the evening breeze pouring in through the screens. She walked out to the deck and shut her eyes, listening to the sounds of the boats and the ocean at dusk.

The rambling house her grandfather Rush had built was two hundred yards up the rockbound shore. After an architect friend had walked through it with her, he’d sent her a book of matches in lieu of a plan for renovations. Lizzie loved Maine, but her father avoided it, just as he did Dublin and, to a lesser extent, Boston. “The water’s always too cold,” he’d say. But memories haunted him here, too. Nostalgia not just for what had been but what might have been.

Lizzie was ten when she’d first fantasized her father was a spy and fifteen when she knew he was one. He always deflected her questions without giving a direct answer, even as he taught her how to defend herself, how to spot a tail, shake a tail, do a dead drop-how to think in such terms.

Only when she went to Ireland herself was Lizzie certain that her mother hadn’t tripped on a cobblestone after all, and the circumstances of her death-his inability to stop it-were why her father had taught her how to jab her fingers into a man’s throat. “Don’t be bound by dogma,” he’d say. “Never mind niceties or rules when you’re in a fight for your life. Trust your instincts. Do what you have to do to get out alive.”

Lizzie opened her eyes, noticing a cormorant swooping low over the calm water. Her grandmother, famous for her frugality, had spent as much time as she could in Maine during her last years. She liked her crumbling house the way it was, liked the memories it conjured up for her.

“Sitting here by myself, the memories are like a warm, fuzzy blanket,” she’d told her only granddaughter. But that was a rare display of sentimentality for Edna Whitcomb Rush, and in the next breath, she’d said, “Tear this place down when I’m gone. It’s the location I love.”