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“Does anyone ever-”

“You’re giving me a headache, John. I figure we have ten minutes, tops, before that prick Yarborough lands on us. You know damn well he’s on our trail. He’s not going to let us off Beacon Hill.”

March managed a weak grin. “Whose job does he get first, yours or mine?”

“He can have mine. I’m moving to Ireland to sing in pubs.” Bob saw now what he and March had to do. Maybe March had already seen it, and he’d just been letting the younger police lieutenant come to the same conclusion on his own. Or maybe Bob was taking the lead this time. It didn’t matter. “Lizzie Rush’s old man taught her well, but let’s go find her and her new Brit friend, Lord Davenport. You and me.”

The back door to the hotel opened, and a tawny-haired, middle-aged man in wrinkled khakis walked down the steps. Clearly a Rush, he looked at the two men in the alley as if he knew exactly who they were. “Lizzie’s her mother’s daughter.” The newcomer was tanned and leathery, his tone cool, controlled-but he radiated an intensity that told Bob that this man, too, had a loved one in harm’s way. “I took the red-eye from Vegas. I hate flying. Fill me in, or do I need to kidnap Boston ’s chief homicide detective and the director of the FBI?”

Harlan Rush, Lizzie Rush’s father, could do it, too. Bob balled up his gum wrapper and shoved it in his pocket as he looked to March. “John?”

March didn’t hesitate. “We go.”

Harlan dangled a set of keys from his hand. “My nephew said we could borrow his dad’s car. It’s that one right there. Lucky, huh? You don’t need to steal it after all.”

“Licensed to carry concealed?” Bob asked him.

Harlan headed past Bob for the BMW. “I’m licensed to carry a cruise missile to shove up Norman Estabrook’s flabby butt.”

Bob figured, who was he to argue?

He climbed into the leather backseat of Bradley Rush’s sedan, Harlan Rush at the wheel, next to him, the former BPD detective who’d investigated his Irish wife’s death.

“I hope by the time we get to Maine,” Bob said as Rush started the car, “we find out Abigail is safe and sound here in Boston, and we can all have fried clams.”

The two men in front made no comment.

“Yeah,” Bob said on a breath. “Let’s go.”

Chapter 28

Near Kennebunkport, Maine

7:45 a.m., EDT

August 27

“I love cormorants,” Lizzie said as she ambled along the narrow path above the rocks. “I can watch them endlessly.”

Neither of the two men with her responded. Myles Fletcher had stayed next to her, even if it meant he had to veer off the path, into pine needles or onto the rocks. The second man, silent and obviously less fit, walked a few steps ahead of them. Both men were armed with nine-millimeter pistols, Fletcher’s holstered at his waist, his partner’s in his right hand.

Lizzie hadn’t left her house with so much as a butter knife. She’d tried reaching for a fist-size rock, but Fletcher had calmly touched her shoulder and shaken his head, effectively changing her mind.

She nodded to the ocean, calm and gray in the fog. “It’s a beautiful spot, isn’t it? I know you can’t see much today. I used to walk this path with my grandmother.” She tried to adopt the breezy style she’d had with Norman-oblivious, personable, as if she had no concerns about being escorted to him by armed guards and wasn’t a woman who’d send information anonymously to the FBI. “She’d tell me if she had her way, she’d die out here, watching a cormorant dive for food.”

Fletcher stepped over an exposed spruce root. “Did she?”

“No. She died in the hospital.”

Fletcher eased back onto the path. His manner was detached, but he was clearly on high alert. “You miss her.”

“I do, but it’s okay. You’d want someone to miss you if you died, wouldn’t you?”

“I don’t know that I would, love.”

He and his partner must have seen Will on the deck and Simon’s arrival. Fletcher, at least, would know he had an SAS officer and FBI agent after him. Lizzie would concentrate on finding Abigail Browning and giving them a chance to act. Her father had lectured on being tentative. “Be bold. Be decisive. Especially if lives are at stake.”

She noticed the man ahead of them had picked up his pace. She looked up at Fletcher. “Quite a difference between here and Las Vegas, isn’t there?”

He glanced down at her. “Quite.”

“What did you do, look up Norman in Las Vegas and offer your services? Did you know he was about to be arrested?”

“Keep up,” Fletcher said.

“No problem. Is Norman here or on a boat? He came here last summer in a yacht he’d leased. Gorgeous. I had dinner with him on it, a real step up from my sit-on-top ocean kayak.” She tripped on a sharp, exposed rock but righted herself before Fletcher could take her arm. “How much is Norman paying you to create the mayhem of the past couple days?”

“He’s a wealthy man.”

Lizzie resisted a smart remark and kept to her role. “ Norman knew I’d come, and I have. We should hurry.” She gestured back toward her little house. “I gather you and Will go way back.”

A glint of humor came into Fletcher’s gray eyes. “That’s why I’m staying out of his line of fire.”

“He’s not armed.”

Fletcher laughed outright. “He’s a man of many talents, our Lord Davenport.”

The path curved uphill along the edge of a steep cliff. Seagulls swarmed onto the rocks below, their familiar cries and the rhythmic wash of the tide helping Lizzie to control her breathing. If she hyperventilated, Norman and his men would see through her. She’d walked this route hundreds of times since she was a child. Her grandmother would point out landmarks, plants, birds, the occasional seal, dolphin or whale. Edna Whitcomb Rush hadn’t been a demonstrative woman-no hugs and kisses from her-but she’d been loving in her own way.

“Estabrook will leave us to hold off the FBI and whoever else turns up,” Fletcher called to his partner. “Are you okay with that, mate?”

The thug paused and shrugged. “I don’t plan to stick around for a tactical team to get here, but we do what we have to.” He was American, in his early thirties. He gestured at Lizzie with his gun. “I say we kill this one and the detective and clear out. They’ll only slow us down.”

Lizzie was careful not to react, but now she knew. Abigail Browning was here and she was alive.

Fletcher didn’t look as if he cared one way or the other what happened to her or to Lizzie. “Do you suppose Estabrook has an escape route for himself?” he asked his colleague. “One that doesn’t include us?”

“He pays me before he leaves. That’s it. I don’t care what he does after that.”

“All right, then,” Fletcher said, impassive. “We’re on the same wavelength.”

The other man increased his lead over them. They veered off the path onto the overgrown yard of the shingled house that the first Harlan Rush, Lizzie’s grandfather, had built. He’d died when she was small, but she had a vague memory of his taking her out in a rowboat, staying close to the shore as he told her stories. He’d loved the sea. “Take everything else away from him,” her grandmother had said, “and if Harlan could still get to the ocean, he’d be a happy man.”

It had mystified her that their older son, his father’s namesake, preferred the dry desert of Las Vegas. But there were reasons for that, Lizzie thought.

She angled a look up at Fletcher. “Will believed in you, didn’t he?”

The ex-SAS officer didn’t meet her eye. “Will believes in honor, duty and country.”

“And you don’t?”

They continued through tall, wet grass on the soft ground, past a dense row of beach roses, entangled with wild blackberry vines, but he didn’t answer.

“I know what I’m doing and why,” Lizzie said, falling a few steps behind him. “Do you know the same about yourself?”